The Origin Of The Peloponnesian War Poem Rhyme Scheme and Analysis
Rhyme Scheme: A ABACAD EFAGHIJKL CCACMNAHOPQAAARARS AARRAATRALACAAUUVUU WAXAARDICAEOPOLIS | A |
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Be not surprised most excellent spectators | A |
If I that am a beggar have presumed | B |
To claim an audience upon public matters | A |
Even in a comedy for comedy | C |
Is conversant in all the rules of justice | A |
And can distinguish betwixt right and wrong | D |
- | |
The words I speak are bold but just and true | E |
Cleon at least cannot accuse me now | F |
That I defame the city before strangers | A |
For this is the Lenaean festival | G |
And here we meet all by ourselves alone | H |
No deputies are arrived as yet with tribute | I |
No strangers or allies but here we sit | J |
A chosen sample clean as sifted corn | K |
With our own denizens as a kind of chaff | L |
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First I detest the Spartans most extremely | C |
And wish that Neptune the Taenarian deity | C |
Would bury them in their houses with his earthquakes | A |
For I've had losses losses let me tell ye | C |
Like other people vines cut down and injured | M |
But among friends for only friends are here | N |
Why should we blame the Spartans for all this | A |
For people of ours some people of our own | H |
Some people from among us here I mean | O |
But not the People pray remember that | P |
I never said the People but a pack | Q |
Of paltry people mere pretended citizens | A |
Base counterfeits went laying informations | A |
And making a confiscation of the jerkins | A |
Imported here from Megara pigs moreover | R |
Pumpkins and pecks of salt and ropes of onions | A |
Were voted to be merchandise from Megara | R |
Denounced and seized and sold upon the spot | S |
- | |
Well these might pass as petty local matters | A |
But now behold some doughty drunken youths | A |
Kidnap and carry away from Megara | R |
The courtesan Simaetha Those of Megara | R |
In hot retaliation seize a brace | A |
Of equal strumpets hurried forth perforce | A |
From Dame Aspasia's house of recreation | T |
So this was the beginning of the war | R |
All over Greece owing to these three strumpets | A |
For Pericles like an Olympian Jove | L |
With all his thunder and his thunderbolts | A |
Began to storm and lighten dreadfully | C |
Alarming all the neighborhood of Greece | A |
And made decrees drawn up like drinking songs | A |
In which it was enacted and concluded | U |
That the Megarians should remain excluded | U |
From every place where commerce was transacted | V |
With all their ware like 'old Care' in the ballad | U |
And this decree by land and sea was valid | U |
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Then the Megarians being all half starved | W |
Desired the Spartans to desire of us | A |
Just to repeal those laws the laws I mentioned | X |
Occasioned by the stealing of those strumpets | A |
And so they begged and prayed us several times | A |
And we refused and so they went to war | R |
Aristophanes
(1)
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