celebrate the nuptials of the gods, the banquets of us mortals and the festivals of the fortunate; these are the themes that inspire thy most poetic songs. And should Carcinus come to beg thee for admission with his sons to thy chorus, refuse all traffic with them; remember they are but gelded birds, stork-necked dancers, mannikins about as tall as a pat of goat’s dung, in fact machine-made poets.[1] Contrary to all expectation, the father has at last managed to finish a piece, but he owns himself a cat strangled it one fine evening.[2]
Such are the songs[3] with which the Muse with the glorious hair inspires the able poet and which enchant the assembled populace, when the spring swallow twitters beneath the foliage;[4] but the god spare us from the chorus of Morsimus and that of Melanthius![5] Oh! what a bitter discordancy grated upon my ears that day when the tragic chorus was directed by this same Melanthius and his brother, these two Gorgons,[6] these two harpies, the plague of the seas, whose gluttonous bellies devour the entire race of fishes, these followers of old women, these goats with their stinking arm-pits. Oh! Muse, spit upon them abundantly and keep the feast gaily with me.
Trygæus.
Ah! ’tis a rough job getting to the gods! my legs are as good as broken through it. How small you were, to be
- ↑ Carcinus and his three sons were both poets and dancers. (See the closing scene of ‘The Wasps.’) Perhaps relying little on the literary value of their work, it seems that they sought to please the people by the magnificence of its staging.
- ↑ He had written a piece called ‘The Mice,’ which he succeeded with great difficulty in getting played, but it met with no success.
- ↑ This passage really follows on the invocation, “Oh, Muse! drive the War,” etc., from which indeed it is only divided by the interpolated criticism aimed at Carcinus.
- ↑ The Scholiast informs us that these verses are borrowed from a poet of the sixth century B.C.
- ↑ Sons of Philocles, of the family of Æschylus, tragic writers, derided by Aristophanes as bad poets and notorious gluttons.
- ↑ The Gorgons were represented with great teeth, and therefore the same name was given to gluttons. The Harpies, to whom the two voracious poets are also compared, were monsters with the face of a woman, the body of a vulture and hooked beak and claws.
