HI201 Greek HistorySkidmore College / Fall, 2007Professor C. Welser

Additional Sources for the Megarian Decree

(1.) From Aristophanes, Acharnians (425 B.C.) lines 515-538:(adapted from translation by Jeffrey Henderson)

[The hero of the Acharnians, Dicaeopolis, explains the cause of the Peloponnesian War:]

Dicaeopolis: It was men of ours – I do not say our polis;remember that – I do not say our polis –but some badly-minded troublemaking creeps,some worthless counterfeit foreign currency,who started denouncing shirts from Megaraand if they spotted a cucumber or a bunnyor piglets, cloves of garlic, lumps of salt,it was Megarian, grabbed, sold off that very day.Now that was merely local, small potatoes.But then some young crapshooters got to drinkingand went to Megara and stole the whore Simaetha.And then the Megarians, garlic-stung with passion,got even by stealing two whores from Aspasia.From this the origin of the war broke forthon all the Greeks: from three girls good at blow-jobs.And then in wrath Olympian Periclesdid lighten and thunder and turn Greece upside-down,establishing laws that read like drinking-songs:‘Megarians shall be banned from land and marketsand banned from sea and also banned from shore.’Whereupon the Megarians, starving inch by inch,appealed to Sparta to help make us repealthe decree we passed in the matter of the whores.But we refused although they repeatedly asked.And then it came to a clashing of the shields.

(2) Ancient scholion (commentary) on Aristophanes, Peace 605:(adapted from translation by Charles Fornara)

Philochorus says that, in the archonship of Pythodoros [432/1 B.C.],…the Megarians also complained against the Athenians to the Spartans, claiming that they were unjustly excluded from the marketplace and harbors of the Athenians. For the Athenians decreed this on the motion of Pericles, having accused them of working the land that was sacred to [Demeter and Persephone]. Some say that the Phidias the sculptor had been judged to be cheating the city and had been banished, Pericles, fearful because he had overseen the making of the statue [of Athena in the Parthenon] and was complicit in the theft, wrote the decree against Megara and precipitated the war so that he would not render account to the Athenians because they were totally concerned with the war.