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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 October 2013
At Lysistrate 614-705, after the actors have left the acting area, the two half-choruses, instead of addressing the audience directly in a parabasis as we expect, engage in a debate which displays some of the features of a regular parabasis. The male half-chorus after removing their outer garments (615) perform a lyric stanza followed by an epirrhema, whereupon the women likewise prepare to sing by disencumbering themselves (637): ἀλλὰ θώμεσθ᾿ ὧ φίλαι γρᾶες ταδὶ πρῶτον χαμαί’ ‘but, old dears, let's first put these things on the ground’. The two most recent commentators both suppose, as scholars have long assumed, that the women at this stage remove their outer garments. I wish to suggest an alternative possibility, that the female half-chorus remove only one garment, at 686, and that at 637 they merely put down their pitchers in preparation for their first lyric stanza. This is not a new suggestion, but it has never been adequately discussed.
1 Specific parabatic features in Lys. 614 ff. are: i. the use of exactly balancing epirrhemata in trochaic tetrameters; ii. the fact that both choruses disencumber themselves; iii. the admonitory tone of the women's first speecsh and antode; iv. the address to the audience in the first antode. The quasi-parabasis lacks the valediction to the actors (κομμάτιον) and anapaests, while the pattern of ode/epirrhema/antode/antepirrhema is doubled.
2 See Henderson, J., Aristophanes' Lysistrata (Oxford 1987) 154 f.CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Sommerstein, A.H., Aristophanes: Lysistrata (Warminster 1990) 190Google Scholar (on V.662), 192 (on v.686). Cf. e.g. B.B. Rogers, The Lysistrata of Aristophanes (London 1911) 79, von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, U., Aristophanes Lysistrate (Berlin 1927) 162Google Scholar, Cantarella, R., Aristofane: le commedie IV (Milan 1956) 325Google Scholar, Sifakis, G.A., Parabasis and animal choruses (London 1971) 104Google Scholar, Turner, J.H., Aristophanes' Lysistrata (Bryn Mawr 1982) 76.Google Scholar
3 See Donner, J.J.C., Die Komödien des Aristphanes (Naun-hof/Leipzig 1938), III 56Google Scholar: ‘Aber setzt, ihr lieber Frauen, die Eimer erst zur Erde hin’.
4 Cf. Ach. 627, Ve. 1122, Av. 934, 947, Lys. 615, 663, 686, 1173, Thes. 214, 636, 637, 656, 731, 939, 641, Eccl. 536.
5 The MSS have τὰ σκεύη; see however Seager, R., CQ 31 (1981) 244 f.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
6 Henderson 188 suggests simply ‘sometime after the songs at 781 ff.’). Sommerstein 192 suggests 889–951 ‘when the audience's attention is concentrated on Cinesias and Myrrhine’.
7 Sommerstein 192.
8 Sommerstein 210 (on v. 1086) and QSt II (1980) 393 ff.
9 Cf. especially 471–5, 507–528.
10 Cf. Henderson xxxii and YCS 26 (1980) 186.
11 Cf. Vaio, J., GRBS 14 (1973) 373 f.Google Scholar
12 Cf. 358, where χὴμεῖς links the women's act of depositing their burden with that of the men (312 θώμεσθα δὴ τὸ φόρτιον).
13 Contrast 350 f. with 360 ff.; cf. also 634 f. with 636, 656 f., 681 f. with 704 f., 799 f. with 823 f.
14 Cf. 428–62.
