Prayer to Eileithyia and Athena

A woman who has stuffed a bronze helmet under her dress is pretending to be in labour so as to slip away from the Acropolis, where Lysistrata is keeping the women shut in. The prayer is spoken in the course of the deception.

And the joke is impeccable in point of sacred law. Childbirth polluted consecrated ground, and a woman in labour genuinely had to leave a sanctuary; the Acropolis is the goddess's ground. The excuse is unanswerable: to refuse would be to permit pollution, and Lysistrata has nothing to say to it.

ἕως ἂν εἰς ὅσιον μόλω ᾽γὼ χωρίον — until I reach an hosion place. The word is exact: Greeks distinguished hieron, what is given over to a god, from hosion, what is not consecrated and therefore released for human use. The woman asks not to be let out but to be allowed to reach ground that does not belong to a deity.

And the request goes to Eileithyia — she who hastens or delays a birth at her own discretion. The goddess of childbirth is asked to wait.

In Roman comedy a birth was signalled by a cry from behind a door (diana-021); here the same convention is inverted — there is a cry and no birth.