Set down the basket, daughter, and begin The ceremony.
Give me the cruet, mother, And let me pour it on the holy cake.
O blessed Bacchus, what a joy it is To go thus unmolested, undisturbed, My wife, my children, and my family, With our accustomed joyful ceremony, To celebrate thy festival in my farm. Well, here's success to the truce of thirty years.
Mind your behavior, child. Carry the basket In a modest, proper manner; look demure; Mind your gold trinkets, they'll be stolen else.
Dikæopolis now intones a hymn to Bacchus, but is interrupted by the violent threats of his war-loving neighbors, the Acharnians, who break out in injurious language, and threaten the life of the miscreant who has made peace with the enemies of his country solely for his own interests. With a good deal of difficulty, he persuades the enraged crowd to allow him to argue his case before them, and this fact makes us acquainted with another leading trait in Aristophanes; viz., his polemic opposition to the poet Euripides. Dikæopolis, wishing to make a favorable impression upon the rustics, hies to the house of Euripides, whose servant parleys with him in true transcendental language.
Within, and not within. You comprehend me?
His outward man Is in the garret writing tragedy; While his essential being is abroad Pursuing whimsies in the world of fancy.
The visitor now calls aloud upon the poet:
Euripides, Euripides, come down, If ever you came down in all your life! 'Tis I, Dikæopolis, from Chollidæ.
This Chollidæ probably corresponded to the Pea Ridge often quoted in our day. Euripides declines to come down, but is presently made visible by some device of the scene-shifter. In the dialogue that follows, Aristophanes ridicules the personages and the costumes brought upon the stage by Euripides, and reflects unhandsomely upon the poet's mother, who was said to have been a vender of vegetables. Dikæopolis does not seek to borrow poetry or eloquence from Euripides, but prays him to lend him "a suit of tatters from a worn-out tragedy."
For mercy's sake, for I'm obliged to make A speech in my own defence before the chorus, A long pathetic speech, this very day, And if it fails, the doom of death betides me.