Athens had lost the Peloponnesian War against Sparta, surrendering in 404 BC. For a brief period of time the city was ruled by the Thirty Tyrants imposed by the Spartans, although only a year later, in 403 BC. Thrasíbulo managed to expel them and restore democracy.
Difficult years followed when Athens, now allied with her former enemies Corinth, Argos, and Thebes, opposed Spartan rule and tried to regain hegemony on the sea. The city was impoverished, the fields destroyed and the exploitation of the mines interrupted.
That is why the people were in favor of the war, which allowed them to subsist, while the rich were opposed, since it demanded ever-increasing outlays. In this atmosphere of social and political anguish, the playwright Aristophanes writes his work Las asambleistas in 391 BC, just 13 years after the Athenian defeat.
The work, which aims to criticize the Athenian government of the time, tells how women assume control and establish reforms that prohibit private property, impose sexual equality for young, old and ugly, and the collectivization of fields, businesses, children and handcuffs.
The play ends with a banquet, the first organized by the new political system, with which the women try to please all the attendees. To do this, they prepare a dish that is made up of numerous different and disparate ingredients, in order to please everyone. Aristophanes uses a resource here that seeks to humorously highlight this attempt to establish parity in food as well, and he invents the name of the dish:
En griego el nombre del plato es λοπαδοτεμαχοσελαχογαλεοκρανιολειψανοδριμυποτριμματοσιλφιοκαραβομελιτοκατακεχυμενοκιχλεπικοσσυφοφαττοπεριστεραλεκτρυονοπτοκεφαλλιοκιγκλοπελειολαγῳοσιραιοβαφητραγανοπτερύγων, y ocupa 6 versos y medio con un total de 171 letras y 78 sílabas.
For centuries it has been considered the longest word in all universal literature (and in the Greek language), with the addition that it is found in a play and therefore it is assumed that the actor who plays the character who pronounces it must memorize it.
However, some translations of Aristophanes' work choose to make it easier for the actors and replace the word with a more or less faithful translation of the elements that compose it.
In the case of the translation by Federico Baraibar y Zumarraga, published in 1880, it is replaced by oysters, cecina, rays, lampreys, brains in spicy sauce, silphium, leeks soaked in honey, thrushes, blackbirds, wood pigeons, pigeons , roasted rooster combs, chochas, pigeons, hares cooked in syrup and substance of wings .
The literal translation is very similar:plate of sliced fish with ray remains of shark head spicy potpourri with silphium sea crab with spilled honey thrush on blackbird sea wood pigeon roasted rooster head dipped squab hare cooked in wine and crispy fins .
All this delicatessen that possibly formed part of the Athenian gastronomy with the consequent ironic touch of Aristophanes.