For want of a shield

Still haven't fully made up my mind about the Acharnians dating question. There's a bit of internal evidence that is intriguing me, but unhelpfully it's the kind of evidence that could support either case depending on how you react to it.
One of Aristophanes' stock jokes was about the Athenian general Cleonymus. Cleonymus committed the classic faux pas of throwing away his shield in (probably) the retreat at the battle of Delium in 424 BC, in order to make a quick getaway. There are jokes about Cleonymus as a boaster and a coward in every single one of Aristophanes' six surviving plays up until 414. He lays off him after that, for whatever reason - maybe he had made up with cleonymus over a couple of kylixes, or maybe it just wasn't funny after 10 years.

The Cleonymus joke in the Acharnians is pretty oblique. The characters are talking about a banquet in which a bird is served up "three times the size of Cleonymus. They called it the Boaster" - with a possible pun on phenax (boaster)/phoenix. It's possible to take this as evidence that Cleonymus, though already known as something of a braggart, can't have parted company with his shield at the time the play was written, or else Aristophanes would surely have made a more specific joke. But it's also possible to take it as the kind of subtle reference that a comedian might choose when referring to a very recent military defeat. He was after all playing to an Athenian crowd and trying to win a prize.

The relentless mockery of poor old Cleonymus can seem like a bit much, especially if you're reading the plays in chronological order, and it's easy to wonder why Aristophanes saw fit to keep the joke going for so long. I think it's being used as a deterrent. If you live in a small town at the head of an empire and reliant on its army, the last thing you want is people thinking it's anything other than irreparably shameful to throw away your shield and run away from a battle. Athens had no professional army and relied on its citizens to fight. Aristophanes might well have been at Delium too: many of his audience certainly had. He's more interested in upholding a moral imperative than in tickling your funny-bone.

If you want to find a similar warning in modern day Britain - that the loss of a shield will be the loss of an important plank of society - we have the message round the edge of a pound coin. If it's an English one, you'll see "DECUS ET TUTAMEN", which means "a decoration and a safeguard" - the point being that the decoration doesn't just make the coin look nice. It lets you know immediately if someone's been clipping little bits off the edge of the coin, thus devaluing it. This has admittedly been less of a problem since we started making pound coins out of a cheap copper/zinc alloy instead of gold. The Latin is from Virgil's Aeneid : one of the prizes in Anchises' funeral games is a fancy breastplate described thus. The inscription on Scottish pound coins, "NEMO ME IMPUNE LACESSIT", "nobody disturbs me and gets away with it", or as I prefer, "come and have a go if you think you're hard enough", makes the same point: the original refers to a thistle.

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