30 men with ladies two
Gathered for a festive do.
Dressed quite formal, black and white,
Yet movement turned to nasty fight.

What's going on?

This riddle is diabolically devious. Without even reading any other post(s), I know that they all say that it refers to a chess game. It does not. The riddle states that there were "30 men with ladies two." A chess game has 2 ladies (the queens), only 26 men (2 kings, 4 bishops, 4 knights, 16 pawns), and 4 non-gendered rooks (castles). And if all the pieces are referred to as chessmen, then there are 32 men, not 30. "Dressed quite formal, black and white" - of course no one "dresses" chess pieces. They are made of wood or plastic, and painted various colors. And "movement turned to nasty fight" - chess games are enjoyable, never nasty.

The riddle actually refers to the Rule of the Thirty Tyrants in Athens, who were oligarchs put in place by the Spartan general Lysander after the defeat of Athens by Sparta in the Peloponnesian War. These 30 men ruled over Athens in 404-403 B.C. As it was customary for the Greek historians to refer to their cities in the feminine case, Athens and Sparta are the two "ladies" of the riddle. These men dressed in Greek togas, which were an austere black-and-white in Classical Greece. And the rule of the Thirty Tyrants was a "nasty fight" indeed against the freedom-loving Athenians, culminating in their violent overthrow by the exiled Athenian general Thrasybulus. One tragic aftereffect of their rule was Athens' execution of Socrates in 399 B.C. He was wrongly suspected of being a quisling during their rule, when in fact he had been a courageous conscientious objector.
Edited on November 12, 2003, 8:59 am

Posted by Dan on 2003-11-12 08:46:31