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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=348374" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>The Origin Of The Peloponnesian War</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">DICAEOPOLIS</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Be not surprised, most excellent spectators,<br>If I that am a beggar have presumed<br>To claim an audience upon public matters,<br>Even in a comedy; for comedy<br>Is conversant in all the rules of justice,<br>And can distinguish betwixt right and wrong.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The words I speak are bold, but just and true.<br>Cleon at least cannot accuse me now,<br>That I defame the city before strangers,<br>For this is the Lenaean festival,<br>And here we meet, all by ourselves alone;<br>No deputies are arrived as yet with tribute,<br>No strangers or allies: but here we sit<br>A chosen sample, clean as sifted corn,<br>With our own denizens as a kind of chaff.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">First, I detest the Spartans most extremely;<br>And wish that Neptune, the Taenarian deity,<br>Would bury them in their houses with his earthquakes.<br>For I've had losses--losses, let me tell ye,<br>Like other people; vines cut down and injured.<br>But among friends (for only friends are here),<br>Why should we blame the Spartans for all this?<br>For people of ours, some people of our own,--<br>Some people from among us here, I mean:<br>But not the People (pray, remember that);<br>I never said the People, but a pack<br>Of paltry people, mere pretended citizens,<br>Base counterfeits,--went laying informations,<br>And making a confiscation of the jerkins<br>Imported here from Megara; pigs, moreover,<br>Pumpkins, and pecks of salt, and ropes of onions,<br>Were voted to be merchandise from Megara,<br>Denounced, and seized, and sold upon the spot.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Well, these might pass, as petty local matters.<br>But now, behold, some doughty drunken youths<br>Kidnap, and carry away from Megara,<br>The courtesan, Simaetha. Those of Megara,<br>In hot retaliation, seize a brace<br>Of equal strumpets, hurried forth perforce<br>From Dame Aspasia's house of recreation.<br>So this was the beginning of the war,<br>All over Greece, owing to these three strumpets.<br>For Pericles, like an Olympian Jove,<br>With all his thunder and his thunderbolts,<br>Began to storm and lighten dreadfully,<br>Alarming all the neighborhood of Greece;<br>And made decrees, drawn up like drinking songs,<br>In which it was enacted and concluded<br>That the Megarians should remain excluded<br>From every place where commerce was transacted,<br>With all their ware--like 'old Care' in the ballad:<br>And this decree, by land and sea, was valid.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Then the Megarians, being all half starved,<br>Desired the Spartans to desire of us<br>Just to repeal those laws: the laws I mentioned,<br>Occasioned by the stealing of those strumpets.<br>And so they begged and prayed us several times;<br>And we refused: and so they went to war.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=Aristophanes">Aristophanes</a><div class=q>
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Be not surprised, most excellent spectators,
If I that am a beggar have presumed
To claim an audience upon public matters,
Even in a comedy; for comedy
Is conversant in all the rules of justice,
And can distinguish betwixt right and w..."></div>
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