A realist, depicting life at Athens in the fifth century, was compelled to give women an insignificant rôle, but even in this group of plays Aristophanes makes one exception, the exception, perhaps, that proves the rule, for even under the harem system the masterful woman will sometimes come to the front, and Haroun al Raschid goes in fear of Zobeida. In the _Clouds_, Strepsiades is married and by no means independent of his wife: the lady is mentioned, although she takes no part in the play, and the reasons of this difference are instructive. Strepsiades himself is a person of inferior social position, lacking both in will-power and intellectual force; his wife is a woman of property, the daughter of a noble family and herself of determined character. Using all these advantages, she is just able to hold her own with her feeble, foolish husband, and to insist at least on a compromise when their opinions differ.
But it is possible to make too much of the absence of women characters, for the conditions of performance at the Lenæan festival were all against feminine interests, and even though the plot of many of the comedies has little to do with women, there are constant flashes that reveal the author’s feminist sympathies. Of all the episodes in the _Birds_ there is none quite so freshly humorous as the arrest of Iris, the girl messenger of the Gods, and even in the midst of the fierce political raillery of the _Knights_ there comes the delicious interlude of the lady triremes meeting in council; the old stager Nauphantë, addressing the assembly first and revealing the goings-on of the Government, followed by the shy young thing ‘who has never come near men,’ and is determined to keep her independence, ‘heaven forfend, no man shall ever be my master.’ Indeed, considering the state of Athens and the necessity that lay upon a comic poet of suiting the tastes of his audience, the real surprise is that no less than three of the remaining eleven plays—the _Lysistrata_, the _Women at the Festival_, and the _Women in Assembly_—should be concerned with the feminist movement and be written in open advocacy of the women’s cause.
The Women at the Festival—_Thesmophoriazusæ_—is the lightest of the three, and is really a very brilliantly written feminist ‘revue.’ Euripides is the ‘compare,’ and in various disguises takes part in most of the incidents. He has heard that the women, now assembled in their own festival to which no men are admitted, intend to have him put to death, firstly for being a playwright and secondly as a slanderer of womenkind. He goes round to his friends to save him (the scene is a parody on the _Alcestis_), and first of all to his fellow-dramatist, Agathon. But Agathon, whose music is then burlesqued, is too much like a woman to be of any assistance. He is another of the inner Socratic Circle, but in the way of jest the most infamous conduct is imputed to him: his appearance is as ambiguous as his morals, and all he can do for Euripides is to lend him some articles of women’s dress for the purpose of a disguise. So Euripides has to fall back on his father-in-law, Mnesilochus, the buffoon of the piece, and there follows one of those scenes of disrobing with which we are familiar on the modern stage. The old gentleman is undressed, shaved all over and arrayed in woman’s garments, i.e., he exchanges his rough white blanket for a finer yellow one; winds a band-corset round his breast and puts on a hair-net and bonnet. He is now to all appearances a woman and goes to the Thesmophorian Festival to find out the details of the women’s proposal.