Xuthus: And you can accept a father.
Ion: Could I wish for better?
Xuthus: That you might have seen before.
Ion: Than descent from Zeus's son?
Xuthus: This is indeed your birthright.
Ion: Shall I touch my father then?
Xuthus: Yes, have faith in the god.
Ion: Father—
Xuthus: How dear is the sound of the name you have spoken!
Ion: We should both bless this day.
Xuthus: It has brought me happiness.
—
Euripides, Ion, 556–562
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Electra: Hear one more cry, father,
from me. It is my last.
Your nestlings huddle suppliant at your tomb: look forth
and pity them, female with the male strain alike.
Do not wipe out this seed of the Pelopidae.
So, though you died, you shall not yet be dead, for when
a man dies, children are the voice of his salvation
afterward. Like corks upon the net, these hold
the drenched and flaxen meshes, and they will not drown.
Hear us, then. Our complaints are for your sake, and if
you honor this our argument, you save yourself.
—
Aeschylus, The Libation Bearers, 500–509
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Strepsiades: Curses on war, for many
reasons: I may not punish
My own servants. And there, snug under five blankets,
Lies my young hopeful, snoring fore and aft.
I'll snuggle in, if that's the thing, and snore too.
But I can't. I'm pricked awake by debts and duns
And stable bills—through this son of mine.
He curls his long hair, rides, drives, and even dreams horses;
And I am ruined.
— Aristophanes, Clouds, p. 103
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Pheidippides: To my point I now return:
excuse the
interruption.
Did you beat me when I was a boy? That is now the
question.
Strepsiades: Of course I did, in concern for you, a mark of
my good will.
Pheidippides: Is it then not right for me that function to
fulfill?
Surely if a beating is to be counted a caress,
If I failed to beat you then I would be remiss.
I too am a Greek free-born, entitled to immunity;
Shall children then be whipped and fathers enjoy
impunity?
Perhaps you'll counter by denying that children have the
privilege:
Twice over childish, I reply, is the silliness of senile age.
Old men are more culpable far because of their experience;
'Tis justice then to beat them worse. There you have my
evidence.
— Aristophanes, Clouds, p. 139
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Philocleon: Sweetest thing of all is
this, which I forgot to
mention.
When I come home with my judge's pay, what welcoming
attention!
My daughter washes and salves my feet and then stoops
for a kiss.
Calling me her daddykins; soon from my cheek I miss
The obols I'd hid there, which she, with caressing tongue,
Fishes.
—
Aristophanes, Wasps, p.160–161
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Coryphaeus: Lucky that man
whose children make his happiness in life
and not his grief, the anguished disappointment
of his hopes.
—
Euripides, Orestes, 542–543
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Agamemnon: My daughter and my wife,
I know what calls
To me for pity and compassion, and
What does not. I love my children!
Did I not I would be mad indeed.
—
Euripides, Iphigenia in Aulis, 1255–57
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Lysistrata: Are you not sad your children's
fathers
Go endlessly off soldiering afar
In this plodding war? I am willing to wager
There's not one here whose husband is a home.
— Aristophanes, Lysistrata, p. 291
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A place where the father of some pretty
young boy would come up to me and complain, "O Stilbonides,
that's no way to treat my son, he told me that you bumped into
him outside of the gym and you never
tried to give him a little kiss or a cuddle, and what's more you didn't
even bounce his balls! And you call yourself a friend of the
family!"
—
Aristophanes, Birds, 137–142
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