306

Eupolis

Long Walls in 415 BCE, having presumably settled there fifteen years earlier,
during the first wave of Spartan invasions of the Attic countryside (which
ended in 425 BCE), and having decided for personal or economic reasons to
remain in place rather than move back to their farms on a permanent basis.* * 197
The same conclusion can be drawn from Ar. Eq. 792-3 και πώς σύ φιλεϊς, δς
τούτον όρων οϊκούντ’ έν ταϊς φιδάκναισι / και γυπαρίοις και πυργιδίοις έτος
όγδοον ούκ έλεαίρεις; (“and how do you care for him, you who feel no pity,
although you see him now in the eighth year living in casks and crannies and
little towers?”; in reference to Demos, the personified Athenian people), which
dates to 424 BCE. The complaint at fr. 99.12-14 is that the Long Wall residents
get more food—what is actually said is that they are άριστητικώτεροι, “lunch-
ier”—than the chorus, although the precise significance of the grievance is
obscure, due in part to the fragmentary character of the verses that follow. It
is nonetheless easy to believe that access to markets, and to imported grain
in particular, was easier inside the walls than outside of them throughout the
Peloponnesian War years, regardless of whether Spartan forces were in the
country. Storey thus appears to be right to insist that fr. 99.12-14 does not
prove that Demoi dates to 412 BCE, although the verses simultaneously offer
no positive evidence to put the play earlier.
As for the second significant item of evidence traditionally offered to date
Eupolis’ play, at fr. 99.81-9 the fact that a foreigner has his moustache full
of barley-groats after drinking kykeon is used by the anonymous character
usually referred to as “the Sycophant” to extort money from him, apparently
via a threat of legal action.198 The consumption of kykeon was an important
part of the Eleusinian Mysteries, and the passage is often understood as a
critical allusion to the impiety trials of 415 BCE, where many of the charges
were just as bogus as the Sycophant’s attack on the stranger in Demoi appears
to be. Storey 2003. 113, however, observes that “it is unclear what is going on
at fr. 99. 78-120; the accusation of sacrilege is not at all obvious”; that “Not
all references to the Mysteries must post-date the scandal of 415”; and that
“Comedy seems to have avoided any direct mention of the scandals of 415 or
of those mentioned in them”. If these claims are correct, the date of Demoi is
open within the parameters noted at the beginning of this section, and Storey

Long Wall to go to the Theseion; and those in the Piraeus to go to the Hippo-
dameian Agora”).
197 Cf. Ar. V. 448-51 (422 BCE), where the relatively well-to-do Philocleon and
Bdelycleon are abruptly revealed to own not just a city house but also a farm in
the countryside, where their domestic slaves are sometimes put to work.
198 For the same character’s vicious and gratuitous litigiousness, cf. fr. 99.103-11.