Unholy and Hallowed Whore Words: Part I

κἀμέ γ᾽ ἡ πόρνη χθὲς εἰσελθόντα τῆς μεσημβρίας,
ὅτι κελητίσαι 'κέλευον, ὀξυθυμηθεῖσά μοι
ἤρετ᾽ εἰ τὴν Ἱππίου καθίσταμαι τυραννίδα.

Me at least, to my Whore yesterdy, were comin at noon.
She at me, Sir Steed of Speed, were eruptin in outrage
At Bronco Buckin. Like she were sittin on her Horse, like a tyrant!

  --Xanthias, a slave
   (in the play "The Wasps," line 500, by Aristophanes,
   in Greece, in 422 BCE,
   translated here by J. K. Gayle)

What's meant to be funny about the line above is that it's out of the mouth of a mere slave, who's been using a mere whore, to answer the elegant Bdelycleon.  Bdelycleon is an elite Aristocrat in Athens.  He not only owns many horses but he also owns several slaves, including Xanthias.  He had so many slaves, in fact, that they were like swarming wasps, after which the play is named.  Bdelycleon (as Eugene O'Neill, Jr. translates him in the play) has just complained aloud, with sophisticated rhetoric, about how others are accusing him of being a tyrant when he feels he's been more than fair and just:

Everything is now tyranny with us, no matter what is concerned, whether it be large or small. Tyranny! I have not heard the word mentioned once in fifty years, and now it is more common than salt-fish, the word is even current on the market. If you are buying gurnards and don't want anchovies, the huckster next door, who is selling the latter, at once exclaims, "That is a man whose kitchen savours of tyranny!" If you ask for onions to season your fish, the green-stuff woman winks one eye and asks, "Ha, you ask for onions! are you seeking to tyrannize, or do you think that Athens must pay you your seasonings as a tribute?"

This is what the slave replies to.  In a post yesterday, we saw O'Neill's rendering:

Yesterday I went to see a whore about noon and told her to get on top; she flew into a rage, pretending I wanted to restore the tyranny of Hippias.

But I wanted to show the playwright's play on the language.  And the connections between a mere whore and a ridden horse are clearer in the Greek.  What's supposed to be funny here (as the men laugh in the audience of the play performed in Athens) is that the mere slave of the sophistocated Aristocrat who owns him inadvertently compares his Master to a mere whore.  And he's put himself in the mere position of the horse.  Yes, the men are also laughing because of the sex play, the sexual role reversals, the woman on top.  And if we had more time, then we could investigate the playwright, and his choice of words, and realize how πόρνη [pórnē] was just coming into currency in Athens as a phrase for prostitutes.  If men in slavery had no rights, and if tyrants ruled like dictators, then at least all men had rights to these women.  And the reinforcement of the sexualized hierarchy -- all men over possessed women -- came in their laughs and language.