h Confederate
should turn to the Aristophanic account of the Peloponnesian war with
sympathetic interest. The Athenians, it is true, were not blockaded as
we were, and the Athenian beaux and belles were not reduced to the
straits that every Confederate man, assuredly every Confederate woman,
can remember. Our blockade-runners could not supply the demands of our
population. We went back to first principles. Thorns were for pins, and
dogwood sticks for toothbrushes. Rag-bags were ransacked. Impossible
garments were made possible. Miracles of turning were performed, not
only in coats, but even in envelopes. Whoso had a dress coat gave it to
his womankind in order to make the body of a riding-habit. Dainty feet
were shod in home-made foot-gear which one durst not call shoes. Fairy
fingers which had been stripped of jewelled rings wore bone circlets
carved by idle soldiers. There were no more genuine tears than those
which flowed from the eyes of the Southern women resident within the
Federal lines when they saw the rig of their kinswomen, at the cessation
of hostilities. And all this grotesqueness, all this dilapidation, was
shot through by specimens of individual finery, by officers who had
brought back resplendent uniforms from beyond seas, by heroines who had
engineered themselves and their belongings across the Potomac.

[Note: As is well known, the Greek had a mania for shoes. For women's
shoes see Av. Lys. 417. For other cordwainer's wares, _l. c._, 110.]

Of all this the scholar found nothing in the records of the
Peloponnesian war. The women of Megara may have suffered, but hardly the
Corinthian women; and the Athenian dames and damsels were as particular
about their shoes and their other cordwainer's wares as ever. The story
that Socrates and his wife had but one upper garment between them is a
stock joke, as I have shown elsewhere. "Who first started the notable
jest it is impossible, at this distance of time, to discover, just as
it is impossible to tell whose refined wit originated the conception of
the man who lies abed while his solitary shirt is in the wash." The
story was intended to illustrate, not the scarcity of raiment in the
Peloponnesian war, but the abundance of philosophy in the Socratic soul.
All through that war the women of Athens seem to have had as much finery
as was good for them. The pinch was felt at other points, and there the
Confederate sympathy was keen.

In The Acharnians of Aristophan