Aristophanes and the Cloak of Comedy: Affect, Aesthetics, and the Canon 9780226309729

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Aristophanes and the Cloak of Comedy

Aristophanes and the Cloak of Comedy Affect, Aesthetics, and the Canon Mario Telò

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

Mario Telò is associate professor of classics at the University of California, Los Angeles. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2016 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2016. Printed in the United States of America 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16

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isbn-13: 978-0-226-30969-9 (cloth) isbn-13: 978-0-226-30972-9 (e-book) doi: 10.7208/chicago/9780226309729.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Telò, Mario, 1977– author. Title: Aristophanes and the cloak of comedy : affect, aesthetics, and the canon / Mario Telò. Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015036902 | ISBN 9780226309699 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226309729 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Aristophanes—Criticism and interpretation. | Greek drama (Comedy)—History and criticism. Classification: LCC PA3879 .T43 2016 | DDC 882/.014c23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015036902 This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

To Alex

Contents

Acknowledgments ix Note to the Reader xiii

1

Delayed Applause: Competitive Aesthetics and the Construction of the Comic Canon 1. Triumphant Failure: Peace, Clouds, and the Poetics of Hierarchy 2. Parabasis, Plot, and the Directionality of the Text 3. Affecting the Audience: Knights, Clouds, and the Feel of Comedy

1 3 10 14

Part 1: Wasps 2

3

A Touch of Class: The Enduring Texture of Aristophanic Comedy 1. Converging Identities: Bdelycleon and Aristophanes between Parabasis and Plot 2. Contest of Cloaks: Restaging the First Clouds 3. The Daemons in the Details: Sensing the Cratinean Fashion 4. Aristophanic Fabric and Comic Canonicity 5. Conclusions

28 31 42 49 55

Emotional Rescue and Generic Demotion: Old Comedians and Tragedy’s Ragged Audience 1. Intersecting Affects: Tragic Love as Comic Disease 2. Anger and the Aesthetics of Alienation 3. Wrapping Walls: Affective Mimesis and Proto-Canonical Therapy 4. Ragged Feelings: The Comic Audience as a Tragic Parent 5. Conclusions

56 58 63 68 76 86

4 The Broken Net: Comic Failure and Its Consequences 1. An Iambic Erinys: Cratinus, Affect, and Tragic Havoc 2. Aesopic Agonistics: Fables and Comic Redress

27

88 90 101

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3. Undoing Failure: Dire Dancing and Ersatz Liberation 4. Conclusions

109 120

Part 2: Clouds 5

Aristophanes’ Electra Complex and the Future of Comedy 1. Aristophanes’ Oresteia 2. The Comic Stage as Tragic Classroom: The Audience Meets Socrates (and Eupolis) 3. Stripping Strepsiades: Socrates, Eupolis, Clytemnestra 4. Revision as Revenge: Stolen Cloaks and Suffocating Sons 5. Conclusions

135 140 144 155

Epilogue 1. “Fail Better” 2. Canonicity: Reenactment, Literary Affections, Enduring Objects 3. Affect: Touch, Vibrant Objects, Intertextuality

157 158 160

Synopses 163 Notes 165 Bibliography 203 Index 229

125 127

Acknowledgments

This book has been through a long journey, not unlike my own. It started in Italy with a nebulous, pseudo-Bloomian interest in parental bonds and literary affiliation throughout Greek drama. By the time of my trans-Atlantic passage, to Southern California, I envisioned a series of case studies on the metapoetics of fatherhood drawn from Aristophanes. When I began writing the book, I was serendipitously intrigued by the prominence of two similar pieces of clothing in Wasps and the second version of Clouds, both of them plays that concern father-son relationships and spring from a competitive setback. With the forensic attitude of a philologist, I took it upon myself to piece together things that seemed unconnected: not just father-son relationships but textiles and an ultimately canonical poet’s artistic failure. My original interest in poetic self-reflexivity had come to include aesthetics, materiality, and canonicity. I soon realized that the resolution of the puzzle I was investigating could occupy a whole book. Instead of collecting multiple case studies, I would apply my close readings to the reconstruction of a narrative that, though centered in two plays, stretches into their afterlife, with ramifications for Aristophanes’ authorial survival. My journey would not have happened in the first place without the generous support and encouragement of Joseph Farrell, Donald Mastronarde, Glenn Most, and Seth Schein, with special thanks to Ralph Rosen, who warmly and selflessly shepherded me toward employment in American academia. Thanks are also due to my wonderful UCLA colleagues, who welcomed me and have provided a fertile intellectual environment for these past seven years, including Catherine Atherton, Ann Bergren, David Blank, Shane Butler, Sander Goldberg, Robert Gurval, Chris Johanson, Francesca Martelli,

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Kathryn Morgan, Sarah Morris, John Papadopoulos, Alex Purves, Amy Richlin, Giulia Sissa, and Brent Vine. They all, in various ways, have supported me and helped me bring this project to fruition. The core argument in this book had its first public airing in a talk at Berkeley in April 2012. I thank my UC colleagues Mark Griffith, Leslie Kurke, and Donald Mastronarde for their warm reception and invaluable feedback, which gave me the strength to continue. Donald, to whom I owe a major debt of gratitude dating back to my first visit to Berkeley, as an undergraduate in 1999, has been a source of support throughout the completion of this book. He read the first chapter, offering insightful comments from which I benefited enormously. So did Karen Bassi, Lucia Prauscello, and Ralph Rosen. In particular, Karen helped me work through the theoretical implications of the argument, while Ralph gently yet firmly urged me to “think big” and to clarify structure and organization. Seth Schein and Kathryn Morgan both helped with the book’s abstract. Emily Gowers read the epilogue, improving form and substance with her distinctive wit and kindness. The participants in the June 2014 Cambridge conference “Recontextualizing Occasion: Reperformance in Ancient Greece,” organized by Anna Uhlig and Richard Hunter, lent an attentive and sympathetic ear to some of the contents of the book. I also want to thank Jim Porter for conversations through the years that, together with his writings, have deeply influenced my thinking. Deepest thanks go to Alex Purves for her advice and support, and the inspiration she provides. Alex read the manuscript twice, showing enthusiasm for the project—even when I had none left—and changed my perspective on a number of key issues. She made me realize that ultimately my project was about the “affect of genre” and prodded me to read in affect theory and the new materialism. I am grateful for her inexhaustibly stimulating presence, which has profoundly enriched me as a scholar. At the University of Chicago Press I found in Susan Bielstein the ideal editor: visionary, perceptive, and generous—an author’s dream. James Whitman Toftness was an unrivaled example of efficiency, kindness, and responsiveness. Thanks are also due to Susan Karani, my copy editor, for her patience and attention. I am grateful for the insights of my two no-longer-anonymous readers. Charles Platter, whose work on Aristophanes has greatly informed my own, provided much-needed encouragement and innumerable astute observations. Melissa Mueller offered essential guidance and contributed to making the manuscript clearer, tighter, and stronger. Her groundbreaking work on objects in tragedy infuses me with energy and excitement. I am also grateful to Leslie Kurke for reading the manuscript at a late stage and promptly

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supplying fantastic comments, additions, and corrections with characteristic generosity and acuity. Her extraordinary example of adventurous and rigorous scholarship continually inspires me. This book would have never seen the light of day without the unceasing, painstaking help of Alex Press, my life partner. Alex taught me how to write in English, reinforcing for me the value of clear prose, free from flowery embellishments and jargon. He never tired of correcting sentences, streamlining paragraphs, and reconceptualizing whole pages. He read the manuscript multiple times, improving it at every round in wonderful ways. He was also a constant intellectual interlocutor, talking me through ideas and helping me overcome doubts and hesitations with patience and commitment. This book owes to him much more than can be measured in words. The dedication to him is a minimal compensation for the Heraclean efforts he has put into this project. Santa Monica, 2015

Note to the Reader

Several of the features of this book are designed to make it more accessible to non-classicists. All Greek is translated or closely paraphrased, and the Greek words and phrases I discuss are all transliterated. (In general, inflectional endings are preserved in quotations.) Readers who forget what a particular Greek term means can refer to the index for the first occurrence. Because of my programmatically nonlinear reading of Wasps and Clouds, I have provided, before the endnotes, synopses that map out, in a linear manner, the scenes that I discuss. The plays of Aristophanes are cited according to the edition of N. G. Wilson, OCT (2007). Divergences are noted when necessary. Unless otherwise stated, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides are also cited according to their most recent OCT editions. Citations of the comic fragments are based on the standard edition of R. Kassel and C. Austin (Berlin 1983–2001), referred to as KA. All translations are mine, unless otherwise indicated. For ancient authors and works cited in the endnotes, I follow the abbreviations of the Oxford Classical Dictionary (4th edition, 2012) where possible; in other cases, those of Liddell, Scott, and Jones, A Greek-English Lexicon (9th edition, Oxford 1996). For the works of Galen (cited according to the volume and the page number of the edition of Kühn), I follow the abbreviations of S. P. Mattern in Galen and the Rhetoric of Healing, 163–71 (Baltimore 2008).

1 Delayed Applause: Competitive Aesthetics and the Construction of the Comic Canon Since Socrates was an uncommon subject and an unexpected spectacle on the stage and in a comedy, at first the play astonished the Athenians because of its oddity. Later, as they were jealous by nature and had taken to reproaching the best (aristois) men, not only those in politics and in public offices but even more harshly those highly respected for their good speeches or the dignity (semnotēti) of their life, this play, Clouds, seemed to be very pleasant to hear. They applauded the poet as they never did on any other occasion, shouted that he should win, and urged the judges in the front row to write the name of Aristophanes [as the winner] and nobody else. A e l i a n , Historical Miscellany 2.13

This anecdote fancifully rewrites a famous chapter of Athenian theatrical history. After defeating Cratinus with Knights at the Lenaia of 424 BCE, Aristophanes suffered a humiliating loss a year later at the Great Dionysia with Clouds, placing third behind that veteran of the comic stage and Ameipsias, who is barely known to us. However, in the account of Aelian—a thirdcentury CE miscellanist—Clouds managed to transform the audience’s attitude from bewilderment to unconditional approval. Aelian emphasizes the force of the spectators’ change of mind not only by interpreting their final applause as a roaring recommendation to the judges of the dramatic competition, but also by eliding the outcome. Aelian’s omission implicitly converts the Athenian audience’s second thoughts about Clouds into a victory. This revision is, in a sense, emblematic of the larger story of Aristophanic reception, in which this momentarily defeated comic poet would rise to dominance over the other representatives of Old Comedy. In other words, the audience’s recommendation in Aelian’s account seems to retroject to the moment of the play’s original performance the verdict of later judges, first and foremost the Hellenistic scholars who relegated Aristophanes’ chief rivals, Cratinus and Eupolis, to a secondary position, which would ultimately contribute to their merely fragmentary survival. Posterity indeed preserved the work of Aristophanes and of “nobody else.” In implicitly merging two distant moments in the life and afterlife of Aristophanic comedy (the loss to Cratinus in 423

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and the poet’s triumph in ancient literary-critical history), Aelian’s anecdote provides a fitting point of entry into the broad, interrelated themes of this book: dramatic reception, canonicity, and aesthetics. But before we get to these matters, let us pause to lay down a few facts about the dramatis personae and the places involved in this story. The annual Great Dionysia—the most important Athenian civic festival, attended by the whole Attic community as well as foreigners—included dramatic contests for the star playwrights of tragedy and comedy. The tragic contest featured a trio of competitors, the comic one a group of five, possibly reduced to three during the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE). Tragedians were each responsible for three tragedies and a satyr drama, comic contestants for only one play. At the Great Dionysia and the Lenaia, a less prestigious festival, Aristophanes repeatedly competed against Cratinus and Eupolis, with varying outcomes. Aristophanes and Eupolis belonged to the same generation, occupying the comic scene in the last three decades of the fifth century BCE (the former debuting in 427, the latter in 429), while Cratinus, their predecessor, was active from the mid-450s to the late 420s. At the Great Dionysia of 423, Cratinus victoriously performed one of his last plays, Pytinē (“The Wine Flask”), in which, responding to Aristophanes’ ridicule of him in Knights, he put himself onstage as a drunken, yet vigorous, old husband of Komoidia (the personification of comedy). About two hundred years later, in the Hellenistic period, this fluid competitive milieu would become fixed by a set of critics and grammarians based in Alexandria, in the Egypt of the Ptolemies, whose mission of preserving and commenting on the patrimony of archaic and classical Greek literature entailed standardizing canonical rankings for each poetic genre. The canonical triad of tragedy (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides), which had already emerged by the fourth century, came to be matched by a comic triad (Cratinus, Aristophanes, Eupolis), with lasting repercussions for the later history of ancient drama. The canon looms large here, as several of Aristophanes’ works following the negative reception of Clouds display an aesthetic discourse that I will call proto-canonical. I use the term because this discourse establishes a selfserving axiology within Old Comedy that implies the generic demotion or even expulsion of rivals. Regardless of Aristophanes’ specific intentions, this discourse helped raise him to the top of the comic canonical hierarchy. Focusing on two plays programmatically reflecting on Aristophanes’ defeat— Wasps (422, Lenaia) and the second Clouds (419–417?), whose original version does not survive—this book examines the contours of this discourse, which served to turn a failure into the lasting applause depicted in the Aelian episode. It complements recent work on Aristophanic self-construction by

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exploring how a central moment in the poet’s career directs future perceptions of his oeuvre and of Old Comedy’s generic identity. The interconnected actions of Wasps and Clouds suggestively plot the relationship between Aristophanes, his audience, and his two major rivals by offering an ongoing commentary on the setback of 423 through a complex and coherent process of reimagining, reinvention, and restaging, which sets the terms of the critical evaluation and survival of Old Comedy. This is the story of how a revisionary narrative of dramatic failure creates the enduring illusion of Aristophanic comedy as a prestigious aesthetic object by presenting it as a vehicle of ostensibly transhistorical values: dignity, self-control, health, paternal authority. Aesthetics are at the center of my analysis. By aesthetics I mean the specific character (including psychological and even physical effects) of the connection between the dramatic form and an audience—or, more precisely, the way this connection is constructed. I begin in this chapter with the payoff of this construction, namely critical elevation culminating in canonical hegemony. I then lay out the methodology, grounded in intra- and intertextual readings, by which I reconstruct Aristophanes’ aesthetic discourse. I conclude with a preliminary examination of this discourse, showing how Knights previews themes of the narrative mapped out in Wasps and the second Clouds, a narrative which I proceed to analyze in chapters 2 through 5. 1. Triumphant Failure: Peace, Clouds, and the Poetics of Hierarchy The parabasis, a standard feature of Old Comedy, was the moment in which the Chorus, breaking the fourth wall, addressed the audience, ostensibly offering the poet’s perspective. Surveying the continuities between the ancient literary-critical account of Old Comedy and the parabasis of Peace will help illustrate the place of proto-canonical discourse in Aristophanic selffashioning and outline my argument. From the Hellenistic period onward, Aristophanes was the favored poet of Old Comedy, eclipsing all others. The Hellenistic canon of Old Comedy is famously formulated in the opening line of one of Horace’s satires (1.4): Eupolis atque Cratinus Aristophanesque poetae. But this is not an equal triumvirate. The Hellenistic tripartite canonization of tragedy, already visible in Frogs and formalized in the fourth century, implied no clear-cut, stable internal hierarchy—at least not one that foreclosed the survival of any member. The axiology of the comedic triad, however, engendered a de facto monad. In one text of the so-called Comic Prolegomena, a twentieth-century edition of late-antique treatises that probably preserve Alexandrian material, the entry “Aristophanes” opens with a hyperbolic verdict presented as a state-

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ment of fact: “By far the most skilled in words among the Athenians and surpassing all in natural talent.” This judgment presupposes a larger evaluative schema evident in the anonymous critic’s much less enthusiastic view of Eupolis in the preceding entry: “He became powerful in diction and imitated Cratinus; indeed he displays much slander and crude outspokenness.” Not only is Eupolis dismissively treated as an imitator of Cratinus, but two qualities that may be perceived as ingredients of satiric discourse as such— “slander” (loidoron) and “crude outspokenness” (skaion)—become signs of literary second-ratedness if read against the description of Aristophanes as “more subtle and elegant” (leptoteros). Collected in the same edition, the critic Platonius pits the “vulgar humor” ( phortikon) of Cratinus, Eupolis’s alleged model, against Aristophanic “gracious wit” (charis). Another treatise in the Comic Prolegomena ranks Aristophanes as the shining star in the comic canon for “having practiced comedy more skillfully (technikōteron) than his contemporaries” and having rescued the genre from the archaiotēs (“archaic style”) and ataxia (“disorder, lack of direction”) still manifest in its Cratinean form. In Satires 1.123–24 Persius reconnects his satiric self with the Old Comic triad and replays this schema by spelling out the climax implicit in the Horace passage, in which Aristophanes’ final position discreetly hinted at his role as generic telos. He pairs Cratinean boldness (audaci . . . Cratino) with Eupolidean anger (iratum Eupolidem) and singles out Aristophanes as the only comedian whose distinctive poetic and emotional qualities coincide with superlative ( praegrandi) artistic value. The correspondence between this verdict and Aristophanes’ humorous self-fashioning is well illustrated in the parabasis of Peace—a play performed at the Great Dionysia two years after the fiasco of the first Clouds. It is here that Aristophanes claims through the Chorus to have turned comedy into a technē (“craft”), as robust and grandiose as a towering building, by safeguarding the genre from the destabilizing effects of cheap and vulgar humor (748–50): τοιαῦτ’ ἀφελὼν κακὰ καὶ φόρτον καὶ βωμολοχεύματ’ ἀγεννῆ ἐποίησε τέχνην μεγάλην ὑμῖν κἀπύργωσ’ οἰκοδομήσας ἔπεσιν μεγάλοις καὶ διανοίαις καὶ σκώμμασιν οὐκ ἀγοραίοις Having removed (aphelōn) such evils, vulgarity ( phorton), and sordid, buffoonish acts (bōmolocheumata), he (= the poet) has devised a great craft (technēn) for you and built it up to a towering height (epurgōse oikodomēsas) with grandiose verses and ideas, and jokes you won’t hear in the marketplace (agoraiois).

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Leucon and, in particular, Eupolis—Aristophanes’ competitors in the Great Dionysia of 421—are probably the immediate targets of these lines. The architectural imagery together with the evocation of the agora (agoraiois 750) constructs this rivalry around multiple sets of opposites: sophistication and vulgarity ( phorton 748), order and disorder, craft and amateurish improvisation, symbolic capital and debased monetary exchange, monumental stability and performative ephemerality—and, by extension, writtenness and orality. The parabatic statement resonates with Platonius’s account of Aristophanes’ refusal of phortikon, but especially with the contrast between the Aristophanic “technical” (technikōteron) approach to comedy writing and the ataxia of Cratinus (Eupolis’s putative model) that is drawn in one of the treatises analyzed above. This resonance signals the convergence of the values that Aristophanes attaches to his comic mode with the Alexandrians’ own notion of poetry as fine craftmanship (technē), their critical selectivity (krisis), and, above all, their organization and monumentalization of the literary past. Significantly, Aristophanes also declares his hostility toward the debased poetic products of the agora (τοὺς νοῦς δ’ ἀγοραίους fr. 488.2 KA) in his response to Cratinus’s mockery of his alleged cultivation of (Euripidean) leptotēs (“subtle elegance”)—an important category of Hellenistic aesthetics, which, as we have observed, one of the comic treatises assigns to Aristophanic comedy. It has been argued that in looking for an author’s or a genre’s literary identity, “we are, always, to some extent, looking at ourselves” (Houghton and Wyke 2009, 5). The Alexandrian scholars may well have seen their technical, taxonomical attitude reflected in the comedian’s self-fashioning. The proto-canonical valence of the Aristophanic edifice, which resembles Horace’s bronze-outlasting monumentum, is heightened by the semantics of phortos. The language of building (“[he] built it up to a towering height” [epurgōse oikodomēsas]) activates the materiality of phortos, setting the immobile, permanent, grand structure conceived for public display against the movable, perishable, petty goods shipped—and thus exposed to constant danger—by “seafaring merchants” ( phortēgoi) or carried by “porters” ( phortakes). The participle aphelōn, which expresses Aristophanes’ proud “removal” of the shoddy stuff of phortikē kōmōidia (“vulgar, ephemeral comedy”) from his generic blueprint, adds to this opposition. Five lines earlier, the verb exelaunō (“to ban”) indicates Aristophanes’ alleged “expulsion” of “low-value” devices from the comic repertoire (ἐξήλασ’ ἀτιμώσας 743). This verb, in fact, brings to mind the rhetoric of devaluation and exclusion that ancient literary criticism employs to justify the arbitrary axiologies of canonical listings. Though Eupolis and his predecessor Cratinus are not ostracized from

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the Hellenistic comic canon and their works continued to be read through antiquity, their brand of comedy, dismissed as slipshod merchandise, is marked for literary history’s clearance bin. Intertextuality in this passage assimilates Aristophanes to a tragic dramatist, Aeschylus, who at the time of the performance of Peace had already acquired canonical or semi-canonical status. The description of Aristophanes’ comic edifice is modeled upon a self-proclamation of poetic grandiosity assigned to Aeschylus in Pherecrates’ Crapataloi—a play that was probably set in the underworld and featured the dead tragedian as a character: “I who have built (exoikodomēsas) a great craft (technēn) and handed it down” (ὅστις   .  .  . παρέδωκα τέχνην μεγάλην ἐξοικοδομήσας [fr. 100 KA]). In turning Aeschylus’s tragic art into a “craft” that he has “built and handed down” to future generations, this statement presents him as an already canonized tragedian, whose plays, if not revived at the major dramatic festival through reperformance by public decree, were at least restaged at the Rural Dionysia (another Attic festival) and were probably incorporated “within the canon of literature that formed part of a typical curriculum” (Biles 2006– 2007, 230). One of the icons of this canonization is the poet’s memorial in Sicily—a magical site for the reperformance of his plays—which supplied aspiring tragedians and tragic actors with the illusion of materially recapturing his dramatic legacy. The Pherecratean Aeschylus evoked by Aristophanes is similar to the character in Frogs, who, in the atmosphere of the play— “retrospective, tinged with nostalgia, venerating, canonizing” (Porter 2006b, 301)—advertises his poetic afterlife and receives praise for the monumental “dignity” (semnotēs) of his tragic products, which is conducive to generic orderliness: “But you first among the Greeks built up towers ( purgōsas) of dignified (semna) words and adorned tragic chatter” (1004–5). I do not mean to suggest that Aristophanes posits a connection between his comic persona and Aeschylus’s tragic one, but rather that the parabasis of Peace toys with the discourse of dramatic canonicity, framing the comic poet’s self-presentation as an elevation of his particular mode to a generic norm and thus imposing a self-serving hierarchy of value. This proto-canonical gesture establishes the Aristophanic mode’s legitimacy by denouncing rivals’ lack of conformity to an imagined, self-constructed ideal of comedy deceptively offered as generic orthodoxy. The onomastic play in an earlier part of the parabasis can also be seen to participate in this proto-canonical maneuvering. The adjective aristos, which closes the first line of a typically self-promoting parabatic statement (736–38), punningly exploits the talking potential of Aristophanes’ name by presenting him as the aristos kōmōidodidaskalos (“the best comic poet”). Com-

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bined with the image of the monument introduced in the following lines, this trope amounts to an inscriptional gesture, mimicking the way epitaphs engraved on poets’ tombstones (like that of Aeschylus in Sicily) extend and immortalize their physical and textual bodies through the creation of a perpetual presence. Not just the covert embedding of the poet’s name within the verbal texture, but also the meaning of the word aristos contributes to the epigraphic, commemorative register of these lines. The status of aristos comedian, which Hellenistic and post-Hellenistic critics in effect assign to Aristophanes, may partly reflect the reception of this parabatic pun as an authorial signature, defining for future readers not just an individual but his oeuvre and constructing it as the expression of objective aesthetic value. The comic poet’s name predisposes him, as it were, for canonicity. In the literary-critical reception of his name, the self-ironical coloring of Aristophanes’ onomastic play is suppressed by the authoritative force of its self-aggrandizement. It has been suggested that Aristophanes seems to be “anxious about [his] place in the literary and dramatic canon” (Torrance 2013, 291), but scholars have not tackled Aristophanic proto-canonical discourse as it affects the comedian’s plots and the actual construction of the ancient comic canon. Though the proto-canonical narrative that permeates the parabasis of Peace has its roots in Knights, it is fully developed in the plots and parabases of Wasps and the revised Clouds, two plays that programmatically respond to Aristophanes’ defeat in 423. Analyzing the complex strategies by which the plots of the two plays evoke the defeat of the first Clouds, making characters and actions participate in and expand on parabatic themes, is essential to understanding how these texts shore up the generic edifice described in Peace and shape the later history of Old Comedy from antiquity onward. And it is ultimately the texts that are my concern. Although for argumentative purposes I often refer to Aristophanes as the agent behind the discourse I recover, I do not aspire to a definitive reconstruction of Aristophanes’ authorial intentions and do not see these intentions as stable or reducible to a univocal interpretive effort. I am, however, interested in locating in the textual constructions of Aristophanes’ plays self-fashioning gestures with potential canonical relevance—namely, those that to an ancient and modern spectator or reader may seem to act out the self-monumentalizing ambition advertised in the parabasis of Peace. Since the proto-canonical discourse of Wasps and the second Clouds figures in a narrative of failure, we can see how ancient literary critics—prone to second-guess the original audiences’ artistic judgments—might seize on it. A narrative of failure is a privileged site of authorial self-construction because it entails “coping, accommodation, and repair, and the continuation of the

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event” (Bailes 2011, 5). The reimagining of failure grants authors an opportunity for self-extension, for projecting their constructed literary identities into the future. As I contend, the self-justifying, proto-canonical narrative of Wasps and the second Clouds amounts to a tale of poetic semnotēs (“dignity”) and sōphrosunē (“self-control, restraint”) misunderstood and unfairly condemned by the audience of 423. There is a sense of the visionary, of lofty aspirations unrecognized because they are ahead of their time—something similar to the aesthetic titanism of those who nobly fall while pursuing the sublime, as discussed by pseudo-Longinus. In the act of failure through selfless overreaching, one can detect a seed of redemption, the promise of recognition by later, less blinkered, observers. Such a story—decisive in the later perception of Aristophanes as the praegrandis comedian—is, to a degree, inverted in Aelian’s outraged report of the Athenian public’s customary reproach of “the best (aristois) men” and its schadenfreude over the Aristophanic lampooning of Socrates’ “dignity (semnotēti) of life.” Recent studies have shown how the agonistic context of the performance of Knights in 424 is pervasively reflected in the thematics of this play, but in Wasps and the second Clouds Aristophanes raises the stakes by conceptualizing the comic competition as a struggle for comic legitimacy itself. This struggle is waged through a series of competing generic associations: Aesopic fable, iambic poetry, and especially tragedy, which is reduced to a violent unleashing of dangerous emotions and stereotyped as a channel of physical and psychological enervation for the audience. As I will suggest, Wasps capitalizes on Cratinus’s self-styled generic affiliation with tragedy, which scholarship has recently elucidated, to characterize the affective impact of his comic mode as somehow tragic—specifically, enervating and infantilizing. In the second Clouds, the same aesthetic force, expressive of a pathological lack of sōphrosunē, is imputed to Eupolis. In contrast with the paradoxically tragic quality of his rivals’ phortikē kōmōidia, Aristophanes’ comedy emerges from the two plays’ proto-canonical discourse as presenting and tending to induce in its audience a dignified stance, mature deportment, and healthy composure. In a twist of generic reversal, the semnotēs usually ascribed to tragedy and assigned to the canonized Aeschylus in Frogs is thus tendentiously imported into the domain of Aristophanic comedy. Aristophanes was not the only comic poet to exhort or find fault with an audience. In Maricas, Eupolis urged the spectators to wake up and wash away from their eyes the “chatter” of other poets—comic or tragic—who performed earlier on the same day (fr. 205 KA). According to Aelius Aristides’ gloss (Orations 28.91), Eupolis offered the sentiment “as though, on that day, he had been about to make all [spectators] wise and serious (sophous te kai

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spoudaious).” In an unknown play, Cratinus reproaches the audience for its erratic judgment: “Greetings, you crowd with laughter ill-timed and loud, the best judge of all of our wisdom (sophias)—days after the performance” (fr. 360.1–2 KA). In another fragment (fr. 395 KA), captured by Aelian in the same passage mentioned at the start of this chapter, Cratinus goes so far as to accuse an audience of “having lost its wits” (νοσῆσαι τὰς φρένας). (In contextualizing this quote as a response to the reception of the first Clouds, Aelian strikingly furthers the erroneous notion that Aristophanes won the contest.) Though these examples show that Aristophanes “was clearly not the only comic poet to question his audience’s critical acumen” (Wright 2012, 52), the fact remains that his reading of the terms of critical difference proved decisive. The discreetly manipulative gesture of self-affirmation hidden in the restaging of the audience’s rejection evidently carried more weight, for example, than Cratinus’s onstage boasts of drunken vitality in Pytine after his loss to Knights. A reason could well be that Aristophanes’ disingenuous discourse included generic delegitimation and exclusion in an all-encompassing, coherent narrative of undeserved failure that, as I noted, would appeal to Hellenistic critics’ mistrust of agonistic verdicts. Barbara Herrnstein Smith has observed that canons are typically created by “privileging absolutely—that is, ‘standard’-izing”—particular, contingent interests and functions, while “pathologizing” others. In addition, as Smith remarks, “the privileging of a particular set of functions for artworks or works of literature may be (and often is) justified on the grounds that the performance of such functions serves some higher individual, social, or transcendent good, such as the psychic health of the reader” (1984, 22–23). I will contend that, by casting the first Clouds as an attempt to cure and protect a debilitated audience, the revisionary narrative of Wasps and the second Clouds imbues Aristophanes’ comic mode with canonical potential, converting it, as it were, into generic orthodoxy. An accusation that an audience “has lost its wits” will seem less compelling from someone like Cratinus, who programmatically characterizes himself as drunk, manic, and capable of “flooding” (kataklusei) his spectators with his poetry (fr. 198.5 KA)—a self-portrait incompatible with Hellenistic scholars’ notorious predilection for “water-drinking poets.” In Wasps and the second Clouds, this proto-canonical discourse frames the contrast between the ultimately “winning” Aristophanes and the other two major poets of Old Comedy as a confrontation between sanity and madness, self-control and self-indulgence, paternal stability and infantile caprice. This moral posture has a specifically aesthetic dimension, grounded in the materiality of dramatic performance—in the distinctive emotional and bodily feelings that different comic modes arguably transmit to an audience.

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In reflecting upon the contest of 423 and thus, in a sense, bringing the defeated first Clouds back onstage, Wasps “ostracizes” Cratinus as a source of tragic enervation while assigning Aristophanes the interrelated roles of providential, if unappreciated, benefactor of the comic audience and stabilizing savior of the genre. The second Clouds completes the struggle of Wasps by construing Eupolis as the inheritor of the Cratinean comic mode and similarly marginalizing him. Thus, the two plays dramatize the demotion and expulsion of comic phortos that we saw in the parabasis of Peace. Embedding proto-canonical discourse within their correlated plots, Wasps and the second Clouds place Aristophanes against the duo of Cratinus and Eupolis according to a strategy that ancient scholarship will adopt and simplify as literary-critical truth. These two plays set up the terms of opposition that will define Aristophanic comedy for ancient critics—and us. A final point before we proceed: all strands of metaliterary discourse and literary criticism in the Aristophanic corpus confront us with the impossibility of establishing a clear-cut line between sincerity and irony. In both Old Comedy and Roman satire, “each literary critical comment issued is undermined by laughter in manifold ways,” as Jennifer Ferriss-Hill has remarked before aptly concluding that “it nevertheless lingers  .  .  . as an incisive aesthetic judgment” (2012, 388). In my readings, I lay emphasis on the agonistic framework that produces and motivates the discourse in the first place rather than potential ironical undermining, not because I deny its presence (I do not), but because I am interested in the aesthetic discourse per se, in the textual mechanisms that generate it, and in its legacy. The ironical scare quotes that may frame this discourse do not neutralize its substance entirely or for all readers. As Philip Hardie has observed regarding the contrast of poetic modes between Aeschylus and Euripides in Frogs, “serious or not, this kind of dichotomy has been remarkably tenacious of life” (2007, 145). 2. Parabasis, Plot, and the Directionality of the Text My analysis of Aristophanes’ proto-canonical discourse relies upon intraand intertextual readings that present the comic plot and its engagement with different generic traditions, especially tragedy, as acting out the self-reflexive contents of the parabasis. Some methodological considerations on the models of textual connectivity and directionality presupposed in my readings and on the audiences I envision for them are in order. The related notions of metafiction, metatheater, and metalepsis have long been central to the critical discourse on Aristophanes, which has widely recognized the intense self-reflexivity and frame breaking of his plots. As

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Gregory Dobrov has observed, in a dramatic corpus where characters can blatantly channel the poet’s voice, “no distinct boundary protects the dramatis personae from invasion by (the fictionalized) ‘Aristophanes’ ” (1995, 50). Old Comedy characteristically bridges the divide between fiction and reality, stage and theatron, playwright and audience, by laying bare the circumstances and mechanisms of dramatic production and incorporating them within the plot’s thematics. As a result, within the subversively anti-illusionistic, polyphonic, and multilayered realm of Aristophanic comedy, no textual space can be considered immune from metatheatricality. Although prologue, parodos, and exodos, alongside the programmatic parabasis, are recurring venues for the expression of the comic poet’s voice, “the unpredictability, as well as variety, of comic self-reflexivity,” Ian Ruffell has remarked, “makes it impossible to bracket large-scale parts of a formal comic structure as privileged locations” (2011, 251). Thus, the dialogue of the Aristophanic plays can be regarded as continually liable to comment on the multiple aspects of its fictionality and echo the comic poet’s voice, with varying levels of intensity, depth, and irony, negotiated by different spectators and readers at different times. What allows the Aristophanic critic to read reverberations of the poet’s voice in the action is primarily the recognition of the plot’s verbal and thematic resonances with the parabasis. Even though it “marks a distinctive moment of frame-breaking” (Whitmarsh 2013, 13), the parabasis is well integrated in the action, as scholarship of the past three decades has shown. The fictionalized poetic autobiography sketched in the parabasis has been seen to “emphasiz[e] those . . . ideas of the play that are chief bearers of meaning” (Bowie 1982, 37), connecting “to the drama’s themes, issues, and characters by many finely spun threads of language, imagery, political reference, and ideology” (Hubbard 1991, 30). Conversely, the political antics of Aristophanes’ earlier plots have been viewed as mirror images of the parabatic narratives of comic poetics and agonistics. As a result of this pervasive exchange between parabasis and plot, Aristophanes’ comic persona is constantly entangled in the twists and turns of his dramatic fictions. The parabasis works, in many respects, as a preface. As paratextual signposts “generally written after the texts they deal with” (Genette [1987] 1997, 174), prefaces tendentiously endow the literary works to which they introduce their readers with a retrospective intention; this post-factum framing inevitably conditions the reader’s approach to the whole text. Prefaces conflate three distinct temporal dimensions: the reader’s first encounter with the text as a present object, the author’s view of his text as a finished product and thus as the result of a past intentionality, and the author’s manipulation of his future survival. Located roughly in the middle of a play, the parabasis arguably

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shares with the preface the two authorial perspectives, which are essential to the reconstruction of what I call proto-canonical discourse. Thus, in my readings of Wasps and Clouds, I try to recapture, as it were, the full prefatory potential of the parabasis by placing it at the beginning of my analysis. This disruption of the performative sequence is entirely justified, as I will explain. In the analysis of the intratextualities of Wasps and Clouds—the actions, objects, images, and metaphors that connect the parabasis with the plot and take on metadramatic significance—I cast a wider net than has been done so far. In doing so, I indicate ways in which the plots of these plays preview and prolong their parabatic engagements with the failure of the first Clouds and its aftermath. The suggestive associations, though not rigid allegorical identities, that emerge between the characters and the participants in the performative events described in the parabases (the comic poet, his rivals, the audience) serve to encode Aristophanes’ reception aesthetics. As I will argue, elements of the plots’ extended dramatizations of the parabatic narratives are absorbed into Aristophanes’ ancient biographical-critical tradition, which sanctions his hegemonic position in the comic canon. A similar procedure is at work, as Emily Gowers (2004) has shown, in the ancient biographical construction of Terence, which merges the interlocking narratives of his prologues and plots. In his prologues, Terence “presents us with a contrived personal or professional predicament that the plays then take up, thrash out and solve with their own disentanglements” (ibid., 163); the plots’ elaborations upon the prologic accounts, which are comparable and perhaps even indebted to the Aristophanic parabases, generate the biographical outline of later periods. For Aristophanes, the notorious text-based approach of ancient biography and criticism appears to reproduce the integration of plot and parabasis that his intratextuality realizes. Which interpreters do I envision for the connections that I posit? Although I privilege critics, ancient and modern, capable of making connections that are immanent in the text regardless of their perceptibility for a theatrical audience, I in fact consider the latter to be deeply involved in decoding the process of metapoetic signification that I reconstruct. The argument for interand intratextual allusion draws “only on textual potentialities, not on historical certainties” (Wohl 2010, 51n37). Connections that to modern eyes might seem “likely” to have been apprehended only by a restricted elite of connoisseurs or even to have escaped the notice of the whole audience may have enjoyed greater recognition and appreciation among the aurally and visually trained recipients of Attic drama. It is dangerous to establish hierarchies of interpretive likelihood on the basis of our historically contingent notions of theatrical perceptibility. As Richard Hunter puts it, “We must avoid overfine

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distinctions between what is possible with an oral, performance tradition and what requires written texts” (2009, 25). Cognitive psychology has demonstrated that, like pictures and objects, imagistically dense language is “easiest for the mind to recall with an associated context” and, consequently, “literacy is not necessarily a prerequisite for audience understanding of a drama’s metapoetic suggestions” (Torrance 2013, 11). In addition, some viewers of the plays may have been readers, as numerous scholars have been led to observe by the repeated, if tongue-in-cheek, references in Old Comedy to the reception of drama as a reading experience. Although we cannot determine the extent of the overlap between viewing and reading, these references provide ground for treating Aristophanic plays not just as scripts but as literary texts fully amenable to the application of intra- and intertextual intepretations. Alison Sharrock has observed that “reading intratextually means looking at the text from different directions (backward and forward), chopping it up again, building it up again, contracting and expanding its boundaries” (2000, 5). I conceive the intratextual connections of plot and parabasis as cues for reading in both directions. I read the parabasis into the post-parabatic scenes, highlighting their metadramatic potential and bringing out additional layers of meaning in the parabasis itself. However, disrupting the linear progression of the theatrical performance, I also retrospectively read the parabasis and its post-parabatic accretions into the scenes that precede it, treating them as previews of the parabatic narratives that enrich the reading of the parabasis. This non-linear, synchronic dimension of reading, which turns the hermeneutic enterprise into an ongoing process of reappraisal, is central to the interpretation of texts, whether written or performed. A scholar of musical theater, Millie Taylor, observes that “in the course of a performance the blend of . . . dramatic materials presented to the audience at any one moment will continually alter the potential meanings of previously presented images,” for “synchronous and diachronous information is being interpreted . . . simultaneously” (2012, 92 and 73).  I also conduct detailed analyses of the tragic intertextualities that suffuse the plots of Wasps and the second Clouds. Aristophanic drama is constantly “haunted,” at both the verbal and visual level, by the ghostly presence of tragedy—the privileged generic and cultural discourse against which comedy constructs itself. As many studies have shown, paratragedy in Aristophanes enacts complex and sustained crosstheatrical dialogues both at the micro and the macro, plot-based level, encouraging spectators to locate allusions within their original contexts. In a groundbreaking article, Don Fowler observed that Aristophanic drama can “be significantly intertextual with its tragic source-text down to the level of the marked use of particles”

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(1997, 29n25) and thus lends itself to the sort of readings commonly practiced in the fields of Hellenistic and Latin studies. In making sense of the dense fabric of Aristophanic paratragedy, one can, with some confidence, treat intertextual traces as potential conveyors of thematic and imagistic associations, intergeneric exchanges, or even entire tragic plots embedded in the verbal and visual architecture of comic scenes. Combining intra- and intertextual analyses within a unified interpretive framework, I consider how in Wasps and the second Clouds paratragedy engages with the parabatic narratives and their accretions throughout the plot. As a kind of parody, paratragedy prompts “a form of self-reflection and selfcritique, a genre’s way of thinking critically about itself ” (McHale 1987, 145) and thus converges with the parabasis as the comic self-reflexive site par excellence. Furthermore, in fostering a code of shared knowledge between poet and audience, paratragedy symbolically reduces the distance of stage from theatron, creating the same impression of intimacy and proximity as parabatic addresses. In other words, both parabasis and paratragedy enact the notion of performative “closeness” captured by the prefix para- (not just “aside,” but also “beside”). Capitalizing on these functional similarities, I point out ways in which the intertextual dynamics conjured by paratragedy flesh out aspects of the self-reflexive narratives in the parabasis and the plot. The intersections of parabasis and paratragedy intimate affinities between Aristophanes’ comic and tragic rivals, offering insights into how the playwright constructs conflicting aesthetic modes of comic reception. These intersections suggest that paratragedy works not just as a burlesque clash of registers or an intergeneric game, but as an indication of a character’s entrapment in tragic psychology or in a dangerous situation evocative of tragedy. As I will propose, in Aristophanes’ reconstruction, this entrapment has much to do with the comic audience’s rejection of his 423 play, which is the narrative focus of the parabases of Wasps and the second Clouds. 3. Affecting the Audience: Knights, Clouds, and the Feel of Comedy I now explore the central theme of this book: the aesthetics of comic reception or, to be more precise, Aristophanes’ construction of the distinctive ways in which his and his rivals’ comic modes affect the audience’s bodies and minds. I begin with a brief discussion of ancient aesthetics in light of the recent “affective turn” in the humanities. I then focus on a case study, Knights, whose finale provides an emblematic picture of the aesthetic connection of poet and audience, anticipating themes and images of the proto-canonical discourse that permeates Wasps and the second Clouds. The analysis of the ending of

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Knights will lead me to preliminary thoughts on how the aesthetics of comic reception play out in Wasps and the second Clouds, a matter which I will later consider in much greater detail. In archaic and classical Greek literature, the idea that the sights and sounds of performance exert an intense psychological and physical force shapes the relationship of every poetic genre with its public. Ancient perceptions of drama lay emphasis on its material immediacy. However improbable, the account in the Life of Aeschylus of the miscarriages suffered by female spectators of Eumenides at the sight of the terrifying Erinyes presupposes the possibility of physical and emotional transformations triggered by the intimacy of performers and audience. Gorgias famously conceptualizes tragedy as a deceptive theama (“seeing”) and akousma (“hearing”) affecting spectators through the material, medicinal, and magical potency of logos (“speech, language”). Plato’s condemnation of tragedy in the Republic and the Laws casts this genre’s expressions of grief as an invasive force that enervates and maddens spectators. Aristotle’s theory of tragic reception in the Poetics is thought to posit a “conversion of painful into pleasurable emotions” that, as the medical term katharsis (“cleansing, purification”) seems to indicate, has “a strongly physiological substrate” (Halliwell 2011, 256 and 248). Aristophanes, too, seems to comment on theatrical performance as a transaction between material language and sensory apparatuses with a wide range of effects—“threatening, inflammatory, . . . or soothing, comforting and therapeutic,” to borrow a recent description of the impact attributed to drama in Shakespeare’s age (Craik and Pollard 2013, 1). For example, in a fragment from an unidentified play (fr. 688 KA), he assimilates the aesthetic encounters with two different modes of dramatic poetry to opposed wine-tasting experiences. According to this account, the people (dēmos) have a low tolerance for “hard and dry” poets, who, like the corresponding wine (the Pramnian), “contract brows and stomach”; they prefer those more similar to a sweet, fragrant wine redolent of nectar. As has been suggested, Cratinus and Aristophanes himself may lie behind the antithetical gustatory sensations described here. The recent “affective turn” in critical theory has emphasized the permeability of body and mind in the process of emotional experience, redefining affect as a material concept, a feeling transmissible from body to body. This idea of affect, which borders on habitus (social deportment), captures well the exchange of somatic and mental energies between performer and audience. Studies in performance theory have compared this process to a “contagion.” For example, examining the aesthetics of the body in motion (or kinesthetics), Susan Leigh Foster (2008, 57) has observed that “the dancing body’s ‘contagion’ can impel our bodies . . . to mimic its movement, and, as a

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result, feel its feelings,” almost turning us into performers. Performed speech can produce the same diffusion of feeling, as illustrated, for example, in the prologue of Plato’s Menexenus (235a–c). As Socrates wryly explains, the delivery of epitaphic praise transmits to the audience a feeling of semnotēs that lasts beyond the moment of the performative event, making the listener feel “bigger, nobler, and more handsome.” The empathic transmission of this “affect” from performer to listener is presented here as occurring through the latter’s bodily absorption of sound: “Ringing in this way, the sound of the language coming from the speaker penetrates (enduetai) the ears.” The verb enduō, which primarily means “to put on,” seems to assimilate this process to the donning of a piece of clothing embracing the whole self through its contact with the skin. How this process of affect transmission might work through reading is a separate issue. Clearly, though it involves an imagined complex of sensory experiences analogous to those encountered in a theatrical setting—or, for that matter, in a lived experience—it can be just as efficacious. Presupposing both spectators and readers as interpreters of the connections I posit, I nonetheless privilege transmission of affect in performance because it is the production of Clouds within a performative contest—and its purported impact on that occasion—that is at the center of the narrative of failure I aim to piece together. We will see how skin imagery in Knights illustrates the importance of affect in Aristophanes’ representation of the poet-audience relationship, but, before looking at this imagery, I wish to sketch the ways this play dramatizes its own agonistic performative context. As scholars have noted, in Knights a complex of parallels and verbal echoes connects the three main characters (the Sausage Seller, Paphlagon, and the old and grumpy Demos) with the three “actors” in the comic contest of 424 (Aristophanes, Cratinus, and the Athenian audience). Taking his cue from the alleged feud between Aristophanes and the Athenian politician Cleon referred to in the parabasis, Thomas Hubbard (1991, 67) has observed that the Sausage Seller—the young opponent of the Cleonic demagogue Paphlagon—“figures the political role of the dramatist, who perceives his own verbal activity . . . as the means for ridding the city of Cleon.” In addition, Demos, a transparent personification of the Athenian citizen body, crucially contributes to presenting the Sausage Seller as a “dramatic and metadramatic persona” (ibid., 71): through Demos, the audience is, in fact, brought onstage and fully integrated into the comic fiction. In this way, “the poet’s competition for public favor corresponds with the rivalry of the politicians for the affection of Demos” (ibid., 77). Further studies—in particular, by Zachary Biles and Ian Ruffell—have il-

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luminated the correspondences between Paphlagon and Cratinus, whom the Chorus famously describes in the parabasis. Aristophanes portrays Paphlagon as a monster with a stormy, canine voice and a voracious appetite, a characterization that can be seen as distorting Cratinus’s own self-fashioning as a tempestuous, drunken, and barking satirist. Thus, the play’s agonistic texture consistently suggests a convergence between internal and external enemies, between political and poetic succession. In particular, the final scenes, which culminate with the victory of the Sausage Seller and the rejuvenation of Demos, clearly merge the resolution of the comic plot with the outcome of the dramatic contest. As Biles has noted, “Both adversaries are unequivocally retired from active competition . . . , [Paphlagon] to a marginal wasteland away from public business, Cratinus to the fringes of theatrical activity” (2011, 129), while the Sausage Seller and Aristophanes, respectively acclaimed by Demos onstage and by the Athenian audience in the theatron, are jointly headed toward a celebratory feast. For Ruffell, the conflict between Aristophanes and Cratinus dramatized in Knights is waged over epinoiai (“devices, inventions”), a terms that designates political shrewdness as well as comic inventiveness in the domains of plot and jokes. I argue that there is more at stake in the contrast of comic modes built into the plot of Knights: not only a duel of strategies for humor and plot making, but a confrontation between different paradigms of aesthetic connection with the audience. The finale of Knights shows how, through skin imagery, the play encapsulates competing psychophysical effects of performed drama, healthful and harmful. The rejuvenating cleansing that the Sausage Seller administers to Demos in the play’s finale, his crowning epinoia, is what seals his victory (1322); his literal “boiling off ” (1321) of Demos, followed by anointing, leads to a miraculous change of skin. As a professional tanner, Paphlagon knows the different techniques for scraping, softening, embalming, and preserving animal skins, but his activity is perceived as bearing the mark of physical decomposition and death. Conversely, by bringing new life through moistening, the Sausage Seller and by extension the poet trumpet their salubrious effect on the citizen body. This reading is supported by the assimilation of poetic language to an unguent, which dates back to Hesiod’s description of the Muses’ voice as dew poured on the lips of poets and kings. The harmfulness of Cratinus’s poetics is signaled not just by his connection to Paphlagon the tanner but also by the rushing and disorderly river to which he is compared in the parabasis (526–28). This comparison, usually interpreted as a superficially flattering but subtly derogatory depiction of the comedian’s satiric voice in its heyday, may be read in an even more negative

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way from the viewpoint of the aesthetics of reception; the underlying idea of violent invasiveness raises the possibility that Cratinus’s liquid aggression may harm not only his satiric adversaries but also his vulnerable listeners. The river simile could hint at Cratinean comedy’s power to swamp the bodies and minds of his audience—an engulfing affect that Aristophanes’ older rival seems to tout in one of the fragments of Pytine, when he is introduced as “able to flood (kataklusei) everything . . . with his poetry” (fr. 198.5 KA). In the likely case of similar language in earlier Cratinean plays, we could regard the soothing liquid treatment administered to Demos at the end of Knights as a response that undermines the aesthetic value of Cratinus’s more aggressive, self-styled sublimity—even if he proceeds to repeat the boast in Pytine. The contrast in liquid imagery is evidence of a manipulative and ultimately effective working through of the affective implications of the Cratinean persona. We can perceive another Aristophanic intimation of the Cratinean mode’s impact on the audience if we read what follows the river simile in light of Demos’s final rejuvenation. The picture of the comedian’s impetuous past gives way to a different expression of his ataxia (“disorder, lack of direction”): Cratinus’s current decrepitude, epitomized by his sexual impotence, his wandering around desperate for a drink, and his incomprehensible babbling. While apparently blaming the audience for neglecting the veteran comedian, the Chorus blurs the boundaries of life and art by insinuating that Cratinus’s bodily condition is a consequence of his notorious poetics of intoxication (531–36): νυνὶ δ’ ὑμεῖς αὐτὸν ὁρῶντες παραληροῦντ’ οὐκ ἐλεεῖτε, ἐκπιπτουσῶν τῶν ἠλέκτρων καὶ τοῦ τόνου οὐκέτ’ ἐνόντος τῶν θ’ ἁρμονιῶν διαχασκουσῶν· ἀλλὰ γέρων ὢν περιέρρει, ὥσπερ Κοννᾶς, στέφανον μὲν ἔχων αὗον, δίψῃ δ’ ἀπολωλώς, ὃν χρῆν διὰ τὰς προτέρας νίκας πίνειν ἐν τῷ πρυτανείῳ, (535) καὶ μὴ ληρεῖν, ἀλλὰ θεᾶσθαι λιπαρὸν παρὰ τῷ Διονύσῳ But now you feel no pity for him even if you see him blathering, with his pegs dropping out, his strings loosened, and his joints yawning. He is just an old man who wanders in circles, like Connas, sporting a shriveled wreath and dying of thirst, although, on account of his earlier victories, he should be drinking in the Prytaneum, and instead of blathering, he should sit, sleek (liparon), in the audience next to Dionysus.

The Chorus’s ostensibly sympathetic suggestion that Cratinus should be allowed to sit in the first row, “sleek (liparon 536),” next to the statue of Dionysus, reinforces the mocking description of his real condition, symbolized by his shriveled wreath with its air of staleness, decay, and death. Demos’s

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miraculously bathed body, on the other hand, reconstitutes the sensuous shape of archaic Athens. The Sausage Seller’s treatment enables Demos to reinhabit the “violet-crowned Athens” of the archaic age (1323) and don the luxurious outfit—probably “a long, ornate himation draped . . . over an ankle-length, linen chiton” (Stone 1981, 403)—distinctive of the time of Aristides and Miltiades (1325). In urging Demos to make his epiphany onstage, the Chorus underscores the equivalence of bodily and urban rejuvenation: “You sleek (liparai) and violet-crowned and much-envied Athens” (1329). The adjective liparos indicates the sensory qualities (smoothness, brightness, fragrance) of bathed and anointed skin, establishing a strong contrast with the parabatic Cratinus, whose crown is withered instead of smooth. This contrast implies that the potential harm his poetics could do to the audience can be conceptualized not only as an aggressively invasive inundation but, alternatively, as a mimetic decrepitude. Thus, the multilayered battle in Knights is dramatized as a contest between opposed psychophysical experiences. While saving Demos from the abuses of Paphlagon’s violent politicking and tempestuous rhetoric, the Sausage Seller’s liquid therapy also enacts the cathartic and invigorating effects of Aristophanic comedy on the skin of an audience under the assault of Cratinus’s debilitating mode of comic performance. This opposition of affects recalls the contrast of poetic modes that we observed in Aristophanes’ mapping of dramatic aesthetics onto the taste of wine. Though, as always, Aristophanes has it both ways, sparing neither side in the controversy from mockery, the selfirony in the Sausage Seller’s action and Demos’s rejuvenation does not collapse the polarity of comic modes as aesthetic paradigms laid out in the play. Now that we have seen how the affect of dramatic performance shapes the poetic contrast adumbrated in Knights, we can preview the role that the notion of a curative touch for an afflicted audience plays in Aristophanes’ self-serving diagnosis of his 423 failure in Wasps and the second Clouds. This preview will bring us back to the nexus of aesthetics and canonicity referred to toward the beginning of this chapter. The transformative force of the Aristophanic mode reemerges in Wasps and the second Clouds through a shift in tactile imagery. In the two plays, as suggested by their intratextualities of parabasis and plot, Aristophanes converts Knights’ rejuvenating bath, anointing, and reclothing into an allencompassing textile image—a refined χλαῖνα (chlaina) and, less specifically, a ἱμάτιον (himation)—retrospectively ascribed to the first Clouds and to his poetic mode as a whole. The two items of clothing revive the first Clouds as a textual commodity,  but, as I will argue, they also materialize Aristophanes’ construction of the affective relation between the performed play and

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the audience as that of a warm outer garment wrapped around the body. That is to say, they reenact the force of the unappreciated play as a sensuous and emotional presence felt on the skin. As has been observed, “to understand the tactile properties of objects and materials . . . is also to attempt to understand their capacity to affect—or ‘touch’—us” (Paterson 2007, 80). In reifying comic performance as clothing, Aristophanes extends the idea that underlies the treatment of Demos at the end of Knights: the theatrical experience as an intense transferral of affect from performer to audience. The chlaina and the himation—which, in Aristophanes’ proto-canonical narrative of failure, objectify the performative force of the first Clouds—provide a form of touch meant to bring about empathic nearness through the healthy comfort and safety supplied by their wrapping textures. What links the ending of Knights with Aristophanes’ dramatized retelling of the failure of the first Clouds is not only the therapeutic affect that he attributes to his comedy but also the role of his poetic persona in restoring paternal authority. The Sausage Seller’s rejuvenation of Demos symbolically reconnects the audience with the political fathers of Athens, Aristides and Miltiades. Thus, we can say that the new comic regime established by Aristophanes through the Sausage Seller is presented as beneficial to Demos in that it remedies the debilitating intoxication arising from Cratinus’s comedy by assimilating the audience to figures of powerful fatherhood. At the same time, the young Sausage Seller adopts a quasi-paternal role and, in so doing, stages Aristophanic comedy’s growth into authority. In Wasps, the poet-audience relationship emerging from the plot of Knights is reconfigured through an explicitly intergenerational relationship. The young poet who succeeded in restoring an old, worn-out audience is now reflected in Bdelycleon, a son committed to curing his mentally debilitated father, Philocleon, but ultimately unable to do so. Bdelycleon’s role, which I call “paternal son,” defines the Aristophanic poetic stance; the poet’s assistance, the narrative claims, was unwisely rejected by the comic audience in 423. The role of the paternal son strongly informs the relationship between Aristophanes, the comic audience, and his rivals (Cratinus and Eupolis) in Wasps and the second Clouds. Hesiod’s poetic persona in the Works and Days provides an antecedent. By using his father’s imprudent conduct as a warning to his brother, the Hesiodic narrator elevates his filial condition to a position of authority and thus reverses the traditional scenario of wisdom literature whereby a paternal figure is expected to offer normative paradigms of behavior. As Pietro Pucci has observed, Hesiod’s authorial voice constantly acts “as the substitute of the absent father” (1996, 196). In Wasps and in the second Clouds, Aristophanes rereads the unsuccessful play of 423 as an attempt to re-

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store the comic audience, resembling a father, to full presence by protecting it from the unfilial attacks of his rivals. The action that Aristophanes retrospectively assigns to the first Clouds is that of the dutiful and self-sacrificing son tending to an audience enfeebled by his adversaries and trying, as it were, to reconcile it with fatherhood as the quintessential expression of authority and self-control—the Lacanian symbolic (“paternal Law”) or the Freudian superego. Although, to an extent, the intergenerational thematics of Wasps are shaped by the comic rivalry of Aristophanes and Cratinus, the reconstruction of the contest of 423 crafted in this play does not simply represent a Bloomian strife of the younger poet against his predecessor. Rather, as becomes clear particularly in the second Clouds, Aristophanes presents the conflict with his rivals as a confrontation of attitudes toward the comic audience construed as a father: on the one hand, the Aristophanic protective affect and, on the other, the aggressive stances of Aristophanes’ “brothers”: Cratinus (older) and Eupolis (coeval). The wrapping texture of the chlaina in Wasps and of the himation, its counterpart in the second Clouds, materializes the action of the Aristophanic paternal son. Clothing is “both containing and expansive, both protective and projective” (North 2013, 66–67). The chlaina and the himation, which encompass Aristophanes’ view of the first Clouds’ affective force, are fundamentally containing. These garments physically and psychically hold together the audience while insulating it from the harmful effects of the performative modes of Aristophanes’ rivals, who unleash unruly and dangerous emotions more appropriate to tragedy than comedy. Thus, the chlaina and the himation reconstitute and defend the audience’s dissolved paternal identity. In Aristophanes’ rereading of the contest of 423, Clouds was meant to reinstate the audience’s fatherly authority by shielding it from the infantilizing effects of Cratinus’s tragic comedy, which Eupolis would later appropriate. In helping the audience contain harmful emotions, the therapeutic touch of the chlaina and of the paternal son beneficially connects performer and audience and, by extension, audience and society. It is precisely the self-containment figured by the chlaina and himation that allows a healthy, appropriate, fatherly “expansion” of the individual into society as opposed to an infantile and fundamentally self-destructive eruption. In Wasps and the second Clouds, semnotēs and sōphrosunē define the wholesome affect that the paternal son, mistreated in the contest of 423, sought to impart to a diseased fatherly audience. The textile surrogates of the paternal son, chlaina and himation, re-create the first Clouds’ purported effort to restore the audience to its paternal identity through a lasting feeling of “dignity” and “self-control.” As Ann Jones and Peter Stallybrass have

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observed, “Clothes permeate the wearer, fashioning him or her within” and leaving “a print or character” (2000, 2 and 4). The healthy, protective wrapping of semnotēs and sōphrosunē that Aristophanes attempted to bestow upon the audience of the first Clouds is at the center of the proto-canonical discourse that shapes his Hellenistic and post-Hellenistic primacy as the poet who brought order, stability, discipline, and sophistication to the realm of Old Comedy. Through the development of Knights’ notion of dueling aesthetic modes into the textile conceits of the revisionary narrative of Wasps and the second Clouds, Aristophanic comedy becomes a special, powerful, revered object—received by audiences ancient and modern as the comic standard. In reading the defeat of the first Clouds as a dutiful son’s failure to restore a debilitated father to his proper generational role, Wasps and the second Clouds are instrumental in generating Old Comedy as we know it, that is comedy in the Aristophanic mode. In what follows, I scrutinize Wasps and the second Clouds, showing how their strikingly similar plots, characters, and structures are implicated in a discourse that extends beyond the contingencies of the dramatic fiction. To be sure, this book is just as much about a third play—the non-extant first Clouds, which, if only through Aristophanes’ games of reinvention and revision, emerges from the interstices of the images and dramaturgy of the two subsequent comedies. In chapter 2, I argue that the father-son battle of Wasps retells the comic contest of 423 as a choice between Cratinus’s threadbare cloak (the τρίβων [tribōn]) and Aristophanes’ salubrious wrap (the chlaina). Through a consideration of these garments, I recover a materialist, specifically tactile, subtext of Aristophanes’ literary-critical discourse that contributes to his enduring dominance. The next two chapters develop the link between aesthetics and proto-canonicity by exploring how the tribōn and chlaina, in their materiality, encode Aristophanes’ delegitimating assimilation of Cratinean comedy to tragedy. Chapter 3 details the proto-canonical force of the paternal son Bdelycleon’s efforts to heal the tragic emotions of his father. In this chapter, I consider the imagistic play between binding and loosening, and the analogy of textile and architecture—specifically how the house, like the chlaina, figures emotional and generic stability, while the ragged surface of the tribōn aligns with tragic alienation and generic errancy. Chapter 4 shows an ominous side to the finale of the play, usually interpreted more benignly—a false liberation, in the tribōn, of Cratinus’s quasi-tragic mode. We see how, amid a play of genres—iambos, Aesopic fable, and tragedy—the affective force of this mode pushes Philocleon to a more advanced state of morbid identification, from

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a quasi-spectator to a sort of performer, in a way that foretells physical ruin for the character, the audience, and Cratinus himself. In chapter 5, I suggest that the second Clouds stretches out Wasps’ proto-canonical narrative of the failure of 423 by replacing Cratinus with Eupolis and assimilating the latter’s quasi-tragic affect to that of the former. Transforming interpoetic rivalry into a clash of filial models, the play seems to depict a fatherly audience that the bad son Eupolis has deprived of the protection of Aristophanes’ himation. In a moment of redemptive recognition, the implied violence of the EupolideanCratinean mode is turned against its practitioners in a manner that predicts Aristophanes’ eventual triumph. Why are three chapters pegged to Wasps and one to Clouds? In fact, all four of the following chapters concern both. The first Clouds, which represents an absent presence in the second one, is just as much a part of Wasps, presupposed in everything I say about it. The reimagination of the first Clouds in the revised, extant version is in turn mediated by Wasps. The two other plays treated in this introductory chapter, Knights and Peace, though a part of this picture, each touch upon one, but not both, of the preoccupations that animate this study: the dramatization of reception aesthetics and the discourse of generic legitimacy. Though I have chosen close reading over a survey, I believe my findings have implications for the entire Aristophanic legacy. The specific readings advanced in this book are not intended to exclude or replace other interpretive possibilities. They are designed to open up new avenues for appreciating Aristophanes’ strategies of self-referentiality and gauging their impact on the later perceptions of his oeuvre. I hope to illuminate the mechanics of his proto-canonical discourse while offering suggestive ways of defamiliarizing the verbal and imagistic texture of two central, tightly connected, and much-studied plays of Aristophanes’ corpus. It is perhaps not on the surface, but in the folds of Aristophanes’ capacious cloak, that we may find his stratagems for wrapping the defeat of 423 in a victory for all time.

2 A Touch of Class: The Enduring Texture of Aristophanic Comedy Enwrapping language may well stifle and inhibit us, but it can give us a sense of safety and pleasure as well. Such words may hold us together, however broken we remain inside them; perhaps they even offer us the reinforcing strength that we need in order to heal. K a r m e n M a c K e n d r i c k , Word Made Skin

In this chapter, I introduce the link between proto-canonicity and the feel of a fabric in Wasps by looking at how Aristophanes reimagines the audience’s experiences of the two comic modes that battled each other in the contest of 423—when Cratinus’s Pytine defeated his Clouds. As I argue, Aristophanes structures this reimagination around two items of outerwear: a short, porous humble cloak (the tribōn) and the thick, capacious formal wrap of a prosperous Athenian (the chlaina). While the tribōn exposes the play’s wandering father to cold and fevers, the chlaina offered by his son promises the warm, soft texture of a garment with protective and curative force. This texture, which revives the imputed affective quality of Clouds, gives material shape to a selffashioning in line with the elevation of Aristophanes to canonical exemplar. My analysis focuses on the parabasis and its reverberations, particularly in the scene that follows and a later choral ode. I thus start in medias res. The first part of the play revolves around Bdelycleon’s repeated efforts to cure his father’s judicial affliction. The parabasis follows Philocleon’s provisional acceptance of Bdelycleon’s therapeutic program, thereby marking a turning point in the action, a moment of progress that will be undone by the play’s end. Through the intratextual relationship of the parabasis and the play’s later movement, I start to retrace the self-serving, proto-canonical narrative in Wasps that retells the story of the first Clouds’ defeat. The intergenerational strife between Bdelycleon and Philocleon converges with the relationship of the comic poet and the audience of Clouds, the plotline reflecting the dissolution of the aesthetic bond established in 424, with the victory of Knights. Bdelycleon’s filial caretaking figures Aristophanes’ effort to preserve the previously secured bond; and Philocleon’s intractability, the audience’s self-destructive determination to loosen it. Wasps explores the

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reasons for this aesthetic disconnect. In this way, I contend, the play does not suspend but rather intensifies the interpoetic hostilities of Knights while redirecting the polemical strategy harnessed by Aristophanes against Cratinean comedy in 424. Wasps reconstructs Aristophanes’ disconnection from his audience in 423 by grounding the sensory dynamics of dramatic reception in the materiality of textiles, representing the comic contest of that year as a confrontation between the opposed affective experiences produced by the Aristophanic chlaina and Cratinus’s rough and deceptively liberating tribōn. The failure of the first Clouds is identified with the comic audience’s immature choice of the latter over the soft and therapeutically constraining bond of the former. After surveying the major correspondences between the paternal son Bdelycleon and Aristophanes’ poetic persona, I concentrate on the image of the comic poet as a healer of fathers in the parabasis and on the reemergence of this image in two climactic points of the play: the scene in which Bdelycleon coaxes Philocleon into a radical change of clothing from coarse tribōn to refined chlaina and the choral ode that accompanies Bdelycleon’s final exit. This analysis will allow us to gauge the essential, paradoxical role that Wasps’ textile-wrapped narrative of failure plays in granting Aristophanes unchallenged supremacy in the ancient comic canon. 1. Converging Identities: Bdelycleon and Aristophanes between Parabasis and Plot In this section I consider how Wasps’ political-domestic plot reflects Aristophanes’ poetic self-representation and thus turns this comedy into a meditation upon “the complex relation between author, audience, and spectacle” (Hubbard 1991, 132). This discussion will help us appreciate the kinship of Aristophanes with Bdelycleon and the relevance of disease and filial caretaking to the play’s dramatization of the aesthetic disconnect between playwright and audience. The political stance of Wasps emerges from the interactions between the play’s two main characters, who are both struggling, albeit in different ways, with their social status. On one hand, Philocleon’s irrational obsession with the law court, which is the thematic focus of the plot, has caused him to shun his wealthy household and to adopt the low-class habitus of the old men for whom jury duty is the only source of income. On the other hand, in trying to restore his father to sanity by denouncing the demagogues’ political control over the law courts, Bdelycleon strives to prove his philopatria (“love of father”) and his devotion to the democratic cause in spite of his aristocratic

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appearance. His efforts to rescue Philocleon from judicial mania and to reconcile him with his home life need not signify a reactionary hostility against the rites of democratic participation or a dream of apolitical withdrawal; on the contrary, they may well display the young man’s genuine attempt to safeguard his father and the democratic institutions by exposing the demagogues’ unscrupulous manipulation of jurors. Similarly, the sympathetic response to Philocleon’s condition that the play may elicit from some audiences need not detract from Bdelycleon’s concern for his father nor cast the comic son as the oppressive aristocratic villain. Arguably, the modern critics who have accused Bdelycleon of anti-democratic sympathies make the same mistake as Philocleon and, initially, the Chorus of waspish jurors, misreading the young man’s upperclass lifestyle and his aversion to the demagogues. Notably, after the agōn— the play’s “contest,” a climactic confrontation between father and son—the Chorus understands Bdelycleon’s good intentions and the groundlessness of the accusations against him (esp. 725–26). The numerous analogies between Philocleon and Demos in Knights support the idea that Bdelycleon’s commitment to curbing his father’s self-degrading impulses reflects pro-democratic sentiments. Bdelycleon’s sociopolitical role overlaps with the poetic identity that Aristophanes claims for himself in the play. Many critics have argued that in Wasps Aristophanes suggests an assimilation of his comic persona to Bdelycleon and pairs his self-proclaimed devotion to the Athenian audience in the parabasis (esp. 1017 and 1029–37) with this character’s protection of his father and the jurors from the abuses of the demagogues. In particular, Bdelycleon’s name evokes the satiric battle against the politician Cleon, which since Aristophanes’ alleged legal dispute with him after the performance of Babylonians (at the Great Dionysia in 426) had become a trademark of the poet’s selfpresentation. In no other extant Aristophanic play does the name of a comic hero so transparently reflect a defining trait of the comic poet’s persona. The dispute between Aristophanes and Cleon, alluded to in the second parabasis (1284–91), is neatly mirrored in the judicial contest—between the defendant dog, Labes (punning on the Athenian general Laches), and his accuser, the Cleonic Kydathenaion Dog—which Bdelycleon sets up for his father at home (805–1008). It is no coincidence, therefore, that Bdelycleon’s depiction of this mock trial as a “new” (kainēn) healing rite ingeniously devised (kainotomoumen) by him for his father’s sake (876) dovetails with the claims of novelty and originality made by Aristophanes’ parabatic voice, especially in this play (1044) and in the second Clouds (546–48). The agōn (546–724) casts Bdelycleon and his father as respectively comic poet and audience. The contest begins with Bdelycleon’s request for a stylus

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and a wax tablet on which, as he announces, he will take notes during his father’s speech (529–30; 538; 576). The request metatheatrically singles out Bdelycleon “as a writer and thus a figure easily assimilated to the poet” (Olson 1996, 144). The same scene figures Philocleon as the audience. As indicated in his speech (548–58; 560–75; 579–82), Philocleon’s compulsive commitment to jury service at the behest of Cleon affords him an illusory sense of empowerment coupled with the self-aggrandizing joy of theatrical spectatorship. Taking narcissistic pleasure in the histrionics of the law court, Philocleon complacently depicts it as a performance space designed to entertain the jurors with melodramatic laments and supplications, as well as invective, Aesopic fables, dramatic aulos songs, and tragic speeches. His fantasy of political dominance through jury service coincides with a spectator’s obsessive consumption of theatrical emotions. Another moment of the agōn is quite explicit in charging Bdelycleon’s and Philocleon’s identities with metadramatic implications. Before debunking Philocleon’s dream of judicial empowerment and exposing his enslavement to the demagogues, Bdelycleon ventriloquizes the comic poet in stating that “it’s a hard task, and one requiring formidable knowledge beyond the level of comedians (trugōidois), to cure the city’s old deep-seated sickness” (650–51). Significantly, while disclosing his kinship with the trugōidoi (“comedians”), he places his challenging healing mission under the protection of Zeus’s supreme fatherly authority (“O father of ours, son of Cronus” 652a) and provokes Philocleon’s grumbling reply, “stop ‘father’-ing me” (652b). This passage figures the relationship between audience and comic poet through the polarities of disease/therapy and father/son. Philocleon’s disease results in the degradation of his paternal identity, which has impelled his son to replace him, albeit informally and temporarily, as head of the household; the therapy of Bdelycleon aims precisely to rehabilitate his father by saving him from the infantilism of his affliction. This same conceptual nexus of fatherhood and illness plays an important role in the parabasis, where Aristophanes crafts a complex narrative of his theatrical career, dwelling on the failure of the first Clouds in the previous year. I maintain that this narrative provides an interpretive key for reading the familial conflict of Bdelycleon and his father not just as an image of the comic poet’s relationship with his audience, but, more specifically, as a fictionalized reconstruction of the rupture between Aristophanes and the spectators of the first Clouds. In this and the following two chapters, I will make this case by treating Bdelycleon’s kinship with Aristophanes’ poetic persona, and that of his father with the comic audience, not as products of a one-to-one allegory, but as effects of reading (diachronically and synchronically)—that is, as in-

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terpretive suggestions stemming from the possibility of importing the selfreflexive meanings of the parabasis and other strongly metadramatic scenes into other moments of the plot that are intratextually connected. These associations are not meant to be fixed and predetermined. For example, as we will see in chapter 4, in the finale of the play Philocleon’s role slips markedly between audience and performer. In the next section I will examine how Aristophanes assimilates the defeat of Clouds to an episode of failed familial communication by considering verbal and imagistic echoes that cause the quasi-autobiographical narrative of the parabasis to stretch into the plot and awaken the affective vibrancy of two props—the chlaina and the tribōn. In the post-parabatic scenes, Bdelycleon executes his healing strategy by instructing his father on how to conduct himself at a fancy symposium possibly attended by the same demagogues who exploit his services as a juror but exclude him from the pleasures of their luxurious lifestyle. In imparting meticulous instructions on costuming, posture, singing, and acting, Bdelycleon poses as an expert didaskalos (“teacher, dramatist”) determined to transform Philocleon into an active spectator, well-versed in the secrets of the dramatic art and able to be a performer himself. In one of these scenes, as I will propose, Bdelycleon’s initial attempt to reeducate his father self-reflexively represents Aristophanes’ offer of a succoring hand, whose rejection by the audience in the comic contest of 423 marked a failure to maintain the hold on spectators that he had established with Knights. 2. Contest of Cloaks: Restaging the First Clouds In what follows I show how Aristophanes restores to the stage the defeated Clouds through a textile that captures the play’s putative performative agency, its somatic power. A central moment in Bdelycleon’s therapeutic program looks back to an enigmatic statement regarding fevers in the parabasis, bringing out aesthetic ramifications of the widely recognized political imagery. I will situate this statement within the autobiographical account of the parabasis and then analyze its intratextuality with Bdelycleon’s effort to change his father’s clothing. This discussion will lead me to read the garment that the paternal son imposes upon his father as a materialization of Clouds and to recognize in the cloak’s anti-pyretic force, documented in the Hippocratic corpus, the therapeutic affect of the rejected play. The parabasis is organized around an artful rhetorical structure that delineates the relationship between comic poet and audience. In the lyric opening (the so-called kommation) the Chorus addresses the spectators and

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cautions them not to let the impending message “fall to the ground” (1012), because, in so doing, they would betray their genuine nature and shamefully resemble “foolish (skaiōn) viewers” (1013). The underlying rhetoric of this address resurfaces in the final appeal to the audience (1051–59), which recasts the initial warning as an invitation to treasure the ideas of those comic poets “who seek to devise and say something new (kainon)” (1052–53) as though they were precious sachets stored in clothes boxes to diffuse the aroma of dexiotēs (“clever sophistication”) (1055–59). This circular rhetoric disguises as a captatio benevolentiae a rebuke to the audience that the Chorus formulates on behalf of the comic poet in the middle section of recitative anapests: “The poet wishes to blame the viewers, for he says that he was wronged first, in spite of having benefited them in many ways” (1016–17). In the following lines of this section, the Chorus substantiates this charge of injustice by retracing the essential stages of Aristophanes’ poetic career: from his “hidden” apprenticeship as a collaborator of other comic poets (a ghostwriter, in fact) to his full exposure on the theatrical scene as a didaskalos with Knights and the subsequent plays. The climactic point of this tendentious autobiography is reached in 1029– 50. The choral voice first refers to the triply monstrous target of the Heraclean satirical combat that Aristophanes undertook on assuming the role of didaskalos in 424 (1029–35). Attention then shifts to more recent events in an account that presents the parabasis as a programmatic reflection upon the failure of Clouds (1036–48): οὐδ’ ὅτε πρῶτόν γ’ ἦρξε διδάσκειν, ἀνθρώποις φήσ’ ἐπιθέσθαι, ἀλλ’ Ἡρακλέους ὀργήν τιν’ ἔχων τοῖσι μεγίστοις ἐπεχείρει, (1030) θρασέως ξυστὰς εὐθὺς ἀπ’ ἀρχῆς αὐτῷ τῷ καρχαρόδοντι, οὗ δεινόταται μὲν ἀπ’ ὀφθαλμῶν Κύννης ἀκτῖνες ἔλαμπον, ἑκατὸν δὲ κύκλῳ κεφαλαὶ κολάκων οἰμωξομένων ἐλιχμῶντο περὶ τὴν κεφαλήν, φωνὴν δ’ εἶχεν χαράδρας ὄλεθρον τετοκυίας, φώκης δ’ ὀσμήν, Λαμίας δ’ ὄρχεις ἀπλύτους, πρωκτὸν δὲ καμήλου. (1035) τοιοῦτον ἰδὼν τέρας οὔ φησιν δείσας καταδωροδοκῆσαι, ἀλλ’ ὑπὲρ ὑμῶν ἔτι καὶ νυνὶ πολεμεῖ· φησίν τε μετ’ αὐτοῦ τοῖς ἠπιάλοις ἐπιχειρῆσαι πέρυσιν καὶ τοῖς πυρετοῖσιν, οἳ τοὺς πατέρας τ’ἦγχον νύκτωρ καὶ τοὺς πάππους ἀπέπνιγον κατακλινόμενοί τ’ἐπὶ ταῖς κοίταις ἐπὶ τοῖσιν ἀπράγμοσιν ὑμῶν. (1040) ἀντωμοσίας καὶ προσκλήσεις καὶ μαρτυρίας συνεκόλλων, ὥστ’ ἀναπηδᾶν δειμαίνοντας πολλοὺς ὡς τὸν πολέμαρχον. τοιόνδ’ εὑρόντες ἀλεξίκακον τῆς χώρας τῆσδε καθαρτήν,

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πέρυσιν καταπροὔδοτε καινοτάτας σπείραντ’ αὐτὸν διανοίας, ἃς ὑπὸ τοῦ μὴ γνῶναι καθαρῶς ὑμεῖς ἐποιήσατ’ ἀναλδεῖς· (1045) καίτοι σπένδων πόλλ’ ἐπὶ πολλοῖς ὄμνυσιν τὸν Διόνυσον μὴ πώποτ’ ἀμείνον’ ἔπη τούτων κωμῳδικὰ μηδέν’ ἀκοῦσαι. τοῦτο μὲν οὖν ἐσθ’ ὑμῖν αἰσχρὸν τοῖς μὴ γνοῦσιν παραχρῆμα.

He says he did not attack average men, not even when he first started producing, but, having some sort of Heraclean anger (orgēn), he confronted the biggest monsters, audaciously standing up right from the get-go against the snaggle-toothed one himself, from whose eyes gleamed the bitch Cynna’s dreadful rays, and all around his noggin a hundred heads of damned brownnosers licked at him. He had the voice of a death-dealing deluge, as well as the odor of a seal, the unwashed (aplutous) balls of Lamia, and the anus of a camel. Spotting such a monstrosity, he says, he was not afraid, nor did he betray you for a bribe, but even now he battles in your defense. And he says that, along with the monstrosity, he confronted last year ( perusin) the shivers (ēpialois) and fevers ( puretoisin) that by night choked (ēnchon) fathers and strangled (apepnigon) grandfathers, that lying down on the beds of the quiet among you, glued together (sunekollōn) affidavits, summonses, and depositions, so that, terrified (deimanontas), many leaped up (anapēdan) to go to the polemarch. Having found such a bulwark against evil (alexikakon), such a purifier (kathartēn) of this land, last year ( perusin) you betrayed (kataproudote) him when he planted the newest (kainotatas) ideas, which you made barren by not understanding (mē gnōnai) them purely (katharōs). And still, pouring many libations here and there, he swears by Dionysus that no one ever heard comedic words better than these. So it is a shame for you not to have understood (mē gnousin) this right away.

As the Chorus suggests in 1044–45, the defeat of the first Clouds revealed the comic audience’s reluctance to protect and grow the novel poetic seeds sown by Aristophanes. Recasting this statement through the imagery employed by the Chorus at the beginning of the parabasis (1010–12), we could say that the spectators of Clouds let the ideas of the comic poet simply “fall to the ground,” thereby deserving the label of skaioi (“foolish”). Thus, the Chorus’s reference to the failure of Clouds fully clarifies the background of the injustice against the comic poet lamented at 1017; in addition, the initial warning on the dangers of foolishness is retrospectively converted into an open accusation. The image of “shivers (ēpialois) and fevers ( puretoisin)” (1038) confronted by Aristophanes “last year” ( perusin) introduces the first Clouds into the

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Chorus’s account of his heroic poetic enterprises. Line 1043 conjures the familiar notion of Heracles as a cosmic purifier (kathartēn) and healer (alexikakon) to characterize Aristophanes after the audience’s “betrayal” in 423 (1044) as a misunderstood and publicly victimized benefactor. Heracles supplies a conceptual bridge between the chronological poles of the Chorus’s report: Aristophanes’ debut as a didaskalos engaged in a monster-cleansing enterprise, with Knights (1029–35), and the facts of “last year” ( perusin)—a temporal marker, in both lines 1038 and 1044, of the unsuccessful performance of Clouds. In fact, in assimilating the production of the first Clouds to a battle against father- and grandfather-strangling ēpialoi (“shivers, chills, or colds” 1038–39), the Chorus is marking Aristophanes’ most recent undertaking as an attempt to replay another success of Heracles’ purifying action: the defeat of the father-strangling giant Ephialtes, whom the mime writer Sophron had merged with Epialos (or Epiales), the nocturnal daemon presumed to bring feverish chills on sleepers (frr. 67 and 68 KA). At the same time, the conjunction of ēpialoi with puretoi (“fevers”) suggests a transformation of this daemonic force into a physiological phenomenon, making AristophanesHeracles a Hippocratic healer. Scholars have duly seen Cleon, the political target of Knights, behind the triple monster described as a conflation of Cerberus, Typhon, and Lamia in 1031–35, but they have long grappled with finding a suitable political referent for the fevers to which the Chorus likens the threatening adversaries of Aristophanes’ more recent Heraclean efforts. I intend to explore the possibility that the explicitly political valence of the fever image suggestively correlates with an aesthetic one. To do so, I will consider how the fevers as such shape Aristophanes’ reconstruction of the failure of Clouds in the parabasis and in the plot. This analysis will offer some ground, in the next section, for reading the two phases of Aristophanes’ Heraclean career mentioned in the parabasis as reflections of the same battle against his vanquisher in the 423 contest, Cratinus. There are resemblances between Aristophanes’ parabatic self-portrait and Bdelycleon’s therapeutic mission. It has been observed that the Chorus’s presentation of Aristophanes as a Heraclean kathartēs, intensified by the language of purification interspersed throughout the parabasis (katharon 1015; katharōs 1045), also applies to Bdelycleon, who, before the beginning of the play, ineffectively performed cathartic ablutions on his ailing father (118). What has gone unnoticed is that the therapeutic efforts against fatherstrangling fevers that the Chorus attributes to Aristophanes are carried over into the scene in which Bdelycleon pushes his father to change his clothing in preparation for the high-society symposium that Philocleon will soon attend.

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Immediately after the parabasis, the two characters exit from the skēnē (stage backdrop) followed by a slave carrying a refined chlaina, the signature item of the new clothing regime that Bdelycleon seeks to impose on Philocleon. However, the old man is reluctant to take off his customary outfit, a coarse and well-worn tribōn (1131–41): Φι. τί οὖν κελεύεις δρᾶν με; Βδ. τὸν τρίβων’ ἄφες, τηνδὶ δὲ χλαῖναν ἀναβαλοῦ τριβωνικῶς. Φι. ἔπειτα παῖδας χρὴ φυτεύειν καὶ τρέφειν, ὅθ’ οὑτοσί με νῦν ἀποπνῖξαι βούλεται; Βδ. ἔχ’, ἀναβαλοῦ τηνδὶ λαβών, καὶ μὴ λάλει. (1135) Φι. τουτὶ τὸ κακὸν τί ἐστι, πρὸς πάντων θεῶν; Βδ. οἱ μὲν καλοῦσι Περσίδ’, οἱ δὲ καυνάκην. Φι. ἐγὼ δὲ σισύραν ᾠόμην Θυμαιτίδα. Βδ. κοὐ θαῦμά γ’· εἰς Σάρδεις γὰρ οὐκ ἐλήλυθας. ἔγνως γὰρ ἄν· νῦν δ’ οὐχὶ γιγνώσκεις Φι. ἐγὼ. (1140) μὰ τὸν Δί’ οὔτοι νῦν γ’. Philocleon So what do you command me to do? Bdelycleon Take off this tribōn and expertly (tribōnikōs) put on this chlaina. Philocleon Should one beget ( phuteuein) and rear (trephein) children anyway, when now this one wants to strangle (apopnixai) me? Bdelycleon Here, take this and put it on, and stop prattling. Philocleon By all the gods, what is this horrible thing? Bdelycleon Some call it a Persian cloak, others a kaunakēs. Philocleon I thought it was a coat from Thymaetidae. Bdelycleon It’s no wonder, since you haven’t been to Sardis. Otherwise you would have recognized (egnōs) it. But now you don’t (ouchi gignōskeis). Philocleon Me? By Zeus, I don’t.

The strangling imagery employed by Philocleon associates—incorrectly, as we will see—the change of fashion orchestrated by Bdelycleon with the fevers alluded to by the Chorus in the parabasis. Philocleon’s paranoid suspicion (1133–34) that the chlaina is meant to suffocate (apopnixai) him recalls the Chorus’s styling of Aristophanes’ first Clouds as a reenactment of Heracles’ battle with father-strangling daemons. This connection is signaled not only by the repetition of the verb apopnigō (apepnigon 1039), but also by the way Philocleon paratragically recasts the parental complaints voiced in Euripides (“Should one beget [phuteuein] and rear [trephein] children anyway . . . ?” 1133). Philocleon’s lament about the plight of fathers generalizes the threat of suffocation, as in the Chorus’s indictment of Aristophanes’ enemies, the daemonic fevers responsible for “choking fathers and strangling grandfathers.”

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This intratextual relationship relies on another verbal echo, created by gignōskō (“know, discern, recognize”), which links the audience’s rejection of the first Clouds with Philocleon’s misapprehension of his son’s intentions. As Bdelycleon explains, Philocleon’s hostile resistance is due to his unfamiliarity with the chlaina that he is urged to wear, the Persian version of a soft and capacious men’s himation (“cloak”): “Otherwise you would have recognized (egnōs) it. But now you don’t (ouchi gignōskeis)” (1140). The negation of the verb gignōskō denotes the old man’s inexperience with the refined products of Persian textile art as well as his inability to discern the wholesome value behind their suspect connotations of habrosunē (“softness, luxury”). Although Bdelycleon’s choice of an imported chlaina contributes to sharpening the class theme in the play, presenting him as a Perserie-loving aristocrat, one should not overstate the sinister implications of this style choice. Much emphasis is laid on Philocleon’s absurd paranoia. For example, later in the scene, the old man rejects Spartan sandals (1159–60), which, in spite of their onomastic collusion with the “enemy,” made up, together with the chlaina, the standard formal attire of a middle- or upper-middle-class urban Athenian male. In this respect, Philocleon’s stubborn resistance to a somewhat less familiar version of a well-known outfit closely resembles the attitude of the Aristophanic audience, which, as lamented in the parabasis, neither appreciated the first Clouds’ novel ideas nor recognized the benefits behind their appearance of alien sophistication (mē gnōnai 1045; mē gnousin 1048). In other words, while apparently aligning Bdelycleon’s conduct with the father-strangling fevers attacked by Aristophanes, Philocleon’s dismissal of the chlaina seems to figure, in fact, the equally misguided response of the comic audience to the poet’s recent performance. In this scene, the reappearance of apopnigō and gignōskō turns the confrontation of clothing options into a commentary on the parabasis’s reconstruction of the 423 contest, placing Aristophanes’ trumpeted anti-pyretic attacks at the very center of his agonistic failure. Consideration of the characteristics of tribōn and chlaina—the two garments that pit father and son against each other—will enable us to see how this scene develops the connection between the comic poet’s therapeutic efforts and his defeat. The tribōn—the typical male outfit of slaves, Spartans, poor Athenian citizens, and ascetic philosophers (including Pythagoreans, Socrates, and Cynics)—was a short, thin, and rough cloak, which was probably “wrapped around the upper torso twice, thus keeping the chest, waist, and groin warm while leaving legs and arms exposed to the elements” (Desmond 2008, 79). As a result, the tribōn offered only partial protection of the body from cold weather. Significantly, in a scene of Aristophanes’ Wealth that outlines the

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hardships of an unidentified “just man” before the restoration of Plutus’s vision, the tribōn is introduced as the coat in which the anonymous citizen “has frozen for thirteen years” (842–46). The chlaina, conversely, covered the entire upper body and was made of a thick and warm wool that, in the Persian variant favored by Bdelycleon (a kaunakēs), was arranged in a tightly patterned texture. Consequently, a chlaina conveys comfort and full protection from external agents and disease. In Book 14 of the Odyssey both Odysseus and the swineherd Eumaeus face the rigors of a cold night by putting on a “thick” and “large” chlaina (520–21), which is qualified as alexanemos (“wind-averting” 529). The adjective is transparently homologous with the epithet alexikakos (“evil-averting”), which, in the parabasis of Wasps (1043), aligns Aristophanes’ poetic efforts with the cathartic undertakings of Heracles. The same outer garment also evokes an Odyssean reverie of warmth and repose in a poem of Hipponax, where, selfconsciously displaying iambic abjection, the poet yearns for a thick chlaina as a “remedy” ( pharmakon) for the winter cold that has turned him into a shivering beggar (fr. 34.1–2 West). The image of a warmth-providing cloak may have had special resonance for the spectators of Wasps, shivering in the January cold of the Lenaia festival.  In Wasps, the warming power of the chlaina deepens the link between the change of clothing imposed by Bdelycleon upon his father and the parabasis, materializing the father-saving protection purportedly offered to the audience of Clouds against fevers and shivers. Bdelycleon’s chlaina is a part of the therapeutic program, previously announced, to prevent his father from rushing to the law court by persuading him to become a stay-at-home juror (736–38): “I will support him by providing whatever is suitable for an old man: porridge to lick up, a malakē (“soft”) chlaina, an overcoat.” In surrendering to Bdelycleon’s remedies, Philocleon is attracted by the fanciful prospect of earning his jury pay even when beset by fever (813). Fever is an expected consequence of Philocleon’s compulsive anger, as his fellow jurors point out in the parodos (283–84). The swathing action of the chlaina—both as garment and blanket—supplies not just comforting warmth to combat wintry rigors, but also an effective method for sweating out fevers. Several texts of the Hippocratic corpus prescribe wrapping feverish patients in clean (kathara), soft (malthaka), and warm himatia, presenting this procedure as the final stage, after bathing and anointing, in a therapeutic strategy for fighting various kinds of fevers through intense perspiration. Read against this background, Bdelycleon’s offer of a chlaina—qualified as malakē (“soft”) since Hesiod— seems not only to prepare Philocleon for his encounter with high society, but also to protect him from a recurring disease and to dramatize the anti-

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pyretic action that, in the parabasis, Aristophanes retrospectively attributes to Clouds. Philocleon’s fear of suffocation, underlined by his comparison of the chlaina to an oven that gives off a hot belch (1150–51 and 1153), is thus radically misguided. Far from inducing suffocation, the chlaina is meant to ward off or defeat the father-strangling fevers that the parabasis presents as the targets of the first Clouds. The superficial appeal of the tribōn casts additional light on the parallel dynamics behind Philocleon’s resistance to his son’s textile pharmakon and the comic audience’s rejection of Aristophanes’ wholesome poetic offering in 423. In keeping the body partly uncovered, the tribōn lends Philocleon a sense of freedom and ease of movement while in fact exposing him to chills, cold weather, and, consequently, the assaults of “shivers and fevers” (ēpialoi and puretoi). Two passages help illustrate this point. In Wealth, the tribōn is described as a cloak with so many holes that it allows its wearer to see through them (713–15). In Dialogues of the Dead, Lucian characterizes the tribōnion (“little tribōn”) of the Cynic philosopher Menippus as poluthuron (“having many doors”)—as Lucian notes, this open structure subjected Menippus’s body to the attacks of every wind (1.2). At the beginning of Wasps, Philocleon strives to elude Bdelycleon’s caring protection and sneak away to the law court through the holes in the walls (126–27), which are analogous to those in the tribōn, whereas the thick fabric and tangled weave of the chlaina will mislead the old man into assimilating his son’s pharmakon to something that imprisons and smothers. Just as Philocleon’s paranoid hostility against the chlaina’s intricate texture and aristocratic flair obscures the garment’s therapeutic warmth and softness, the spectators’ prejudice toward the first Clouds’ poetic dexiotēs (1059) impeded their perceiving and benefiting from the healing (anti-pyretic) power of Aristophanes’ innovations. Philocleon’s attachment to the open structure and loose texture of the tribōn thus reflects on the comic audience’s rejection of Clouds, dramatizing it as a childish refusal of familial care. That Bdelycleon’s chlaina brings the first Clouds onstage, reifying it as a prop, comes as no surprise in view of both the well-established metaphorical equation of literary composition and weaving and Aristophanes’ explicit use of clothes as objective correlatives of plays. In a parabatic fragment of the play Anagyrus (58 KA), the Chorus, speaking in the voice of Aristophanes, criticizes Eupolis’s lack of poetic inventiveness by accusing him of “making three tunics out of my chlanis” (ἐκ δὲ τῆς ἐμῆς χλανίδος τρεῖς ἁπληγίδας ποιῶν)—the term it uses, etymologically connected to chlaina, describes an even fancier version of the already dignified garment. The parabasis of the second Clouds raises a similar allegation of comic plagiarism and employs an

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analogous clothing metaphor to blame Eupolis for “having turned . . . Knights inside out” in his play Maricas (554). Another item of the new apparel supplied by Bdelycleon to his father captures elements of Aristophanes’ parabatic narrative of his fiasco. When Bdelycleon shifts from cloaks, urging his father to take off his “wretched” shoes and wear a pair of Spartan sandals (1157–58), Philocleon resumes the paratragic tone adopted in his complaint of attempted suffocation and protests against the alleged pro-Spartan sympathies of his son: “How could I bear to put on hateful shoes coming from foes?” (ἐγὼ γὰρ ἂν τλαίην ὑποδήσασθαί ποτε / ἐχθρῶν παρ’ ἀνδρῶν δυσμενῆ καττύματα; 1159–60). The poetic implications here are illuminated by two allusively linked moments of Aristophanes’ earlier comic output, involving the noun kattuma (“shoe”) and the cognate verb kattuō (“sew together like a shoemaker”). In Acharnians, the Chorus’s threatening preview of Aristophanes’ satiric reduction of Cleon to “shoe-leather” leads to the announcement of the title of the comic poet’s next play (300– 301): “I’ve loathed you even more than Cleon, whom I will shred as shoeleather (kattumata) for the knights.” In the 424 play, Paphlagon recycles the shoe-making metaphor to turn the attacks against him—and, by extension, the play as a whole—into fulfillments of the “plot” announced in Acharnians: “This plot was sewn up (kattuetai) a long time ago, and I know where it came from” (314). Although the mention of kattumata in the scene of Wasps does not rely on the well-established comic link between Cleon/Paphlagon (the tanner) and leather, it suggests a similar nexus of politics and poetics. The expression “coming from foes” (ἐχθρῶν παρ’ ἀνδρῶν) can be seen as pairing Philocleon’s paranoid fears of pro-Spartan “plots” with the comic audience’s aversion to the Aristophanic play in 423. Philocleon’s rejection of the allegedly enemy objects (kattumata) may dramatize the misguided hostility to the first Clouds that motivates the Chorus’s hope for better responses in the future to poets “who seek to devise and say something new,” responses informed by familial affection and solicitude (1052–54). (The audience is urged to “love” such poets [stergete] and “take care of ” them [therapeuete].) Though the Spartan shoes lack the salubrious force of the chlaina, they nevertheless embody “accessory” components of the narrative that makes the chlaina a textile surrogate of Clouds. Read together with other Aristophanic passages, the parabasis of the revised Clouds further contributes to the metadramatic force of Bdelycleon’s apparel by casting the earlier version as the outcome of intense poetic labor. In advertising the high quality of the chlaina, Bdelycleon points out that it has been woven “at great expense” ( pollais dapanais 1146). We can appreciate the self-reflexive implications of this statement in light of Aristophanes’ judg-

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ment of Crates in the parabasis of Knights. The excessively sober and plain, if not unwitty, comic technique of Aristophanes’ predecessor is likened to a different craft (baking instead of weaving), but its products are significantly described as cheap: “[Crates] . . . used to send you home with a lunch served at small expense (apo smikras dapanēs), baking very urbane ideas out of his very sober mouth” (538–39). The same misgivings about Crates’ modest poetic expenditure inform the image of a comic meal “tossed out without labor (aponōs),” which Aristophanes reserves for the archaic comedian in the Second Thesmophoriazusae (fr. 347.3 KA). In the parabasis of the revised Clouds, we can read an implicit contrast between Crates’ “effortless” comic manner and the hard-won comedy of Aristophanes’ first version of this play, “[a comedy] that cost me great labor” (ἣ παρέσχε μοι / ἔργον πλεῖστον 523– 24). In this perspective, the “great expense” necessary to craft Bdelycleon’s refined chlaina seems to translate the intellectual labor of the first Clouds into quantifiable material. As Bdelycleon puts it, “This cloak easily guzzled a talent of wool” (1146–47). Thus, the dressing scene completes and nuances the set of qualities defining the value of Aristophanes’ unsuccessful play in the parabasis of Wasps: not only dexiotēs and kainotēs (“novelty”), but also painstaking poetic toil, all put to the service of the audience’s well-being. The function of the chlaina goes beyond the notion of the textual object. This textile certainly works as an image of the poetic craft that produced Clouds. However, what makes it an emblem of Aristophanes’ comic fashion is not the dramatic product per se, its refined manufacture, as it were, but its relational vitality, which its materiality and sensory force bring about. Bdelycleon’s chlaina is, in fact, meant to recapture the original affective energy of an archived performance, paradoxically fixing such ephemeral energy in a durable object. In the garment’s wholesome materiality, animated by the intratextuality with the parabasis, we are supposed to feel again the first Clouds’ attempt to wrap the audience in the protective folds of Aristophanes’ drama. The swathing action of the garment figures Aristophanic aesthetics as a salubrious (though failed) embrace of his audience—a transmission of healing affect that invests the performance with sensory intimacy. But how does the tribōn fit into the dressing scene’s representation of comic aesthetics? A scene in Knights with a similarly problematic piece of outerwear provides important clues in this regard. In the agōn, the Sausage Seller gains Demos’s favor by supplying him with a free pair of sandals, exposing the lack of generosity of Paphlagon, who, in spite of his métier as a tanner, has never bestowed such a gift upon his old master (868–74). In the following lines, the Sausage Seller’s offer of a double-sleeved chitōn (“tunic”) to Demos

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places the young adversary of Paphlagon in a position of definite advantage (881–86): Αλλ. τονδὶ δ’ ὁρῶν ἄνευ χιτῶνος ὄντα τηλικοῦτον, οὐπώποτ’ ἀμφιμασχάλου τὸν Δῆμον ἠξίωσας χειμῶνος ὄντος· ἀλλ’ ἐγώ σοι τουτονὶ δίδωμι. Δημ. τοιουτονὶ Θεμιστοκλῆς οὐπώποτ’ ἐπενόησεν. καίτοι σοφὸν κἀκεῖν’ ὁ Πειραιεύς· ἔμοιγε μέντοι (885) οὐ μεῖζον εἶναι φαίνετ’ ἐξεύρημα τοῦ χιτῶνος. Sausage Seller And although you [scil. Paphlagon] see this Demos, at his age, without a tunic, you’ve never deemed him worthy of a double-sleeved tunic for the winter, (to Demos) while I’m furnishing you with this one. Demos Themistocles never had such a brilliant idea (epenoēsen)! Certainly that Piraeus was a canny (sophon) idea too, but to me it doesn’t seem a greater invention (exeurēma) than this tunic.

This exchange and its immediate development involve the same thematics that, in Wasps, connect Aristophanes’ parabatic account of his recent healing enterprises with the scene of Philocleon’s fashion re-education. Not only is the Sausage Seller’s chitōn designed precisely to protect old Demos from the cold of the winter (883), but Paphlagon’s prompt, if clumsy, countermove brings into play the theme of suffocation. After Paphlagon tries to cover Demos with his jacket, redolent of his work as a tanner, the old man personifying the Athenian citizen body protests with disgust (891–92), while the Sausage Seller maliciously suggests, “He has covered you with this on purpose, so that he may smother (apopnixēi) you” (893). This scene displays a high degree of poetic self-reflexivity. The language of cunning and creativity in Demos’s reaction to the Sausage Seller’s gift (epenoēsen 884; sophon 885; exeurēma 886) highlights the germaneness of the political battle in these lines to the conflict between Aristophanes and Cratinus suggested in the play. On this ground, the garments pitted against each other in this scene can be construed as articulating Aristophanes’ tendentious vision of his and his rival’s ways of affecting the comic audience. This parallel from Knights raises the suspicion that, in the dressing scene of Wasps, Philocleon’s tribōn functions as a material representation of Cratinean comedy. While Demos, like the audience of Knights, can smell the debilitating effects of Paphlagon’s political/comic option, Philocleon corresponds to the audience of Clouds in his apparent inability to distinguish therapeutic wrapping from suffocating pseudo-freedom. In the next section I will explore this hypothesis by looking at possible associations between Aristophanes’ rival,

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as viewed in Knights, and the tribōn. This exploration will help tease out the aesthetic implications of the daemonic fevers and the other monsters portrayed in the autobiographical narrative of the parabasis—all intimations of the Cratinean comic mode. I will posit a link between Aristophanes’ putative affective force and the proto-canonical image of a beneficial cleansing of comedy. 3. The Daemons in the Details: Sensing the Cratinean Fashion I now offer a first hint of the connection in Wasps between aesthetics and an embryonic discourse of canonicity built upon notions of generic exclusion and development. I articulate this connection by aligning the bodily experience of the tribōn with Aristophanes’ view of Cratinus’s comic affect—a sensation of squalor that I link with the disease-inducing, vociferous, emotionally turbulent, malodorous daemons and monsters pictured in the parabasis. Like the tribōn, these ostracized monsters, as my discussion will propose, turn the Cratinean mode into a primitive stage of the genre prior to the refinement of comedy wrapped in the Aristophanic chlaina. The ethos of the tribōn is in keeping with Cratinus’s monstrous comic self. As the Cynics’ appropriation of this garment demonstrates, the bodily freedom and exposure to the external elements caused by the tribōn could be thought to entail a regression to an unmediated relationship with nature in its most primitive and unsettling manifestations, as embodied by Polyphemus. In the play Odysseis, Cratinus suggested an assimilation of his comic persona to the Cyclops, and elements of this monstrous comic self can be seen behind the characterization of Paphlagon in Knights. More specifically, the bodily imagery conjured by the tribōn bears resemblances to the decrepit Cratinus depicted in the parabasis of Knights. In Lysistrata, the Chorus’s portrait of the Spartan king Cleomenes associates the tribōn with starvation, poverty, self-neglect, and a chronic “lack of cleanliness” (alousia): “Cleomenes, having an exceedingly small tribōn, hungry, grubby, unshaved, unwashed (aloutos) for six years” (278–80). As we saw in chapter 1, the parabasis of Knights depicts Cratinus as a sexually worn-out and abject old man roaming about with a dry wreath (531–34). In further remarking that, on account of his previous victories, Cratinus should sit in the theater, “sleek (liparon) . . . next to Dionysus” (535–36), the Chorus of Knights tauntingly hints at the comedian’s actual condition of squalor, the opposite of the cleanliness and freshness evoked by liparos. Thus, the tribōn’s connotations of alousia set this garment against the ablutions that, at the end of Knights,

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the Sausage Seller performs to make Demos liparos—an advertisement of the purifying and regenerative force of Aristophanes’ comedy in contrast with that of his adversary. We need not imagine the tribōn as the garment Cratinus wears in the caricatured portraits of him here or elsewhere in Aristophanes’ plays; the point is rather that the tribōn is a fitting textile counterpart of the squalor, decay, and self-neglect that characterize the older comedian in Knights. In a passage from Medical Compilations by Oribasius—a physician to the emperor Julian—not only is the tribōn troped as the garment of wintery dotage in opposition to the summer of vigorous youth expressed by the chlaina, but the presentation of the typical senile body as ragged, porous, and dry conflates the textile materiality of the tribōn with withered physicality. This link between the tribōn and alousia brings us back to the critique of the audience of the first Clouds in the parabasis of Wasps. The account of its breach with Aristophanes apparently leaves out the third party in the triangle, Cratinus himself. The Chorus explains Aristophanes’ defeat by imputing the poor reception of the play to the spectators’ inability to judge with “purity” (katharōs 1045). This lack of purity led to their rejection of Aristophanes’ actions as a Heraclean “cleanser” (kathartēn 1043). In this narrative conceit, we can infer, Cratinus’s victory laid bare the audience’s entrapment in disease, squalor, and decay. In the dressing scene, examined in the previous section, Philocleon submits to wearing the chlaina, according to most reconstructions of the staging. Nevertheless, the ultimate failure of Bdelycleon’s therapeutic mission illustrates his father’s faithfulness to the tribōn and unwillingness to shed the habits of the past. In expressing the triumph of alousia and disease over purity and health, Philocleon’s stubborn attraction to the degrading freedom of the tribōn mirrors the Athenian spectators’ preference for Cratinus’s “old,” squalid comedy in 423 and their misplaced fear of becoming entangled in the smothering embrace of Aristophanes’ aristocratic dexiotēs. We find a remarkably similar complex of ideas in a section of Plutarch’s How to Listen to Lectures. In the following passage (42d–e), the tribōn takes on explicit metapoetic meaning, figuring the misguided attitude of students refusing to be wrapped up in beneficial lecture contents comparable to a warm cloak (himation), preferring to freeze in their fixation upon the stylistic bareness of the Lysianic tribōn: But the student who from the start is not engrossed in the subject matter but demands that the style be Attic and plain is similar to the man who refuses . . . to wrap himself in a himation when it is winter if the wool should not be of Attic sheep, but sits, idle and unmoving, in a thin and bare tribōn of Lysianic speech, as it were.

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This depiction of performed discourse, both content and form, as a textile that comforts or debilitates its audience suggests striking resemblances between the Plutarchan listeners and Philocleon, inviting us to see in the latter’s clinging to the tribōn an attachment to an unwholesome comic mode—in this case, Cratinus’s. The agōn of Wasps provides a further argument for reading Aristophanes’ representation of the Cratinean comic fashion into the contest of tribōn and chlaina. In this part of the play, Philocleon boastingly presents his jury pay as a panacea and uses high-flown epic diction to tout the protective powers of his wages, which he earns every day after putting on his uniform, the tribōn (116–17): “I have [these wages] as a shield against evils, an instrument, a bulwark against arrows” (τάδε κέκτημαι πρόβλημα κακῶν, σκευὴν βελέων ἀλεωρήν 615). The images of the shield ( problēma) and the bulwark (aleōrēn) link Philocleon’s statement and the parabasis, where Aristophanes defines his poetic mission in Clouds by describing himself as alexikakos (“a bulwark against evil” 1043), a revision of the old man’s epic phrase problēma kakōn (“shield against evils”). This adjective (alexikakos) extends Aristophanes’ selfcharacterization as a Heraclean healer to the chlaina, an alexanemos (“windaverting”) garment, as we have seen—a bulwark against the elements. Thus, the parabasis draws an implicit contrast between Aristophanes’ curative efforts, reified by the chlaina, and the jury pay’s alleged safeguarding and healing functions, which are symbolized by Philocleon’s tribōn. What is more significant is that the “protection” afforded Philocleon by his wages makes him behave like the intoxicated Cratinus in Pytine. As Philocleon explains, if his son is reluctant to let him consume alcohol at home, his jury pay allows him to satisfy his thirst with a donkey-eared wine flask, which causes a (presumably Cratinean) burst of coarse drunkenness (616–18). While it is possible to view this drunk Philocleon as a figure of Cratinus himself, the phonically resonant intratextual parallel between kakōn . . . aleōrēn and alexikakos prompts one to read Philocleon’s intoxication—enabled by the “bulwark” of his jury pay—as his choice, like the audience’s, of a false alternative to the beneficial catharsis conceptually tied to the Heraclean epithet in the parabasis. The correspondences between Philocleon’s and the comic audience’s preferences—the former for the tribōn, the latter for Cratinean comedy—suggest that, besides its primary political meaning, Aristophanes’ battle against “shivers (ēpialois) and fevers ( puretoisin)” described in the parabasis also figures the first Clouds’ battle against Cratinus’s comic mode (1037–39). It is perhaps not surprising that in what has been judged a play of “exceptional” methatheatrical quality (Ruffell 2011, 251) certain political images of the parabasis

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may acquire a secondary poetological significance if reread through their echoes in the plot. In a fragment from Phrynichus, a comic poet contemporary with Aristophanes, ēpialos is used as a derogatory epithet of the musician Lamprus, who, in his mediocrity, is said to afflict nightingales, while starving the Muses and even killing listeners (Μουσῶν σκελετός, ἀηδόνων ἠπίαλος, ὕμνος Ἅιδου 74 KA). Given the inefficacy of Philocleon’s tribōn against fevers, and the garment’s possible association with Cratinus’s comedy as an item preferred by a recalcitrant audience, we can see the elusive political implications of these father stranglers overlapping with aesthetic ones. Aristophanes’ second Heraclean enterprise—against fever-bringing daemons— may then also hint at the contest of comic affects that resulted in the betrayal mentioned soon after (1043–48), the impure judgment among the unappreciative spectators of the first Clouds. We can likewise read the first cathartic feat of the Heraclean Aristophanes, the one against the Cleonic triple monster (1031–35)—an allegory of Knights, as we have seen—as secondarily directed against the monstrous poetics that Cratinus, the “enemy” defeated by Knights, flaunted in Odysseis and that Paphlagon embodies in the play of 424. Among the three monsters listed in 1031–35, the “snaggle-toothed” Cerberus (1031–32) and the Hesiodic Typhon (1033–34)—with “the voice of a death-dealing deluge”—form an indissoluble couple iconic of Hadean ataxia (“disorder, lack of direction”). Not only do they both appear in Knights as alter egos of Paphlagon/Cleon (511, 1017, 1030), but the canine nature of the former and the torrential quality of the latter, alluded to in the parabasis of Wasps, create a common symbolic terrain on which the phonic identities of the demagogue and Cratinus, both barking and stormy, intersect. The thematics of anger supply other points of convergence between these Cleonic monsters and Aristophanes’ rival. Both Typhon and Cerberus incarnate chthonic fury. Since it is by appropriating Heraclean rage (orgēn 1030) that Aristophanes battles a triply monstrous Cleon, we may view this heroic duel as a conflict between two different types of orgē (“rage, anger”). The use of this term for Aristophanes’ mythical counterpart is marked in a play that pictures the degeneration of Philocleon’s judicial anger into madness. At 1031, the conjuring of Heracles’ descent to the Underworld to retrieve Cerberus associates Aristophanes’ satire with the much-celebrated twelve labors. In the traditional, pre-Euripidean version of the myth, these stemmed from an act of chthonic anger, the hero’s filicide. Heracles’ labors, after which the parabasis of Wasps patterns the comic enterprise of Knights, replace this unrestrained, Philocleon-like, chthonic—we could even say “tragic”—orgē with a constructive, purposeful, or “epinician” manifestation of the same

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emotion. The opposing notions of orgē can be seen to correspond to different comic modes, since anger is the primary psychological domain through which satiric genres, such as comedy, define themselves. In light of the monstrous orgē of Cratinus, who, in Odysseis, allied his Archilochean satire with the bestial anger of Polyphemus, the Heraclean feat of Knights registers as not only political, but also poetic. Therefore, the Heraclean battle to which Aristophanes assimilates his debut as a didaskalos in Knights seems to intimate a tendentious narrative of comic transition and development like the clothing contest of Philocleon and Bdelycleon. Notwithstanding the elements of commonality that Aristophanes establishes with Cratinus in Knights, the festive finale of the play makes us believe that their comic modes offer antithetical affective options for the audience. In the parabasis of Wasps, the progression from destructive to therapeutic orgē marked by Heracles’ victories against the clamorous Typhon and Cerberus, and by his emotional evolution (from tragic to epinician anger), seems, like Bdelycleon’s attempted replacement of Philocleon’s tribōn with a chlaina, to trope the refinement of comedy—Aristophanes’ distinctive merit, according to later constructions of his canonical primacy. In other words, this progression may coincide with a hoped-for change of comic fashion, which, as we have suggested, underlies Aristophanes’ reference to the Heraclean offensive against the father-strangling fevers in the comic contest of 423. Lamia, the third monstrous component in the portrait of Cleon—and the one that most explicitly engages the senses—reinforces the proto-canonical valence of this progression rooted in opposite embodied experiences, as we will now see. Lamia enhances the continuity between Wasps’ parabatic representations of Knights and the first Clouds in terms of poetic targets, programmatic goals, and their sensory analogs. The beautiful queen of Libya who, after having borne several children to Zeus, was transformed by the jealous Hera into a ghastly daemon of notorious malodorousness and greed provides another personification of grotesque rage, one whose ravenous pursuit of babies is motivated by Hera’s killing of her children. According to the mythographer Heraclitus (On Incredible Things 34), Hera condemned Lamia to live in savage isolation, “unwashed” (alouton) and “neglecting herself ” (atherapeuton), a condition that contributes to the Cleonic monster’s tripartite olfactory foulness (“the odor of a seal, the unwashed [aplutous] balls of Lamia, and the anus of a camel” 1035). This miasma stands in contrast to the pleasant fragrances with which Aristophanes aligns his poetic dexiotēs (“clever sophistication”) in the last lines of the parabasis, where the audience is invited to treat the ideas of innovative poets as sachets for clothes (1057–59). The adjective aplutos (“unwashed”), which defines Lamia’s brand of monstrous effluvium, connects

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this target of Aristophanes’ epinician orgē with the alousia (“lack of cleanliness”) typical of the wearers of the tribōn. In the scene of sympotic tutoring in which Bdelycleon offers a chlaina to his father, Philocleon tellingly mentions Lamia as his favorite narrative subject (1177), reconfiguring the contest of chlaina and tribōn as one between logoi semnoi (“dignified stories”), mainly focused on the recent Athenian past (1186–87 and 1190–94), and fetid muthoi (“mythical stories”): Βδ. ἄγε νυν, ἐπιστήσει λόγους σεμνοὺς λέγειν ἀνδρῶν παρόντων πολυμαθῶν καὶ δεξιῶν; (1175) Φι. ἔγωγε. Βδ. τίνα δῆτ’ ἂν λέγοις; Φι. πολλοὺς πάνυ. πρῶτον μὲν ὡς ἡ Λάμι’ ἁλοῦσ’ ἐπέρδετο, ἔπειτα δ’ ὡς ὁ Καρδοπίων τὴν μητέρα— Βδ. μὴ ’μοιγε μύθους, ἀλλὰ τῶν ἀνθρωπίνων, οἵους λέγομεν μάλιστα, τοὺς κατ’ οἰκίαν. (1180) Bdelycleon Come now, will you be able to tell dignified stories (logous semnous) among cultivated and sophisticated (dexiōn) men? Philocleon I will. Bdelycleon Which one, then, would you tell? Philocleon I have a lot of choices. First of all, how Lamia let one rip when she was captured. Then how Cardopion gave his mother . . . Bdelycleon I don’t want mythical stories (muthous), but human stories, those we tell the most, the domestic ones.

This passage resumes thematic concerns from the parabasis. As signaled by the proximity of the monster Lamia (1177) and sophisticated (dexiōn) listeners (1175), this dialogue joins the two olfactory moments of the parabasis that I have referred to above: the description of the monstrous Cleon confronted by Aristophanes in Knights and the final request that the comic audience redeem the rejection of the first Clouds by treasuring the aroma of Aristophanes’ future poetic innovations. In brushing off the dignified and domestic logoi commended by his son and proclaiming instead his loyalty to the primitive and distant muthoi exemplified by Lamia, Philocleon is not only reproducing the cool reaction of the comic audience to the dexiotēs of the first Clouds (cf. 1051–59) but also reflecting renewed allegiance to the atavistic poetic fashion defeated by Aristophanes in Knights. The poetic valence of Lamia comprises more than just poor hygiene and a bad smell, extending to a kind of iambic crudeness in line with Aristophanes’ distorted characterization of Cratinus. Lamia belongs to a group of indecorous female figures who symbolize iambic poetics in its primitive manifestations (from Iambe and Baubo to Horace’s Canidia). Philocleon’s

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reference to the daemon (Λάμι’ ἁλοῦσ’ ἐπέρδετο 1177) is embedded in a resonant, iambicizing adaptation of a line from the Lamia of Crates, a possibly self-reflexive play of an older contemporary of Cratinus (fr. 20 KA σκυτάλην ἔχουσ’ ἔπερδετο “she farted, holding a stick”). What is more, the complex of drunkenness, sharp teeth, and decrepit old age that informs ancient portraits of Lamia creates striking points of contact with the intoxicated, canine, broken-down Cratinus. The images of uncleanliness and daemons that connect parabasis and plot, tying together Lamia and the tribōn, thus seem to reduce Cratinus’s outdated iambic mode to a force that physically harms an audience—through repellent smells or morbid touch. These intimations of a daemonic Cratinean mode in and outside the parabasis contain an implicit element of generic ostracism in an underlying developmental scheme that reminds us of canonical rankings—and of the parabasis of Peace. There, the same description of Aristophanes’ Heraclean defeat of the triple monster (752–58) segues, significantly, into his claim of having purged crude vulgarity ( phortos) from comedy’s edifice (748–50). The readings I have put forward suggest that Wasps’ reflection upon the defeat of the first Clouds after the triumph of Knights represents shifting comic fashion through the affective dialectic of chlaina and tribōn. The parabasis depicts the Heraclean Aristophanes as banishing Cleon, a political monster, from the social community. As we have seen, this gesture may well be directed, additionally, against the fever-inducing, tribōn-like comic mode evoked by the monster—in an aesthetics of exclusion. The associations conjured by this monster (Lamia’s iambic foulness, the clamorous Cratinean ataxia of Typhon and Cerberus) evince an affinity between Heracles’ cleansing operation and the generic refinement that ancient critics will attribute to Aristophanes. A link thus emerges between Aristophanes’ generic supremacy and his representations of the divergent sensory experiences that his old adversary’s and his own comedic fashions purportedly bestow upon an audience. After criticizing the audience for the poor reception of Clouds, the Chorus closes the anapestic section of the parabasis by observing, in a probable reuse of a Cratinean equestrian image, that despite this setback Aristophanes still receives the appreciation of the “wise” (1049–50): “The poet is not considered inferior in anything in the eyes of the wise (sophois) if while trying to overtake his rivals he has run over his conception.” The generic shifts that the discourse of comic affect seems to delineate in Wasps may indeed have contributed to the unchallenged appreciation that Aristophanes’ comedy received from later, influential sophoi. In the next section, I will examine a choral ode that brings the aesthetic contrast of chlaina and tribōn into

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a meditation upon Philocleon’s failed change of life. This close reading will help further illustrate the proto-canonical potential of the narrative through which Wasps reconstructs the reception of the first Clouds. 4. Aristophanic Fabric and Comic Canonicity I now investigate the physicality of textiles in the dramatization of comic reception that Aristophanes sets up in Wasps by reading the chlaina in light of the pseudo-biographical Life of Aristophanes. I make a case for seeing the garment’s fabric and affective agency as channels of the canonical values (dignity, beneficial constraint) central to the generic transformation constructed for Aristophanic comedy. The parabasis and Philocleon’s re-dressing are tied together in a choral ode at the end of the post-sympotic scenes, which mark the definitive failure of Bdelycleon’s father-saving mission and the old man’s regression to deranged intemperance. After Bdelycleon pulls his father back into the house (1443–44), the Chorus assumes that Philocleon will return to sanity, but the final scene of the play disappoints this expectation. In the antistrophe of the ode, the Chorus celebrates Philocleon’s son, who will never reappear onstage, and adopts a rhetorical strategy resonant with Aristophanes’ representations of the performance of the first Clouds (1462–73): πολλοῦ δ’ἐπαίνου παρ’ ἐμοὶ καὶ τοῖσιν εὖ φρονοῦσιν τυχὼν ἄπεισιν διὰ τὴν φιλοπατρίαν καὶ σοφίαν (1465) ὁ παῖς ὁ Φιλοκλέωνος. οὐδενὶ γὰρ οὕτως ἀγανῷ ξυνεγενόμην, οὐδὲ τρόποις ἐπεμάνην οὐδ’ ἐξεχύθην. τί γὰρ ἐκεῖνος ἀντιλέγων (1470) οὐ κρείττων ἦν, βουλόμενος τὸν φύσαντα σεμνοτέροις κατακοσμῆσαι πράγμασιν; The son of Philocleon will depart, having received much praise from me and from all sensible men because of his wisdom (sophian) and love of father ( philopatrian). I’ve never encountered a man so mild (aganōi), nor have anyone’s manners made me so crazy with enthusiasm and caused me to gush like this. For in which of his responses was he not better, since he wanted to adorn (katakosmēsai) his begetter with more dignified things (semnoterois pragmasin)?

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At 1465 the conjunction of philopatria (“love of father”) with sophia (“wisdom”) re-creates Aristophanes’ self-aggrandizing posture in the parabasis. There the Chorus aligned Aristophanic comedy with sophoi spectators (1049) in opposition to the unappreciative audience of the first Clouds (1048). In addition, both Heraclean labors that the Chorus singled out in Aristophanes’ poetic career instantiate philopatria: as we have seen, the first included fighting against an archetypal transgressor of paternal authority, the Hesiodic Typhon (1033–34), while the second deed (1038–39) aimed to ward off suffocating fevers from fathers and grandfathers. At the end of the antistrophe (1471–73), the Chorus substantiates its tribute to Bdelycleon’s philopatria through language and imagery that import Philocleon’s earlier re-dressing into this lyric praise. Two passages clarify this point. First, one of the final scenes of Wealth dramatizes the selection of gifts for the returning god Plutus: when an impoverished just man is about to offer his ragged tribōnion to Plutus (935–37), the slave Cario points out that such a cloak is more appropriate for “a criminal” (939), whereas the god of wealth deserves to “be adorned (kosmein) in dignified cloaks (himatiois semnois)” (940). The striking resonance with the closing lines of the Chorus’s praise in Wasps (“to adorn [katakosmēsai] his begetter with more dignified things [semnoterois pragmasin]” 1472–73) links the objects involved in Bdelycleon’s father-rescuing mission with the chlaina (a himation semnon) and—in view of what we have argued thus far—with the performance of the first Clouds. As we have seen, semnos qualifies the “new” logoi (1174) to which Bdelycleon had introduced his father. Second, in Frogs, Aeschylus is said “to have adorned” (kosmēsas) tragedy with “dignified words” (rhēmata semna), an act that presupposes and contributes to his canonization (πυργώσας ῥήματα σεμνὰ / καὶ κοσμήσας τραγικὸν λῆρον 1004–5). In 1061, Aeschylus assimilates the “more dignified cloaks” (himatiois . . . semnoteroisin) worn by the demigods to the magniloquent words (rhēmata) used in his tragedies to express “grandiose thoughts and ideas” (1059). This comparison, which can be read as a retrospective explication through imagistic expansion of the earlier participle, kosmēsas (“having adorned” 1005), parallels the use of katakosmēsai (“to adorn”) in the Wasps passage, lending further weight to the verb’s resonance as a clothing image. Another element in the antistrophe, the epic adjective aganos (“mild”), evokes the chlaina and its function as a material surrogate of Aristophanes’ first Clouds. In both the Iliad and the Odyssey, aganos often describes benign but effective verbal restraint with a paternal coloration: for example, in Odyssey 2.230–34 (= 5.8–12) the combination of aganos and ēpios (“gentle”) presents Odysseus as a “fatherly king.” What is more significant, aganos connects

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with the semantics of restraint, as exemplified in Book 2 of the Iliad where the hero cuts short the Greeks’ disorderly withdrawal toward the ships by “restraining” (erētusaske) the leaders “with mild words” (aganois epeessin 2.189; cf. 164, 180), though he also uses his scepter. I suggest that the application of aganos to Bdelycleon (1467) is motivated by his philopatria (1465), which is realized precisely in the paternal restraint he exerts on his infantile father. Similarly to Odysseus in Book 2 of the Iliad, Bdelycleon uses softness, specifically the prospect of a “soft” chlaina, to thwart an insane flight, enticing his father back into the house (736–38) and restraining his irrational attraction to the law court. A distinctive element of Bdelycleon’s chlaina, its softness, is referred to in the strophe, identifying the change of life afforded to Philocleon with the material quality of this textile. Tropoi (“habits, modes, ways”) is the watchword of the strophe. The members of the Chorus still seem to believe that Philocleon will convert to his son’s tropoi, but they also cast doubt, in a sententious vein, on the possibility of reforming one’s nature (1450–61): ζηλῶ γε τῆς εὐτυχίας (1450) τὸν πρέσβυν, οἷ μετέστη ξηρῶν τρόπων καὶ βιοτῆς· ἕτερα δὲ νῦν ἀντιμαθὼν ἦ μέγα τι μεταπεσεῖται ἐπὶ τὸ τρυφῶν καὶ μαλακόν. (1455) τάχα δ’ ἂν ἴσως οὐκ ἐθέλοι. τὸ γὰρ ἀποστῆναι χαλεπὸν φύσεως, ἣν ἔχοι τις ἀεί. καίτοι πολλοὶ ταῦτ’ ἔπαθον· ξυνόντες γνώμαις ἑτέρων (1460) μετεβάλοντο τοὺς τρόπους. I’m jealous of the old man’s good fortune, how much he has changed (metestē) from his dry habits (xērōn tropōn) and (biotēs) way of life. Now, having learned other things instead, he’ll really make a big change (metapeseitai) toward luxury (truphōn) and softness (malakon). But perhaps he might not want to, for it’s difficult to step away from the nature one has always had. Still, many have experienced these things. In the presence of others’ ideas, they have changed (metebalonto) their habits (tropous).

In this passage, the abundance of terms indicating personal manners and lifestyle (tropōn, biotēs 1452; tropous 1461) is matched by the insistence on the notion of change, which is expressed through three different verbs compounded with meta- (metestē 1451; metapeseitai 1454; metebalonto 1461). The final out-

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come of the change promised by Bdelycleon crystallizes in the abstract nouns truphōn (“luxury”) and malakon (“softness” 1455). The latter conjures the distinctive haptic quality of the chlaina, the semnoteron textile that the Chorus alludes to at the end of the antistrophe. In fact, the adjective malakos appears elsewhere in the play only once, to modify chlaina in the catalog of remedies Bdelycleon uses to keep his father inside (737–38). The presence of the chlaina in the imagistic texture of both strophe and antistrophe, together with the emphasis on semnotēs and change, re-creates the narrative of comic shifting that I have previously outlined. Through the connection with the soft garment capable of preventing ill humors and restoring health, the change described by the Chorus corresponds to the beneficial Aristophanic touch turned away by the audience of 423. The pertinence of Philocleon’s change of habits (metabalonto . . . tropous 1461) to the dynamics of comic reception is supported by a fragment from the parabasis or the agōn of an unidentified play of Eupolis, in which the comedian or another poet-figure blames the Athenian spectators for their hostility toward local practitioners of mousikē (“performed poetry”) and closes his rebuke with the following exhortation (fr. 392.7 KA): “But listen to me, completely changing (metabalontes) your habits (tropous).” In the pervasively metafictional world of comic language, a change of lifestyle can easily slide into one of aesthetics, the adoption of new mores into the empathic conversion to a new poetic mode (tropos). In the Chorus’s reference to Philocleon’s old tropoi we can detect traces of Aristophanes’ construction of the Cratinean comic tropos as a bodily experience. As indicated in the strophe, Philocleon’s failed transition “to luxury and softness” would perpetuate his xēroi tropoi (“dry habits” 1452). Together, malakos (“soft”) and xēros conjure the opposition of reinvigorating moistness and enervating dryness—a commonplace of medical literature—implicitly aligning the former pole with Bdelycleon’s chlaina. In Knights the representation of the rebirth of the comic audience under the guidance of the Sausage Seller builds upon the visual and haptic semantics of liparos, another antonym of xēros, which contrasts Demos’s refreshed, soft, and luminous skin with Cratinus’s dry wreath (534). The material softness of the chlaina activates the bodily quality of Philocleon’s old dry tropoi in a way that is relevant to the metapoetic imagery of the parabasis. Through this opposition, the parched physicality of Philocleon is aligned with the worn-out texture of the tribōn and the alousia (“lack of cleanliness”) of the garment’s wearers, both reflecting a retreat from the refreshing, purifying touch of Aristophanic comedy, the audience’s assumption of the dry staleness of the Cratinean fashion. The Chorus’s praise of Bdelycleon is certainly laden with ironical under-

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tones. The play’s finale will soon reveal Philocleon’s transition to his son’s tropoi as just a mirage. Even Philocleon’s unrestrained behavior before the choral ode raises the suspicion that, despite the Chorus’s enthusiasm, his expected conversion will never take place. However, the irony that frames the lyric section does not necessarily undermine the value of Bdelycleon’s behavioral and poetic program. In fact, set against the unappealing prospect of devitalizing xērotēs (“dryness”), the Hesiodically sanctioned adjective malakos, which characterizes the wholesome materiality of the chlaina, pushes the problematic notion of luxury (truphōn) in the direction of therapeutic softness, legitimizing, as it were, its aristocratic connotations. The Chorus’s approval of Bdelycleon seems to expose his father’s—and the audience’s— self-destructive intractability more than the inadequacy or unreliability of his proposal of change and the aesthetic paradigm it entails. The metaliterary potential of the choral ode and of the change of tropoi fostered by Bdelycleon is amplified in the Life of Aristophanes, which exemplifies the Hellenistic and post-Hellenistic tendency to place Aristophanes far above the other representatives of Old Comedy. That this ancient pseudobiography presupposes Wasps is indicated by its double use of the parabasis: the passage on fevers (1038) and, more significantly, the trajectory described in the parabasis from self-effacing ghostwriting to the courageous performative exposure of Knights (1018–20 and 1029–30). According to the Life, Aristophanes profoundly transformed the archaic tropoi characteristic of Cratinus and Eupolis, ushering an errant comedy to a new phase of generic semnotēs (Proleg. de com. xxvii): (scil. Ἀριστοφάνης) πρῶτος δοκεῖ τὴν κωμῳδίαν ἔτι πλανωμένην τῇ ἀρχαίᾳ ἀγωγῇ ἐπὶ τὸ χρησιμώτερον καὶ σεμνότερον μεταγαγεῖν, πικρότερόν τε καὶ αἰσχρότερον Κρατίνου καὶ Εὐπόλιδος βλασφημούντων ἢ ἔδει. πρῶτος δὲ καὶ τῆς νέας κωμῳδίας τὸν τρόπον ἐπέδειξεν ἐν τῷ Κωκάλῳ. Aristophanes seems to have been the first to change (metagagein) comedy, still wandering ( planōmenēn) in its archaic mode (archaiai agōgēi), into something more beneficial and dignified (semnoteron), while Cratinus and Eupolis practiced slander more bitterly and shamefully (aischroteron) than necessary. He was also the first to show the mode (tropon) of New Comedy in his Cocalus.

This narrative, which contains all the elements of the developmental account of Old Comedy typical of ancient scholarship, recasts the lyric eulogy of Bdelycleon in explicitly literary-critical terms. The conceptual cluster of four words—agōgēi (“mode”), resumed by tropon at the end; semnoteron (“more dignified”); and metagagein (“to change”)—highlights remarkable convergences between the Life’s chapter of comic literary history and the

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Chorus’s praise of Bdelycleon’s philopatria, in which synonyms of agōgē such as tropos, and three compounds with meta-, set up the same scenario of transition to semnotēs (1472–73). In no other play of Aristophanes is the notion of semnotēs so strongly implicated in the definition of his comic mode in opposition to his recently victorious older rival. The Life depicts Aristophanic semnotēs as tempering the archaic aischrotēs (“shamefulness”) of Cratinus and Eupolis, according to a scheme common to all the comic rankings of ancient literary criticism. In a similar vein, the prologue of Wasps, delivered by the house slave Xanthias, lays out an implicit contrast between the semnotēs of Bdelycleon’s tropoi (tropous phruagmosemnakous “horsey-dignified ways” 135) and the phortikē kōmōidia (“vulgar, ephemeral comedy”) from which the slave programmatically differentiates the Aristophanic play (64–66).” In the parabasis of the second Clouds, the same adjective, phortikos, is significantly used to describe the rivals, “vulgar ( phortikoi) men”—first and foremost Cratinus—by whom the first version of the play was defeated (524). Xanthias’s contrast of phortikē kōmōidia and semnoi tropoi (“dignified ways”) previews the account of the Life, but also the proto-canonical maneuvering of the parabasis of Peace, where the portrait of the monumental dignity of the Aristophanic brand carries with itself the reduction of all the others to the status of vulgar disposable objects ( phortos). By representing the new Aristophanic fashion as a force that restrained a still-“wandering” ( planōmenēn) comedy and thus led it to “more beneficial and dignified” results, the Life invites an association with Bdelycleon’s chlaina, the semnon himation intended to “adorn” (katakosmēsai) his wayward father. Indeed, the author of the Life of Aeschylus, in praising Aeschylus’s semnotēs, reveals the Aristophanic descent of his judgment by citing Frogs 1004–5, where, as noted above, the Chorus celebrates Aeschylus’s “adorning” (kosmēsai) of tragedy with rhēmata semna (“dignified words”). As we saw, Bdelycleon’s chlaina objectifies the first Clouds’ attempt to cure and maintain a hold on the comic audience. Even if Philocleon’s journeys, which his son tries to contain, never stray from the law court, they are symptomatic of his undisciplined, unsettled old habits. Entrusted to the care of Aristophanes, the personified comedy depicted by the Life resembles Philocleon, who in turn figures Clouds’ audience, at a crossroads between reveling in disease and converting to health-giving semnotēs. While, in the teleological account of the Life, kōmōidia accepts and benefits from the adorning and restraining feel of the Aristophanic agōgē, in Wasps the audience of the first Clouds evoked by Philocleon pulls back from the salubrious hold of the new comic fashion, proving unable to see beyond the mirage of freedom emanating from the archaic unruliness of Cratinean comedy.

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Synthesizing the hints in Wasps’ narrative of failure, the Life reveals how such a narrative paradoxically fixes Aristophanes’ primacy through his imputed virtue of semnotēs—a guarantee of canonicity. What the Life of Aristophanes presents as a generic reshaping of kōmōidia through dignified restraint reflects the affect associated with the chlaina—upper-class composure and healing energy—which Aristophanes designates as the physical and psychological condition offered by Clouds to its audience. The transformation of Wasps’ self-reflexive suggestions into the putatively biographical account of the Life of Aristophanes shows the proto-canonical force of this aesthetics. 5. Conclusions I have followed multiple connective threads of parabasis and plot that turn Aristophanes’ reflection upon the performance of the first Clouds into an intimation of his comic mode as a healthful presence felt on the skin. The resulting narrative of a failed transition from the Cratinean tribōn to Aristophanes’ chlaina infuses the latter object with therapeutic and indeed, as shown by the Life of Aristophanes, enduring proto-canonical value. Reconstructing comic performance as an act of filial caretaking, Aristophanes sought to fulfill, as it were, the prayer that the abject poetic persona of Hipponax had addressed to Hermes (fr. 32 West), imploring the god to grant him a chlaina to relieve his shivering poverty. However, instead of welcoming Aristophanes’ heroic solicitude, the comic audience remained faithful to Cratinus’s dry and fever-inducing comedy. By retracing precisely this ill-advised choice, Wasps elevates the imputed sensory texture of a single performance—soft, warm, healing—to the signature affect of a winning poetic mode. Next, I will investigate other aspects of Wasps’ proto-canonical discourse by considering the infantile psychology that Aristophanes associates with the audience’s return to Cratinean comedy in 423. In particular, I will explore the role of tragedy’s contagious emotions in the aesthetic opposition of tribōn and chlaina, detailing the delegitimizing power of Aristophanes’ assimilation of his adversary to an agent of tragic affect.

3 Emotional Rescue and Generic Demotion: Old Comedians and Tragedy’s Ragged Audience The wind that bites, that gets under my skin and gnaws at my bones with its bitter chill is a memory or a foretaste of a terrible coldness that is the feeling of isolation, homesickness, alienation, despair. The register of hot and cold, of warmth and frost, of passion and dispassion is an emotional and affective register. B e n H i g h m o r e , “Bitter After Taste” A house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability. G a s t o n B a c h e l a r d , The Poetics of Space

The proto-canonical discourse arising from Aristophanes’ reimagination of the first Clouds is grounded in theatrical emotions. How does Wasps diagnose the affliction that made spectators favor Cratinus? As I argue, the audience of 423 figures in the plot as a father whom Cratinus has caused to suffer enervation and alienation, a quasi-tragic surfacing of the destabilizing daemonic forces within the human soul. The rough tribōn—one of the textiles examined in the previous chapter—materializes Cratinean comedy’s ragged affective force, which, diffused through mimesis to spectators, estranges them from home and thus themselves. Conversely, the soft, warm Aristophanic chlaina, which is homologous to the protective structure of home, tends to reconcile them with themselves. Endowing the sensory force of Aristophanes’ performative mode with an all-encompassing tactile dimension, bodily and architectural, the chlaina and the house convey not just an anti-tragic affective agency but a canonical effect of closure, of emotional and generic stability, as it were. My focus is the intensely paratragic dimension of the first part of the play as it relates to the aesthetic battle between the Aristophanic and Cratinean fashions. I suggest that Aristophanic paratragedy reflects on the psychology of dramatic reception, assimilating the effects of Cratinean comedy on the audience to tragic infantilization. Addiction to jury service has reduced Philocleon to an infantile rejection of paternal duties, which his son intends to cure by restoring his father to his place in the household. Read in light of the parabasis and its accretions throughout the plot, the prologic presentation of Philocleon intimates connections between this condition, the affliction

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suffered by the Cratinean audience, and the infantile regression that tragedy threatens to generate by way of affective mimesis. The prologue’s resonances with Euripides’ Hippolytus allow us to map the aesthetic opposition of tribōn and chlaina onto the tragic dialectic of lusis (λύσις) and desis (δέσις), the “unbinding” and “binding” of destructive emotions. Desis and lusis are famously formulated in Aristotle’s Poetics as, respectively, “complication” and “solution” (denouement)—the former, the plot from the beginning to the climactic transition (metabolē) toward eutuchia or dustuchia (“good” or “bad fortune”); the latter, the knot-loosening section from the metabolē to the end. I use this opposition differently. Following one of the ways it is dramatized in Hippolytus, I construe lusis as the unleashing of daemonic passions that sets the tragic plot in motion and desis as the forces of physical and psychological composure as well as narrative closure. It is with degrading emotional lusis, deemed emblematic of the psychological experience of tragedy, that Aristophanes identifies the impact of Cratinus’s comedy, self-servingly assigning to his own comic manner salubrious desis. Not merely playing an intergeneric/intertextual game, the prologue’s engagement with Hippolytus gives substance to Aristophanes’ reimagining of his performative failure and the aesthetic shortcomings of his competitor. A genre (tragedy) is thus put to the service of characterizing an affect—the psychological and physical energy transmitted by a performative medium to an audience—in this case, the Cratinean affect. The materiality of the tragic emotions involved in this operation emerges, as we will see, from the overlap of bodily with textile and architectural images. Besides analyzing the prologue against the background of Hippolytus, I locate instances of the interplay of lusis and desis, linked with the symbolism of tribōn and chlaina, in two other scenes before the parabasis, in which Philocleon’s affliction connects with the abject condition of the Aeschylean Niobe and the Euripidean Bellerophon. In displaying the mimetic effects of tragedy, such figures, along with Phaedra in Hippolytus, are like a comic audience infantilized and made ragged by Cratinus. To begin, I read the prologue, delivered by Xanthias, against Euripides’ Hippolytus, adhering to the slave’s tripartite narrative: the definition, symptomatology, and therapy of Philocleon’s disease. Later, I turn to Philocleon’s reenactments of Niobe’s and Bellerophon’s melancholic antics. Through these examples of what I call affective intertextuality—the diffusion of emotional energy through textual connections—I show how the comic audience’s impure judgment in the previous year’s contest is attributed to the tragic psychology of Cratinus’s comedy. What all these readings ultimately suggest is that by aligning Aristophanes’ mode with emotional, narrative, and generic binding (desis) the three paratragic scenes predispose his poetic brand and its

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putative affective force to comic canonicity, relegating that of his quasi-tragic rival to marginality. 1. Intersecting Affects: Tragic Love as Comic Disease I now lay the groundwork for viewing Philocleon’s malady as a reflection of the tragic disease of the first Clouds’ audience. I consider two seemingly unrelated moments in the prologue: Xanthias’s revelation of Wasps’ poetic program and his subsequent diagnosis of Philocleon’s disease, which reproduces elements of the narratives surrounding Phaedra’s affliction in Euripides’ Hippolytus. This intertextual relationship will lead me to posit, at the end of the third section, a connection between these apparently disparate phases of the slave’s prologic exposition, one that ties phortikē kōmōidia (“vulgar, ephemeral comedy”) to tragic lusis, expressing a proto-canonical generic demotion. A turning point in the prologue of Wasps is Xanthias’s transition from the dialogue with his fellow slave Sosias to a monologic narrative, which starts by addressing the spectators in an unusual parabatic tone (54–57 and 64–66): Ξα. φέρε νυν, κατείπω τοῖς θεαταῖς τὸν λόγον, ὀλίγ’ ἄτθ’ ὑπειπὼν πρῶτον αὐτοῖσιν ταδί, (55) μηδὲν παρ’ ἡμῶν προσδοκᾶν λίαν μέγα, μηδ’ αὖ γέλωτα Μεγαρόθεν κεκλεμμένον . . . ἀλλ’ ἔστιν ἡμῖν λογίδιον γνώμην ἔχον, ὑμῶν μὲν αὐτῶν οὐχὶ δεξιώτερον, (65) κωμῳδίας δὲ φορτικῆς σοφώτερον. Xanthias Come now, let me lay out the plot for the spectators. But first I’ll say these few words to them as a preface. Don’t expect anything excessively grand (lian mega) from us, or, on the other hand, any gag snatched from Megara. . . . We have a little plot with an idea, not more clever than yourselves, but wiser than vulgar comedy (kōmōidias . . . phortikēs).

In situating the comic quality of Wasps between undue grandeur and the lowbrow humor of Megarian comedy (56–57), Xanthias previews the poetic self-definition characteristic of the Aristophanic parabasis. His announcement of Wasps’ avoidance of the “excessively grand” (lian mega) hints at the audience’s failure to appreciate the first Clouds. Xanthias in fact establishes a strong continuity between Wasps and the previous play. As Charles Platter has remarked, “far from being a critic of Clouds-style grand comedy, Wasps pitches its aspirations to coincide specifically with those of Clouds” (2007, 91). The statement that summarizes and closes this part of the prologue (65–66)

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contains an unflattering allusion to the enemy of the first Clouds, Aristophanes’ vanquisher Cratinus, who, as indicated by the reference to him as anēr phortikos (“vulgar man”) in the parabasis (524) of the revised play, is probably the main representative of the phortikē kōmōidia from which Xanthias assertively distances Wasps. We can thus say that this passage looks ahead to Wasps’ parabatic meditation upon the first Clouds’ defeat. Is there any relation between this quasi-parabatic moment in the prologue, which introduces the principal actors in the “drama” of the previous year’s contest (Aristophanes, Cratinus, the comic spectators), and Xanthias’s account of the plot, which follows? Keith Sidwell, Ian Ruffell, and Zachary Biles have viewed Philocleon’s madness, the main topic of Xanthias’s account, as reflecting Cratinus’s manic addiction (to wine) in Pytine, the play that probably redeemed the old comedian’s intoxicated poetics by turning him into its hero. I argue instead that the paratragic texture of the slave’s diagnosis prompts us to detect affinities between the comic character’s tragic affliction and the disease of the audience of 423. Reading the prologue against Hippolytus will help us see, in the later stages of the argument, how the audience of the first Clouds suffered, in Aristophanes’ view, from something similar to Philocleon’s Phaedra-like malady. This tragic malady is, in other words, integral to the discourse of comic affect pursued in Wasps. I will now set up an overarching intertextual framework, which will allow us to link the erotic passion of the Euripidean Phaedra, absorbed by Philocleon, with the morbid imagery that figures the defeat of Clouds in the parabasis and in the post-parabatic dressing scene. The first stage direction provided by Xanthias discreetly transports the prologue into paratragic territory. Stationed outside the door of the skēnē with Sosias, a fellow slave, he draws attention to his young master, who is sleeping on the roof to prevent his father from escaping through the chimney and rushing to the law court (67–68). Bdelycleon’s appearance on the roof at the start of the play places him in the same physical and symbolic position as the gods and goddesses who, in the prologues of several extant tragedies, probably spoke from above, flaunting their control over impending events and supplying spectators with a panoramic vision of the dramatic action. Although Bdelycleon does not deliver the prologue, his privileged vantage point from the upper level of the skēnē turns him, to a degree, into a comic version of the tragic theos prologizōn (“god delivering a prologue”), while Xanthias acts as his spokesman. It is, however, when Xanthias shifts his and the audience’s attention from the son to the father inside that his narrative fully displays its paratragic quality. This turning point is marked by the introduction of the theme of disease

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(71): “His father, you see, is afflicted (nosei) by a weird sickness (noson).” As observed by David Harvey (1971, 363), the combination of “direct address to the audience” and “the illness or madness of a main character” in Xanthias’s account re-creates basic elements of the Euripidean prologues of Medea and Hippolytus, where the speaker, almost addressing the audience, supplies the dramatic coordinates of the plot by focusing on the malady of its protagonist. Harvey regards the opening of Hippolytus as “a more striking parallel,” for here Aphrodite describes Phaedra’s erotic madness precisely as a nosos (“disease”), a word that permeates this tragic play. Furthermore, Philocleon’s judicial compulsion is explicitly characterized by the language of eros (“he loves [erai] doing this jury service” 89). In 111–12 Xanthias’s allusion to Stheneboea, a double of Phaedra, invites a deeper engagement with the thematics of tragic female love and, consequently, with the structural parallels between Hippolytus and the account of Philocleon’s nosos. These lines (τοιαῦτ’ ἀλύει· νουθετούμενος δ’ ἀεὶ / μᾶλλον δικάζει), which I will analyze later, adapt a snippet of Euripides’ Stheneboea to compare Philocleon’s longing for the law court with the erotic passion of the eponymous heroine. Likewise, in Frogs, Aeschylus distances the moral austerity of his tragic poetry from Euripides’ dramatization of transgressive love by coupling Phaedra and Stheneboea—another adulterous woman struggling with erotic madness—as interchangeable icons of his adversary’s harmful mimesis (“But by Zeus, I never made whores, the Phaedras and Stheneboeas” 1043). Though the few spare fragments of Stheneboea preclude a lengthy comparison, the points of connection between Xanthias’s account and Hippolytus suggest a close relationship with the initial dramatic movement of the Euripidean play: Aphrodite’s prologue and the parodos, two distinct moments in the disclosure of Phaedra’s sickness. What we find here is not a precise re-creation of the Euripidean script, but a programmatic play of similarity and difference that inscribes Philocleon’s comic disease within the dramaturgy of tragic female love. The slave’s final revelation of Philocleon’s infatuation with the Heliaea— Athens’s supreme court—plays up the erotic nature of this unheard-of disease through a description of longing (erai) and moaning (stenei) (ἐρᾷ  .  .  . καὶ στένει Wasps 89), the same association of desire and pained expression that marks Aphrodite’s depiction of Phaedra in the Euripidean prologue (“moaning [stenousa] from the goads of love [erōtos]” στένουσα . . . κέντροις ἔρωτος Hippolytus 38–39). Regarding Philocleon, Xanthias observes (88–90): φιληλιαστής ἐστιν ὡς οὐδεὶς ἀνήρ, ἐρᾷ τε τούτου, τοῦ δικάζειν, καὶ στένει ἢν μὴ ’πὶ τοῦ πρώτου καθίζηται ξύλου.

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He is a philheliast like no other man. He loves doing this jury service and moans if he can’t sit in the front row.

In Hippolytus, Aphrodite shares with the audience her privileged knowledge of the queen’s secret disease, which, as she points out, nobody in the household can identify (38–40): ἐνταῦθα δὴ στένουσα κἀκπεπληγμένη κέντροις ἔρωτος ἡ τάλαιν’ ἀπόλλυται σιγῆι, ξύνοιδε δ’ οὔτις οἰκετῶν νόσον. Now, the wretch, moaning and driven out of her senses by the goads of love, perishes silently. None of the house slaves (oiketōn) knows her disease.

There is a striking resonance between Aphrodite’s knowledge claims and Xanthias’s initial presentation of Philocleon’s nosos. In introducing the affliction of Bdelycleon’s father, the comic oiketēs (“house slave”) places himself and Sosias in the position of epistemological advantage that Aphrodite reserves for herself in the tragic prologue (71–73): νόσον γὰρ ὁ πατὴρ ἀλλόκοτον αὐτοῦ νοσεῖ, ἣν οὐδ’ ἂν εἷς γνοίη ποτ’ οὐδ’ ἂν ξυμβάλοι εἰ μὴ πύθοιθ’ ἡμῶν· ἐπεὶ τοπάζετε. His father, you see, is afflicted (nosei) by a weird sickness (noson), which no one would ever be able to discern or understand without asking us. So take a guess.

By announcing that they, the old man’s house slaves, are the only ones able to diagnose Philocleon’s nosos, Xanthias inverts the hierarchy posited by Aphrodite and vindicates his tragic counterparts, condemned a priori to limited knowledge. The spatial continuities between the comic scene and the beginning of Hippolytus support the idea of an epistemological hierarchy. In the Euripidean prologue Aphrodite’s elevated position visualizes the vertical order that governs knowledge of the queen’s disease. From the viewpoint of the audience, which Xanthias’s statement emphasizes (73), the slave shares some affinities with Aphrodite. In acting as a mouthpiece of Bdelycleon, located on the skēnē roof like Aphrodite, Xanthias is invested with the same exclusive task of revealing a secret to the audience that the goddess has in the Euripidean prologue. In tragedy gods and slaves ostensibly act on different cognitive levels; in this comedy Bdelycleon shares the status of a theos prologizōn, an inculcator of knowledge, with his spokesman. The comic scene also recasts a key element of the Euripidean parodos:

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the debate concerning Phaedra’s condition. Before Xanthias displays his omniscience—compelling proof of his closeness to the momentarily dozing stage manager of the dramatic action—he and Sosias play with expectations by imagining a discussion among spectators concerning the old man’s nosos (74–84): Ξα. Ἀμυνίας μὲν ὁ Προνάπους φήσ’ οὑτοσὶ εἶναι φιλόκυβον αὐτόν. (75) Σω. ἀλλ’ οὐδὲν λέγει, μὰ Δί’, ἀλλ’ ἀφ’ αὑτοῦ τὴν νόσον τεκμαίρεται. Ξα. οὔκ, ἀλλὰ “φιλο” μέν ἐστιν ἁρχὴ τοῦ κακοῦ. ὁδὶ δέ φησι Σωσίας πρὸς Δερκύλον εἶναι φιλοπότην αὐτόν. Σω. οὐδαμῶς γ’, ἐπεὶ αὕτη γε χρηστῶν ἐστιν ἀνδρῶν ἡ νόσος. (80) Ξα. Νικόστρατος δ’ αὖ φησιν ὁ Σκαμβωνίδης εἶναι φιλοθύτην αὐτὸν ἢ φιλόξενον. Σω. μὰ τὸν κύν’, ὦ Νικόστρατ’, οὐ φιλόξενος, ἐπεὶ καταπύγων ἐστὶν ὅ γε Φιλόξενος. Xanthias Amunias here, the son of Pronapes, says that he’s a dice-o-phile. Sosias But he has no clue, by Zeus. He’s just guessing the disease on the basis of his own. Xanthias No, but the name of his sickness does include “phile.” Now Sosias here is telling Dercylus that he’s a drink-o-phile ( philopotēn). Sosias Not at all, because this is a disease of honest men. Xanthias Nicostratus of Scambonidae says instead that he is a meat-o-phile ( philothutēn) or that he is a guest-o-phile ( philoxenon). Sosias By the dog, Nicostratus, no! He is not a guest-o-phile ( philoxenos), for Philoxenus, as far as I know, is a bugger.

This metatheatrical guessing game transforms the diagnosis of Philocleon’s nosos into a comic riddle that elicits multiple answers. A similar narrative polyphony characterizes the final section of the parodos of Hippolytus (the second strophic pair and epode), where the Chorus advances various hypotheses on Phaedra’s consuming affliction, conveying interpretive impotence in line with Aphrodite’s prologic reference to the ignorance of the house slaves (141–69). Though the aetiological debate of the Euripidean parodos lacks the challenge and response that we see in the Aristophanic scene, it can be connected with the comic guessing game in two ways. First, the structure of strophe, antistrophe, and epode organizes the Chorus’s aetiological speculation around a triple set of possibilities (god-sent illnesses, jealousy or sadness, pregnancy) that parallels the division of the comic debate (“dice-o-phile” 75; “drink-o-

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phile” 79; “meat-o-phile” or “guest-o-phile” 82). Second, both scenes feature a sequence of conjecture, desire for knowledge, and then revelation. After Aphrodite’s prologue, which invests spectators with foreknowledge of impending events, the Chorus acts as an internal audience, impatient to make sense of what it beholds. At the end of the parodos, spotting Phaedra accompanied by the Nurse, it expresses a longing to learn the nature of the queen’s disease, using the language of eros (“My soul desires [eratai] to know what has ruined the the queen’s body, discoloring it” 173–75). Phaedra’s subsequent appearance, “a spectacular act of revelation” for the external audience (Holmes 2010, 254), also marks the beginning of a revelation for the internal one, the Chorus. In the comic scene, the end of the guessing game ushers in Xanthias’s teasing reference to the audience’s “desire (epithumeite) to know” (86) and, after a line, the revelation of Philocleon’s idiosyncratic disease (88–89), which, as we have seen, re-creates Aphrodite’s prologic depiction of Phaedra’s nosos through the conjunction of longing (erai) and weeping (stenei). By engaging with the prologue and the parodos of Euripides’ Hippolytus, Aristophanes activates the tragic elements in the comic plot through characters (slaves, an ailing master, a god figure); their arrangement in relation to the house (up, down, inside, outside); and thematics (aetiological anxiety, the hierarchy of dramatic knowledge, the mysteries of the self). But how does the intertextual shadow of Hippolytus condition the initial presentation of Philocleon? As we will see, the positioning of Xanthias’s narrative against Hippolytus brings out significant correspondences between the symptoms of Philocleon’s and Phaedra’s diseases, casting light on Aristophanes’ retrospective diagnosis of the diseased audience responsible for the defeat of his 423 play. 2. Anger and the Aesthetics of Alienation In this section, I reconstruct the tragic enervation and infantilization of the audience of the first Clouds. I do this by considering, in light of the parabasis and subsequent dressing scene, the affective intertextuality between Philocleon and Phaedra—the way imagistic associations become vehicles for the diffusion of emotional intensities. As I argue, Philocleon’s enervated version of anger, transmitted, as it were, from Phaedra’s erotic passion, manifests itself through parallel symptoms—feverish attacks and sleeping outside. These symptoms, expressing the tragic condition of Philocleon, and behind him the comic audience, are linked in various ways with the ragged tribōn, the garment implicated in Aristophanes’ view of Cratinean comedy. Danielle Allen (2003) has discussed the role of the Athenian ideology of anger, citizenship, and masculinity in the dramatic construction of Wasps

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and, particularly, in the characterization of the play’s animal chorus. In classical Athens, anger in the court functioned as a fundamental performative ritual of civic identity. The institutional context of the law court was meant to neutralize the disruptive effects of this emotion by turning its punitive force into an instrument of political participation, reinforcing essential values of democratic freedom and equality and also defining normative standards of masculine behavior. In Athens “men . . . affirmed their virility” together with their sense of democratic belonging “when they punished” (ibid., 89). In the epirrhematic section of Wasps’ parabasis, the Chorus of aggressive jurors validates its self-presentation as a “very brave race (andrikōtaton genos) that has benefited the city very much” (1077–78) by conceptualizing judicial orgē (“anger”) as an expression of the old-fashioned ideal of courage and manhood associated with the victory of Marathon. To some extent, this self-presentation replicates the comic poet’s own claim of service to the community (1017) and his alignment with Heraclean bravery and beneficial orgē (1030) in the anapests of the same parabasis. Even before Philocleon appears onstage, bursting into what later sources would classify as manic anger, Xanthias’s prologue presents the old man’s orgē as a pathology, a description that Philocleon’s fellow jurors later confirm, differentiating their kindred emotion. When Philocleon states that he never acquits anybody, for fear of “drying up” (aposklēnai 160), he relates judicial anger to the preservation of his sexual potency, unaware of the emasculating power of his presumed source of virility. In fact, the compulsion toward jury service, which manifests his orgē, has already compromised his masculinity. The parallels between Philocleon’s affliction and the eros of Phaedra and Stheneboea separate him from the andrikōtaton genos of his fellow jurors, degrading his anger to insanity with enervating consequences. In the parodos, the jurors themselves allude to this difference while trying to summon their tardy colleague in the early morning with a song in the strains of Phrynichus (273–89), the long-dead tragedian, for whom Philocleon has a compulsive affection, as the Chorus’s use of the adjective philōidos (“sing-o-phile”) indicates (269–70). They refer to Philocleon as “by far the fiercest” (drimutatos 277) but note the pathological consequences of his anger: failure to bring about a conviction can expose him to grief with physical repercussions—strong fevers ( purettōn), forcing him to bed (283–84). The Phrynichean melody that frames the Chorus’s apparent praise acts as a warning, ironically converting his fierceness and alleged primacy in the art of jury duty into a tragic malady. In detailing Philocleon’s Phaedra-like sleeplessness, Xanthias hints at the fever-inducing power of the old man’s affliction. After solving the mystery

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of the nosos, Xanthias illustrates Philocleon’s emotional turmoil since the arousal of his judicial passion (91–96): ὕπνου δ’ ὁρᾷ τῆς νυκτὸς οὐδὲ πασπάλην. ἢν δ’ οὖν καταμύσῃ κἂν ἄχνην, ὅμως ἐκεῖ ὁ νοῦς πέτεται τὴν νύκτα περὶ τὴν κλεψύδραν. ὑπὸ τοῦ δὲ τὴν ψῆφόν γ’ ἔχειν εἰωθέναι τοὺς τρεῖς ξυνέχων τῶν δακτύλων ἀνίσταται, (95) ὥσπερ λιβανωτὸν ἐπιτιθεὶς νουμηνίᾳ. At night he doesn’t get any sleep, not even a tiny morsel. And if he does close his eyes for a bit, nevertheless his mind is there flapping around the water clock all night. Because he is accustomed to hold a voting pebble, he gets up (anistatai) holding together three fingers as if he were placing incense on an altar at the new moon.

Philocleon’s consuming fantasies about the law court and its empowering objects (water clock, voting pebbles) have condemned him to wakeful nights, another resemblance to Phaedra’s erotic distress. Phaedra alludes to her insomnia at the outset of the long speech to the Chorus in which she retraces the thoughts that persuaded her to end her life in the face of the overwhelming force of eros (375–76). This connection with Phaedra’s sleeplessness, which is the target of explicit verbal parody in Frogs (931), seems thus to fashion Philocleon’s manic orgē as a female subjection to daemonic forces. Not only are daemons such as Eros deemed responsible for nighttime fevers, but febrile conditions are staple elements of the literary physiology of love. Indeed, ancient medicine presents lovesick subjects “as pale, sleepless, and even feverish” (Gal. Hipp. prog. 18b.18). We cannot know whether Phaedra is actually feverish when she makes her first onstage appearance in Hippolytus (as some critics have supposed her to be), but her wakefulness certainly makes her vulnerable to fevers. An insomnia-inducing emotion, anger, like erotic desire, is considered by Galen a cause of febrile states. Thus, in offering a possible explanation for Philocleon’s lateness, the jurors’ tragically inflected reference to their colleague’s fevers in a sense expands on the symptomatology traced by Xanthias. The imagistic complex of sleeplessness, daemonic incursions, and fevers that develops from the affective intertextuality between Philocleon and Phaedra links Xanthias’s clinical account to the parabatic narrative of a Heraclean struggle. The emotional upheaval provoked by Philocleon’s jury obsession unleashes daemonic, pathological forces analogous to the ēpialoi and puretoi (“shivers” and “fevers”) that, regardless of their political implications,

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Aristophanes claims to have combated for his audience’s sake in the comic contest of the previous year. Philocleon’s delirium causes him to rise up from bed (anistatai 95), a motion similar to the terrified leaping from bed (anapēdan deimainontas 1042) that the Chorus attributes to feverish fathers and grandfathers in the parabasis and that the Hippocratic treatise On the Sacred Disease presents as a consequence of fear or derangement (paranoiai) caused by the daemonic Hecate at night. In the dressing scene, Philocleon’s paranoid mistrust of his son’s textile, anti-pyretic therapy reflects the reluctance of the first Clouds’ audience to bond with Aristophanic comedy. Read in light of this scene and the parabasis, the prologue seems to supply a tragic symptomatology not only of Philocleon, but also of Aristophanes’ audience. Another feature of Philocleon’s nocturnal turmoil, his outdoor sleeping, deepens affinities with Phaedra, as we will see, conveying infantile regression that further suggests a diagnosis of the first Clouds’ diseased audience. Philocleon’s judicial infatuation has completely estranged him from his home. According to Xanthias, Philocleon’s morning starts the night before. At bedtime, eager for the next day’s forensic adventure, he routinely charges the rooster with having been bribed by a group of influential magistrates to wake him up late (100–102). Immediately after supper, feeling the urgent call of his duties, he puts on a tribōnion (“little tribōn” 116) and heads to the court (104). Performing a sort of paraclausithyron, a camping out before the door of one’s love, he spends the night sleeping outside the Heliaea, using a pillar as a pillow (103–5): εὐθὺς δ’ ἀπὸ δορπηστοῦ κέκραγεν ἐμβάδας, κἄπειτ’ ἐκεῖσ’ ἐλθὼν προκαθεύδει πρῲ πάνυ, ὥσπερ λεπὰς προσεχόμενος τῷ κίονι. Immediately after dinner he cries out for his shoes, goes there, and sleeps in front of the court very early in the morning, attaching himself to the pillar like a limpet.

The behavior described here supplies the background for the prayer that Philocleon, attempting to escape from his confinement at home, addresses to Lycus, the Athenian hero whose shrine was adjacent to the eponymous law court (389–93): “Save now your neighbor!” (393). In referring to himself this way, Philocleon highlights his outdoor sleeping and, synechdochically, his designation of all the courts in Athens as his home. The grotesque replacement of the warm and internal with the cold and external expresses the old man’s lost sense of belonging, which I refer to as alienation. Philocleon’s chilly, solitary slumbers can be mapped onto the initial scene

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of Hippolytus, in which Phaedra, at her request, is brought outside on her sickbed. As shown by the hallucinatory fantasies of evasion and hunting in the mountains that she voices (198–238), this request stems from a desire to be physically close to Hippolytus and to act as the “chaser” instead of the “chased.” The queen’s entrance unleashes revelations that fulfill the expectations of Chorus and audience, but furthermore, as the doors are opened, one imagines the unleashing of the daemonic force of eros and the opening of the innermost parts of Phaedra’s soul where daemons reside. Phaedra’s urge to lie down outside stages the alienation that ensues when what ought to remain hidden is revealed. As Froma Zeitlin has remarked, “the secret of adulterous desire is incompatible with the house and the social values it objectifies, so that the woman is no longer ‘at home’ with herself ” (1996, 243). In addition, after the disclosure of her disease, Phaedra is “a child again, and the Nurse does for the grown woman what she had always done for the child—evades her questions, makes light of her fears, relieves her of responsibility, and decides for her” (Knox 1952, 11). Although Philocleon, far from incapacitated, translates his fantasies of escape into action, his sleeping outside visualizes a similar condition. His insane impulse to be near the court (the object of his passion) and “hunt” defendants, while actually being “hunted” by unprincipled politicians, resembles Phaedra’s situation. By inducing Philocleon to transfer his home into uncanny spaces of alterity, this impulse compromises his identity as father and head of the household, causing him to regress, like Phaedra, to a childish condition. The alienation and enervation brought about by Philocleon’s pathological orgē tie together Xanthias’s narrative, the parabatic account of Aristophanes’ recent poetic setback, and the choice between tribōn and chlaina. The tribōn is the porous garment that Philocleon wears while spending nights in front of the doors of the Heliaea, making himself an easy target of nocturnal fevers. It thus replicates the harmful effects of Philocleon’s Phaedra-like insomnia. Symbolically, the ragged cloak provides Philocleon with the ideal uniform for his peregrinations: its loose, open structure, like his outdoor sleeping space, objectifies the opening of the crevices of Philocleon’s soul, where feminizing and infantilizing emotional energies abide. The pillar that Philocleon clings to while asleep replaces the warm softness of the chlaina-as-blanket with a rough surface that re-creates the material coarseness of the tribōn, thus multiplying the objective correlatives of his estrangement from home. The parabasis aligns the affective agency of the first Clouds not only with the cathartic attack on father-strangling fevers but also with the domestic comfort and intimacy conveyed by the image of fragrant drawers (1055–59). Xanthias’s diagnosis of Philocleon’s alienation, then, participates in Aristophanes’

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tendentious reconstruction of the disease that prevented the previous year’s audience from responding to his therapeutic touch. The solipsistic gesture of holding on to the rough and cold surface of the pillar, which represents a rejection of touch as a healing sensation and of the enveloping warmth offered by the chlaina, has an analog in Phaedra’s wish to remove her veil. The chlaina is a garment resembling the swaddling clothes customarily employed by nurses to regulate babies’ temperature and stop their angry weeping. Philocleon’s resistance to the soft touch of the chlaina, reflected in a preference for the impersonal and superficially liberating haptic bond with the tribōn and the pillar, calls to mind the characteristic refusal of physical contact seen among diseased subjects. In particular, it may recall Phaedra’s request that her oppressive headdress (epikranon) be removed (202), in the same initial scene of Hippolytus, when the arrival of her sickbed outside leads to her trance-like expression of erotic desire. The covering function that Phaedra assigns to the headdress in her appeals to the Nurse at the end of her delirious utterances (243; cf. 245, 250) reveals the analogy of her epikranon with Bdelycleon’s chlaina, similarly covering and constraining. Both Philocleon’s choice of the tribōn’s open texture and the tragic heroine’s uncovering gesture replay, at the tactile level, the symbolism of sleeping outside as a dangerous baring of secret emotions. Reading the parabasis and the dressing scene into the prologue, we can see the comic audience’s failed appreciation of the first Clouds dramatized in Philocleon’s tragic alienation and in the correlative rejection of comforting familial contact. In the previous chapter I argued that the tribōn bears the distinctive marks of Aristophanes’ view of Cratinean comic aesthetics. The analysis of the symptomatic overlap between Philocleon’s anger and Phaedra’s eros—an intertextual transmission of affect—shows that his judicial uniform reifies a tragic release of disruptive emotions. The resonances of the prologue, parabasis, and dressing scene (with its contest between tribōn and chlaina) thus insinuate a link between Philocleon’s tragic syndrome and the affective power of Cratinean comedy. In the next section I will examine this link in relation to Bdelycleon’s therapeutic strategies and Aristophanes’ proto-canonical discourse. 3. Wrapping Walls: Affective Mimesis and Proto-Canonical Therapy I now focus on the tragic mimesis that, according to the nonlinear narrative we have been following, Cratinean comedy imposed upon the audience of the first Clouds. As I propose, in Xanthias’s account of Bdelycleon’s therapeutic efforts the spatial and textile metaphors previously discussed are subsumed

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in the dichotomy of lusis and desis, which permeates Hippolytus. In the prologue of Wasps, lusis ultimately expresses Cratinus’s quasi-tragic affect, that is, the physical and emotional dissolution that his “vulgar comedy” ( phortikē kōmōidia), almost like tragedy, passes on to the audience. Conversely, Bdelycleon’s therapy of desis, grounded in the protective power of the house and the chlaina, reflects the affect of the comic mode that Aristophanes claims to have offered to his audience as a treatment for the alienating effects of Cratinus’s quasi-tragic mimesis. The psychological and physical stability promised by Bdelycleon’s desis anticipates the idea that Aristophanes stabilized the genre of Old Comedy. Xanthias closes his report on Philocleon’s judicial mania at 111–13 by recapitulating the feminizing effects of his disease through the allusion to Euripides’ Stheneboea, a tragic plot of love and death parallel to Hippolytus: τοιαῦτ’ ἀλύει· νουθετούμενος δ’ ἀεὶ μᾶλλον δικάζει. τοῦτον οὖν φυλάττομεν μοχλοῖσιν ἐνδήσαντες, ὡς ἂν μὴ ’ξίῃ. This is how disturbed he is (aluei). But the more he is rebuked (nouthetoumenos), the more cases he judges (dikazei). So having wrapped him up (endēsantes), we guard ( phulattomen) him with bolts (mochloisin) so he doesn’t get out.

The quotation of a line from the tragic play (“That is how disturbed she is. But the more Eros is rebuked [nouthetoumenos] the more it afflicts her [piezei]” TrGF 5.665) turns the old man into a hybrid of Euripides’ most infamous women (Phaedra and Stheneboea). In addition, in 112–13 Philocleon’s domestic confinement, described by Xanthias in tragic language and meter ( phulattomen mochloisin), recalls the enforced segregation in the female quarters through “bolts (mochlois) and seals” in Thesmophoriazusae (414–16), which the Chorus of that play laments as a consequence of Euripides’ representation of Athenian women’s desires. More significantly, Xanthias’s parodic allusion to Euripides’ Stheneboea brings the dialectic of emotional lusis and desis into his portrait of Philocleon’s alienation. At 111, the comic replacement of eros (the subject of nouthetoumenos in the tragic text) with “he” (Philocleon) iconically underscores that the old man’s identity has been subsumed under Eros. This intertextual depiction of his absorption into the daemonic otherness of tragic love is reinforced by the assonance of piezei (“afflicts”) and dikazei (“judges”), which also hints at his ambiguous condition as both victim (object of piezei) and victimizer (subject of dikazei). In the Euripidean play, the proverbial impossibility of outtalking Eros, which Xanthias recasts as his and Bdelycleon’s inability to

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restrain Philocleon’s compulsion verbally, is meant by Stheneboea’s nurse— the most likely speaker of the lines adapted by the comic slave—to excuse the attempt to seduce Bellerophon. This unbinding (lusis) of Stheneboea’s amorous emotions (aluei 111), which Xanthias allusively and punningly conjures, stands in contrast to the physical and symbolic binding (desis) that he and Sosias have carried out by “wrapping up” (endēsantes 113) Philocleon on behalf of his son. The precise nature of this desis becomes clear at the end of Xanthias’s overview of Bdelycleon’s therapeutic experiments (115–24). The nets (diktua) that the two slaves have spread around the internal courtyard of the house (131–32), obstructing all possible escape routes and thus, as it were, wrapping Philocleon up, are the last of the architectural stratagems to keep the old man within the walls of the house (125–32): ἐντεῦθεν οὐκέτ’ αὐτὸν ἐξεφρίομεν, (125) ὁ δ’ ἐξεδίδρασκε διά τε τῶν ὑδρορροῶν καὶ τῶν ὀπῶν· ἡμεῖς δ’ ὅσ’ ἦν τετρημένα ἐνεβύσαμεν ῥακίοισι κἀπακτώσαμεν, ὁ δ’ ὡσπερεὶ κολοιὸς αὑτῷ παττάλους ἐνέκρουεν εἰς τὸν τοῖχον, εἶτ’ ἐξήλλετο. (130) ἡμεῖς δὲ τὴν αὐλὴν ἅπασαν δικτύοις καταπετάσαντες ἐν κύκλῳ φυλάττομεν. After this we no longer let him go out, but he tried to escape through the gutters and the holes (opōn). So we stuffed all the openings with rags and fastened (epaktōsamen) them, but he banged pegs into the wall for himself and then, like a pet crow, hopped out (exēlleto). So having spread (katapesantes) the whole courtyard with nets in a circle, we stand guard.

The language of this account causes the opposition of tribōn and chlaina to slip into the architecture of the home. In 126–28, the use of rags to fill all the gaps—“holes” (opōn) and “gutters”—that may allow Philocleon’s departure furnishes the walls with a thick and impenetrable texture similar to that of the chlaina. The verb paktoō (“to fasten, close” 128) seems even to transform the walls into fastened doors, introducing another layer of imagery relevant to the representation of the tribōn and chlaina: if the former, with its “holes” (opas, Wealth 715), can be seen as “full of open doors” ( poluthuros), the latter amounts to a protective door, shielding its wearers from external threats. In the description of Xanthias’s and Sosias’s latest scheme, which resumes and clarifies endēsantes (“wrapping [Philocleon] up” 113), the participle katapetasantes (132) similarly equates the nets laid out around the courtyard with a piece of clothing (such as the chlaina) draped over the body. In Wealth,

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Plutus is restored to vision after undergoing the healing rituals in the temple of Asclepius that, according to Xanthias, were unsuccessfully administered to Philocleon (121–24). The same verb (katepetase) designates one of these rituals, the spreading of a large crimson cloth over the patient’s head and face (Wealth 730–32). The slaves’ gestures of architectural constraint, culminating in their final desis, thus seem to converge with the change of outerwear that Bdelycleon urges upon his father after the parabasis. The therapy of desis implemented by Bdelycleon’s slaves is meant to quell Philocleon’s bodily agitation, which has the effect of assimilating him to a bird and a maenad. The primary reason for placing nets around the courtyard is Philocleon’s crow-like motions (129–30) of mounting the sealed walls and jumping away from the house (exēlleto 130). This avian metamorphosis further signals Philocleon’s alienation, literalizing the metaphorical equation of madness with flying that Xanthias had previously used (“his mind is . . . flapping” 93). However, Xanthias’s report reveals that even previously the old man’s manic resistance manifested itself as a precipitous movement like the hopping of a bird (118–20): εἶτ’ αὐτὸν ἀπέλου κἀκάθαιρ’, ὁ δ’ οὐ μάλα. μετὰ τοῦτ’ ἐκορυβάντιζ’, ὁ δ’ αὐτῷ τυμπάνῳ ᾄξας ἐδίκαζεν εἰς τὸ Καινὸν ἐμπεσών Then he (= Bdelycleon) tried to bathe (apelou) and purify (ekathaire) him, but there was no way. After this, he tried the Corybantic rites, but his father, with the drum itself, darted off (aixas), careened (empesōn) into the New Court, and started judging cases.

Bdelycleon’s homeopathic strategy of associating his father with Corybantic worshippers backfired, as Philocleon’s reaction assimilated him to a maenad. According to Plato (Laws 790d–91a), the external agitation induced by the Corybantic dances could temper the internal commotion of manic subjects, calming them the way that mothers and nurses calm sleepless children by rocking them in their arms. However, instead of putting the restless Philocleon to sleep, the exposure to the frenzied dancing of the adepts of Cybele exacerbated his affliction, causing a headlong rush to the law court that resembled the bird-like darting of an angry maenad. This resemblance is conjured by the appearance of the drum (119) together with aixas (120), from aissō, which in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (385–86) explicitly likens the goddess’s rapid, frantic movement toward her object to that of a maenad. The resonances between this passage and the parabasis suggest Bdelycleon’s therapy as a cipher for the failed desis of the first Clouds. The depiction of Philocleon’s maenadism closes the account of two complementary

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rituals, the first of which foreshadows the purifying action that the Chorus ascribes to the comic poet in the parabasis. The cathartic rites referred to at 118 (apelou . . . ekathaire) look ahead to the role of kathartēs (“purifier”) of the audience that Aristophanes claims for himself in his parabatic narrative of the defeat of the first Clouds by Cratinus’s Pytine, as we saw in the previous chapter. In light of the defeat of the two would-be purifiers (Bdelycleon and Aristophanes)—for Philocleon’s maenadism powerfully visualizes the failure of his son’s rites—we are invited to link prologue and parabasis and see a common affliction of father and audience. Maenads can be regarded as icons of the Dionysiac madness triggered by tragedy’s unbinding of overpowering emotional energy; this unbinding is reflected in their dancing movements, imitated by Philocleon, which entail a loosening of bodily bonds. The intratextuality between prologue and parabasis, established by the language of purification, connects the effects of tragic lusis on the comic father with the effects of the tribōn-like Cratinean mode on the comic audience. The dialectic between lusis and desis is essential to the representation of Phaedra’s madness in Hippolytus, which, as we have seen, informs Xanthias’s characterization of Philocleon’s disease. Looking at the dialectic between lusis and desis in this play will lead us to propose that, in Wasps, Aristophanes manipulates this opposition to set up a contrast of comic modes rooted in the notion of affective mimesis. In Hippolytus dissolution and death are figured through the same imagery of lusis that shapes the representation of Philocleon’s alienation in the prologue of Wasps. As soon as she appears onstage bound to her sickbed, Phaedra resorts to the language of lusis and desis to express the dissolution of her physical integrity caused by Eros, known as lusimelēs (the “limb loosener”). As she puts it, “I am undone (lelumai) with respect to the bindingtogether (sundesma) of my limbs” (199). Her subsequent transformation into a maenad, signaled by her delirious longing for hunting in the mountains (215–22), results from this unbinding of daemonic energy. This lusis is also conveyed through the metaphors of fastened and unfastened doors that lie behind Xanthias’s reference to guarding Philocleon with bolts ( phulattomen mochloisin 112–13). In the second part of the play, Theseus’s command that the bolts of the house be undone (ekluete) to display Phaedra’s corpse (809–10) figures the unfastening of her body mentioned earlier (199), thus merging architectural and somatic lusis. The overlapping imagery of architectural and somatic dissolution (open doors, porous walls, loosened bodies), which connects Philocleon with Phaedra, captures the enervation that some critics, both ancient and modern, have deemed typical of tragedy’s affective power. In the Republic, Plato fa-

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mously condemns the mimetic force of tragedy on the assumption that it brings out into the open potentially destructive emotions and that “the psychology of audiences can be . . . influenced by, assimilated to,” that of tragic characters (Halliwell 1996, 343). As a result of this empathic transmission, spectators can absorb into their own lives tragedy’s transgression of “the canons of moderation and self-control” (ibid., 344). Grief and lamentation, but also madness and female eros, are among the representational domains that Plato censures as carriers of an emotional infection that jeopardizes both body and mind. Tragedy’s unleashing of unrestrained emotions draws its audience into a mimetic process that, in Plato’s view, entails for the Athenian male spectator not only a shift to femininity, but also a regression to infantile psychology. For example, empathic identification with Phaedra’s antics may cause the tragic spectator to experience a detour into “other” identities (feminine and infantile) that fosters the physical and mental enervation of the adult male self. Phaedra’s infantilization, a byproduct of her erotic madness, can in itself be regarded as an image of the estrangement of identity (or alienation) that, in Plato’s view, may affect the tragic spectator. Although modern critics have challenged Plato’s proto-Brechtian notion that emotional empathy is incompatible with cognition, they have followed his lead in recognizing in tragedy a venue for experiencing, if only vicariously and provisionally, psychological “otherness” in its most threatening manifestations. Plato was in fact not the first to raise these issues. As is well known, a quasi-Platonic notion of “the replicating power of the stage” (Bassi 1998, 238) emerges in Frogs. In that play, Aeschylus construes dramatic spectatorship as an experience of mimetic empathy that causes the viewer of his Ares-filled tragedy to “become a lover” (ērasthē) of warfare (1020–22), while coaxing women in Euripides’ audience to emulate Stheneboea’s erotic madness (1050–51). Philocleon’s own Phaedra-like maenadic affliction can be seen as an image of an audience infected by Cratinus’s madness in its overlapping iambic and tragic affiliations. Intoxication, one of the distinctive traits of Cratinus’s comic persona, was trumpeted in his plays as the marker of his generic kinship with Archilochus and, by virtue of this iambic descent, assimilated to madness. In a programmatic statement (fr. 120 West), Archilochus couches his Dionysiac inspiration in the language of insanity, flaunting the “loss of wits” provoked by his dithyrambic boozing, which will cause Dionysus—the lusios (“loosening”) god—to infuse “his own disposition into every individual participating in the performance” and to transform “poet . . . and audience into an embodiment of his own nature” (Lavecchia 2013, 62). In doing so, Archilochus codifies an enduring nexus of iambic anger and madness exemplified in Callimachus’s first Iamb (78–79), in which Hipponax, appearing as

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one of the speakers, is paired with Alcmeon, an icon of tragic madness. Pytine’s rehabilitation of Cratinean poetics after the success of Knights brought Cratinus’s madness back onstage, as indicated by an echo of Archilochus’s dithyrambic insanity in one of the play’s extant fragments (fr. 199.4 KA). In addition, Cratinus’s manic persona probably was shaped by his self-styled affinity with Aeschylean tragedy—a pervasive presence in his work at the level of thematics, dramatic construction, and ideology, as Emmanuela Bakola has demonstrated. The prologue of Wasps supplements Aristophanes’ parabatic narrative of the failure of 423 by implicitly representing, through Philocleon, the audience of the first Clouds as enervated and infantilized by Cratinus’s “tragic” comedy and resistant to therapeutic bonds despite being prone to fevers. The backward reach of the parabasis into the prologue seems to identify the harmful, contaminating affect of Cratinean comedy with tragedy’s unbinding (lusis) of emotional violence. The prologue’s imagery of desis, meanwhile, causes Aristophanic comedy— through Bdelycleon—to play up the binding forces in Euripides’ Hippolytus. Though the reunion of Theseus with the broken-bodied Hippolytus, orchestrated by Artemis ex machina, effects only a modest rebinding of Aphrodite’s destructive lusis, the refastening of familial bonds—and, finally, the wrapping of Hippolytus’s corpse by his father (1459–61)—serve as devices of narrative desis. The prologue of Wasps reconfigures the tragic arrangement of unbinding and binding by turning the restoration of desis into the driving force of the dramatic action. The bird’s-eye view that Bdelycleon enjoys from the skēnē roof grants him the physical and symbolic position of a theos prologizōn (“god delivering a prologue”), as we have seen. However, Bdelycleon’s programmatic desis casts him as a deus ex machina—in tragedy, a consummate bringer of psychological and narrative closure—who restores identity to an afflicted character and, by extension, an alienated audience. Bdelycleon also develops the metatheatrical role of the Nurse in Hippolytus, who stagemanages the dramatic action from within. In the Euripidean play, the Nurse acts both as a mother figure concerned to preserve Phaedra’s sanity and as an ally of Aphrodite who unwittingly helps realize the goddess’s plan of lusis. Bdelycleon resolves this ambiguity by redefining the Nurse’s function exclusively as a parental therapy of desis, which finds emblematic expression in the swaddling folds of the chlaina. The reversal of generational hierarchy that lies at the core of Wasps— where an infantile father is attended by a son who takes on a paternal role —corresponds to a paradoxical opposition between tragedy and comedy, whereby the higher (and older) genre is assigned a destruens function, the lower a construens one. According to an anonymous Byzantine treatise, On

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Comedy, “the end of tragedy is the dissolution (luein) of life, of comedy its constitution (sunistan).” This formulation uses the tragic opposition of lusis and desis to reduce the closural differences of tragedy and comedy to the contrast between self-perpetuating disaster on one side and a happy ending on the other. Such a binary scheme calls forth other polarities: selfindulgence vs. self-control, immaturity vs. maturity, and, in Freudian terms, id vs. superego. Philocleon’s desire to escape and sleep outside exhibits the typical forces of the id—which Tim Whitmarsh describes as “emotional turbulence, centrifugality, . . . alterity, the transformation of identity” (2011, 20)—while Bdelycleon’s domestic desis exemplifies the drive toward home characteristic of the superego. Thus the prologue of Wasps uses the disconnect between an infantile father and a paternal son to pit the tragic psychology of Cratinus’s infantile comic self against the anti-tragic maturity of Aristophanic comedy. Earlier in this chapter, I raised the question of the relation between Philocleon’s tragic madness and phortikē kōmōidia—the mode from which Xanthias distances Wasps at the beginning of his prologue. We are now prepared to see that the common thread between these two intimations of Cratinean aesthetics is a lack of sōphrosunē (“self-control, restraint”). In Aristophanes’ tendentious view, the unbinding of disruptive emotions onstage and in the audience causes his competitor’s theatrical mode to slip between lowbrow comedy and something like tragedy—the former matching the latter in its affective force. The Aristophanic critique contained in the prologue, parabasis, and dressing scene constitutes a unified, disingenuous strategy, according to which “les extrêmes se touchent”: the outcome is generic delegitimation and ultimately exclusion. The term phortikos, as we saw in chapter 2, carries anti-canonical force, associating the defining quality of Cratinean comedy with the ephemerality of commodities. This adjective is antithetical to semnos (“dignified”), which Xanthias employs in a compound word ( phruagmosemnakous “horsey-dignified” 135) to characterize Bdelycleon’s tropoi (“habits, modes, ways”) at the very end of the prologue, and which the author of the Life of Aristophanes uses to describe the Aristophanic comic mode. We can see the result of the delegitimizing move in the canonical rankings of Old Comedy presupposed in that pseudo-biography, albeit without the more subtle tragic insinuations. In the prologue of Wasps, Xanthias’s account of Bdelycleon’s therapy of desis for his father’s judicial eros advertises the semnotēs (“dignity”) as well as the maturity of Aristophanic comedy by retracing the young comedian’s attempt in the previous year to bond with the comic audience through a rebinding of all that Cratinus-as-quasi-tragedian was undoing. When Xanthias

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points to his master on the roof, he is also pointing out the anti-Cratinean tropoi of Wasps and identifying Bdelycleon (a projection of Aristophanes in Clouds) with a deus ex machina committed to fighting off the infantilizing forces of tragic lusis. In view of the common metaphorical equation of the house with textuality itself, Bdelycleon’s domestic fortification can be seen as a symbolic shoring-up against Cratinean tragic aesthetics, a proto-canonical embodiment of “constraining structurality,” to use Whitmarsh’s formulation (2010, 345)—something similar to the constraint that, according to the parabasis of Peace and ancient literary critics, Aristophanes brought to a comedic edifice still dominated by ataxia (“disorder, lack of direction”). This structurality is also conveyed by the textile counterpart of the house, the chlaina. Its wrapping force complements softness in offering a genuinely comic feel in contrast to the tragic roughness and porousness of the Cratinean tribōn. It also implicitly figures the closing, binding, and fixing inherent in any canonical operation. I will now consider the development of Aristophanes’ proto-canonical narrative in two scenes that dramatize the effects of Philocleon’s domestic confinement, in particular his transformation into a melancholic tragic parent: a suicidal prayer to Zeus and a reenactment of Bellerophon’s fatal flight. As I will suggest, in the second scene the dialectic of Aristophanic desis and Cratinean lusis is mapped onto a tragic plot that is likely to have featured a paternal son struggling to convert to sōphrosunē an infantile father beset by insanity. 4. Ragged Feelings: The Comic Audience as a Tragic Parent In this section, I show how other intertexts, Aeschylus’s Niobe and Euripides’ Bellerophon, channel the quasi-tragic affect foisted upon the comic audience by Cratinean comedy. Philocleon’s melodramatic responses to his confinement express tragedy’s ailing parenthood, evoked by the tribōn, in contrast to Aristophanic comedy’s filial tutelage, represented by the chlaina. In Philocleon’s paratragic outbursts, the symbolic complexes of mourning and flying convey his affliction, resuming the prologic thematics of tragic lusis through two of tragedy’s melancholic parents, Niobe and Bellerophon. The opposition between Cratinean lusis and Aristophanic desis is reinforced by ethical and ideological concepts of tragic plotting—hamartia (“error”), anagnōrisis (“recognition”), pathei mathos (“learning through suffering”), sōphrosunē— another remarkable expression of Aristophanes’ proto-canonical discourse within the action.

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Let us go back to the parodos, where the Chorus of Philocleon’s fellow jurors, surprised by his delay in leaving home, venture a song in Phrynichean meters, hoping to stir his passion for old-fashioned tragic tunes. The performance includes a duet between the Chorus leader and his son, which ends in a unison lamentation of their poverty. Their self-referential exhortation to mourn (316) is unexpectedly taken up by Philocleon, from within the house, and metrically folded into his paratragic monody, which explains his lateness. This monody underscores his shared sense of social and emotional abjection but also marks his self-projection into the imagistic territory of tragic melancholy (317–33): Φι. φίλοι, τήκομαι μὲν πάλαι διὰ τῆς ὀπῆς ὑμῶν ἐπακούων. ἀλλ’—οὐ γὰρ οἷός τ’ εἴμ’ ᾄδειν—τί ποιήσω; τηροῦμαι δ’ ὑπὸ τῶνδ’, ἐπεὶ βούλομαί γε πάλαι μεθ’ ὑμῶν ἐλθὼν ἐπὶ τοὺς καδίσκους κακόν τι ποιῆσαι. ἀλλ’, ὦ Ζεῦ μεγαβρόντα,

(320)

ἤ με ποίησον καπνὸν ἐξαίφνης ἢ Προξενίδην ἢ τὸν Σέλλου (325) τοῦτον τὸν ψευδαμάμαξυν. τόλμησον, ἄναξ, χαρίσασθαί μοι, πάθος οἰκτίρας· ἤ με κεραυνῷ διατινθαλέῳ σπόδισον ταχέως, κἄπειτ’ ἀνελών μ’ ἀποφυσήσας (330) εἰς ὀξάλμην ἔμβαλε θερμήν· ἢ δῆτα λίθον με ποίησον, ἐφ’ οὗ τὰς χοιρίνας ἀριθμοῦσι. Philocleon Friends, I have been melting away (tēkomai) all this time, listening to you through the hole (opēs). But since I am unable to sing, what shall I do? I’m being kept under surveillance by these men because for a long time I have wanted to go to the voting urns with you and do some harm. Now, great thundering Zeus, turn me immediately into smoke or into Proxenides or into the son of Blowhard here, that lying social climber. Patiently, lord, show favor to me, taking pity on my suffering. Either swiftly roast me with a red-hot thunderbolt, lift me up, blow me away, and throw me into piping-hot sauce (oxalmēn) or make me stone, the one on which they tally the jurors’ votes.

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I will now focus on the beginning and the conclusion of this monody, showing that they belong to a symbolic cluster that associates Philocleon with Niobe. Stemming from the old man’s acquaintance with a performance of the play Niobe, this kinship, as we will see, is a product of tragic mimesis, of the same affective contagion, then, that, according to Aristophanes’ narrative, beset the Cratinus-afflicted audience of the first Clouds. Philocleon’s melodramatic claim, tēkomai (“I have been melting away” 317a), construes his lamentation as a dissolution of the self that flows from irreparable loss. The tragic use of this verb and compounds to express the consuming force of sorrow often takes the metaphoric river of tears further, indicating the bodily and emotional “liquefaction” typical of subjects, especially female, for whom loss and mourning degenerate into pathology. Instead of reconciling the alienated Philocleon with home, the forced separation from his beloved law court turns his Phaedra-like weeping into debilitating grief, which aggravates the physical and psychological lusis reflected in his attempts to escape. The idea of melancholic deliquescence conveyed by tēkomai conjures not just melting but, alternatively, dessication, connecting Philocleon’s persistent tragic affliction with the xēroi tropoi (“dry habits”) that, as argued in chapter 2, the Chorus attributes to the old man, and by extension to Cratinean comedy, in its final praise of Bdelycleon. It is remarkable that in one of the surviving fragments of Pytine (fr. 196 KA) the verb ektēkomai is employed to depict Cratinus as “ ‘melting away’ for want of drink” (Wright 2012, 127). The prayers for death in the second part of Philocleon’s monody blend comedy’s gastronomic fantasies with tragedy’s divine violence and melancholic psychology, including a desire for reunification with the lost love object that likens him to the tragic Niobe. Commentators have observed that Philocleon recasts the “conventional prayer to be turned to stone” (MacDowell 1971, 179) as a desire to reconnect with the law court through one of its emblematic objects, the flat stone on which votes were deposited to be counted. However, they have not considered the role that Philocleon’s assimilation of the law court to home and erotic object plays in his request. The alienated Philocleon absurdly treats judicial paraphernalia as pieces of domestic furniture or, we could even say, beloved members of his “real” family. This perverse transformation of the law court into an apparently lost object of affection suggests that, in begging Zeus for a lithic metamorphosis, the old man distorts the tragic idea of petrification as a way of being permanently united with a loved one after her burial in a stone tomb. This tragic paradigm of melancholy is embodied by Niobe, who not only was transformed into an ever-weeping rock while lamenting over her children’s tomb, but in some versions petitioned Zeus to petrify her.

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The exemplarity of Niobe as a mourner-turned-monument, who thus literalizes the process of melancholic identification with the lost love object, is seen in Sophocles’ Antigone. In 823–33, Antigone compares her imminent living entombment to Niobe’s petrification, reading the grieving mother’s final destiny as the fulfillment of the same desire for reunion with family that motivates her own encounter with death. Antigone’s lyric conjuring interweaves Niobe’s consuming grief with her metamorphosis into an ever-weeping rock, playing upon the original liquid semantics of tēkomai (826–32): [Niobe,] whom a stony growth, like stubborn ivy, subdued; and rains and snow, so men say, never leave her, as she melts away (tākomenan) with grief, but from under ever-weeping brows she bedews her sides with her tears.

The passage suggests that Philocleon, in his final prayer for petrification, looks back to the all-consuming mourning described by tēkomai at the beginning of the monody, applying the Niobe paradigm in his anxiety to be physically reincorporated into his apparently lost “family.” Philocleon intends his reenactment of Niobe’s metamorphosis as a liberation from his domestic confinement, but the underlying longing for the law court entails his fatal imprisonment in tragic enervation and wizened abjection. In the agōn, which concerns the merits of jury service, Philocleon confirms his familiarity with the tragic subject of Niobe, suggesting that his monody is informed by his own experience of a dramatic performance, most likely the Aeschylean version. While depicting the law court as a venue for nonstop spectacles put on to entertain jurors, Philocleon candidly reveals that only a bravura performance from Niobe allowed the tragic actor Oeagrus to be acquitted (579–80). Though both Aeschylus and Sophocles wrote plays entitled Niobe, their plots treated different moments in the saga. While Sophocles focused on the slaughter of Niobe’s children by Apollo and Artemis, the Aeschylean play, which Euripides harshly criticizes in Frogs (911–20), addressed the aftermath, offering a memorable portrait of the melancholic Niobe apparently internalized by Philocleon. The extant fragments of the Aeschylean play and its Aristophanic interpretation in Frogs clarify that the action was spatially and emotionally centered around the mourning Niobe, sitting on her children’s tomb in immobile silence. In all likelihood, the play included her metamorphosis in the plot or foreshadowed it through imagery and staging. Philocleon’s casual mention of Oeagrus’s recital retrospectively illuminates his monodic request for a stony Niobe-like destiny, comically exposing the dangerous mimetic effects of tragic performance. Though Philocleon gains enjoyment and a sense of empowerment from this performance, he is oblivious to the contagious force of its melancholic contents.

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Aeschylus placed Niobe in an abject position somewhat similar to that of Philocleon. The crucial event in the almost uneventful Aeschylean plot, whose frozen quality mimicked the motionlessness of its protagonist, must have been the arrival of Tantalus, attempting to cure his daughter’s pathological grief and bring her back home. This scenario might have played up the infantilizing consequences of self-indulgent melancholy, presenting Niobe’s regression from pain-stricken mother to weeping daughter; but it might have also presented her as a sick (and mostly silent) audience that a father figure, comparable to the paternal son Bdelycleon, strived to win over with persuasive rhetoric. Philocleon’s lyric evocation of Niobe, then, conditioned by his own experience as a spectator of the Aeschylean recital, highlights the analogies between the tragic mater dolorosa, the Phaedra-like old man of the prologue, and, by extension, the diseased audience of the first Clouds. Like the prologic diagnosis of Philocleon’s Phaedra-like psychology, the old man’s identification with Niobe contributes to defining the relationship between comic poet and audience in Wasps. Anticipating Platonic concerns, Philocleon’s prayer for petrification shows how tragic performance can lead to perilous mimesis, legitimizing grief and causing an audience to lapse into melancholy. Philocleon’s tragic despair is certainly due to his forced abstinence from the law court’s spectacles, but at a deeper level it lays bare an enervating assimilation of tragic psychology, which has caused his pathological estrangement from home. By performing Niobe’s infantile weeping, undoubtedly an emblem of tragedy’s aesthetics of sorrow, Philocleon confirms Xanthias’s symptomatology and illustrates the tragic contagion afflicting the comic audience, which requires the intervention of Aristophanes’ swaddling chlaina. In other words, the intertext of Niobe wields the kind of harmful affective agency that, as I have argued, Aristophanes imputes to the Cratinean mode. We can perceive a similar affective intertextuality in Philocleon’s second paratragic outburst, which engages with another plot of ragged and infantilized parenthood: Euripides’ Bellerophon. The mixture of anger and selfindulgent mourning that triggers Bellerophon’s deadly flight aptly reflects Philocleon’s condition and, in a sense, that of a comic-turned-tragic audience. As we will see, the context of this second paratragic moment positions Philocleon’s melancholy within language, themes, and symbols (first and foremost, the chlaina) that look ahead to the parabatic narrative of the first Clouds’ defeat and the proto-canonical opposition of Cratinean and Aristophanic comedy coded in the Chorus’s final praise of Bdelycleon. I will examine this context first and then move on to Philocleon’s channeling of Bellerophon. The end of the agōn is marked by the temporary victory of Bdelycleon, which the Chorus officially proclaims by vowing to “ease rage” (orgēn 727)

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and support the father-saving cause of the young man (725–28). Realizing his defeat, Philocleon has drifted into a quasi-tragic petrified silence. To awaken him, the Chorus shifts from iambics to the urgent rhythm of tragic dochmiacs (729–35): Xo. πιθοῦ πιθοῦ λόγοισι, μηδ’ ἄφρων γένῃ μηδ’ ἀτενὴς ἄγαν ἀτεράμων τ’ ἀνήρ. (730) εἴθ’ ὤφελέν μοι κηδεμὼν ἢ ξυγγενὴς εἶναί τις ὅστις τοιαῦτ’ ἐνουθέτει. σοὶ δὲ νῦν τις θεῶν παρὼν ἐμφανὴς ξυλλαμβάνει τοῦ πράγματος, καὶ δῆλός ἐστιν εὖ ποιῶν· σὺ δὲ παρὼν δέχου. (735) Chorus Heed his words, and don’t be mindless (aphrōn) or too obdurate (atenēs) and too stubborn a man. If only I had some guardian or kinsman to chide me (enouthetei) in such a way. But here you now have some god in the flesh (emphanēs) who will help with your trouble, and it is clear that he is benefiting (eu poiōn) you. So come here and accept him (dechou).

This recognizably tragic strophe seems to cast the problematic relationship between the comic poet and the audience of the first Clouds as a drama of persuasion comparable to the plot of Aeschylus’s Niobe. In 733–34, Bdelycleon is assigned the same beneficial role (eu poiōn) that Aristophanes claims for himself and the first Clouds in the parabasis. Conforming, as it were, to the tragic atmosphere imposed by his father’s silence, he is self-aggrandizingly portrayed as a providential epiphany in language that recalls his position as a deus ex machina in the prologue. The tragic vocabulary of foolishness (aphrōn) and obduracy (atenēs) that informs the Chorus’s exhortation of Philocleon links Bdelycleon’s persuasive enterprise with Aristophanes’ poetic efforts in the previous year’s comic contest, as does the call for acceptance (dechou 735). It also evokes the efforts of tragic characters such as Tantalus in the Aeschylean Niobe—or, for that matter, the Nurse in Euripides’ Hippolytus—to cajole their child or surrogate child to abandon distressed selfisolation. The verb noutheteō (732), previously used in the context of Philocleon’s intractable judicial eros (111–12) and the recalcitrance of the Chorus leader’s little son (254), foregrounds the infantile psychology of these tragic melancholic figures and their comic counterparts (Bdelycleon’s old father and the Aristophanic audience). Bdelycleon’s subsequent anapestic intervention introduces the chlaina into the representation of Philocleon’s Niobe-like affliction. In 741–42, Bdelycleon airs concern for Philocleon’s prolonged silence (“he is silent and doesn’t make a grunt [gruzei]”), which resembles that of the Aeschylean Achilles and

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Niobe, as described in Frogs (“an Achilles or Niobe . . . not even making this much of a grunt [gruzontas]” 912–13). Before this remark, in a list of objects and treatments promised by Bdelycleon as domestic alternatives to the illusory attractions of the law court (736–40), the warmth and softness of a chlaina malakē spill over into the other items. Bdelycleon’s promises range from a hot, creamy porridge to the chlaina (737–38) and, bathethically, to a warm, caressing full-body massage provided by a prostitute (739–40). This last service, arguably expressive of phortikē kōmōidia, ironically layers the aesthetic self-construction that the refined, Hesiodic chlaina encodes. However, the soft textile’s function as a remedy, in this case of melancholy, aligns this disorder with the fevers, mentioned in the parabasis, which the chlaina also wards off or defeats. I have argued that the ēpialoi and puretoi (“shivers” and “fevers”) that the chlaina averts trope the effects of Cratinean comedy. Philocleon’s Niobe-like despondency can be read as another manifestation of the tragic psychology of the older comedian’s aesthetic mode. The antistrophe of the choral ode completes the picture with a rhetoric of change that suggests the desired transition from the Cratinean to the Aristophanic comic mode. In the following lines the Chorus mobilizes the conceptual arsenal of tragic ethics (hamartia, arti manthanō, pathei mathos, sōphrosunē) to explain Philocleon’s melancholic silence (743–49): Χο. νενουθέτηκεν αὑτὸν εἰς τὰ πράγμαθ’, οἷς τότ’ ἐπεμαίνετ’· ἔγνωκε γὰρ ἀρτίως, λογίζεταί τ’ ἐκεῖνα πάνθ’ ἁμαρτίας (745) ἃ σοῦ κελεύοντος οὐκ ἐπείθετο. νῦν δ’ ἴσως τοῖσι σοῖς λόγοις πείθεται, καὶ σωφρονεῖ μέντοι μεθιστὰς εἰς τὸ λοιπὸν τὸν τρόπον πειθόμενός τέ σοι. Chorus He has been chiding (nenouthetēken) himself for the things that he used to be crazy about (epemaineto). For now he knows (egnōke . . . artiōs) and he regards as errors (hamartias) all that he did not heed when you bid him. Perhaps now he is heeding what you say and is self-controlled (sōphronei), changing (methistas) his ways (tropon) for the future and heeding you.

The strophe’s theme of persuasion is resumed here, interlaced with two other potentially metapoetic verbs: sōphronei and methistas (748). The idea of change expressed by methistas . . . tropon previews the motif of change of habits (tropoi) that the Chorus’s final praise of Bdelycleon (1450–61) employs to articulate Philocleon’s and, as argued in chapter 2, the comic audience’s (missed) opportunity to switch from the dry tropoi of the Cratinean tribōn to the wholesome softness of the Aristophanic chlaina. Likewise, the juxtaposi-

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tion of nenouthetēken (“he has been chiding [himself]”) with epemaineto (“he used to be crazy”) in 743–44 suggests that the promised sōphrosunē resulting from Philocleon’s conversion may subdue the eruption of tragic mania associated with Cratinus’s phortikē kōmōidia in the prologue. This transformation of behavioral and poetic tropoi corresponds to the tragic movement from hamartia (“error”) toward sōphrosunē or, to use Aristotelian terminology, toward peripeteia (“reversal”) and anagnōrisis (“recognition”). The conceptual cluster that frames the antistrophe (nenouthetēken . . . epemaineto 743–44; egnōke . . . artiōs . . . hamartias 744–45; sōphronei 748) suggestively identifies the audience’s conversion to Aristophanic comedy, reflected in Philocleon’s acceptance of his son’s therapy, with tragedy’s dynamics of pathei mathos (“learning by suffering”) and arti manthanō (“now I know”). These dynamics draw upon a recognition process that brings the spectator close to the character onstage. For instance, in the finale of Bacchae, when Agave utters arti manthanō (1296), it “mirrors the anagnorisis, the self-recognition, of the spectator who has experienced and understood the play” (Segal 1997, 314). The Chorus’s reflections upon Philocleon’s hamartia in the past and ostensible sōphrosunē in the present can be seen to establish the ethical and temporal antipodes of the tragic plot, positioning Cratinean and Aristophanic comic modes on opposite ends, the former with the hamartia of the beginning, the latter with the sōphrosunē of the ending. While Cratinus’s phortikē kōmōidia, which oppresses the audience evoked by Philocleon, is linked with the madness and hamartia that typically set the tragic plot in motion, the sōphrosunē provided by the deus ex machina Bdelycleon allies Aristophanic comedy with the recognition and moral recomposition that tragedy can employ as a strategy of closure. The dialectic of lusis and desis at work in the prologue thus seems to be reformulated through ethical categories (error and knowledge) that similarly pair the dueling comic modes in Wasps with the competing forces of a tragic plot. The implicit transformation of Aristophanes into a deus ex machina combating narrative and psychological ataxia through closural sōphrosunē invests his comic mode with almost teleological and thus proto-canonical force. We will now see how the affective intertext of Euripides’ Bellerophon, which transmits emotional raggedness to Philocleon, dramatizes the tragic mimesis undergone by the first Clouds’ audience and its consequent choice of tribōn over chlaina, of Cratinus’s lusis and hamartia over Aristophanes’ desis and sōphrosunē. Despite the Chorus’s optimism, Philocleon’s silence does not signify repentance for his hamartia, and his return to verbal communication yields not a prompt acceptance of Bdelycleon’s domestic treatment but rather a paratragic reenactment of the Euripidean Bellerophon’s flight to Olympus (750–59):

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Φι. ἰώ μοί μοι. Βδ. οὗτος, τί βοᾷς; (750) Φι. μή μοι τούτων μηδὲν ὑπισχνοῦ. κείνων ἔραμαι, κεῖθι γενοίμαν, ἵν’ ὁ κῆρύξ φησι, “τίς ἀψήφιστος; ἀνιστάσθω.” κἀπισταίην ἐπὶ τοῖς κημοῖς ψηφιζομένων ὁ τελευταῖος. (755) σπεῦδ’, ὦ ψυχή.—ποῦ μοι ψυχή;— πάρες, ὦ σκιερά—. μὰ τὸν Ἡρακλέα μή νυν ἔτ’ ἐγὼ ’ν τοῖσι δικασταῖς κλέπτοντα Κλέωνα λάβοιμι. Philocleon Alas and alack! Bdelycleon Here, why do you shout? Philocleon Don’t promise any of those things. These are the things I long for, there I would like to be, where the herald says: “Who hasn’t voted? Let him rise.” And I would like to stand at the voting urn, the last one to vote. Hurry up, my soul! Where is my soul? Let me pass, you shady—by Heracles, may I never hereafter be among jurors who convict Cleon of stealing!

Far from practicing sōphrosunē, in these lines Philocleon stages a mock suicide. Although he seems to believe Bdelycleon’s demonstration of Cleon’s thievish behavior, he is clearly still trapped in his longing for the law court and its rituals. The impossibility of satisfying his longing induces Philocleon to exploit the melodramatic potential of his sword, the tragic prop that he has been holding (or pretending to hold) since the beginning of the agōn, when he announced his intention to commit an Ajax-like suicide in case of defeat (523). While pretending to keep his vow, he conflates this tragic mode of suicide with Bellerophon’s fatal ride on Pegasus, the subject of a Euripidean play. This pastiche of tragic ways of killing oneself takes place in 756–57, where Philocleon quotes the scene that staged the hero’s last flight in enraged protest against the gods, especially Zeus. Philocleon repurposes the tragic Bellerophon’s addresses to his soul (TrGF 5.307a) and to the woods through which, in a frenzy, he made his way up to Olympus (“Let me pass, you shadowy foliage; let me go over spring-fed valleys” TrGF 5.308.1–2). The “foliage” that he allusively evokes and that his sword, imaginary or otherwise, passes through is none other than his cloak.  The plot of Euripides’ Bellerophon can be regarded as a variation of that of Aeschylus’s Niobe and, more important, as a tragic version of the father-son dynamic in Wasps. By focusing on the final act of Bellerophon’s life, in particular his persecution and embittered withdrawal from home to a solitary life in the Aleian plain, the Euripidean play depicted the hero’s transformation from triumphant slayer of monsters to—in Julia Kristeva’s words—“the

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first Greek melancholy hero . . . condemned to banishment, absence, void” ([1987] 1989,  7). The extant testimonia and fragments suggest an abject, diseased hero, alternately angry and despondent, whom his interlocutors, first and foremost his son Glaucus, tried to comfort and dissuade from his self-destructive impulse to confront Zeus. In other words, Glaucus was probably assigned the same function as Tantalus in Niobe, creating a precedent for Bdelycleon’s role as a paternal son and practitioner of sōphrosunē. Conversely, the melancholic Bellerophon assumed an infantilized position somewhat analogous to that of Niobe and Philocleon, embroiled in both hamartia and madness—to adopt the Chorus’s terminology. This convergence of father-son relationships in the Euripidean and Aristophanic plays provides grounds for connecting Philocleon’s rendition of the tragic highflier’s last exploit, at the end of the agōn, with two earlier moments of the comic character’s madness: his prison monody, which I analyzed at the beginning of this section, and his attempts to escape from home as related by Xanthias in the prologue. Locating Philocleon’s mock suicide within the plot of its tragic subtext, we can see in his self-patterning after Bellerophon an attempt to realize his earlier monodic prayers. Zeus, the main target of Bellerophon’s protests, brought the desperate flight of the famous rider to a tragic ending by suddenly throwing his thunderbolt, causing the terrified Pegasus to unseat him. In his prison song Philocleon addressed his prayers for death to Zeus, invoking divine lightning against himself. Thus, in grafting his staged suicide onto Bellerophon’s thunderbolt-stricken ride, Philocleon attains intertextual fulfillment of his previous appeals. I am not suggesting that Philocleon’s monody already evoked the model of Bellerophon, but rather that this figure forges continuity between the previous and the current tragic outbursts of the old man. Philocleon’s reperformance of Bellerophon’s melancholic flight may look even further back in the play, recalling the fugitive manifestations of his tragic affliction. Bellerophon’s ill-fated journey can perhaps be seen as resembling Philocleon’s attempts to evade his guardians by climbing the walls like a pet crow (129–30) or jumping through the roof in a way that Bdelycleon explicitly compares to flying (ekptēsetai 208). Furthermore, in re-creating Bellerophon’s last flight as a suicide by sword, Philocleon addresses his cloak with the apostrophe that the tragic hero had directed to the wooded landscape while trying to pass through its wall of leaves (TrGF 5.308.1). This apostrophe may conjure a correspondence between clothing and walls that supplements the one discussed in the previous section, in which we saw how, stuffed with rags, the otherwise porous walls produced an architectural chlaina. Bellerophon’s journey to Olympus, which he presents as a self-liberating passage

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through the interstices of a thick barrier, recalls Philocleon’s slipping through the holes in the walls (126–27), whose porousness evokes the texture of the opposing garment, the tribōn. As Bellerophon’s last ride on Pegasus merges his self-destructive melancholy with his desire to reclaim his glorious past, Philocleon’s Bellerophon-like suicide discourse seems to enable him to stage the apparent fulfillment of his prayers for death as another journey to the law court and a reappropriation of its symbols. Philocleon’s impersonation of Bellerophon serves, in fact, as a surreptitious affirmation of his jury outfit, which encodes his tragic alienation and the correlative condition of the Cratinus-afflicted audience. In a famous metatheatrical scene of Acharnians (418–34), Bellerophon is listed among the ragged protagonists of the plays, each represented by a tattered piece of clothing that Euripides hauls out of his overcrowded closet of dramatic products to comply with Dicaeopolis’s request for a sufficiently pitiful tragic costume (426–29). Through his intertextual fantasies, Philocleon symbolically dons Bellerophon’s rags, reenacting the pre-dawn routine of putting on the tribōn, which displays the same raggedness as the tragic hero’s “squalid garments” (duspinē . . . peplōmata, Acharnians 426). Though Philocleon is presumably wearing the tribōn, this virtual act of dressing reinstates—performatively, as it were—his attachment to the juror’s life, to the old, insane tropoi from which his son is attempting to separate him. In light of Philocleon’s links with the spectators of the first Clouds, his symbolic appropriation of Bellerophon’s rags can be viewed as dramatizing the transformation by Cratinean comedy of a comic audience into a tragic one in need of Bdelycleon’s and Aristophanes’ Glaucus-like tutelage. Thus, Bellerophon’s “squalid garments” and Philocleon’s tribōn converge in objectifying not only the text of a play (by Euripides in Acharnians and by Cratinus in Wasps), but also its affective force, that is, the debilitating effect or the mimetic impulse to self-degradation that its performance may engender. It is by identifying the disease of the first Clouds’ audience with this physical and emotional raggedness—the opposite of the psychic stability embodied by solid domestic walls and warm cloaks—that Aristophanes effects his protocanonical delegitimation of the aesthetic ataxia of Cratinus’s phortikē kōmōidia. 5. Conclusions I hope to have shown how a synchronic reading of the parabasis, the dressing scene, and some pre-parabatic episodes foregrounds a strategy of aesthetic self-construction that we can characterize as proto-canonical. The effects of intra- and intertextual reading that I have discussed suggest that Aristophanes’ devaluation of Cratinean comedy as phortikē kōmōidia—expressed in

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Xanthias’s prologue and presupposed in the literary-critical rankings of Old Comedy—may be situated within a broader process of generic delegitimation. This process grounds itself in the affective connection of different comic modes with the audience. In the first part of Wasps, paratragedy hints at the diseased condition of a comic audience that Cratinus has subjected to a kind of emotional raggedness and infantile regression similar to the mimetic dangers experienced by tragic viewers. Phaedra, Niobe, and Bellerophon, whose afflictions resonate with Philocleon’s disease, yield to the infantilizing drives of emotional lusis, which violently launch the tragic plot with possibly perilous effects on the audience. Together, this multiplicity of intertexts contributes to the sense of identity loss, of alienation. Conversely, other characters (Tantalus, Glaucus, and, in Aristophanes’ reinterpretation of Euripides’ Hippolytus, Phaedra’s Nurse) exemplify semnotēs as well as the mature forces of desis and sōphrosunē, which, in the tragic plot, are meant to impose narrative and emotional closure by bringing conflicts to an end. This self-serving manipulation of tragic figures and concepts construes Cratinus’s comedy as embodying and generating manic lusis, while assigning to Aristophanes’ own comic mode the constraining task of desis. The narrative and affective forces of desis and sōphrosunē are, as it were, removed from the domain of tragedy and converted into distinct features of (Aristophanic) comedy. The tribōn, which represents emotional and physical lusis in the prologue, expresses the tragic raggedness that Cratinus has allegedly imposed upon the comic audience. The wrapping action of Bdelycleon’s chlaina aims, instead, to cure this comic-turned-tragic audience. Retrospectively the Aristophanes of Clouds becomes a protector of comedy, striving to keep it from straying into the emotional territory of the adversary genre. Embodying the healing affect foolishly dismissed by the audience of the first Clouds, the succoring presence of Bdelycleon during his father’s outbursts of Cratinean lusis preemptively neutralizes, as it were, their potential mimetic impact on the current audience. Wasps does not only codify the restraint of phortikē kōmōidia as Aristophanes’ winning contribution to the development of Old Comedy, but it also likens this process to a courageous, if momentarily unsuccessful, defense of comedy’s generic nature from dangerous intrusions. In comically diagnosing the reasons of his defeat, Aristophanes does not just defensively establish what is good comedy and what is not but indeed what is comedy tout court, condemning his vanquisher to a permanent secondary position. Next, I will consider the last scenes of the play, in which the symbolic breaking of Bdelycleon’s therapeutic nets produces a quasi-tragic ending, fulfilling Philocleon’s melancholic prayers for death and furthering the relocation of Cratinean comedy into the affective realm of tragedy.

4 The Broken Net: Comic Failure and Its Consequences Strategies of failure in the realm of performance can be understood as generative, prolific even; failure produces, and does so in a roguish manner. S a r a J a n e B a i l e s , Performance Theatre and the Poetics of Failure David: I can’t let you go. Woody: It’s none of your business. David: Yes, it is. I’m your son. Nebraska (2013)

In the final scenes of Wasps, the drunken unruliness and violence that mark Philocleon’s participation in the fancy symposium demonstrate the failure of Bdelycleon’s efforts to rehabilitate his father. In this chapter I reconsider that failure in light of the interpretive model mapped out so far of competing aesthetics, tracking Aristophanes’ proto-canonical discourse as it emerges from a complex of alignments involving Aristophanic comedy and Aesopic fable, tragedy and Cratinean comedy, tragedy and iambos. Philocleon’s enthrallment to the ragged affect of Cratinean comedy (in opposition to the Aristophanic and Aesopic) creates a slippage in his identification from spectator to manic performer. Productive of a discourse of generic affect, Aristophanes’ narrative of failure will make the father’s (and audience’s) rejection a mere setback on the path to a canonical embrace. Many critics have interpreted Philocleon’s apparent rejuvenation during and after the symposium as a festive eruption of comic energy redirecting the sympathies of the audience from Bdelycleon to his father. Recently, Zachary Biles has maintained that in the finale of Wasps Aristophanes concedes the limitations of his own comic art and, through Philocleon’s intoxicated exuberance, emphasizes his “effort to put Cratinean poetics to work for his own advantage in the contest” (2011, 165–66). I contend, on the contrary, that this finale supplies another iteration of the proto-canonical narrative by which Aristophanes reconstructs the defeat of the first Clouds, delegitimizing the generic credentials of his rival. In the previous chapter we saw the audience’s absorption of Cratinus’s aesthetic mode

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evoked in Philocleon’s melancholic shenanigans. In the finale, the empathic malady has advanced to an even more thorough assimilation of that mode. Now a kind of Cratinean performer, Philocleon displays euphoria that does not fully conceal a sinister tragic quality. Though “Philocleon’s wild behavior is . . . offered as a pleasurably laughable spectacle” (Halliwell 2008, 210), there are moments when this comic surface breaks open, compromising his ostensible triumph. I will analyze these moments by considering explicit and subterranean resonances with the first part of the play. The ending of Wasps seems to dissociate Cratinean comedy, as reflected in Philocleon’s behavior, from its comic identity and insinuate an eerie kinship of its misused iambic quality with the unleashing of destructive emotions, what I have called tragic lusis. At the same time, Aristophanes implicitly construes his poetic mode, of which the chlaina is emblematic, as the only form of genuine comedy by identifying the healthy composure of his affective stance with Aesopic sōphrosunē (“self-control, moderation,” shading into “wisdom”). Bdelycleon’s absence from the last scene, an expression of his failure, need not entail a repudiation of his therapeutic chlaina or a palinodic conversion to Cratinus’s tribōn. The absence, as I propose, may instead dramatize the failure of the first Clouds as the heroic enterprise of an unheeded benefactor contending with his audience’s self-destructive attraction to an alienated comedy dangerously veering into tragedy. In other words, the ominous tinges of Philocleon’s rejuvenation reinforce Aristophanes’ anti-Cratinean aesthetics as well as the posture that the comedian had assumed in the parabasis. Attributed to an audience under the tragic spell of Cratinean comedy and incapable of recognizing a genuinely comic affect, Aristophanes’ failure, which is mirrored in Bdelycleon’s, turns, paradoxically, into a winning strategy—a demonstration that only Aristophanic comedy is legitimate. I begin by examining Xanthias’s account of the symposium and Philocleon’s subsequent arrival onstage, looking beyond the liberated appearance of the old man’s overindulgent conduct. I then turn to Bdelycleon’s attempt to temper his father’s post-sympotic rowdiness, focusing on how Philocleon’s misuse of Aesopic fable lays bare Cratinus’s detachment from comedy. The representation of this generic detachment culminates in the final scene: the dance contest between Philocleon and the sons of the tragic poet Carcinus. As I argue, this grotesque scene suggests an assimilation of Cratinean comedy to tragedy, envisioning for the comic audience a frightening future after the rejection of the first Clouds’ therapy of desis (“binding”). This unhappy ending, for the audience as well as Philocleon, also portends an unhappy future for the Cratinean mode, providing a glimpse of the later literary-critical demotion of Aristophanes’ rival.

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1. An Iambic Erinys: Cratinus, Affect, and Tragic Havoc My analysis starts by retrieving the ways in which Philocleon’s sympotic adventure exposes Cratinus’s generic alienation. The old man’s drunken jolliness—almost a Cratinean performance—brings back his madness in its aggressive manifestation, complementary to the melancholic one that we saw at the end of the previous chapter. Channeled through threatening exuberance, the abject, iambic unruliness of Philocleon’s Cratinean performance, I argue, coincides with the chthonic violence distinctive of tragedy. Laying bare the aggressive side of Cratinus’s tragic, ragged affect—and its ability to turn spectators into crazed agents of violence—Aristophanes stages a crisis of generic identity for his adversary, construing his own semnotēs (“dignity”) as the only legitimate comic mode. The beginning of Xanthias’s account of the drinking party attended by Philocleon hints at the tragic substance beneath the comic surface. Xanthias brings Philocleon’s sympotic conduct to the audience’s attention through a report vaguely similar, in length and tone, to a tragic-messenger speech. Its initial lines are markedly paratragic: “For hasn’t the old man been the most disastrous (atērotaton) evil, and by far the drunkest ( paroinikōtatos) of the banquet guests?” (1299–1300). Xanthias juxtaposes the superlatives of a distinctively tragic adjective (atēros “disastrous”)—from atē (“folly that brings ruin”)—and a comic one ( paroinikos “drunken”) to describe Philocleon’s sympotic escapades, whose consequences spectators will soon see. After analyzing Xanthias’s report, where Philocleon’s abjection emerges from interwoven suggestions of Cratinean comedy, tragedy, and iambos, I will concentrate on the old man’s arrival in order to show how his latent resemblance to an Erinys—a monstrous figure associated with atē—signals the surreptitious reemergence of his tragic madness in a threatening fashion. Xanthias’s portrait of Philocleon’s juvenile rowdiness at the symposium evokes Aristophanes’ notion of phortikē kōmōidia (“vulgar comedy”). Philocleon’s physical and verbal excitement at the lavish banquet is iconically marked by the following asyndetic sequence: “he jumped up (anēlato), he pranced (eskirta), he farted, he mocked (kategela)” (1305). The line is strikingly similar to the list of instructions supplied by the Weaker Argument in the agōn of the revised Clouds—which, as we will see in the next chapter, can be read as a continuation of Wasps: “Profit from your nature, prance (skirta), laugh ( gela), consider nothing shameful” (1078). Such a brazen recommendation of intemperance and self-indulgence stands in contrast not only to the modesty and paternal respect endorsed by the Stronger Argument, but also to the sōphrosunē that the Chorus assigns to Clouds in the

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play’s parabasis  (537). Here Aristophanes purports to distance his sōphrōn (“self-controlled”) comedy from the cheap dramatic devices and lowbrow characters of phortikē kōmōidia (537–43): such as old men hitting bystanders with a stick (541) while launching into abusive jokes (542) and old women dancing the kordax, a bawdy dance (555). Philocleon’s unrestrained dancing and his violent use of a stick on Xanthias (1296) and passers-by (1323) place him among the stereotyped figures mentioned in the parabasis of the second Clouds. In this parabasis, the sōphrosunē of Clouds is presented as an alternative to the products of the phortikoi (“vulgar men” 524) who defeated Aristophanes in 423: Ameipsias and especially Cratinus. Philocleon’s lowbrow sympotic demeanor, then, seems to enact the Aristophanic construction of Cratinus’s phortikē kōmōidia. At the same time, Xanthias’s précis of Philocleon’s unruly conduct looks back to the prologic diagnosis of the old man’s tragic alienation. Anēlato and eskirta link Philocleon’s sympotic rejuvenation with his earlier frantic darting and leaping (aixas 120; exēlleto 130). In tragedy, skirtaō frequently refers to manic motions comparable to Philocleon’s. In Prometheus Bound, Io’s self-diagnosis of madness (“I darted [ēisson] with manic prancing [emmanei skirtēmati]” 675–76) illuminates the possible affinity between Philocleon’s past maenadic darting (aixas) and his current excited jumping (eskirta). In addition, Iris’s orchestration of the Euripidean Heracles’ madness presents his imminent frenzied leaping (skirtēmata) as the bodily counterpart of the loosening that, as in the Aristophanic prologue, figures the eruption of insanity: “send madness (manias) . . . and leaping (skirtēmata) of feet upon this man, stir him up, let loose (exiei) the murderous rope” (Heracles 835–37). Thus, Xanthias’s depiction of Philocleon’s sympotic movements seems to insinuate a correlation with the “daemonic dancing” that Bdelycleon’s desis tried to curb. We can recover further corroboration of the return of Philocleon’s tragic alienation in his animated exchanges with two of the party guests. Xanthias’s account casts all three characters as comic performers in a contest of sympotic mockery (1308–21): εἶτ’ αὐτόν, ὡς εἶδ’, ᾔκασεν Λυσίστρατος “ἔοικας, ὦ πρεσβῦτα, νεοπλούτῳ τρυγὶ κλητῆρί τ’ εἰς ἀχυρὸν ἀποδεδρακότι.” (1310) ὁ δ’ ἀνακραγὼν ἀντῄκασ’ αὐτὸν πάρνοπι τὰ θρῖα τοῦ τρίβωνος ἀποβεβληκότι, Σθενέλῳ τε τὰ σκευάρια διακεκαρμένῳ. οἱ δ’ ἀνεκρότησαν, πλήν γε Θουφράστου μόνου· οὗτος δὲ διεμύλλαινεν, ὡς δὴ δεξιός. (1315) ὁ γέρων δὲ τὸν Θούφραστον ἤρετ’· “εἰπέ μοι,

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ἐπὶ τῷ κομᾷς καὶ κομψὸς εἶναι προσποιεῖ, κωμῳδολοιχῶν περὶ τὸν εὖ πράττοντ’ ἀεί;” τοιαῦτα περιύβριζεν αὐτοὺς ἐν μέρει, σκώπτων ἀγροίκως καὶ προσέτι λόγους λέγων (1320) ἀμαθέστατ’ οὐδὲν εἰκότας τῷ πράγματι. As soon as he set eyes on him, Lysistratus made a comparison: “Old man, you look like a newly rich (neoploutōi) young man (trugi) or an ass (klētēri) that has run off (apodedrakoti) to a chaff pile.” And shouting out (anakragōn), he compared Lysistratus in turn to a locust that has lost the wings of its ragged cloak (tribōnos) and to Sthenelus shorn of his theatrical paraphernalia. They all clapped, with Thuphrastus the only exception. He made a wry face as though he were sophisticated (dexios). Then the old man asked Thuphrastus: “Tell me, why are you stuck-up (komais) and play at being elegant (kompsos), when you’re just a clown brown-nosing (kōmōidoloichōn) whoever happens to be on the winning side?” With such comments, he grossly insulted each of them in turn, mocking (skōptōn) them coarsely (agroikōs) and, on top of that, most ignorantly telling tales that were not at all appropriate for the occasion.

Although the sympotic contest pits Philocleon against Lysistratus, together they exemplify a model of comic jesting opposed to that of the third competitor, Thuphrastus. Philocleon and Lysistratus on one side and Thuphrastus on the other also express polarized social stances. The opposition of comedic styles—somewhat resembling, as I will propose, the contrast between the Cratinean and the Aristophanic modes—is reflected in the different ways in which Philocleon interacts with his two interlocutors. Let us first examine the exchange between Lysistratus and Philocleon. As we will see, the ragged tribōn, which captures their shared abjection, is the material site where the opposed generic forces of iambos and tragedy converge affectively. Lysistratus initiates the duel by attacking Philocleon through a couple of mocking comparisons that narrow the distance between the old man’s present and his manic past by reactivating his earlier escape attempts. His first insult (neoploutōi trugi 1309) plays upon the ambiguity of trux, meaning on the one hand “raw, unfermented wine” (and, by extension, “young”) and, on the other, “dregs,” to imply that Philocleon’s Dionysiac buoyancy and apparent restoration to vigor in fact conceal an irredeemable physical and social degradation. Lysistratus’s second, animal-themed comparison (1310) suggests that Philocleon’s encounter with the sympotic world has fulfilled his desire for liberation from his son’s therapeutic net. The double meaning of klētēr— “donkey” but also “summons-witness”—causes Lysistratus’s image of the fugitive ass to imply a successful reenactment of Philocleon’s manic attempts to escape from home for judicial service. In addition, Lysistratus’s compari-

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son connects Philocleon’s sympotic demeanor with one of the play’s initial scenes of mania: the old man’s clumsy impersonation of Odysseus sneaking out of the Cyclops’s cave with the aid of his favorite ram (184–91). Seeing Philocleon clinging to the underside of a donkey, Bdelycleon had blocked his escape and unveiled his inept Odyssean disguise through a sarcastic, paratragic comment foreshadowing Lysistratus’s mocking comparison: “To me at least he seems very similar to the foal ( pōliōi) of a summons-witness ass (klētēros)” (188–89). The diminutive ( pōliōi) of the markedly tragic term pōlos assimilates Philocleon to a young horse frantically struggling to evade the yoke with movements similar to the skirtēmata previously mentioned by Xanthias (1305), the convulsive leaps of mad and recalcitrant animals (including a pōlos). Lysistratus’s intratextually loaded comparison calls forth another moment of Philocleon as a lover of jury service, connecting the old man’s asinine intemperance with Cratinean intoxication. During the agōn Philocleon had mentioned a donkey-eared flask (onon) full of wine (616–17) among the amusements afforded by his jury pay. This flask offered him a way to overcome his son’s restrictions and enjoy the pleasures of drunkenness. As we saw in chapter 2, this celebration of drunkenness in a context previewing the parabasis makes Philocleon’s flask into a double of Cratinus’s putinē (“wine flask”) in the eponymous play. What is more, Philocleon’s enthusiastic description of the curative powers of this object had converted, by metonymy, the abundant flow of wine from the asinine vessel into the incontinent gaping (both oral and anal) of a drunken donkey: he speaks of how the donkey-shaped flask “opening wide, braying . . . farted (kateparden)” (617–18). It is the same bodily and verbal incontinence (“farted [epepordei], mocked” 1305) seen in Xanthias’s account of Philocleon’s rowdiness, which the slave describes through a series of verbs that, as we have noted, are implicated in the representation of Cratinean phortikē kōmōidia in the second Clouds. Xanthias himself characterizes the behavior as donkey-like (“like a little donkey [onidion] feasting on barley” 1306). The portrait of the drunken, asinine Philocleon supplied by Lysistratus in confirmation of Xanthias’s own judgment recalls the gaping impropriety to which his flask—of probable Cratinean pedigree—was previously assimilated in the play. While Lysistratus mockingly exposes the continuity between the ostensibly rejuvenated Philocleon and the old ragged one, he also assimilates the latter to the figure of the buffoonish, parasitic ptōchos (“beggar”), which he himself exemplifies. Lysistratus is consistently depicted in Aristophanes as an abject flatterer who exchanges comic entertainment for meals. In Acharnians, he is equated with a beggar “always freezing (rhigōn) and starving” in

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the agora (857). Therefore, the mocking comparisons that he directs against Philocleon are also self-referential. In its pejorative meaning (“dregs [of society]”) the term trux suits Lysistratus’s servility. In addition, his debased social status suggests the donkey, a “rough, cheap, coarse” animal “doing menial . . . ‘low-comic’ work” (Griffith 2006, 228 and 227). Philocleon’s first comparison in response to Lysistratus’s attack brings the tribōn back into the picture, confirming the old man’s social and generic kinship with the sympotic parasite—an iambic figure. In likening Lysistratus to a locust that has lost its tribōn (1311–12), Philocleon inadvertently evokes the uniform of his pre-sympotic life. Before surrendering to his son’s therapeutic program, he, like Lysistratus, had exposed himself to the Athenian winter, wearing only a rough tribōn in his daily trips to the law court. Philocleon’s attempt to distance himself from his adversary—and his own abject past—is contradicted by Xanthias’s framing narrative, which, as we have seen, converges with Lysistratus’s mockery. Although Philocleon probably attends the symposium dressed in the chlaina lent to him by his son, his conduct shows the lingering grip of the abjection and madness eloquently symbolized by the tribōn. The mud-slinging match between Lysistratus and Philocleon recalls the sympotic skirmishing of the beggar Iros and Odysseus before the amused eyes of the suitors in Book 18 of the Odyssey and the feuds between poverty-stricken satirists and their similarly low-class targets that are staged in iambic poetry. Through his affinity with Lysistratus, then, Philocleon’s Cratinean associations take on the additional coarseness of the iambic ptōchos. The audience of the symposium applauds Philocleon’s and Lysistratus’s low iambographic humor (1314), but Aristophanes—we can surmise—“[locates] himself  .  .  . far above the satiric boxing ring,” disowning their phortikē kōmōidia and even pointing to similarities with the adversary genre of tragedy. Philocleon mocks Lysistratus’s penury by pairing him not only with a locust deprived of its shabby apparel (tribōn)—a striking bit of projection— but also with a mediocre tragedian, Sthenelus, denuded of his costumes and props (1313). This comparison comically reifies Sthenelus’s notorious poetic tapeinotēs (“wretchedness”) as material poverty. More important, in conjoining the tribōn with the image of a ragged tragedian, Philocleon’s double comparison resumes the associations of tragedy with the physical and mental dissolution (lusis) that permeates the first part of the play, where the tribōn objectifies the nexus between Philocleon’s social debasement and tragic enervation. In Xanthias’s report, Philocleon’s insults seem to connect Lysistratus’s iambic pauperism, and by extension his own Cratinean conduct, with tragic lusis (aptly encoded in his target’s name). Poverty, a fundamental trait of iam-

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bic personas, can also trope tragedy. In Wealth (423–25), the pale, manic figure of Penia (“Poverty”) is explicitly characterized as a representative of the genre. In other words, both tragedy and iambos can be seen as embodiments and projections of a ragged affect. Thus, in Philocleon’s assimilation of Lysistratus to a poor tragedian one may see a subtle dissociation of comedy from the iambic excess of the two sympotic performers, a self-distancing that contributes to the notion of Aristophanes’ aesthetic semnotēs (“dignity”)—the healing affect associated with the chlaina. Let us now consider Thuphrastus, whose targeting by Philocleon suggestively brings the Aristophanic comic mode and its detractors to center stage. Thuphrastus is but a name to us, but Philocleon’s taunts replay the self-reflexive narrative that maps the plot of Wasps onto the failure of the first Clouds. Biles (2011, 165n122) has observed that Philocleon’s use of the adjective kompsos in reference to Thuphrastus (1317) echoes the charge of producing kompsoi (“elegant”) spectators that Cratinus leveled against Aristophanes in his famous mockery of his younger rival’s alleged tendency to “Euripidaristophanize” (fr. 342 KA). Kompsos is in direct opposition to skōptōn agroikōs (“coarsely mocking”), the way that Xanthias describes the sympotic Philocleon three lines later (1320)—a possible evocation of phortikē kōmōidia. In addition, Xanthias’s presentation of Thuphrastus as dexios echoes the parabasis’s alignment of Aristophanic comedy with dexiotēs (“clever sophistication” 1059) as well as Bdelycleon’s endorsement of this quality (1175). It is also significant that Philocleon’s accusation of affected kompsotēs (“elegance”) accompanies a disparaging reference to “putting on airs,” literally “wearing long hair” (komais 1317), a habitus that serves as an external marker of Bdelycleon’s semnotēs. In an early scene the Chorus had construed its effort to free Philocleon as an attempt to rescue the poor from Bdelycleon’s aspirations of tyranny (464–65), signified by his long hair (he is referred to as “Kometamunia”—“long-haired Amunias” 466). Such suspicions preview Philocleon’s paranoid rejection of his son’s chlaina. Thus, in rebuking Thuphrastus, Philocleon seems to ventriloquize not only Cratinus’s anti-Aristophanic stance, but also the comic audience’s tragically misguided suspicion of the first Clouds, lamented in the parabasis and subsequently dramatized in the dressing scene. Philocleon’s final charge against Thuphrastus, that he is subservient to politicians (1318), may further reflect audience resistance to the Aristophanic mode. His depiction of Thuphrastus as pleasing the powerful of the day— kōmōidoloichōn (“comic licking”)—recalls the accusation that Aristophanes claims was raised against him after the performance of Knights. In the final section of the second parabasis (1284–91), which immediately precedes Xanthias’s report of the symposium, the comic poet answers some detractors who

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chastised him for his supposedly conciliatory attitude toward Cleon (1284). Aristophanes’ response is a fanciful account of the torture inflicted upon him by the demagogue for the sadistic amusement of spectators (1285–89). Far from surrendering to Cleon or pandering to the audience, we are told, Aristophanes offered just a smidgen of moderate clowning: “I monkeyed around a little bit” (hupo ti mikron epithēkisa) (1290). Although Thuphrastus’s alleged servility seems more generalized than a momentary armistice with Cleon, the ensemble of resemblances between Thuphrastus on one side and Bdelycleon and the parabatic Aristophanes on the other are too striking to be coincidental. Philocleon’s attack against Thuphrastus summons up both Cratinus’s victory in 423 and the audience’s rejection of Clouds as reconstructed by Aristophanes. Of course, the pompous manners attributed to Thuphrastus may be tinged with self-mockery, and Philocleon’s earthy reproach of his interlocutor’s semnotēs seems, at first sight, the most natural focus of audience identification. However, the manic, tragic latencies of his sympotic behavior at least complicate and problematize this identification, demonstrating precisely the disease of the audience and thus partially redeeming Thuphrastus as an abused and victimized comedian similar to Aristophanes. Whereas Lysistratus confronts Philocleon, appropriating Xanthias’s and Bdelycleon’s imagery, Thuphrastus remains silent. The symposium hall resonates with Philocleon’s shouting voice (1311) and the audience’s applause at the end of his iambic match with Lysistratus (1314). I propose that the staging of Philocleon’s return from the symposium in a sense gives the last laugh to the silent Thuphrastus (and, behind him, Aristophanes). The analysis of Xanthias’s narrative has shown that the madness and abjection lurking behind Philocleon’s Cratinean performance construe his presumed rejuvenation as a mere recasting of his infantile distress. As I will now suggest, the old man’s reappearance onstage intensifies this ominous sense of déjà vu by blurring the boundaries between Cratinean drunkenness and tragic mania through the incongruous figure of an iambic Erinys. Xanthias concludes by sketching out Philocleon’s return, which includes his physical abuse of passers-by (1323). Spotting the old man, the slave repairs inside to avoid his sympotic fury, at which point Philocleon arrives onstage, drunk and accompanied by Dardanis, a flute girl stolen from the banquet. Holding a torch, he menaces all around him (1326–30): Φι. ἄνεχε, πάρεχε. κλαύσεταί τις τῶν ὄπισθεν ἐπακολουθούντων ἐμοί· οἷον, εἰ μὴ ’ρρήσεθ’, ὑμᾶς, ὦ πόνηροι, ταυτῃὶ τῇ δᾳδὶ φρυκτοὺς σκευάσω.

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Philocleon Halt! Scatter! Some of the people tagging along behind me are going to weep! You good-for-nothings, if you don’t get lost, I’ll make roasted fish of you with this torch!

The old man’s drunken return, a drawing-out of his sympotic performance that lays bare his impotence, is reminiscent of Cratinus’s comic poetics as presented in Knights. In the autobiographical plot of Pytine, Cratinus’s reassertion of drunken inspiration coincided with a claim of restoration to sexual vigor (a clear metaphor of poetic fertility) and reconciliation with his wife, Komoidia (“Comedy”), who at the beginning of the play had, in all probability, formally accused her husband of neglect of conjugal duties. In the scene that follows Philocleon’s entrance, his interaction with Dardanis exposes his flaccidity (“watch out, since my rope is worn out [sapron]” 1343), not unlike Cratinus’s, which was probably alluded to in Pytine. This dysfunction had been previously ridiculed in the parabasis of Knights with the image of the loosened strings of Cratinus’s lyre (532–33). In this way, Philocleon’s illusory return to youth reflects the image of the sexually (and poetically) broken-down Cratinus, one which Pytine sought to put behind him. While the post-sympotic Philocleon comically presents Cratinus’s imputed impotence, he is also suggestive of tragic figures, the Erinyes, who act as icons of the genre. Stephen Halliwell has observed that though post-sympotic violence is not uncommon, “Philocleon’s ‘solo’ kōmos [procession] is a contradiction in terms” (2008, 210). We can better grasp the peculiarity of the grotesquely solipsistic kōmos if we compare this entrance with a similar scene from Wealth, referred to above, in which Penia is presented as a withered old woman wearing rags, an innkeeper or a marketplace seller (426–27), screaming (428) and hurling death threats in paratragic style against Blepsidemus and Chremylus (415–16 and 418–21). While trying to run off like Xanthias (417), the two characters point out that the old, ragged, vocally intemperate Penia displays all the attributes of a tragic Erinys, except for torches (423–25): Βλ. ἴσως Ἐρινύς ἐστιν ἐκ τραγῳδίας βλέπει γέ τοι μανικόν τι καὶ τραγῳδικόν. Χρ. ἀλλ’ οὐκ ἔχει γὰρ δᾷδας. Blepsidemus Perhaps she’s an Erinys from tragedy. Indeed, she stares in a somewhat crazy (manikon) and tragic (tragōidikon) way. Chremylus. But she doesn’t have torches!

Philocleon, who is old, ragged, and vocally intemperate—and does carry a torch—bears other resemblances to the Erinyes. His impotence signals a gender ambiguity similar to that of the Erinyes, often represented as infertile

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and with masculine features. His grotesque blend of old age and youth could be compared to the Erinyes’ condition as “aged maidens.” Furthermore, in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, the Erinyes appear to Cassandra as a dancing kōmos of creatures drunk with human blood (1189–90). Through the association with the Erinyes, Philocleon’s komastic entrance seems to visualize the tragic qualities of madness and penia, which, as we have seen, overshadow the old man’s sympotic exuberance. As has been noted, “the Erinyes seem to have become, after the Oresteia, something of a symbol of tragedy,” for, like the Erinyes, “tragedy brings the fearsome into human life; it stirs up visions of family conflict, bloodshed, curses, the stuff of nightmares, and especially nightmares about the power of the threatening female” (Taplin and Wilson 1993, 176 and 175). In the visual and literary iconography of the Erinyes, the torch expresses the disastrous consequences ignited by daemonic madness and punitive rage, as shown in an emblematic scene from Euripides’ Trojan Women. Cassandra enters in her customary state of oracular distress, singing an ominous wedding monody while holding two bridal torches (308). The torches, which symbolize the blazing fall of Troy, foreshadow not just Cassandra’s own doom but also the retribution that will soon strike Agamemnon and his family. In other words, the torches signify her impending role as an Erinys, bringing avenging rage into the house of the victors. Explicitly assuming this role in her final address to Apollo, who she says is “about to lead me out of this land as one of three Erinyes” (457), Cassandra is destined to stir up family conflict and bloodshed and thus become, in a way, an agent of tragedy. With torch in hand, Philocleon, sinking further into the aggressive side of his tragic malady, can also be seen as an Erinys-like agent of tragedy. His threat to use the torch against bystanders brings to mind Erinyes pursuing their targets with torches as weapons, an image whose status as an icon of tragedy is reflected, even hundreds of years later, in Cicero’s recollections. The imagistic fusion of fish and destructive flame that shapes Philocleon’s threat in 1330 (“I’ll make roasted fish of you with this torch”) connects this lyric outburst with the paratragic monody (317–33) analyzed in chapter 3. Carefully guarded within the house and prevented from “doing some harm” (322) in the law court, Philocleon absurdly voiced melancholic fantasies of suicide. At the end of this lyric lamentation, he prayed to Zeus to be roasted with a thunderbolt (328–29) and thrown into a piping hot sauce for fish (oxalmēn 331). With his “fish-roasting” torch, Philocleon condenses Zeus’s thunderbolt and fish sauce into a single image, presenting himself as a manic dispenser of tragic violence. His Phaedra- or Bellerophon-like malady, previously depressive and

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self-directed, is now outer-directed, conveying the manic side of the tragic mimesis to which Cratinus subjects his audience. The old man’s torch signals the flooding back of the tragic energies responsible for his judicial obsession. Philocleon is now able to “do some harm” again, regressing to the state of tragic mania preceding Bdelycleon’s desis. Despite his best efforts, Bdelycleon’s sympotic cure leads to the same manic results as the Corybantic therapy described by Xanthias in the prologue. Instead of exposing Philocleon to the wholesome effects of aristocratic semnotēs, the sympotic initiation triggers an unexpected recrudescence of tragic lusis. As illustrated in the Pseudo-Aristotelian Problems, the loosening force of drunkenness (ekluein) can release anger, hubristic behavior, mania, and melancholy, as seen on the tragic stage in Ajax, the filicidal Heracles, and indeed Bellerophon. Philocleon’s Erinys-like kōmos suggests that Bdelycleon has unwittingly contributed to the recurrence of his father’s tragic, even frightful, condition. In the Eumenides, Apollo calls the Erinyes knōdala (“wild creatures” 644), the same label that Sosias uses for the diseased Philocleon at the very beginning of the play (4). Philocleon’s torch-wielding return reinforces the dangerous affinities of Cratinean comedy with tragedy thematized in the the first part of the play. Bringing together Cratinus’s drunkenness and the Erinyes’ rage, Philocleon’s post-sympotic performance expresses the alienated nature of a comic mode whose driving forces are fundamentally tragic. The convergence of inebriation and tragic violence in Philocleon’s torch reduces the distance between the superlatives paroinikōtatos (“drunkest”) and atērotatos (“most disastrous”), which Xanthias applies to his old master at the beginning of his speech. Cratinean intoxication lets loose the forces of tragic daemonic madness (such as Ate and the Erinyes). Thus, a hidden scenario of tragic chaos lurks beneath the surface of comic vitalism. Instead of endorsing the supposedly liberating power of his older rival’s Dionysiac excess, in this scene Aristophanes seems to use Philocleon’s return to stereotype Cratinean comedy as the expression of monstrous chthonic energies. This is a strategy discernible in the parabasis of Wasps, where, as I argued in chapter 2, the poetic shadow of Cratinus can be seen behind the infernal monsters vanquished by the Heraclean Aristophanes. In Plutoi, Cratinus styled his own comedy as chthonic by allying his persona with the Aeschylean Erinyes. The play presented the Chorus as an intertextual and ideological reincarnation of the Aeschylean Erinyes in the form of “chthonic divinities” related to the Hesiodic daimones ploutodotai (“wealthbringing daemons”) “who come from the depths of the earth and avenge the crime of unjust wealth” (Bakola 2013, 248). The extant fragments indicate

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that in the parodos the Chorus merged its voice with that of the comic poet, thereby conflating satiric anger with chthonic retribution, comic inspiration with Aeschylean tragedy. On these grounds, the resemblances of the Cratinean Philocleon to a tragic Erinys can be seen to project Aristophanes’ manipulation of one of his adversary’s multiple gestures of generic self-affiliation. A consequence of Philocleon’s hubristic behavior, the threat of a lawsuit by one of the assaulted passers-by, elicits a superficial repudiation that is in fact a reaffirmation of his past. When the victim mentions “summonses” (1334), Philocleon replies (1335–40): Φι. ἰηῦ ἰηῦ, “καλούμενοι.” (1335) ἀρχαῖά γ’ ὑμῶν. ἆρά γ’ ἴσθ’ ὡς οὐδ’ ἀκούων ἀνέχομαι δικῶν; ἰαιβοῖ αἰβοῖ. τάδε μ’ ἀρέσκει· βάλλε κημούς. οὐκ ἄπει; ποῦ ’στ’ ἠλιαστής; ἐκποδών. (1340) Philocleon Oooo . . . “summonses!” How old-fashioned (archaia) of you! Don’t you know that I can’t even tolerate hearing about lawsuits (dikōn)? Phooey! [Indicating the flute girl] This (tade) is what I like! Screw voting urns! Get lost! Where’s the judge? Scram!

Philocleon’s sympotic adventure restores his manic anger, though in the capacity of offender rather than juror. This role renews the impulse to “do harm” (322 and 340) and the erotic attraction to the law court, where his hubristic conduct inevitably leads him. Indeed, the new passion that he declares, indicated by the deictic tade, betrays an unconscious entanglement with his “archaic” obsessions (archaia). The referential ambiguity of tade, contrasted with dikōn (“lawsuits”), captures Philocleon’s fruitless effort to differentiate his present from his past. Philocleon’s forceful assertion “I can’t even tolerate hearing about lawsuits” seems to affirm, almost as a Freudian negation, a selfdestructive longing for the law court that tragically compromises the comic surface of his new life as a youthful roisterer. Philocleon’s persistent judicial obsession, together with the Erinys-like kōmos and Xanthias’s sympotic description, undermines the comic quality of Cratinean drunken merriment. These post-banquet moments tendentiously suggest the generic otherness of Cratinus’s distinctive comic selfpresentation, which suffuses Philocleon’s sympotic performance. Images employed in the first part of Wasps are reactivated to question the comic affect of Cratinean comedy, drawing attention to affinities between its iambic abjection and tragic raggedness, between the juvenile unruliness of Cratinus’s per-

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sona and tragedy’s unleashing of chthonic madness. Through the recrudescence of Philocleon’s aggressive mania, Cratinus’s sublime, authority-building self-affiliation with Aeschylus appears to be downgraded to a pathological generic alienation, which condemns comedy and its audience to a loss of identity. Philocleon’s self-distancing from “old-fashioned” stuff (archaia) is contradicted by his inveterate judicial madness and by the resemblances of his kōmos to the irruption of atavistic forces, such as the Erinyes. By bringing out the tragic affect of the Cratinean mode, Wasps allies the antique immaturity of Aristophanes’ older rival—the archaia agōgē (“archaic mode”) mentioned in the Life of Aristophanes—with the adversary dramatic genre and thus seems to reconstruct the victory of Pytine in the contest of 423 as the triumph of a play of dubious comic identity. Next, I will argue that Philocleon’s reaction to his son’s last intervention sets up a match between comic modes in which Aesopic sōphrosunē contends with phortikē kōmōidia, presenting a further proto-canonical strategy for separating the Cratinean affect embodied by Philocleon from the realm of comedy. 2. Aesopic Agonistics: Fables and Comic Redress Aristophanes’ alignment of his comic affect—restrained, protective—with the anti-tragic wisdom of Aesop and Aesopic fables produces another potential maneuver for undoing the failure of Clouds. Faced with protests and legal threats from his victims, Philocleon aggressively deploys Aesopic fables. But his choice of subject matter makes his fables backfire, revealing the deep kinship of the Cratinean mode that he acts out not with Aesop (an ancestor of iambos and comedy), but with the crazed violence of tragedy. I begin with an exchange between father and son that ends with a knockout blow, an image of Aristophanes’ fiasco in 423. I then explore how two of the fables told by Philocleon, both involving Aesop as a character, dramatize a battle between the Aesopic and tragedy, giving Bdelycleon (and Aristophanes) the last laugh. Upon discovering Philocleon’s theft of Dardanis, the flute girl, Bdelycleon labors to rescue her and spare his father another lawsuit. Deprived of his sympotic captive, Philocleon protests (1379), but his reaction dramatically escalates when Bdelycleon brings up his father’s sexual impotence as a rationale for letting the flute girl run off (1380–81). Telling the story of a senior contestant’s boxing victory in the Olympic games, the old man turns against his son the logoi semnoi (“dignified stories”), based on contemporary not mythical subjects, that Bdelycleon had previously recommended. The violent blow that is commonly thought to cap this fake narrative transforms Philocleon’s speech into a painful performative utterance (1381–86):

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Φι. ἄκουσόν νυν ἐμοῦ. Ὀλυμπίασιν, ἡνίκ’ ἐθεώρουν ἐγώ, Ἐφουδίων ἐμαχέσατ’ Ἀσκώνδᾳ καλῶς ἤδη γέρων ὤν· εἶτα τῇ πυγμῇ θενὼν ὁ πρεσβύτερος κατέβαλε τὸν νεώτερον. (1385) πρὸς ταῦτα τηροῦ μὴ λάβῃς ὑπώπια. Philocleon Now listen to me. At Olympia, when I was on an embassy, Ephudion, who was already getting on in years, battled well against Ascondas. Then the older man socked the younger one with his fist and knocked him off his feet. [He knocks Bdelycleon down] So be careful not to get a pair of black eyes.

In knocking down his son, Philocleon dramatizes not just his peer’s pugilistic triumph over a younger adversary but also Cratinus’s defeat of Aristophanes in 423. Satiric combat is often mapped onto athletic competition. In the parabasis, Aristophanes compares the failure of Clouds to an accident in a chariot race (1050). As we saw in chapter 2, his Heraclean persona (1030– 45) is in itself a reflection of the epinician image of the winning athlete as a public benefactor. What is more, boxing provides a favored trope of selfrepresentation for dueling satirists: Hipponax imagines a pugilistic bout with Boupalos along the lines of the one between Odysseus and Iros. In Knights the competitive space in which the Aristophanic Sausage Seller and Cratinean Paphlagon confront each other is assimilated to a wrestling ring (490–91). As we have seen, in the representation of Philocleon as a Cratinean satirist the reference to his flaccidity renews the charge of performative impotence that Aristophanes had raised against his older rival in the parabasis of Knights. Philocleon’s effective blow in response to Bdelycleon’s disrespectful remark seems, thus, to figure Pytine’s victorious counterattack against Knights and to restage the contest of 423, where “the older man” felled “the younger one” in a kind of iambic boxing match. How do Bdelycleon, and Aristophanes, regain their footing? Though two of Philocleon’s victims seem to steal the stage from Bdelycleon and prevent him from articulating a response to his Cratinean father, the first and the last of the Aesopic fables told by Philocleon, as I contend, tilt the contest in the son’s favor. The self-reflexive implications of these tales, unanticipated by Philocleon, undermine his attempt to align his Cratinean identity with Aesop as an illustrious iambic and comic ancestor. Thus, the evocation of Aesop fuels a battle over the ownership of comedy whose final outcome seems to vindicate Bdelycleon and Aristophanes. Fables inscribe various more or less explicit forms of agonistic discourse. As Deborah Steiner has observed, the characters, settings, and plots of fables

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“comment on the contrasting verbal styles and corresponding ethical and moral dispositions of the narrator and his rival” (2012, 2). The words and deeds of characters in the fabulistic arena often acquire metapoetic significance: thus, the fable of the hawk and the nightingale in the Works and Days encodes the intra-epic contrast between Iliadic poetry and Hesiodic didactic. Likewise, when a fable features Aesop as a character, the verbal strife at the center resembles the altercation between an iambic performer and his targets. In putting himself onstage, Aesop “assumes a persona as mocker . . . reminiscent of the Ionian iambographers” (Steiner 2012, 34). In this way, Aesop foregrounds the generic affinity of fable telling with iambos and, by extension, with Old Comedy. In mentioning Aesop in three different extant plays (Wasps, Peace, and Birds) and borrowing various Aesopic elements for the purposes of plot construction, Aristophanes shows awareness of this affinity and establishes a direct lineage between his comic persona and that of the fabulist. These two general points—fables’ metapoetic valence and their generic kinship with iambos and comedy—will provide a background for drawing connections between Philocleon’s Aesopic fable-telling and the poetic contest suggested by the earlier scene of familial violence. As we will see, Aristophanes plays with two facets of Aesop’s identity in antiquity—the iambic parodist and “the performer of wisdom” (Martin 1993)—to claim the mantle of the noble ancestor of comedy. Philocleon fabricates his first fable to insult Myrtia, a bread seller seeking restitution for the old man’s double abuse: not only did he hit her with his torch, but he also knocked several loaves off her tray (1389–91). The continuity with the assault on Bdelycleon is underscored by the similar introductions to the old man’s tales, both starting with akouson (“listen” 1381 and 1399). After a brief captatio benevolentiae (1399–1400), Philocleon tells his story (1401–5): Φι. Αἴσωπον ἀπὸ δείπνου βαδίζονθ’ ἑσπέρας θρασεῖα καὶ μεθύση τις ὑλάκτει κύων. κἄπειτ’ ἐκεῖνος εἶπεν, “ὦ κύον κύον, εἰ νὴ Δί’ ἀντὶ τῆς κακῆς γλώττης ποθὲν πυροὺς πρίαιο, σωφρονεῖν ἄν μοι δοκεῖς.” (1405) Philocleon As Aesop was strolling home from supper one evening, a brazen and sozzled bitch barked (hulaktei) at him, and he said, “Bitch, bitch, if, by Zeus, you were to buy some wheat from somewhere in exchange for your vulgar tongue (kakēs glōttēs), I think you would be wise (sōphronein).”

Clearly Philocleon pairs himself with Aesop, while the dog advised to trade her tongue for some flour is an animal stand-in for Myrtia. The bread seller,

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understanding Philocleon’s message (“Are you mocking me?” 1406), is not amused. The correspondences activated by Philocleon’s impromptu fable, however, are more complicated than they seem at first. In the last line of his tale (“I think you would be wise [sōphronein]” 1405), Philocleon adopts the persona of Aesop as a performer of sōphrosunē. Although the characterization of Aesop as an abject figure, an icon of the Bakhtinian body, in the Life of Aesop may bear some resemblances to Philocleon’s incarnation of phortikē kōmōidia during and after the symposium, the old man’s evocation of sōphrosunē calls attention to his own lack of this quality, which Aesop’s fables purport to transmit. Furthermore, the attributes that mark Myrtia’s fabulistic double— boldness, drunkenness, and angry barking—apply to Philocleon and define his Cratinean performance. Philocleon’s coarse loudness (anakragōn 1311) echoes the Cerberus-like vocality of the demagogue after whom he is named and Cratinus’s satiric barking, which is reflected in Paphlagon’s canine voice in Knights. In addition, Philocleon inappropriately employs fable telling as an instrument of abuse outside the performative space of the symposium. Differently from the iambic Aesop as well as all other satirists, he does not respond to aggression, but he initiates it, operating on the same level as the dog, with her kakē glōtta (“vulgar tongue”). Thus, the affinities between Philocleon and Myrtia compromise the intended system of identifications (Philocleon : Aesop : Myrtia : dog), and Philocleon’s fable proves to be unwittingly self-mocking. While this miscalculation certainly enhances the humor of his performance, Philocleon’s lack of self-awareness jeopardizes his credibility as an heir to Aesop. Philocleon’s maneuvers have the effect of uncovering the “true” heir of Aesop, not himself but his son. The only other occurrence of a word cognate to sōphrōn (“self-controlled”) in the play is supplied by an earlier scene, in which the Chorus had enthusiastically presented Philocleon’s apparent conversion as the end of his madness (743–44) and a rebirth delivered by his son under the sign of sōphrosunē: “Perhaps now he is heeding what you say and is selfcontrolled (sōphronei), changing (methistas) his ways (tropon) for the future and heeding you” (747–49). In chapter 3, I proposed that this conversion may mirror the audience’s hoped-for transition from the Cratinean to the Aristophanic mode. The marked intratextual echo invites a connection between Bdelycleon’s therapeutic program, Aristophanes’ aesthetic mode, and the Aesopic persona. The fable’s opposition between kakē glōtta (“vulgar tongue”) and sōphrosunē (“self-control, moderation” shading into “wisdom”), which, in spite of Philocleon’s intentions, aligns him with Myrtia, seems even to replay the prologic contrast between lowbrow, unrestrained comedy ( phortikē

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kōmōidia) and social, as well as aesthetic, dignity (semnotēs). The monitory phrase (“I think you would be wise [sōphronein]”) that Philocleon deludedly ventriloquizes two lines before Myrtia’s reference to her own phortia (“movable goods” 1407) emphasizes the Aesopic transmission of sōphrosunē to an audience. It is the kind of affective connection that, in his self-fashioning game, Aristophanes claims for his own comic mode through the dramatic mechanism of Bdelycleon’s therapeutic program—and the textile that enacts such a program, the chlaina. The exchange between Philocleon and Myrtia, then, reveals the old man’s inability to change and, more importantly, the convergence of his son’s tropoi (“habits, modes, ways”) with Aesopic sōphrosunē. As a result of the intratextual associations triggered by Philocleon’s fabulistic misfire, the Aristophanic Bdelycleon turns out to be closer to Aesop in one of his facets (the sage) if not the other (the iambicist). Philocleon, failing in both respects, loses the generic contest. The conclusion of the scene deepens the failure of Philocleon’s Aesopic self-fashioning with an oblique reference to a tragic father. With the arrival of Chaerephon—Socrates’ famous acolyte—who Myrtia announces (1406–8) will serve as a witness in Philocleon’s trial, the old man makes another comparison that reinforces his affinity with his female adversary (1412–14): Φι. καὶ σὺ δή μοι, Χαιρεφῶν, γυναικὶ κλητεύεις ἐοικὼς θαψίνῃ Ἰνοῖ κρεμαμένῃ πρὸς ποδῶν Εὐριπίδου; Philocleon And you, Chaerephon, tell me, are you really serving as a summonswitness for a woman while looking like sallow Ino hanging on to (kremamenēi) Euripides’ feet?

Through kremamenēi (“hanging on to”), Chaerephon’s subordination to the bread seller is presented as equivalent to Ino’s supplication in the eponymous Euripidean play. The object of Ino’s memorable appeal is obscured by the typically comic assimilation of characters to their author, but there is a scholarly consensus that Athamas, Ino’s husband, lies behind “Euripides.” Maddened by Hera while hunting, Athamas chased Ino and probably killed their son Learchus. Very likely, the terrified Ino struggled to contain her husband’s fury, begging for mercy for herself, her child or both. The pairing of Myrtia with an emblematically tragic mad father strengthens the unexpected similarity between the bread seller and Philocleon that his Aesopic fable unwittingly highlights. As we saw in chapter 3, in the last manic outburst before the apparent acquiescence to Bdelycleon’s therapy, Philocleon reenacted the melancholic antics of Bellerophon, another disturbed Euripidean father. The

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correspondences between the drunk Philocleon, Myrtia, and Athamas underscore the conformity of the old man’s Cratinean manners with his past activity as a juror receiving supplications (like the tragic character and the bread seller) and listening to—not reciting—Aesopic fables, part of the defendants’ performative repertoire. The assimilation of Philocleon to Myrtia through Athamas, then, pushes the Cratinean mode away from the performance of Aesopic sōphrosunē and, again, toward the enactment of tragic madness. This reading—charged with proto-canonical implications, as we will see —finds support in Philocleon’s last fable, which delivers the final blow to his Aesopic pretensions. Witnessing an altercation with another accuser after Myrtia’s exit (1415–40), Bdelycleon tries to avoid an escalation by dragging Philocleon back into the house (1443–45). Philocleon responds with the bestknown Aesopic fable, that of the eagle and the dung beetle (1446–49): Φι. Αἴσωπον οἱ Δελφοί ποτ’— Βδ. ὀλίγον μοι μέλει. Φι. φιάλην ἐπῃτιῶντο κλέψαι τοῦ θεοῦ· ὁ δ’ ἔλεξεν αὐτοῖς ὡς ὁ κάνθαρός ποτε— Βδ. οἴμ’ ὡς ἀπολεῖς με τοῖσι σοῖσι κανθάροις. Philocleon Once the Delphians accused Aesop . . . Bdelycleon I don’t care. Philocleon . . . of stealing (klepsai) a bowl belonging to the god. And he told them that once the beetle . . . Bdelycleon Good grief, you will kill me with your beetles!

Philocleon’s protest calls forth both the fable and the frame narrative in the Life of Aesop. Unjustly accused of having stolen a bowl sacred to Apollo, Aesop tells the fable to the Delphians as they try to drag him out of the Muses’ shrine and lead him to death. In the fable, a dung beetle is offended by an eagle’s refusal to spare a hare whom the insect had sheltered. After the beetle takes revenge by breaking some of the eagle’s eggs, the bird asks Zeus for protection and transfers the nest onto the god’s lap. In response, the insect flies around Zeus’s face or deposits a ball of dung on his head, causing him to drop and destroy the eagle’s eggs. In Philocleon’s elliptical telling, the eagle represents the Delphians “as violators of divine law” (Kurke 2011, 89)—specifically hospitality and supplication—while the dung beetle stands for Aesop, who, despite his humble position, “will . . . posthumously and through the agency of others, punish those who scorn him” (Steiner 2008, 85). Scholarship on Philocleon’s use of this fable has emphasized his cooptation of the overlapping roles of Aesop and the dung beetle; what has not been considered is how the incongruity between the frame narrative of the fable and its comic retelling overturns his Aesopic plan. Philocleon men-

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tions the Delphians’ false charge of theft against Aesop (klepsai 1447) but in doing so inadvertently draws attention to his own robbery of Dardanis, which Bdelycleon chastises him for in 1368–69: “how dare you make fun of me, after you stole (klepsanta) the flute girl from the banquet guests!” The symbolism of hares as erotic prey and the common metaphorical equivalence between eating and sex provide grounds for likening the eagle’s pursuit of the wild rabbit to Philocleon’s seizure of the flute girl. Intending to associate himself with the beetle (and the innocent Aesop), then, Philocleon conjures the insect’s predatory adversary as the appropriate comparandum. Philocleon’s eagle-like quality leads us naturally to appreciate continuities between Bdelycleon, Aesop, and the beetle. In rescuing Dardanis from Philocleon’s predatory clutch (1379–81) and warning the old man about the legal repercussions of his theft (1366), Bdelycleon resembles the insect offering asylum to the hare and urging the eagle to respect justice, as well as Aesop predicting the Delphians’ punishment. Even in hauling his father into the house, Bdelycleon is safeguarding him from the (legitimate) pursuit of his prosecutors, guided by the same refuge-offering spirit that motivates the liberation of the flute player and, in the Aesopic fable, the beetle’s protection of the hare. Bdelycleon’s gesture is in keeping with his therapeutic mission throughout the play as well as with the commitment to safeguard the audience that Aristophanes claims for his comic mode in the parabasis. Philocleon’s aquiline kinship reinforces his previously established link with Athamas as a mad tragic father and, more broadly, with tragedy itself. Like the maddened Athamas, who slaughters his son, mistaking him for a prey animal, Aesop’s eagle is the addressee of pitiful supplications that are ultimately unable to restrain its rapacious anger. Supplication, a common thread linking the Aesopic eagle, the Euripidean father, and Philocleon as a juror, offers another path for the tragic associations that come to define the last of the three despite his best efforts. Indeed, the tragic valence of the eagle is famously evident in the initial scene of Peace, in which Trygaeus successfully rides an Aesopic dung beetle to Olympus to challenge Zeus (the eagle), recasting the tragic flight of Euripides’ Bellerophon as a utopian act of comic redemption. The battle between comedy and tragedy staged by this journey replays the fabulistic feud of the humble, protective, law-abiding, and eventually triumphant beetle with the boastful, aggressive, appetite-driven, and ultimately self-destructive eagle. Philocleon’s aquiline—and not at all beetlelike—behavior seems, then, to distance him further from Aesop and comedy, reasserting the avian associations that figured his tragic madness at the beginning of the play. Together with Philocleon’s earlier rhetorical blunders, the battle between

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the eagle and the beetle presents a set of paradoxical correspondences that characterize the contrast of comic modes underlying the father-son dispute. The uncontrolled violence inflicted by Philocleon under the influence of Cratinus’s intoxicated comedy, and by the tragically aggressive eagle, pairs the social debasement of phortikē kōmōidia with the sublime position of Zeus’s sacred bird, while the practice of sōphrosunē allies the aristocratic affect (semnotēs) of the Aristophanic Bdelycleon with the iambic humbleness of the beetle and Aesop. In other words, if Philocleon’s eagle-like actions locate Cratinus’s self-degrading unruliness within the tragic realm, the affinities of Bdelycleon’s restraining and protective stance with the humble but high-minded beetle fashion Aristophanic semnotēs as a direct continuation of Aesop’s sōphrosunē. The interconnected narratives I have considered seem to manipulate Aesopic sophia (“wisdom”) to differentiate Aristophanic comedy and, in particular, the first Clouds from Cratinus’s unrestrained or misplaced iambicism, which, through Philocleon’s fable-telling and insults, comes to encompass apparently incompatible symbolic paradigms: tragic madness, the lowbrow violence of a marketplace woman, and the hubristic rapaciousness of Zeus’s bird. Philocleon’s unintended kinship with the eagle delegitimizes Cratinean comedy in a way that is almost suggestive of generic exclusion. Building on a scholion to the Wasps passage that glosses the Aesopic reference, Leslie Kurke (2011, 91) has observed that, in coupling the eagle with the Delphians, “Aesop deauthorizes or delegitimates official Delphic sacrificial practice by transforming it into its opposite—criminal bōmolochia,” meaning literally “lurking around altars to steal meat.” Conceptually, this original sense of the term is linked to the later meaning of “buffoonery” through the notion of a lowbrow character who feeds off the table of others through flattery or pandering, somebody like Lysistratus or Philocleon himself in the passage analyzed earlier in this chapter. The buffoonery denoted by bōmolochia is precisely the sort of lowbrow and vulgar jesting from which Aristophanes purports to distance his own comedy. In the parabasis of Peace, the Chorus describes the removal of comic commodities—bōmolocheumata (“buffoonish acts”) and phortos (“vulgarity,” but also “cheap goods”)—as the preliminary condition for Aristophanes’ reconstruction of comedy with canonical gravitas (748–50). While Philocleon’s unintended alignment with the Delphians and the eagle entails an association with parasitism and its attendant buffoonery, the tragic elements of Philocleon’s aquiline behavior seem to add another layer to this tendentious gesture of delegitimation. The pathological lack of sōphrosunē of the old man’s Cratinean bōmolocheumata paradoxically converges with madness, the defining emotional experience of comedy’s

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adversary genre. Dragging his father—and hopefully the audience—inside the comic edifice of their home, Bdelycleon presumably wishes to keep the bōmolocheumata outside. The protective affect of the Aesopic paternal son, corresponding to the wrapping texture of the chlaina, coincides with an act of proto-canonical exclusion. The fable of the eagle and the beetle casts an ambiguous shadow on Philocleon’s knockout punch, which re-creates the defeat of the first Clouds as the outcome of an iambic confrontation. By hinting at Philocleon’s resemblances to the eagle, Aristophanes turns the victory of Pytine, reflected in the old man’s pugilistic triumph, into a hubristic act that, as in the Aesopic fable, will be followed by tragic retribution. Far from strengthening Cratinus’s position, Philocleon’s misuse of Aesop’s iambic legacy seems thus to give Bdelycleon and, behind him, Aristophanes the prospect of the last laugh. In the next section, I will suggest that the final scene of the play imagines the aftermath of the failure of Clouds as a tragic disaster. Philocleon’s deceptively uplifting liberation from his son’s therapeutic net converts an apparent contest between Cratinean comedy and contemporary tragedy into a powerful confirmation of their deep aesthetic consonance. This consonance speaks to a fearful destiny of self-destruction for Philocleon as a consumer and performer of Cratinus’s tragic comedy. 3. Undoing Failure: Dire Dancing and Ersatz Liberation In the final scene of Wasps, I see a paradoxical tragic beginning—an impending outburst of tragic havoc. This eerie open-endedness in lieu of comic closure is the culmination of Aristophanes’ proto-canonical strategy to reveal the tragic identity behind Philocleon’s Cratinean manners. Soon after Bdelycleon’s exit, Philocleon will compete in tragic dancing with the three sons of the tragedian Carcinus, all of them contemporary writers or performers of tragedy, to whom Aristophanes lends a marine identity through Carcinus’s talking name (Κάρκινος, meaning “crab”). Biles has contended that Philocleon’s victory in the dancing contest celebrates comedy’s triumph over tragedy while reflecting Aristophanes’ palinodic conversion to his predecessor’s comic poetics (2011, 165–66). I maintain, instead, that this Cratinean Philocleon is much less clearly victorious than his dominating presence may indicate at first sight, for the dancing competition entangles the old man and his crustacean adversaries in the same destiny of tragic suffocation—an evocation of the suffocating fevers to which the tribōn exposes its wearers. As I will detail, the imagery that shapes Philocleon’s preparation for the contest brings the play back to a grotesque status quo ante, which blends his present,

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illusorily enlivened role of performer with his condition as an ailing spectator, evoked in the first part of the play. In this way, Wasps ends as a cautionary tale for the comic audience: a warning about the consequences of its liberation from the protective affect of the Aristophanes’ chlaina through its choice of Cratinus’s tragic comedy in the contest of 423. Using this cautionary tale, Wasps stages the last phase of its proto-canonical reimagination of the failure of Clouds. Upon arriving onstage, Xanthias announces the imminent dancing contest, displaying the same anxiety that informed his report of the symposium. He describes Philocleon’s nocturnal performance of Thespis’s old-fashioned dances (1479) and his aspiration to prove the modern tragedians outdated (1480–81). Tellingly, Xanthias presents these new developments in Philocleon’s behavior as manifestations of a divine curse leading to tragic mayhem (1474–75): Ξα.νὴ τὸν Διόνυσον, ἄπορά γ’ ἡμῖν πράγματα δαίμων τις εἰσκεκύκληκεν εἰς τὴν οἰκίαν. Xanthias By Dionysus, some divinity has wheeled into (eiskekuklēken) our house some bewildering situations (apora pragmata).

In these lines Xanthias invites the audience to view the impending events as a reversal of Bdelycleon’s binding action at the beginning of the play, which made him a sort of prologic deus ex machina. Critics have commented on Xanthias’s metatheatrical language, which jarringly conflates the “god from the machine” device with an ekkyklema, typically used to wheel out corpses from the backstage area. What has not been observed is that this metaphorical use of tragic machinery is twisted here into the opposite of a problem-solving, ex machina intervention. In fact, in bringing apora pragmata (“bewildering situations”) into the house instead of warding them off, the divinity referred to by Xanthias resembles a daemonic figure exposing the household and the dramatic plot to tragic amēchania (“lack of hope or resources”) through the release of chaotic energies. Thus, the contest about to unfold amounts to a tragic beginning that thwarts Bdelycleon’s prologic efforts at comic desis. If, as I suggested in chapter 3, Bdelycleon’s posing as a deus ex machina at the beginning of the play visualized the first Clouds’ intention to rebind the tragic forces that Cratinean comedy had let loose, Xanthias’s announcement warns the audience that these threatening forces have regrouped. It is their resurgence that, in Wasps’ replay of the 423 contest, determines and figures the audience’s rejection of the first Clouds.

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Philocleon’s appearance at the threshold of the house signals a regression to a pre-prologic reopening of what his son had firmly locked (1484–86): Φι. κλῇθρα χαλάσθω τάδε. καὶ δὴ γὰρ σχήματος ἀρχὴ— Ξα. μᾶλλον δέ γ’ ἴσως μανίας ἀρχή. Philocleon Let these bars (klēithra) be unbolted (chalasthō)! Here it is, the beginning (archē) of a dance . . . Xanthias Maybe more like the beginning (archē) of madness (manias)!

In demanding the unbolting of the doors, Philocleon celebrates his emancipation from the constraints of his son, who, before the beginning of the play, had tried to wrap him within the domestic walls and prevent him from bringing his madness out into the open (112–13). Philocleon’s order figures the tragic unleashing (lusis) of madness and disaster that Bdelycleon’s therapy of desis strove to avert. In tragedy the stage direction “Let these bars (klēithra) be unbolted (chalasthō)” can announce the visual revelation—and often the literal “wheeling-out”—of the plot’s casualties; but it can also portend the release of fresh violence. In Hippolytus, for example, Theseus’s similar command (chalate klēithra 808) not only brings Phaedra’s dead body before the spectators’ eyes (probably through the ekkyklema), but also triggers the conflict with Hippolytus and, ultimately, the young man’s death. Likewise, in a passage from Euripides’ Heracles, the verb chalaō is linked with the fear that Heracles’ filicidal fury will provoke more death and destruction (1055–57): “when he wakes up he will break his bonds (desma . . . chalasas) and destroy the city, and destroy his father and tear down the house.” In the Wasps scene, the command, which symbolizes the breaking of Bdelycleon’s nets and the removal of the chlaina, is therefore charged with powerful tragic implications, ominously previewing the unleashing of the most tragic amēchania, namely death. The conflation of architectural and bodily loosening in Philocleon’s epiphany reinforces the sense of a new, tragic beginning for the play. His unbolting command is accompanied by a deictic reference to the movement that opens his performance (“Here it is, the beginning of a dance”), which should probably be envisaged as miming a sequence of individual figures of tragic dancing. At 1486, Xanthias’s correcting observation (“Maybe more like the beginning of madness!”) re-creates the nexus between the fugitive impulse, feverish animation, and insanity established in the prologue. In 1494–95, Philocleon supports Xanthias’s reading of the situation while com-

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menting again on his dancing: “now (nun) my hip joints roll loose (chalara) in their sockets.” The adjective chalara, cognate with the verb chalaō, styles Philocleon’s tragic unfastening of joints as the somatic counterpart of the architectural loosening enacted by the imperative “Let these bars (klēithra) be unbolted (chalasthō),” while the adverb “now” (nun) positions this return to physical lusis against Bdelycleon’s bodily constraint, emblematized by the chlaina. Xanthias’s dismissive assessment (“crazy [manika] stuff ” 1496) reinforces the interpretation of Philocleon’s performance as an attempt to nullify the action of the deus ex machina Bdelycleon, his initial pose marking the archē (“beginning”) of a dance that, far from being comic and closural, is tragically open-ended. Philocleon’s tragic dance proves to be a self-satisfied and ultimately delusional reperformance of the bird imagery in the prologue. In this Phrynichean dance, which reproduces the movements of a fighting rooster, Philocleon moves from an initial defeated crouch (1490) to an offensive posture, kicking his legs skyward (1492). As observed by a scholiast, the image of Phrynichus crouching probably recalled the famous failure of his play The Capture of Miletus. For Philocleon, the aggressive countermove clearly expresses self-assertion against Bdelycleon and can figure, by extension, the rebellion of the comic audience against Aristophanes in 423 or even the victory of Pytine after Cratinus’s failure in the previous year. Philocleon’s triumphalism is deceptive, however. The Phrynichean thrusting of avian legs skyward recalls Philocleon’s manic upward movements in the first part of the play, presented as a bird-like means of escape (exēlleto 130; ekptēsetai 208). As a result, Philocleon’s counterattack bears the ominous mark of his tragic disease. We could say that his aggressive kicks are in danger of morphing into another iteration of a Bellerophon-like fatal flight. Thus, in imitating Phrynichus’s outdated tragic dances, Philocleon revives his initial, “flighty” evocations of a diseased Cratinean audience, now deprived of Bdelycleon’s protection and consequently faced with tragic disaster. In fact, Philocleon’s emancipation from his son’s desis implies a reacquisition of two sorts of animal identity: not just birds but also creatures of the sea. As indicated in the prologue, during his nights outside the law court Philocleon used to cling to a pillar like a limpet (105). In addition, his obsessive fear of running out of voting pebbles had caused him to transform his home into a seashore (110). Xanthias and Sosias executed their young master’s final plan of architectural constraint by covering the courtyard with diktua (131), nets employed both for hunting and fishing. In the last scene, the old man’s liberation from Bdelycleon’s nets—reflected in the imagery of architectural and bodily loosening, opening and dancing—plays with this ambiguity,

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which, as I will show, is essential to undermining the triumph of Philocleon’s Cratinean vitalism. The presentation of the sons of Carcinus (“the Crab”), Philocleon’s adversaries in the dancing contest, rests upon the same conflation of avian and marine identities. At first Philocleon likens this crowd of crustaceans to a flock “of wrens” (orchilōn 1513)—small, low-value birds—punning on the assonance between orchilōn, orcheomai (“to dance”), and orcheis (“testicles”). Fantasizing about the seafood delicacy his adversaries will become, he urges Xanthias to prepare a salty broth (1512–15): Φι. ὦ Καρκίν’, ὦ μακάριε τῆς εὐπαιδίας, ὅσον τὸ πλῆθος κατέπεσεν τῶν ὀρχίλων. ἀτὰρ καταβατέον γ’ ἐπ’ αὐτούς μοι· σὺ δὲ ἅλμην κύκα τούτοισιν, ἢν ἐγὼ κρατῶ Philocleon O Carcinus, blessed in your superb progeny! What a throng of wrens has landed! But now I must descend to vie with them. You, stir up the salty broth (halmēn) for these men, in case I triumph.

This passage forecasts a ludicrous and at the same time terrifying scenario. The flight of a wren into a house was considered a bad omen; the arrival of a flock heralded tragic apora pragmata, to use Xanthias’s language. The fishiness of Philocleon’s adversaries, which his request for broth (halmēn) plays upon, is also inauspicious, for the old man is, after all, not very different from his foes. Their crabby pedigree activates his own marine connection, one which, as we have seen, stems from his madness. Philocleon is again a limpet, happily freed from Bdelycleon’s net but unaware of his destiny. In other words, the finale’s strong intratextuality with the prologue suggests that Philocleon himself is bound for the cooking pot. Thus, his culinary instructions extend the ominousness of his command to unlock the gates, investing his kinetic exuberance with tragic irony and redefining his dream of liberation as the imminent prospect of death. This eerie scenario portends the self-destruction that Philocleon, resembling the Cratinus-afflicted audience, had invited in the paratragic monody analyzed in chapter 3. Confined to his home, he had tearfully invoked Zeus, praying to be tossed into a piping hot sauce (oxalmēn) for fish (331). As we have seen, this lyric outburst dramatizes tragedy’s enervating effects, which we can connect with Cratinean comedy through the imagistic interactions of parabasis and plot. Upon returning onstage after the symposium, Philocleon re-employed the imagery of his paratragic prayer to present himself as an Erinys-like agent of tragic violence (“I’ll make roasted fish of you with this

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torch” 1330). In the finale, a darkly ironical reactivation of the prayer transforms him into an unwitting victim, drawing upon an image—salty liquid for fish—deeply implicated in Cratinus’s comic self-representation. The common destiny of Philocleon and his adversaries seems to correspond to the tragic future awaiting the audience of the first Clouds after its emancipation from Aristophanes’ beneficial constraint (desis) and consequent affective rapprochement with Cratinean comedy. The nexus of dancing and sea creatures is central to the representation of Philocleon’s illusory liberation from Bdelycleon’s net in this final scene, as is illustrated by an Aesopic fable embedded in Book 1 of Herodotus’s narrative. During his military campaign in Lydia, Cyrus had sent an embassy to the Ionians, unsuccessfully spurring them to revolt against Croesus. After the Persian conquest of Lydia, the Ionians and Aeolians attempted to negotiate with the new winner, but Cyrus responded angrily (1.141.1–2): An aulos player . . . spotted some fish in the sea and played for them, thinking they would swim out to the shore. But when he turned out to be deluded in his hope, he took a net, cast it around a great number of fish, and dragged them out. Then, seeing them leap and quiver, he said to the fish, “Stop dancing for me, since you did not want to come out earlier, when I played my pipe.”

In this fable the dancing fish convey illusory liberation. For fish that have been caught, the usually vitalistic act of dancing becomes a spectacle of death. As the Herodotean text indicates, it is by twitching and gasping that fish resemble human dancers. In rejecting Cyrus’s overtures, the Ionians cultivated the fantasy of escaping from the Persian net, but their deluded sense of freedom was fraught with the danger that will be realized by the fish when they are dragged out onto the sand. In the finale of Wasps, the performances of the sea creatures acted out by Philocleon and his adversaries undergo a similar symbolic metamorphosis from life to death. The sauce’s forewarning of the tragic destiny that will soon trap Philocleon together with his competitors casts his jolly mimesis of Phrynichean postures as a dance of death similar to the convulsions of the fish quivering in the aulos player’s net. A second, related Herodotean fable provides another intimation of illusory liberation that reflects on the Aristophanic scene. The ending of the Histories is marked by the portent of pickled fish gasping and jumping in a pan, which appears to the Athenians after the conquest of Sestos (9.120.1): The people of the Chersonese say that an omen came to pass as one of the guards was roasting salted fish. The fish laid out on the fire were leaping and quivering, and they gasped, as if newly caught.

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Connecting this prodigy with Cyrus’s fable, Paola Ceccarelli (1993) sees the jumping fish as representing the Ionians’ final emancipation from the Persian nets. But, as John Moles (1996, 273–74) has suggested, the fact that the fish are being roasted and are explicitly associated with their gasping, just-caught counterparts casts this portentous dancing as an ephemeral liberation and a preview of Athenian oppression. In the final scene of Wasps, the salty broth condemns the dancing sea creatures—both crabs and limpet—to suffocation after Philocleon’s liberation from Bdelycleon’s therapeutic net. The grotesqueness of this scene, in which “the playfulness is . . . on the verge of collapsing and giving way to the concealed horror,” rests upon a poetics of the illusory that brings us back to the affective opposition of tribōn and chlaina. As we saw in chapter 2, Philocleon’s attachment to the tribōn, which reflects the comic audience’s bond with Cratinean comedy, betrays a misplaced confidence in its liberating power and a groundless suspicion toward the wrapping action of the chlaina. In exposing Philocleon to suffocating fevers, the tribōn is conducive to the strangling effects that he mistakenly ascribes to the chlaina. In this respect, the tribōn and Philocleon’s marine dancing are symbolically equivalent: both hide future suffocation behind a counterfeit emancipatory promise. Thus, the old man’s performance as a sea creature revives the threat of the tribōn for the comic audience after its rejection of the first Clouds’ protective and purifying efforts. We do not know whether in this scene Philocleon still wears the chlaina that he put on under duress before the drinking party, but we can probably say that, by indulging in Phrynichean dancing, he has, at least symbolically, switched back to the Cratinean tribōn, subjecting himself—with no more obstacles—to the consequences of his tragic enervation and alienation. As we will now see, the last lines of the play give us a sense of the tragic alliance of Cratinus and Phrynichus against (Aristophanic) comedy. The illusory liberation we have found in the salty broth and the tribōn leads us to a fundamental reinterpretation of the ode that closes the play, when the Chorus, in Archilochean meter, prods the crustacean tragedians to perform the rooster-like, Phrynichean postures previously mimed by Philocleon (1518–37): ἄγ’, ὦ μεγαλώνυμα τέκνα τοῦ θαλασσίοιο, πηδᾶτε παρὰ ψάμαθον (1520) καὶ θῖν’ ἁλὸς ἀτρυγέτοιο, καρίδων ἀδελφοί· ταχὺν πόδα κυκλοσοβεῖτε, καὶ τὸ Φρυνίχειον ἐκλακτισάτω τις, ὅπως (1525) ἰδόντες ἄνω σκέλος ὤζωσιν οἱ θεαταί.

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στρόβει· περίβαινε κύκλῳ καὶ γάστρισον σεαυτόν, ῥῖπτε σκέλος οὐράνιον· βέμβικες ἐγγενέσθων. (1530) καὐτὸς γὰρ ὁ ποντομέδων ἄναξ πατὴρ προσέρπει ἡσθεὶς ἐπὶ τοῖσιν ἑαυτοῦ παισὶ τοῖς τριόρχοις. ἀλλ’ ἐξάγετ’, εἴ τι φιλεῖτ’, ὀρχούμενοι, θύραζε (1535) ἡμᾶς ταχύ· τοῦτο γὰρ οὐδείς πω πάρος δέδρακεν, ὀρχούμενον ὅστις ἀπήλλαξεν χορὸν τρυγῳδῶν. Come, you great-named scions of the lord of the sea. Jump along the sand and the shore of the fruitless (atrugetoio) brine, siblings of shrimp. Whirl a swift foot, and let someone kick out the Phrynichean hop, so that seeing the leg in the air the spectators will ooh and aah! Twist! Go around in a circle and bop yourself in the breadbasket, then launch a leg skyward. Throw in pirouettes, too. For your lord father, the ruler of the sea himself, is creeping here, taking pleasure in his children, the buzzards. But lead (exagete) us quickly out of here, dancing, if you please, for nobody has ever done this before: cause a comicchorus-turned-tragic (choron trugōidōn) to exit in dance (orchoumenon).

The song stages an encounter between Phrynichus’s tragedy and Cratinus’s comedy, which would, according to a recent reading, signal a turning point in Aristophanes’ comic self-representation. As Biles has observed, the Chorus’s metrical choice turns on “a subtle allusion to Cratinus’s archilochean poetics” (2011, 166). The asynartetic Archilochean dicolon, which the Chorus selects as the tune of its Phrynichean dancing, was, in fact, repeatedly adapted by Cratinus to inflect his comic voice with the distinctive rhythm of Archilochean iambos. In Biles’s reading, the conflation of Cratinean-Archilochean singing and Phrynichean dancing enables the Chorus to advertise Aristophanes’ reconciliation with his comic rival and celebrate a joint comic triumph over contemporary tragedy (2011, 166). However, this interpretation is at odds with the ominous tragic beginning that, as we have seen, the Cratinean Philocleon’s Phrynichean dancing conjures and with the deadly future suggested here for both the old man and his tragic adversaries. Rather than depicting comedy’s usual self-styled outdoing of the adversary genre, Philocleon’s performance seems to stage a tragedy that includes him among its imminent victims. I propose, then, that the mismatched fusion of Archilochean meter and Phrynichean postures in the Chorus’s address to the sons of Carcinus encodes Aristophanes’ final relocation of Cratinean comedy into the realm of tragedy. Ancient critical reception, and Cratinus himself, hint at the tragic character of his choreographic art. In discussing Aeschylus’s groundbreaking contri-

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butions to tragic orchēsis (“dancing, choreography”), Athenaeus (1.22a), citing the musician Phillis of Delos and the late Hellenistic historian Aristocles, supplies a full list of dramatic poets well-versed in the art of dancing both as performers and choreographers: φασὶ  .  .  . ὅτι οἱ ἀρχαῖοι ποιηταί, Θέσπις, Πρατίνας, Κρατῖνος, Φρύνιχος, ὀρχησταὶ ἐκαλοῦντο διὰ τὸ μὴ μόνον τὰ ἑαυτῶν δράματα ἀναφέρειν εἰς ὄρχησιν τοῦ χοροῦ, ἀλλὰ καὶ ἔξω τῶν ἰδίων ποιημάτων διδάσκειν τοὺς βουλομένους ὀρχεῖσθαι. They (= Phillis of Delos [FHG fr. 3]; Aristocles [FHG fr. 11]) . . . say that the ancient (archaioi) poets—Thespis, Pratinas, Cratinus, Phrynichus—were called orchēstai on account of not only importing their own dramas into choral dancing, but, even beyond their own works, teaching all who were interested how to dance.

The mention of Cratinus alongside sixth- and early-fifth-century tragedians (Thespis, Pratinas, and Phrynichus) makes sense in view of certain affinities of rhythm and dancing. As eloquently shown by the anapestic parodos of Plutoi (fr. 171 KA), the metrical and choreographic constructs of some of Cratinus’s plays must have relied on dramatic techniques typical of earlyfifth-century tragedy and aimed for “an ‘archaic’ . . . kind of tragic effect” (Bakola 2010, 129). In addition, the Archilochean meter used by Cratinus and the Chorus of Wasps appears in one of the surviving fragments of Phrynichus, creating another possible connection between the comic poet’s archaia agōgē (“archaic mode”) and the archaic tragedian, whose outdated tunes (archaiomeli-sidōno-phrunichērata 220) Philocleon used to sing while leading his fellow jurors to court. The inclusion of Cratinus in the list of the four orchēstai (“dancers and choreographers”) also accords with what follows in the Athenaeus passage—a quotation from the Peripatetic philosopher Chamaeleon on Aeschylus’s habit of composing his tragedies “drunk” (methuōn). As a skilled choreographer, Aeschylus figures as a successor of the archaic orchēstai. Although Chamaeleon treats Aeschylus’s drunkenness as a personal habit, his testimony reflects a critical perception of a bacchic quality of Aeschylean aesthetics that is akin to Cratinus’s intoxicated self-presentation. The interweaving of Archilochean meter and Phrynichean postures in the Chorus’s last song, therefore, builds upon Cratinus’s flirtation with—or even self-assimilation to—the archaic tragedians to mark the Cratinean quality of Philocleon’s dancing and to turn Aristophanes’ older rival into a quasi-tragedian. In fact, as we have seen, the bird-like postures that the Chorus demonstrates in Archilocheans, imitating Philocleon, forebode the

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fatal twirls of the tragic dancers—and of the old man himself—in a cooking pot. The alignment of Cratinus with tragedy here disrupts the expected alliance of Cratinean and Aristophanic comedy against the new tragedians, setting up a unified tragic pole. On one side, then, we find tragedians both new (Carcinus’s sons) and old (Phrynichus and the Phrynichean Cratinus); on the other, the Aristophanic mode reflected in the therapeutic efforts of Bdelycleon—the great absent of this scene, whose cause the Chorus had previously endorsed. The discussion of the last two lines of the play will lead us to unpack the implications of Bdelycleon’s absence for Aristophanes’ protocanonical discourse. The ominous signs for Philocleon and Cratinean comedy cast a shadow on the much-discussed final two lines of the play, in particular the last word, trugōidōn. After taunting Carcinus and his offspring for their marine and avian traits (1531–34), the Chorus assigns the leading role in the exit procession to the crabby tragedians and, presumably, Philocleon, asking to be led offstage by them (exagete 1535). The following statement is presented as the reason for the request: “For nobody has ever done this before: cause a comicchorus-turned-tragic to exit in dance” (1536–37). Matthew Wright (2013a, 224) has observed that, in these lines, Aristophanes advertises his originality in his victorious handling of the contest of comedy versus tragedy through “a trugic chorus” (choron trugōidōn), i.e., “a comic chorus ‘doing’ tragedy,” and, therefore, parodically importing the older genre into the comic domain. But if the Phrynichean performance initiated by Philocleon is an expression of his self-destructive attachment to Cratinus’s tragic kōmōidia, the interplay of comedy and tragedy encoded in the term trugōidōn and, consequently, the tone of the entire statement undergo a substantial interpretive shift. In presenting the manner and, I would argue, the context of its imminent departure as unprecedented, the Chorus may not be enthusiastically commenting on Aristophanes’ innovations in the play. It may rather be manifesting discomfort with the actions of Philocleon, who has initiated tragic dancing, and, in breaking Bdelycleon’s net, transformed the expected happy ending of the comic plot into the beginning of a tragic spectacle. Philocleon has reshaped the comic Chorus into a tragic one, bound to witness the unfolding of dire events. Placed in this new role, the members of the Chorus are calling upon the experts of tragic performance (Carcinus’s sons and also Philocleon). In seeking their guidance, they seem to be struggling with how to face the crisis of generic identity resulting from the unusual trugōidia—a comedy doing tragedy in the sense of becoming tragedy. The punning resonance between atrugetoio (“fruitless” 1521) at the beginning of the the ode and trugōidōn at the very end in a way highlights the unusual generic direction taken by trugōidia

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in this finale—a literal negation of the fertile, festive, “comic” (trug-) and an uncanny reactivation of the latter half of the portmanteau word (trux + tragōidia) in its original connection with the barren, gloomy, and tragic. In this perspective, the brine described as atrugetoio coincides with the salty broth—almost an image of tears—into which all the characters, Philocleon and his adversaries, will ultimately fall. I suggest, in other words, that Aristophanes is using trugōidōn not in the conventional sense, but in an ironical one, reversing the hierarchy usually reflected in trugōidia (comedy winning over tragedy) to allude polemically to Cratinus’s assimilation of his comedy to archaic tragedy. The statement that “nobody” (before Philocleon) has ever embarked on this experimental trugōidia, then, underscores the disturbing eccentricity of Cratinus’s tragic comedy, which Philocleon is reproducing. In these final lines, the Chorus’s sarcastic tone, which caused its earlier performative instructions to sound almost like defiant imperatives, seems to shift to a mixture of uneasiness and bitter irony, communicating its fundamental distance from the tragic turn taken by the play after the exit of the deus ex machina Bdelycleon. The Chorus’s estrangement from the play’s tragic turn makes Bdelycleon’s therapeutic comic desis an absent presence, an object of implicit longing. In a moment of identification with the comic poet, Bdelycleon had noted, “it’s a hard task, and one requiring formidable knowledge beyond the level of comedians (trugōidois), to cure the city’s old sickness (noson archaian 650–51).” The reading of the play that I have proposed here and in previous chapters suggests that the political target of this difficult task converges with the Cratinus-afflicted audience’s tragic disease. As “the old sickness” besetting Philocleon and the comic audience recrudesces and prevails at the end of the play, pushing the trugōidia into tragedy, the Chorus’s discomfort seems to intimate a nostalgic desire for the genuinely comic efforts of Bdelycleon’s and Aristophanes’ therapeutic desis. Bdelycleon, who can only witness from afar the repercussions of his father’s choice of madness over sanity, and therefore tragedy over comedy, is relegated to the role of the marginalized, Cassandralike kathartēs (“purifier”) that the Chorus had reserved for Aristophanes in the parabatic account of the failure of the first Clouds. The image of a comic kathartēs unappreciated by a diseased audience confusing quasi-tragedy with genuine comedy transforms Aristophanes’ failure into a momentary setback, a paradoxical confirmation of his mode’s legitimacy. Dramatizing the defeat of the first Clouds as the mistake of a blinkered audience drawn toward a deranged comedy, Wasps seems thus to pave the way for the undoing of Aristophanes’ failure. The ominous future that, if we read between the lines, threatens Philo-

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cleon’s dancing performance seems to vindicate Bdelycleon and the first Clouds, not only presenting a cautionary tale for the comic audience, but also obliquely setting the terms of comic literary history. While the ostensibly victorious Cratinean mode is condemned to the disastrous consequences of its tragic quality, Bdelycleon’s absence from the play’s unhappy ending may symbolically grant a prospect of survival to the provisionally vanquished exponent of semnotēs. Aristophanic comedy will live to fight another day. The poet’s self-deprecating replay of his recent failure is fundamentally a protocanonical gesture, hinting at the eventual triumph of the chlaina-like comic mode rebuffed by the audience of the first Clouds 4. Conclusions I have discussed how crucial moments in the final scenes of Wasps plot the comic audience’s return to the Cratinean fashion in 423 after the ephemeral success of Knights. Looking at Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Erich Segal has seen a reversal of what he considers the typical Aristophanic ending. As he puts it, “in place of the traditional comic themes of rebirth, appetite, and phallic triumph, we have senescence, frustration, and impotence” (1994, 237). The standard Aristophanic trajectory gives way to what Segal calls “tragicomic stasis.” And yet a Beckettian tragicomic stasis seems to pervade the finale of Wasps. As I proposed, Philocleon’s sympotic and post-sympotic antics do not reshape his madness as a euphoric comic force, nor does the final absence of Bdelycleon validate his father’s unbridled manic energy as genuinely liberating. On the contrary, Philocleon’s sympotic manners—or lack of them—as well as his hubristic interactions and the absurd balletic contest at the end of the play consistently hint at the unsettling, sinister aspects of the old man’s (and the comic audience’s) unwillingness and inability to adhere to the cathartic affect offered by Bdelycleon and, as suggested in the parabasis, by Aristophanes. As I argued in the previous chapter, the first part of Wasps can be seen to intimate the comic audience’s reception of Cratinean drama as a tragic experience of emotional dissipation of the self, a tragedy-induced raggedness emblematized by the tribōn. As Philocleon markedly slips from a quasispectator to a kind of Cratinean performer in the last part of the play, the coarse aggressiveness and iambic abjection of Cratinus’s phortikē kōmōidia are folded into crazed violence and self-destruction, distinctive forces of tragedy. The self-consciously archaic character of Cratinus’s comedies, which adopted postures and poetic modes of the early tragedians, is thus converted into a deeper affinity with the older genre as an atavistic and, we could even

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say, chthonic dramatic domain. In the finale of Wasps, tragedy becomes the appropriate genre for the primitive and monstrous identity that the parabasis seems allusively to assign to the comic mode of Aristophanes’ rival. According to the self-justifying narrative of the parabasis of Wasps, the audience of the first Clouds unjustly blamed Aristophanes for having defamiliarized comedy through his suspect brand of kainotēs (“novelty”) and alien sophistication. In dramatizing the tribulations of the previous year’s play, Wasps turns against Cratinus this charge of defamiliarization. The failure of the first Clouds is, in fact, imputed to the comic audience’s incurable attraction to an alienated comedy threateningly bordering on the archaic territory of the adversary genre of tragedy. In light of the transition from Cratinus’s archaia agōgē (“archaic mode”) to Aristophanic comedy referred to in the Life of Aristophanes, we may see Wasps providing ancient critics with the notion of Bdelycleon’s and Aristophanes’ beneficial semnotēs as the essential ingredient that allowed a still-unstable genre, indulging in archaic primitivism and thus dangerously resembling tragedy, to become true comedy. We can also say that the refined, healing softness of Aristophanes’ chlaina transformed an ambiguous texture, whose iambic feel too much resembled a tragic one, fixing a new generic standard. Replaying the ineffectiveness of Clouds may seem a peculiar strategy, but Wasps’ rereading of this failure as the story of an unappreciated but vital therapy for comedy and the comic audience need not be seen as entirely selfironical. Playing the role of the misunderstood bearer of therapeutic semnotēs and of sōphrosunē (“self-control”) served to place the losing comedian in a position of supremacy over his vanquisher, at least in the eyes of future readers. It is the inherent canonicity of these values that enduringly rescued the Aristophanic mode from the setback of 423. Bdelycleon may himself be an occasional satiric target, but his therapeutic mission functions as an authoritative strategy for the comedian whose self-styled aesthetic semnotēs and sōphrosunē are implicated in the demeanor of this paternal son. This mission, expressive of a philopatria (“love of father”) that informs the relationship between comic poet and audience, transforms comic canonicity into a question of literary affections. In the next chapter, we will see how the absence of a character evoking the Aristophanic mode continues in the development of the narrative of Wasps that is supplied in the second version of Clouds. As I plan to show, Aristophanes restages the incomprehension of his audience but excludes himself from the plot, leaving the audience alone with a new rival (Eupolis) resembling the old one (Cratinus).

5 Aristophanes’ Electra Complex and the Future of Comedy ELECTRA (to Chrysothemis) Now although it is possible for you to be called the daughter of the best father of all, be called instead your mother’s. For that way you’ll appear wicked to most people, after having betrayed your dead father and your friends. S o p h o c l e s , Electra 365–67 CLYTEMNESTRA (to Electra) Some children side with the male; others love their mother more than their father. E u r i p i d e s , Electra 1103–4 The location of authenticity becomes whatever is distant to the present time and space. S u s a n S t e w a r t , On Longing

I now consider how the second Clouds refashions the self-serving narrative of dramatic affect laid out in Wasps, furthering Aristophanes’ proto-canonical construction of his comic supremacy. The revised version of Clouds was probably composed between 419 and 417 BCE but never produced at any major festival. Drawing attention to the play’s sophisticated theatricality and deep engagement with agonistic festival dynamics, several scholars have recently questioned the long-held belief that Aristophanes intended the revision exclusively for a reading audience, suggesting that he did originally conceive it for performance. Agreeing with this conclusion and treating the play as a performable script as well as a literary text, I see its agonistic dimension and the fact of its revision as laying the ground for authorial self-definition that reaches beyond performative contingencies, projecting the Aristophanic comic mode toward its later reception and dictating the terms of the ancient literary-critical history of Old Comedy. As I argue, the revised Clouds picks up on Bdelycleon’s absence in the finale of Wasps and casts itself as a metadramatic depiction of the comic audience’s dangerous liaisons with Aristophanes’ new competitors, Eupolis in particular. The play transports the retrospective agenda of Wasps into the present, framing an intra-generational comic rivalry as a continuation of the same aesthetic battle. In meditating upon its previous incarnation by replacing Cratinus with Eupolis, the past with the present, the revised Clouds contributed to the unfavorable pairing of the two comedians against Aristoph-

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anes that we observe in the ancient critical tradition. The lack of sōphrosunē (“self-control”), for which Wasps faults Cratinus’s tragic comedy—shaping its critical reception—informs the dramatization of Eupolis’s relationship with the comic audience in the second Clouds. The presence of the Aeschylean Electra in the parabasis is key to understanding the terms of this dramatization. Aristophanes appropriates the defense of paternal authority embodied by the tragic heroine to transform the conflict of comic modes in Wasps into a confrontation between two filial models: on the one hand, the Aeschylean “daddy’s girl,” committed to avenging Agamemnon; on the other, Strepsiades’ spoiled son, Pheidippides, who bankrupts his frugal father through the extravagant lifestyle of his mother’s aristocratic family. The central role of the sōphrōn (“self-controlled”) Electra in the parabasis of the second Clouds provides a basis for reading the problematic father-son relationship portrayed throughout the plot as an image of the abuses that the comic audience, deprived of Aristophanes’ Electra-like solicitude, experiences at the hands of the new comedians and especially Eupolis. The resonances between plot and parabasis also insinuate affinities between Eupolis and Socrates, Pheidippides’ teacher. In the revised play’s conceit, the pitting of Eupolis’s comic mode against Aristophanes’ selfproclaimed devotion to a father-like audience aligns the new rival’s continuation of Cratinus’s phortikē kōmōidia (“vulgar, ephemeral comedy”) with the behavior of Pheidippides as well as with the anti-paternal philosophy of the Socratic phrontistērion (“Thinkery”). The assimilation of Eupolis to Pheidippides and Socrates rests upon motifs (removal of protective textiles, suffocation) and tragic thematics (infantilized, abused fatherhood; pathei mathos [“learning through suffering”]; madness) that mark the second Clouds as a reconfiguration of Wasps in which Aristophanes represents the hardships of a comic audience stripped of Bdelycleon’s (and his own) filial tutelage. The chlaina, which in Wasps materialized Aristophanes’ therapeutic affect, is reconceived as a protective himation (“outer garment”) that Socrates steals from Strepsiades, and Eupolis from the comic audience. The chlaina’s combination of semnotēs (“dignity”) and sōphrosunē, which, in Wasps, defined the affective force of the first Clouds, gives way to the sōphrosunē of Strepsiades’ himation. The common target in Wasps and the second Clouds—phortikē kōmōidia—emphasizes the strong continuity. Building upon the testimony of the play’s sixth hypothesis—one of the introductory comments found in manuscripts and dating back to Hellenistic scholars—I regard the second Clouds as the product of a thorough and systematic process of re-creation. However, beyond the portions clearly established as new, I do not attempt to determine what the revised version

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preserves or alters. My main interest is to show how it prolongs Wasps’ tendentious account of Aristophanes’ failure in 423, deploying against Eupolis’s comic mode the same strategies of delegitimation. I will do this by looking at the intratextual connections of the new parabasis with the dramatic action considered in its own terms, regardless of how it repurposes a pre-existing text or introduces material. My discussion of the play employs, again, the strategy of reading backward and forward. I first examine the parabasis, illustrating the affinities with Electra that Aristophanes claims for himself as he retraces his poetic career and defines his relationship with his audience and rivals. I then recover elements of this narrative in the first and last parts of the play, focusing on moments that arguably figure the exposure of the audience to Eupolis’s reenactment of Cratinean phortikē kōmōidia: Strepsiades’ initial encounter with Socrates; his undressing at Socrates’ behest; and his final confrontation with Pheidippides, followed by his decision to burn down the Thinkery. Read through the intratextuality of parabasis and plot, this finale—to a degree, a complement of the Wasps’ unhappy ending—becomes suggestive of the comic audience’s revenge for the loss of the Aristophanic himation, the cloak that objectifies a performative experience and the affect of a whole comic mode as the feel of philopatria (“love of father”). In a sense, the resulting incineration prefigures the loss of the works of both Eupolis and Cratinus—a consequence of the secondary position that Aristophanes’ strategy of delegitimation helped bring about. 1. Aristophanes’ Oresteia In the parabasis of the second Clouds, Aristophanes uses the Aeschylean Electra to resume the stance of the paternal son detectable in Wasps. The parabasis of the revised Clouds explicitly looks back to that of Wasps, reproaching spectators for their failure to appreciate the first Clouds in 423 (524–27). However, by referring to his vanquishers as phortikoi andres (“vulgar men” 524), Aristophanes supplies a fuller picture of the plays’s aesthetic triangle (himself, the audience, his comic rivals), whose third member he had omitted in the earlier parabasis. The Aeschylean Electra—an alter ego of Aristophanes’ comic persona as well as of the returning Clouds—enhances the continuity, renewing Wasps’ narrative of filial solicitude and linking Aristophanes’ old and new adversaries. As we will see, Aristophanes’ Electra complex in the parabasis entails correspondences between the figures of the aforementioned triangle, the protagonists of the Oresteia, and the characters of the second Clouds.

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From the mention of Clouds’ past defeat, Aristophanes segues to the very beginning of his poetic career. Before concentrating on the return of Clouds (534–48), he evokes his debut play, Banqueters, through its antithetical brothers, “the self-controlled one (sōphrōn) and the libertine (katapugōn)” (529), and compares his apprenticeship as a playwright not yet allowed to produce his comedies with the plight of an unwed mother forced to expose her child and have it claimed by another girl (528–48): ἐξ ὅτου γὰρ ἐνθάδ’ ὑπ’ ἀνδρῶν, οὓς ἡδὺ καὶ λέγειν, ὁ σώφρων τε χὠ καταπύγων ἄριστ’ ἠκουσάτην, κἀγώ, παρθένος γὰρ ἔτ’ ἦν, κοὐκ ἐξῆν πώ μοι τεκεῖν, (530) ἐξέθηκα, παῖς δ’ ἑτέρα τις λαβοῦσ’ ἀνείλετο, ὑμεῖς δ’ ἐξεθρέψατε γενναίως κἀπαιδεύσατε· ἐκ τούτου μοι πιστὰ παρ’ ὑμῶν γνώμης ἔσθ’ ὅρκια. νῦν οὖν Ἠλέκτραν κατ’ ἐκείνην ἥδ’ ἡ κωμῳδία ζητοῦσ’ ἦλθ’, ἤν που ’πιτύχῃ θεαταῖς οὕτω σοφοῖς· (535) γνώσεται γάρ, ἤνπερ ἴδῃ, τἀδελφοῦ τὸν βόστρυχον. ὡς δὲ σώφρων ἐστὶ φύσει σκέψασθ’· ἥτις πρῶτα μὲν οὐδὲν ἦλθε ῥαψαμένη σκύτινον καθειμένον, ἐρυθρὸν ἐξ ἄκρου, παχύ, τοῖς παιδίοις ἵν’ ᾖ γέλως· οὐδ’ ἔσκωψεν τοὺς φαλακρούς, οὐδὲ κόρδαχ’ εἵλκυσεν, (540) οὐδὲ πρεσβύτης ὁ λέγων τἄπη τῇ βακτηρίᾳ τύπτει τὸν παρόντ’, ἀφανίζων πονηρὰ σκώμματα, οὐδ’ εἰσῇξε δᾷδας ἔχουσ’ οὐδ’ “ἰοὺ ἰού” βοᾷ, ἀλλ’ αὑτῇ καὶ τοῖς ἔπεσιν πιστεύουσ’ ἐλήλυθεν. κἀγὼ μὲν τοιοῦτος ἀνὴρ ὢν ποιητὴς οὐ κομῶ, (545) οὐδ’ ὑμᾶς ζητῶ ’ξαπατᾶν δὶς καὶ τρὶς ταὔτ’ εἰσάγων, ἀλλ’ αἰεὶ καινὰς ἰδέας εἰσφέρων σοφίζομαι, οὐδὲν ἀλλήλαισιν ὁμοίας καὶ πάσας δεξιάς. For since the time when my self-controlled (sōphrōn) boy and my libertine (katapugōn) heard the best things said about them by men whom it is a pleasure even to speak of, and I—because I was still unmarried and it was not yet permitted for me to have a child—exposed my baby, and some other girl picked it up and took it and you nobly reared (exethrepsate) and educated (epaideusate) it—since that time I have had your reliable, sworn pledges of judgment ( gnōmēs). So now, like the famous Electra, this comedy has come (ēlthe) seeking (zētousa) whether somewhere she can find spectators as wise. For she will recognize her brother’s lock if she spots it. Look how selfcontrolled (sōphrōn) she is by nature—a gal who, first, has arrived without stitching together anything leathery and dangling, thick and red at the tip, so that there may be a laugh for the children. Nor has she made fun of baldies nor danced a kordax. Nor does a codger, the one who delivers the lines, hit who-

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ever is there with his stick, concealing his bad jokes ( ponēra skōmmata). Nor has she burst in carrying torches. Nor does she shout “iou, iou.” Rather she has come onstage trusting herself and her words (epesin). And I myself, being such a poet, do not wear long hair (ou komō), nor do I seek to cheat (exapatan) you by showcasing the same things twice or three times, but I always apply my ingenuity to producing new (kainas) ideas, in no respect similar to each other and all of them clever.

In the vignette of Aristophanes’ debut depicted in 530–33, the parabasis casts the comic audience as a father figure, re-creating the symbolic link between spectatorship and paternity thematized in Wasps. At 532, the verbs exethrepsate (“you reared”) and epaideusate (“you educated”) equate the spectators with eagerly committed foster-fathers. As I will argue, the paternal identity assigned to the audience in this line is presupposed in Aristophanes’ subsequent assimilation of the returning Clouds to the Aeschylean Electra. Just as the audience of Aristophanes’ early career corresponds to the responsible and dignified father that Philocleon should have been, the Electra-like Clouds described in 534–44 revives the devoted, father-rescuing son Bdelycleon. In 534–36, the depiction of Clouds as a new Electra has long drawn the concern of commentators. Though the play, which “has come (ēlthe) seeking (zētousa 535),” clearly reenacts Electra’s visit to her father’s tomb in the first episode of Aeschylus’s Libation Bearers, what of the “wise spectators” of 535? The following line (“she will recognize her brother’s lock if she spots it”) has prompted the unanimous conclusion that the intelligent audience sought out by Aristophanes’ Electra-like play is troped as a double of Orestes. Kenneth Dover, while accepting this interpretation, has conceded that “unlike Aristophanes’ play, which has come to the theater in the hope of finding there the approbation which his earlier play found, Electra does not ‘go seeking’ (it is Orestes who seeks her)” (1968, 168). However, considering the characterization and the dramatic function of the Aeschylean heroine in the initial scenes of Libation Bearers will lead us to conclude that Electra does “go seeking” an audience—not Orestes but Agamemnon—and that Aristophanes’ returning play follows suit. The traditional view of Aeschylus’s Electra as a secondary character— especially compared with her powerful and transgressive Euripidean and Sophoclean counterparts—has been reassessed along the lines of Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Möllendorff, who accorded her a determining role, eclipsing that of Orestes. In the first scene of the play, Electra’s lengthy exchange with the Chorus about how to perform the libations and the prayer Clytemnestra has requested does not show her as timorous, naive, and utterly reliant

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upon choral advice, as many critics used to argue. From the outset, Electra displays a compulsive concern with choosing the best words to please her father (86–91 and 98–99). Furthermore, she immediately airs her unwillingness to carry out the ritual according to her mother’s wishes (89–93) and makes an impassioned appeal to the Chorus in the name of their shared hatred for Clytemnestra (100–102). All these elements betray her firm intention to alter the purpose of the ritual as well as her anxious effort to secure the Chorus’s complicity. Electra’s concern with the efficacy of her words supplies us with a precious clue in grasping Aristophanes’ assimilation of his play to the tragic heroine. At Libation Bearers 88, Electra’s self-referential question—“How can I say things which will be well received (euphrona) [by my father]?”—captures a preoccupation that lies at the core of the comic poet’s problematic engagement with his audience as constructed in the parabasis of the second Clouds. Like Electra, he is caught up in the challenge of finding the right words to win his audience’s approval and gain nikē (“victory”)—“something of a key word in the Libation Bearers” (Kitto 1956, 147). Electra’s insistently showcased desire for linguistic efficacy (“what shall I say?” 87; 89; “or shall I use this word [epos]?” 91; “I don’t know what to say” 98) makes it clear that she has decided to come to her father’s tomb, like Aristophanes’ play, “trusting herself and her words (epesi)” (Clouds 544). Electra’s ardent prayer in Libation Bearers 138–48 can thus be read as a sort of parabatic address to Agamemnon, a suitable trope for an appeal to a lost paternal audience: ἐλθεῖν δ’ Ὀρέστην δεῦρο σὺν τύχῃ τινὶ κατεύχομαί σοι, καὶ σὺ κλῦθί μου, πάτερ, αὐτῇ τέ μοι δὸς σωφρονεστέραν πολὺ (140) μητρὸς γενέσθαι χεῖρά τ’ εὐσεβεστέραν. ἡμῖν μὲν εὐχὰς τάσδε, τοῖς δ’ ἐναντίοις λέγω φανῆναι σοῦ, πάτερ, τιμάορον, καὶ τοὺς κτανόντας ἀντικατθανεῖν δίκῃ. ταῦτ’ ἐν μέσῳ τίθημι τῆς καλῆς ἀρᾶς, (145) κείνοις λέγουσα τήνδε τὴν κακὴν ἀράν· ἡμῖν δὲ πομπὸς ἴσθι τῶν ἐσθλῶν ἄνω, σὺν θεοῖσι καὶ γῇ καὶ δίκῃ νικηφόρῳ. I pray to you—and please listen to me, father—that Orestes come here through some good fortune, and for me grant that I be much more selfcontrolled (sōphronesteran) than my mother and more pious in deed. Such are the prayers for us, but for our enemies, father, I ask that your avenger appear

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and that those who killed you be killed in return, as is just. I place this in the middle of my good prayer, pronouncing this evil prayer against them. But be a guide for blessings up here, together with the gods, the earth, and justice that brings victory.

Electra presents Agamemnon as the one who will both fulfill her request and benefit most from it, for by ensuring her success, he will be symbolically reintegrated into the world of the living and restored to his bygone power. In visiting Agamemnon’s tomb, Electra “goes seeking” her father’s support in recovering his stolen authority, while Orestes’ lock is a concrete expression of such support. In likening Clouds to the Aeschylean Electra, Aristophanes expands on the fatherly characterization of the comic audience at 532 and thereby reaffirms the equivalence dramatized at various levels in Wasps between responsible paternity and the audience’s appreciation of poetic value. Within this miniature reécriture of the Libation Bearers, Electra serves as a defender of paternal law, while Orestes’ lock stands for dramatic victory, the most recognizable proof of the audience’s recovery of its fatherly identity. We can conclude that from the “narrative of intergenerational conflict” (Goldhill 1984, 207) thematized in Libation Bearers, Aristophanes borrows a compelling paradigm of intense, even obsessive, attachment to the father figure, which he turns into a self-serving metapoetic trope. Electra’s attempt to restore Agamemnon’s paternal authority, in other words, resembles the father-rescuing mission of the paternal son Bdelycleon in Wasps. The Aeschylean Electra and Bdelycleon share a commitment to sōphrosunē, to which the latter unsuccessfully tried to convert his father. At 537, Aristophanes calls attention to the continence of his play (“Look how self-controlled [sōphrōn] she is by nature”) and, in so doing, advertises a further aspect of Clouds’ Electra-like nature. Electra’s propensity for sōphrosunē is inscribed in her name and tied to her devotion to Agamemnon. In fact, her prayer to her father, which cues the parabasis’s allusive engagement with the Aeschylean play, explicitly urges him to make her more sōphrōn than her mother (sōphronesteran 140). The Electra-inspired sōphrosunē of Clouds, which anticipates the ideal young man’s profile delineated by the Stronger Argument in the agōn, is also set in contrast with the phortikē kōmōidia exemplified by Philocleon’s Cratinean antics in the closing scenes of Wasps. The tongue-in-cheek recusal from the thick, dangling leather phallus, trumpeted in Clouds 538–39, matches the Stronger Argument’s contempt for sexual laxity, which he links to wellendowed youth (1018–19). In Clouds 541–42, the old man hitting bystanders with a stick while launching into ponēra skōmmata (“bad jokes”) recalls

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Philocleon striking passers-by (Wasps 1296; 1322–23) on his way back from the drinking party, where he insulted guests and recounted silly, inappropriate stories (1319–21). The Electra-like sōphrosunē of Clouds is thus constructed as a corrective for the lowbrow comedy practiced by the phortikoi andres (especially Cratinus) responsible for Aristophanes’ defeat in 423 and resumed by the new rival Eupolis, as we will see below. Not only the returning Clouds but also its author claims affinities with the sōphrōn Electra, at the same time strategically redefining his earlier relationship with semnotēs. Line 545 (“And I myself, being such a poet [i.e., like Electra], do not wear long hair”) registers a shift in focus from the play back to the comic poet himself. Aristophanes forges his comic persona as an embodiment of sōphrosunē by shrewdly directing attention to his baldness, building upon the well-worn social stereotype of long hair as a sign of aristocratic arrogance, effeminacy, and sexual liberty. In Wasps, the Chorus’s initial suspicion toward the sōphrōn Bdelycleon’s long hair figured the comic audience’s misconstrual of the first Clouds’ beneficial semnotēs—the play’s diffusion of invigorating physical and psychological self-restraint, hidden behind the aristocratic flair of its cloak-like texture. In advertising the return of his unsuccessful play, Aristophanes exploits his hairlessness to reassert the sōphrosunē of his comic mode in all its incarnations and, as we will see in due course, to turn against his new rivals the negative stereotypes about semnotēs that, according to his narrative, the audience of 423 unfairly associated with the salubrious touch of his comedy. The tonsorial discourse sets up a contrast of filial models between Aristophanes-as-Electra and Pheidippides, Strepsiades’ bad son, with whom wearing long hair (koman) is programmatically associated. At the beginning of the play, Strepsiades presents his son’s hair as the correlative of his obsession with his financially ruinous horse racing: “wearing his hair long, he rides horses and chariots and even dreams about horses, while I am dying!” (14–16). It is evident that Aristophanes’ allusion to his baldness pits his poetic personality against the Oedipal (father-destroying, mother-loving) Pheidippides, thereby enhancing the comedian’s alignment not only with the sōphrosunē but also with the philopatria of Electra. Already in the Aeschylean version, Electra’s devotion to Agamemnon entails contempt and hatred for her fierce and transgressive mother. Aristophanes’ model of filial psychology corresponds to what Carl Gustav Jung called the Electra complex but without its pathological dimension. As Strepsiades explains in the prologue, Pheidippides’ hippomania, reflected in his talking name (ending with the highfalutin suffix -ippidēs), shows the influence of his mother—the aristocratic, luxury-loving member (apparently) of the Alcmaeonid family, who degrad-

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ingly dominated her husband and took control of their son’s education (41–55 and 59–74). When Strepsiades threatens to kick Pheidippides out, the young man invokes the illustrious name of his mother’s brother (124–25): “but my uncle Megacles won’t let me remain horseless.” We can thus say that, by drawing the attention of his paternal audience to his baldness, Aristophanes hints at his own “Electra complex,” defining his comic stance in opposition to the Oedipal paradigm dramatized in the plot. The allusion to the habitus of Strepsiades’ son is linked with the theme of deception, as we see in 545–46: “I myself . . . do not wear long hair (ou komō), nor do I seek to cheat (exapatan) you.” Such a link, I will argue, suggests resemblances between Pheidippides as his mother’s child and Aristophanes’ new rivals, but also, in indirect ways, between Eupolis, Socrates, and Clytemnestra. The last part of the parabasis elucidates the nature of this deception— stolen and ruined poetic goods—as well as the excessive violence against satiric targets that, implicitly, threatens the audience itself (549–59): ὃς μέγιστον ὄντα Κλέων’ ἔπαισ’ εἰς τὴν γαστέρα κοὐκ ἐτόλμησ’ αὖθις ἐπεμπηδῆσ’ αὐτῷ κειμένῳ. (550) οὗτοι δ’, ὡς ἅπαξ παρέδωκεν λαβὴν Ὑπέρβολος, τοῦτον δείλαιον κολετρῶσ’ ἀεὶ καὶ τὴν μητέρα. Εὔπολις μὲν τὸν Μαρικᾶν πρώτιστον παρείλκυσεν ἐκστρέψας τοὺς ἡμετέρους Ἱππέας κακὸς κακῶς, προσθεὶς αὐτῷ γραῦν μεθύσην τοῦ κόρδακος οὕνεχ’, ἣν (555) Φρύνιχος πάλαι πεποίηχ’, ἣν τὸ κῆτος ἤσθιεν. εἶθ’ Ἕρμιππος αὖθις ἐποίησεν εἰς Ὑπέρβολον, ἅλλοι τ’ ἤδη πάντες ἐρείδουσιν εἰς Ὑπέρβολον, τὰς εἰκοὺς τῶν ἐγχέλεων τὰς ἐμὰς μιμούμενοι. I’m the guy who socked Cleon in the stomach when he was most powerful, but I did not have the chutzpah to leap on him (epempēdēsai) again when he was on his back. But these guys always stomp (koletrōsi) on the miserable Hyperbolus, and his mother too, as soon as he lets them get a hold of him ( paredōken labēn). First, Eupolis dragged ( pareilkusen) his Maricas onstage, after rottenly turning inside out (ekstrepsas) our Knights like the rotten person he is and, just to have a kordax, tacked on a drunken old woman, the same one that Phrynichus presented a long time ago, whom the sea monster tried to gobble. Then Hermippus went after Hyperbolus again, and now all the others are setting upon (ereidousin) him, imitating my similes (eikous) of the eels.

The passage condemns the practitioners of the poetic deception (recycled ideas) that Aristophanes as an Electra-like comedian (“being such a poet” 545) claims always to have refused out of loyalty to his fatherly audience. The

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participle ekstrepsas (554) equates the plagiarism of Eupolis’s Maricas (Lenaia 421 BCE) with a sartorial misdeed. After stealing Knights, Eupolis turned it inside out like a himation and stitched on a trashy set piece of phortikē kōmōidia (a drunken old woman dancing the kordax) lifted from Phrynichus (555–56). Hermippus, meanwhile, and unnamed comedians have reused Aristophanes’ similes (eikous) for their cruel mockery of the demagogue Hyperbolus (558–59). Such theft does injustice not only to the originators of poetic ideas but also to the audience cheated of the pleasure of dramatic originality. The strong link between koman (“to wear long hair”) and exapatan (“to deceive”) in 545–46 connects these comic deceivers with Pheidippides, turning Aristophanes’ rivals, especially Eupolis, into dangerous underminers of the comic audience’s paternal authority. Eupolis’s prominence is signaled by the parabasis’s use of a form of the Eupolidean meter that is, in all likelihood, a product of this comic poet’s weakness for metrical ataxia (“unruliness”). In “dragging” onstage ( pareilkusen 553) Aristophanes’ himation in the patched and disfigured form of Maricas, Eupolis not only damages the refined fabric of his rival’s comedy but presents his play in the affected manner of effeminate young aristocrats, like Pheidippides or Alcibiades, who notoriously dragged their robes on the ground in defiance of traditional masculine protocol. By insinuating a kinship between the long-haired, “unruly,” father-destroying Pheidippides and Eupolis and his colleagues, Aristophanes raises the suspicion that the comic audience deceived by them may also become the target of their satirical violence. Aristophanes’ Electra complex, then, casts the conflict between the comic poet and his new adversaries, still attached to phortikē kōmōidia, as a confrontation of filial models reminiscent of the plot of Banqueters. As indicated in the parabasis (529), Aristophanes’ debut opposed a sōphrōn, Electra-like son, respectful of his father’s authority, to a katapugōn (literally, a “bugger”), a rebellious brother in the mode of Pheidippides. The parabasis of the second Clouds, we now see, shows Aristophanes as a father’s child battling with Eupolis, a mother’s son. Long hair and deception also tie the parabatic representation of Eupolis and the other violent comedians together with Aristophanes’ distorted portrait of the Socrates of the Clouds as an unscrupulous producer of sophists. Outside the parabasis, the verb exapatan appears only once in the play, at the very end, as Strepsiades exhorts his son to help him “destroy that lousy Chaerephon and Socrates, who cheated (exēpatōn) you and me” (1464–66). Long hair (koman) marks the products of Socratic education, as the ability to nourish long-haired sophists (sophistas . . . sphragidonuchargokomētas 331–32) figures among the merits of the clouds listed by Socrates after the female deities

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arrive onstage as allies of the Thinkery. The Socratic school, therefore, seems congenial both to Strepsiades’ son and Aristophanes’ deceitful rivals. Aristophanes’ allegation of satiric brutality on the part of his new rivals— which previews the critique of Eupolis and Cratinus in the Life of Aristophanes and other sources—associates Eupolis in particular not just with Pheidippides but with Electra’s deceptive antagonist in the Libation Bearers, Clytemnestra. The violence that, in Aristophanes’ account, marks the new rivals’ satire and plagiarism recalls Clytemnestra’s murder and mutilation of Agamemnon. In particular, Aristophanes’ professed reluctance to jump on the fallen Cleon (549–50) implicitly aligns his rivals’ ferocity with the killing of Agamemnon as reported by Clytemnestra herself in Agamemnon 1380–92. After wounding her husband twice, she did not hesitate to strike a third blow when he collapsed (1385–86). In addition, the picture of cruel satirists treading upon their victims (epempēdēsai 550; koletrōsi 552) converges with the trampling that pervades the Oresteia’s representation of hubris: hearing the king’s screams from within the house, the Chorus refers to the misdeeds of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus as a “trampling underfoot” ( patountes 1357). The framework of the Oresteia seems thus to ally Aristophanes’ adversaries with the threatening maternal power that defines Clytemnestra and influences Pheidippides to act on its behalf. Aristophanes’ tendentious self-positioning toward audience and adversaries in the parabasis is entangled with the plots of the second Clouds and the Oresteia. In the remainder of the chapter, I will examine the parabatic narrative’s incursions into the dramatic action by looking at scenes that seem to bring Eupolis and the other followers of Cratinus’s phortikē kōmōidia onstage through the interconnected figures of Socrates, Clytemnestra, and Pheidippides. This analysis will lead to the suggestion that the familial drama of the second Clouds stages the perils of a fatherly audience bereft of the protection of Aristophanes’ Electra-like comedy. It will also uncover ways in which interactions of plot and parabasis in the second Clouds resume the distinctive proto-canonical elements built up in Wasps: the nexus between the Aristophanic mode’s protective affect and the materiality of cloaks as well as the delegitimizing assimilation of phortikē kōmōidia to the chthonic forces of tragedy. 2. The Comic Stage as Tragic Classroom: The Audience Meets Socrates (and Eupolis) In this section, I illustrate how Aristophanes casts his audience as the old father of the plot. During Strepsiades’ first encounter with Socrates and his

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students, he resembles, in a way consistent with Aristophanes’ parabatic construction, an audience threatened by Eupolis’s deceitful comedy. Socratic sophistry, suggestive of Eupolidean comedy, exposes Strepsiades to a tragically inflected vision of matriarchal assault that merges his family troubles with the parabatic narrative. As we will see, Strepsiades responds by turning to a protective object: a himation that brings to mind the chlaina of Wasps. Strepsiades’ conversation with a Socratic disciple casts his introduction to the mysteries of the Thinkery as an evocation of comic spectatorship. In urging the anonymous disciple to open the doors of the school and reveal (deixon) Socrates in the flesh (181–83), Strepsiades is likely expressing the feelings of the audience, eager to see the celebrity materialize onstage. This association with the audience becomes evident in the exchange that follows Socrates’ appearance, accompanied by students and the instruments of his science (probably rulers, set squares, compasses, a map, and a couch). Together with his interlocutor’s interpretive guidance, Strepsiades’ reaction to these actors and props recalls the ways in which Aristophanes dramatizes comic spectatorship. The rhetoric of guessing reflected in this exchange— “What are these creatures?” (184), “What do they seem (dokousin) like to you?” (185)—permeates the humorous depiction of theatrical decoding in the initial scene of Peace, where two slaves imagine viewers trying to make sense of Trygaeus’s dung beetle: “Well, by now some young smart-ass among the spectators might be saying, ‘What is this?’ ” / “Some Ionian guy sitting next to him is probably saying, ‘My hunch is (dokeō) that this is an allusion to Cleon’ ” (43–47). In addition, the disciple’s reference to the neophyte’s astonishment (ethaumasas 185) conjures a significant emotional ingredient of the Aristophanic representation of comic reception: in the parabasis of Wasps, the Chorus muses upon the audience’s predictable amazement (thaumazei) at its theriomorphic costumes (1071–72). Thus, Strepsiades’ awe at the items displayed onstage (201–2) can be seen to mimic the audience’s response to the parade of objects typical of Old Comedy. Among the paraphernalia, the map is laden with metatheatrical potential, for Strepsiades’ clumsy initiation to the rules of cartographic viewing may be understood as mirroring the condition of the spectator, similarly afforded a synoptic gaze and trained to see through a set of spatial conventions. The scene develops the relationship between the sophistic instruction and comic performance by intimating resemblances between Socrates and a chorodidaskalos (“choral instructor”). Socrates’ appearance on the crane in a basket visualizes his characterization as a “scientific philosopher who enquires into ‘things above’ ” (Revermann 2006a, 193) but also equates him with a supercilious deus ex machina looking down upon the other gods, as

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Strepsiades points out (226). As soon as he descends, Socrates imparts instructions to the Chorus, echoing the voice of a choral instructor: “Come here, much-honored clouds, in a show (epideixin) for this [man]” (269). With this order disguised as a prayer, he oversees the arrival of the cloud-goddess Chorus, seeming to posit a parallelism between sophistic epideixis (“show, spectacle”) and dramatic performance, and between Strepsiades as a student of the Thinkery and the audience. Socrates frames the arrival of his aerial allies as a “show” (epideixin) put on for “this (man),” but, through the ambiguity of the deictic pronoun (τῷδε), he underscores the identification of the comic father, on a couch, with the true beneficiaries of the announcement, namely the spectators in the theater (the singular masculine pronoun could refer to dēmos “the people”). After the cloud-goddesses appear, Socrates also brusquely supplies his inept pupil Strepsiades with instructions that ape stage directions, purporting to guide his gaze, like the audience’s, through the complex movements of the Chorus’s entrance. In personifying satiric conceits, the clouds of the Chorus add to the assimilation of Socrates to a comic dramatist. As Socrates explains (348–55), the shape-shifting of the clouds tropes satiric mimesis: their metamorphoses make them appropriate symbolic counterparts (mostly animals) of their targets. By mimicking a deer to ridicule Cleonymus’s proverbial cowardice (353) or assuming a wolf-like appearance to lampoon the predators of public funds (351–52), the clouds serve as self-reflexive images of comedy’s mocking comparisons, the similes (eikones) that, in the parabasis, Aristophanes includes among the secrets of his much-imitated comic art. Consequently, when the Aristophanic Socrates advertises his intellectual alliance with the clouds and choreographs their movements, he shows the hallmarks of a crafter and performer of comic ideas. The satiric similes represented by the clouds combined with Socrates’ sophistry, manipulation of metaphors, and arrogance make him similar to a deceitful comic poet who looks down on both gods and audience. In this respect, Socrates seems to have much in common with the comedians accused of deception in the parabasis. But this connection goes beyond the theme of deception as such. I will now concentrate on a moment in Strepsiades’ Socratic rite de passage—his encounter with the clouds—that imports the parabatic implication of imperiled fathers and discloses continuity with the retrospective agenda of Wasps. The prospect of meeting the clouds makes Strepsiades fear his Socratic initiation will unleash the matriarchal attack that, as we have seen, connects his marriage woes with the poetic practice of Aristophanes’ new rivals. When Socrates offers Strepsiades the opportunity to learn about divine

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matters and “converse” (sungenesthai) with the clouds (nephelaisin) (250–53), the old man accepts enthusiastically (251, 253), but ordered to sit on a sacred sofa and wear a wreath (254–56), he worries that the trappings of a sacrificial ceremony augur a reenactment of Athamas’s hardships at the hands of his wife, Nephele: “My goodness, Socrates—and you, too, clouds—please don’t sacrifice me, like Athamas” (256–57). By comparing himself to the tragic king, whom we encountered in chapter 4, Strepsiades alludes to the ending of Sophocles’ Athamas, in which the eponymous character, about to be sacrificed as a result of his wife’s punitive plan, was saved by Heracles’ intervention ex machina. Like Strepsiades, Athamas unhappily “married up,” wedding a goddess, Nephele, but after he left her for a mortal woman, his divine wife sent a devastating drought—a clear image of castration. Thus, through the tragic story of Athamas, Strepsiades links the threat posed by the clouds and the imperious Socrates to his own disdainful, overbearing wife, whose wasteful ways have created a drought in his finances. What is more, by summoning the Sophoclean plot, the rustic cloud-watcher anticipates the parabasis’s assimilation of the comic audience to a tragic father threatened by the matriarchal power embodied by Aristophanes’ adversaries. Strepsiades’ precautionary action before the clouds’ entrance confirms his assimilation of them to his domineering wife, overlaying his spectatorship with the parabatic concern for sōphrosunē. Upon hearing Socrates’ invocation of the clouds as semnai (“august” or “haughty” 265) goddesses of thunder and lightning, Strepsiades uses his cloak (himation) to defend himself (267): “[Do not come] yet, not until I have wrapped myself in this, so that I don’t get drenched.” In raising his himation against the clouds, Strepsiades brings to mind his prologic account of his wedded life (53–55): “I won’t say that [my wife] was idle. On the contrary, she kept banging at her loom (espatha), and, showing her this cloak (himation), I would say to her as a justification [for my action]: ‘woman, you bang (spathais) too much’!” As Jeffrey Henderson has clarified, in these lines the verb spathaō—meaning literally “to strike the woof with a spathē, a broad wooden blade”—metaphorically indicates the intense sexual activity of Strepsiades’ wife, whose profligacy is matched by her squandering of her husband’s erotic resources ([1975] 1991, 73 and 171– 72). Since the himation is meant to shield Strepsiades from his wife’s lack of sōphrosunē, his use of it as a raincoat in his Socratic initiation is laden with symbolic implications. As Socrates arranges a rendezvous (sungenesthai) for his new student with semnai goddesses as powerful and haughty as his wife, the old man finds himself faced with a familiar threat, which he tries to ward off with an equally familiar defense, his beloved cloak. Having seen that Strepsiades’ meeting with the Socratic clouds suggests a spectator’s reception

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of comic conceits, we can also perceive the dramatization of the comic audience’s harmful exposure to the comedy of Aristophanes’ new rivals. The lack of sōphrosunē that the parabasis imputes to the new practitioners of phortikē kōmōidia, in implicit opposition to Aristophanes’ own Electra-like sōphrōn poetics (537), is yet another way that these deceptive, dangerous poets are aligned with Clytemnestra and Pheidippides as the agent of Strepsiades’ wife, whom, in the prologue, he had described as adversely semnē (48)—like the clouds. In contrast (50), Strepsiades entered his marriage “smelling of new wine (trugos)”— perhaps an encrypted marker, through trugōidia, of authentic, wholesome comedy (especially in a prologic discourse). The lack of sōphrosunē in a pedagogical context establishes a particular affinity between Eupolis and the Socrates of Clouds. In the parabasis of Maricas (fr. 192 KA), Eupolis addresses the audience as pupils in a classroom, but Aristophanes exploits the slippage between aristocratic paideia (“culture, education”) and pederasty to downgrade Eupolis’s teaching to mere sexual predation. In the parabases of Wasps and Peace, Aristophanes pits his sōphrosunē against the conduct of Eupolis, who is ridiculed as wandering in the wrestling schools ( palaistras) to pick up boys. Likewise, in Clouds, he characterizes Socrates as a sexually aggressive teacher who frequents the palaistra with the same intentions (179). When Strepsiades asks him to appear (222–23), Socrates responds by adapting a Pindaric line spoken by the satyr Silenus (“Why are you calling me, ephemeral one?” 223), which assimilates him to the mythological prototype of the lustful instructor. In addition, in the agōn the Weaker Argument, who espouses Socrates’ subversive viewpoint, entirely strips the practice of pederasty of educational value, reducing it to the satyric pleasures of erotic hunting and sexual fulfillment. The same cannot be said of the Stronger Argument, notwithstanding his clear fascination with young men’s bodies. Instructing Strepsiades as a seductive didaskalos (“teacher, dramatist”) and kōmōidodidaskalos (“comedian”), Socrates merges the classroom with the comic stage, exhibiting some of the distinctive features of Eupolis’s poetic personality and of Aristophanes’ distorted image of his rival. Sheltering Strepsiades from a potentially castrating encounter with the Socratic clouds—that is to say, from a version of Eupolis’s matriarchal threat to the comic audience—the himation recalls the chlaina of Wasps. In the revised Clouds, Strepsiades’ cloak wards off danger as Heracles does in Sophocles’ Athamas; in Wasps the “evil-averting” (alexikakos) Heracles and the “wind-averting” (alexanemos) chlaina can be read as interchangeable symbols of Aristophanes’ filial devotion to a fatherly audience afflicted by Cratinus’s tragic comedy. As we will see, the central role of Strepsiades’ himation

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in the last phase of his initiation—his entrance into the Thinkery—further reveals Socrates’ Eupolidean latencies and the cloak’s kinship with the garment in Wasps that reifies the affective agency of the first Clouds. 3. Stripping Strepsiades: Socrates, Eupolis, Clytemnestra Strepsiades’ entry into the Thinkery, preceded by the coerced removal of his shoes as well as his himation, remakes Agamemnon’s carpet scene— transferring the tragic hero’s feelings to the comic father. This restaging previews the parabasis’s construction, through the Oresteia, of the relationship between Aristophanes, Eupolis, and the comic audience. Pairing Eupolis with Cratinus as a target of proto-canonical delegitimation, it provides, after Wasps, a different, though related, dramatization of the defeat of Clouds. The casting off of the cloak has now slipped from the perverse willfulness evoked in Wasps to something imposed on a fearful initiate. Strepsiades’ undressing before entering the Thinkery turns on a complex of objects and symbolic actions that re-create the final moment of Agamemnon’s first—and last—appearance in the eponymous play. At the end of his dialogue with Socrates, Strepsiades discovers with dismay that admission is contingent on the removal of his cloak and, as later comments indicate, sandals. Despite protests, Strepsiades capitulates, though with the same alarm he felt with the arrival of the cloud-goddesses. Socrates’ command that Strepsiades take off his cloak infelicitously follows a threat of punishment: “I fear, old man, that you may need a beating” (493). Furthermore, while stripping, Strepsiades realizes he may soon look like one of Socrates’ acolytes, the pale, emaciated Chaerephon (503). Thus, for Strepsiades the loss of cloak and shoes signals a tragic fate, which he expresses in fitting language: “Alas, wretched me, I will soon be half-dead” (504). Strepsiades’ terror as he crosses the threshold is expressed in his assimilation of the Thinkery to a chthonic space populated by snakes: “I’m afraid of going down (katabainōn) inside there as if into Trophonius’s cave” (507–8). This cluster of elements (fraught crossing of a threshold, ominous shoe removal, snakes) establishes strong intertextuality between Strepsiades’ infernal descent and the carpet scene of Agamemnon. In treading on the inauspiciously purple carpet rolled out by Clytemnestra and crossing the threshold of the skēnē, Agamemnon, seemingly engaged in a voluntary act, in fact submits to the will of his wife, who, by slyly directing his homecoming, reduces him to infancy. He has taken off his sandals (944–45) to mitigate the hubris, but since he appears barefoot and thus vulnerable to his wife’s murder plot, his and the spectators’ fear is intensified instead of being extinguished. In both the tragic and

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the comic scene, the removal of sandals symbolically denudes an infantilized father of all means of defense, charging his movement into the skēnē with the foreboding of a descent to the underworld and making him a sacrificial victim. As has been observed, in Aeschylus’s play “Agamemnon walks over the rich tapestry-garment and into an inextricable richness of garment-net” (Taplin 1977, 314–15). In the course of the trilogy, the net-robe that fatally enwraps Agamemnon is imagistically fused with the suffocating coils of a snake—Clytemnestra’s privileged animal proxy. As a frightening interior space figuratively inhabited by serpentine creatures, the house of Agamemnon thus resembles the Thinkery, which terrifies Strepsiades on the verge of his humiliating regression from father to student and child. This concatenation of symbols, centered around a prop (Strepsiades’ sandals), generates an intense inter-theatrical echo, causing Agamemnon’s tragic shoe-shedding to haunt the comic father’s initiation. The sandals, together with the himation, become the privileged vehicle for the transfer of affect from Agamemnon to Strepsiades, from the tragic to the comic father. This sinister recycling of Aeschylean objects and action is reinforced by the similarities between Strepsiades and Agamemnon on the one hand and Socrates and Clytemnestra on the other. Strepsiades’ motivation for philosophical conversion, as he tells the Chorus, is a narcissistic dream of (rhetorical) omnipotence, which can be compared with the Aeschylean Agamemnon’s overdetermined guilt, particularly the delusion of invincibility expressed in the cruel destruction of Troy: “O mistresses, I ask you this exceedingly small thing, that among the Greeks I be the very best in speaking by 100 miles” (429–30). At the end of the play, as we will see, Strepsiades’ hubris is even inscribed within a typically Aeschylean dynamic of pathei mathos (“learning through suffering”). By means of figurative language and polysemy, the Aristophanic Socrates subjugates and infantilizes Strepsiades. Similarly, “Clytemnestra through her power of speech, particularly through her use of metaphor, exerts control over Agamemnon and others” (McClure 1999, 81). Furthermore, Socrates’ replacement of old-fashioned gods with aerial deities subjects him to the same charge of impiety repeatedly raised against Clytemnestra throughout the Oresteia. But what makes Socrates a Clytemnestra-like figure is, above all, his affiliation with goddesses who, as we have seen, seem to Strepsiades to replay and multiply his wife’s matriarchal threat. Though we do not know whether Strepsiades enters the Thinkery through the same door that leads into his house, it is clear that the convergence of the philosophical school with Agamemnon’s dreaded home effaces the symbolic distance between the two places (Strepsiades’ house and Socrates’ school) that the skēnē represents in Clouds. In this way, far from

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marking Strepsiades’ emancipation from his family troubles, his crossing the threshold of the Thinkery visualizes his regression into an uncanny maternal space that intensifies the challenge to his paternal authority. On these grounds, we can see a narrative sequence from Strepsiades’ entry into the Thinkery to the Electra-themed parabasis. If, as I have suggested, Strepsiades’ interactions with Socrates reflect the comic audience’s experience of a deceitful comedian resembling Eupolis, the final image of the old father as a shoeless and helpless Agamemnon sets up Aristophanes’ parabatic self-assimilation to Electra as a child rescuing a paternal audience from Clytemnestra-like rivals. In other words, the miniature reperformance of Agamemnon that comes just before the parabasis supplies the backdrop against which, in the parabasis, Aristophanes constructs his comic practice as a reenactment of Libation Bearers. This reciprocity between plot and parabasis connects Socrates and Eupolis as cloak stealers. In separating his new pupil from his himation, Socrates acts out his comic reputation as a thief. But Socrates is not the only one guilty of lōpodusia (“cloak-stealing,” “mugging”). In the parabasis, as we have seen, the verb ekstrepsas, which describes Eupolis’s plagiarism, equates Knights to a himation that he has stolen and disfigured. Both Strepsiades’ cloak and Aristophanes as an Electra-inspired comedian defend paternal authority from figures (Socrates, Eupolis, the comic hero’s aristocratic wife) who reinstate Clytemnestra’s matriarchal threat. By stealing Knights and turning it inside out like a cloak, the deceitful, Clytemnestra-like comedian has stripped a fatherly audience of the protection granted by Aristophanic comedy. Thus, the filial solicitude that Aristophanes offers again to the spectators of the second Clouds in the parabasis directly responds to the danger that Strepsiades’ Agamemnon-like entry into the Thinkery dramatizes for a comic audience entrapped and robbed by Eupolis. The narrative continuity of plot and parabasis created by the affective  intertext of the Oresteia establishes a relationship between Aristophanes, Eupolis, and the comic audience through the same motifs (wholesome cloaks, infantilized fatherhood, suffocation) that shape Wasps. In Wasps, the interaction of parabasis and plot yielded the image of a fatherly audience choosing Cratinus’s ostensibly liberating tribōn over Aristophanes’ protective chlaina (a refined himation) and thus condemning itself to a future of suffocation. In the second Clouds, the same audience is linked to a father exposed by the removal of his himation, figuratively by Eupolis and literally by Socrates, who himself wears a tribōn. In effect, in the second Clouds the Aristophanic mode is evoked not by a character (as it was by Bdelycleon in  Wasps) but only by an object (the himation itself). Stripped of this ob-

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ject, Strepsiades as a character suggestive of the audience seems to be headed toward the same tragic destiny that I have argued Wasps envisioned for Philocleon and the Aristophanic spectators beset by Cratinus’s infantilizing comedy. But Strepsiades’ terrified entry into the chthonic Thinkery pictures an audience that, differently from Philocleon, perceives the consequences of the loss of Aristophanes’ touch. By reifying Aristophanes’ filial tutelage, the himation allows us to understand his parabatic Electra complex as an attempt to reseal the pledge of theatrical reciprocity with spectators through a replica of the chlaina. The therapeutic agency and the beneficial embrace that Wasps attached to the chlaina as a retrospective representation of the first Clouds are thus transferred to the himation snatched away by Eupolis/Socrates in the second Clouds. The himation powerfully materializes Aristophanic comedy’s protective affect, a thematic link—not only between plot and parabasis but also between the revised Clouds and Wasps—that invites the spectator/reader to see in Strepsiades’ travails another phase of the tragic infantilization of the comic audience. Aristophanes’ reperformance of Agamemnon, which as we have just seen, evokes the relationship of the audience with his new rivals, also encodes, after Wasps, a second reperformance of the defeat of the original Clouds. If we recall that, in the parabasis, Eupolis is construed as the continuer of Cratinus’s phortikē kōmōidia, we can also read into the Agamemnon-like stripping of Strepsiades another dramatization of the contest of 423, one that emphasizes not so much the audience’s misguided choice (as in Wasps) as its victimization. This shift in emphasis from Wasps to the second Clouds might be formulated as the transition from an audience that rejects the wholesome touch of a cloak to one that is violently stripped of it. In the second Clouds’ reimagination of the fate of its earlier incarnation, as we will see in due course, the victimized audience, through Strepsiades, will not only realize its error but take punitive action against its deceivers, providing a sort of concrete vindication for Aristophanic aesthetics that goes beyond the intimations of dire consequences for the perverse father and audience in Wasps. Interpreting the first part of the play in light of the parabasis allows us to retrieve in the plot of the second Clouds traces of a strategy that undermines Eupolis’s generic legitimacy while predisposing Aristophanic comedy to enduring supremacy. In subjecting the comic audience to degradation, Eupolis’s aesthetic mode emerges, like the Cratinean one in Wasps, as dangerously bordering on the emasculating and infantilizing forces of tragedy, epitomized by Clytemnestra’s chthonic maternal power. Whereas the restoration of paternal integrity that comes to be associated with Aristophanes’ himation through the parabasis and its reverberations in the plot imbues his comedy with a potential

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for authority and canonicity, the alternatives to the Aristophanic mode are construed as imperfect, impure, or even dangerous abuses of the genre. Next, I will bring out other aspects of this proto-canonical strategy by examining the role of the comic hero’s stolen himation in the final scenes, when the Eupolidean latencies of Socrates are assimilated by Strepsiades’ Socratized son, Pheidippides. 4. Revision as Revenge: Stolen Cloaks and Suffocating Sons I now consider how the troubled relationship between Strepsiades and Pheidippides in the second half of the play reflects the parabasis’s contrast of filial models, recasting Aristophanes’ self-presentation in Wasps through a fresh set of tragic stories (from Euripides’ Hecuba and Alcestis). Hoping Pheidippides will serve as a substitute for his protective himation, Strepsiades has persuaded him to enroll at the Thinkery. However, the Socratized Pheidippides soon turns abusive, in a manner reminiscent of Aristophanes’ violent rivals—not just Eupolis, but also Cratinus with his suffocating tribōn-like comedy. I end with a reading of Strepsiades’ arson attack against the Thinkery as a new development of the relationship between audience and comic poet constructed in Wasps, one that, intimating a partial rapprochement of the former with the latter, presciently captures the dark future of phortikē kōmōidia. The paratragic monody, drawn from Euripides’ Hecuba, that Strepsiades triumphantly sings while waiting for Pheidippides to exit the Thinkery reveals the deluded expectation that his Socratically trained son will, not unlike the lost himation, safeguard him (1158–66): οἷος ἐμοὶ τρέφεται τοῖσδ’ ἐνὶ δώμασι παῖς, ἀμφήκει γλώττῃ λάμπων, (1160) πρόβολος ἐμός, σωτὴρ δόμοις, ἐχθροῖς βλάβη, λυσανίας πατρῴων μεγάλων κακῶν· ὃν κάλεσον τρέχων ἔνδοθεν ὡς ἐμέ. ὦ τέκνον, ὦ παῖ, ἔξελθ’ οἴκων, (1165) ἄιε σοῦ πατρός. Such a son is being raised for me in these halls, gleaming with his doubleedged tongue, my bulwark ( probolos), savior (sōtēr) of the house, a source of harm to my enemies, the reliever of the pains (lusanias) of great paternal ( patrōiōn) evils (kakōn). Run and call him to me from inside. My child, son, come out of the house. Listen to your father.

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Commentators have noted that the last two lines of this passage channel Hecuba’s farewell appeal to Polyxena, her daughter destined to become a sacrificial victim for Achilles: “My child, daughter of the most miserable mother, come, come out of the house; listen to the voice of your mother” (ὦ τέκνον, ὦ παῖ / δυστανοτάτας ματέρος, ἔξελθ’, / ἔξελθ’ οἴκων, / ἄιε ματέρος αὐδάν 172–74). But Strepsiades’ quotation signals a more extensive allusive connection with Hecuba’s threnody (154–76), appropriating the thematic preoccupation with “the corporeal unity between children and parents” (Zeitlin 1996, 208) that is distinctive of the Euripidean play. In her lamentation, Hecuba bewails the defenselessness produced by the loss of her husband and, above all, her children, turning next to the gods (159–64): τίς ἀμύνει μοι; ποία γενεά, ποία δὲ πόλις; φροῦδος πρέσβυς, (160) φροῦδοι παῖδες . . . ποῖ δὴ σωθῶ; ποῦ τις θεῶν ἢ δαίμων ἐπαρωγός; Who will defend me? What family, what city? Lost is the old husband, lost the children. . . . Where could I be saved (sōthō)? Where will one of the gods or a divine spirit be a helper (eparōgos)?

Far from providing just a verbal echo limited to the summoning of children, the Euripidean passage presents a parent’s desperate yearning for filial contact and assistance that Aristophanes assimilates into the comic father’s misplaced vision of his son. Diffusing emotional energy, Hecuba seems thus to work as an affective intertext. The model of filial protection that Strepsiades borrows from Hecuba bears the mark of Aristophanes’ alignment with Heracles alexikakos (“bulwark, warder off of evils”) and Bdelycleon in Wasps. In particular, probolos (“bulwark” Clouds 1161), glossed by the subsequent lusanias patrōiōn  .  .  . kakōn (“reliever of the pains . . . of paternal evils” 1162), recalls Philocleon’s reference in Wasps to his donkey-eared wine flask as a problēma kakōn (“shield against evils” 615). Foreshadowing the parabatic epithet alexikakos (1043), this phrase pitted illusory Cratinean protection against Aristophanes’ Heraclean fathersaving mission. The idea of the son as a shield, conveyed by probolos, also connects with the defensive use to which Strepsiades put the himation in his dealings with his sexually voracious wife (54) and her sophistic counterparts (267). Strepsiades’ wishful equation of Pheidippides with a domestic savior (sōtēr 1161), read in light of Hecuba’s implicit comparison of her children to a safeguarding deity (sōthō 163; eparōgos 164), additionally betrays the paradigm of Bdelycleon as a filial caretaker resembling a deus ex machina.

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An earlier paratragic moment in the play, which adapts the same monody from Euripides’ Hecuba, indicates that, in Strepsiades’ fantasies, the new Pheidippides is meant precisely to replace the old man’s protective Aristophanic apparel. During his exasperating Socratic apprenticeship after the parabasis, Strepsiades bemoans his victimization by creditors and the Thinkery: “Lost ( phrouda) is my money, lost (phroudē) is my color, lost ( phroudē) is my soul, lost ( phroudē) are my shoes (embas)” (718–19). This short lamentation probably anticipates Strepsiades’ subsequent monody by appropriating a stylistic trademark of Hecuba’s song—“Lost ( phroudos) is the old husband ( presbus), lost ( phroudoi) the children ( paides)” (160–61). The footwear (embas) that Strepsiades was coerced to take off before entering the Thinkery figures among the items replacing the tragic words presbus and paides. The substitution of “sandals” for “children” reinforces the link between the outfit (himation and embas) shielding Strepsiades from father-destroying attacks and the longing for a protective child—the role that Aristophanes claims for himself as Electra in the parabasis. It is thus clear that Strepsiades’ second reworking of Hecuba’s song expresses his false hope that a new, smooth-tongued Pheidippides will replace the caring touch of the filial Aristophanic himation. The dochmiac rhythm of Strepsiades’ celebratory monody outside the Thinkery announces a fundamental, tragic unity between his joyous song and Hecuba’s threnody. The Socratic father-beating philosophy internalized by Pheidippides will soon confound Strepsiades’ hopes of protection, causing him to share Hecuba’s irreparable separation from her children. In Euripides’ play, the lyric dialogue that folds Hecuba’s monody into her farewell to Polyxena (177–96) is structured through the gloomy rhythm of dochmiacs and anapests. The same combination of meters at the end of Strepsiades’ monody (1162–66) lends a cadence of tragic irony: in particular, at 1162–63 the dochmiacs undermine his wishful description of Pheidippides as an evilaverting presence. This jarring discordance of language and meter portends the impending rupture between father and son while also contrasting the genuinely protective filial model of Aristophanes’ himation with its ostensible alternatives, the mangled imitations paraded by rivals deficient in sōphrosunē. Strepsiades’ gradual discovery of the truth is reflected in his account of his heated argument with Pheidippides and of the Socratized son’s physical abuse, an account that makes the brutality of the mother’s child converge with the comic practice of Aristophanes’ new rivals. Aristophanes’ Electralike mode, suggested in the parabasis, serves as a constant, if implicit, term of comparison for the actions of Strepsiades’ Eupolidean son. Strepsiades’ account of an altercation with his son, during which Pheidippides beat him, conjures a spectator victimized by an angry and aggressive

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performer trying to impose a literary fashion contrary to sōphrosunē. After being beaten by Pheidippides, Strepsiades exits in despair from the house, demanding help against his son, who follows him onstage (1321–24). Urged by the Chorus (1351–52), Strepsiades recounts the fight. When Strepsiades reports his son’s refusal to play the lyre and sing a Simonidean song after dinner (1354–58), Pheidippides suggests that his father should have been “pounded” and “stomped” for asking him to perform in such an old-fashioned style (1359–60). The physical punishment invoked by Pheidippides ( pateisthai “to be stomped” 1359) recalls the satiric brutality that Aristophanes associates with his rivals in the parabasis (epempēdēsai “to leap on” 550; koletrōsi “they stomp” 552), a correspondence that becomes more pronounced as Strepsiades details the second round of his quarrel. Having yielded to his son’s desire to deliver a new Euripidean speech instead of something by Aeschylus, Strepsiades had to hear an extract from Aeolus, a play about incest between siblings (1371–72) and rebellion against paternal authority. Strepsiades booed this recital (1373–74), based on a tragic script blatantly contrary to sōphrosunē, triggering an escalation of violence, the climax of the strife between the father as audience and the son as performer (1375–90): Στ. ἔπος πρὸς ἔπος ἠρειδόμεσθ’· εἶθ’ οὗτος ἐπαναπηδᾷ, κἄπειτ’ ἔφλα με κἀσπόδει κἄπνιγε κἀπέτριβεν. Φε. οὔκουν δικαίως, ὅστις οὐκ Εὐριπίδην ἐπαινεῖς, σοφώτατον; Στ. σοφώτατόν γ’ ἐκεῖνον, ὦ—τί σ’ εἴπω; ἀλλ’ αὖθις αὖ τυπτήσομαι. Φε. νὴ τὸν Δί’, ἐν δίκῃ γ’ ἄν. Στ. καὶ πῶς δικαίως; ὅστις, ὦναίσχυντέ, σ’ ἐξέθρεψα, αἰσθανόμενός σου πάντα τραυλίζοντος, ὅ τι νοοίης. εἰ μέν γε βρῦν εἴποις, ἐγὼ γνοὺς ἂν πιεῖν ἐπέσχον· μαμμᾶν δ’ ἂν αἰτήσαντος ἧκόν σοι φέρων ἂν ἄρτον· κακκᾶν δ’ἂν οὐκ ἔφθης φράσας, κἀγὼ λαβὼν θύραζε ἐξέφερον ἂν καὶ προὐσχόμην σε. σὺ δέ με νῦν ἀπάγχων, βοῶντα καὶ κεκραγόθ’ ὅτι χεζητιῴην, οὐκ ἔτλης ἔξω ’ξενεγκεῖν, ὦ μιαρέ, θύραζέ μ’, ἀλλὰ πνιγόμενος αὐτοῦ ’ποίησα κακκᾶν.

(1375)

(1380)

(1385)

(1390)

Strepsiades We set upon each other (ēreidomestha), word against word. Then this one leaps on me (epanapēdai), and then he crushed me (ephla) and he pounded me (espodei) and he strangled me (epnige) and he wore me down (epetriben). Pheidippides And wasn’t it just, since you don’t praise Euripides,

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the cleverest? Strepsiades That one the cleverest? O . . . what shall I call you? But I’ll be beaten once again. Pheidippides Yes, by Zeus, and justly so. Strepsiades What? “Justly”? I’m the one who reared (exethrepsa) you, shameless one, perceiving what you meant when you lisped everything. If you said “brun,” I would recognize it ( gnous) and give you something to drink. If you asked for “mamma,” I would come to you bringing bread. And even before you finished saying “caca,” I would lift you and bring you outside, and hold you out. But a moment ago, when you were choking me (apanchōn) and I was shouting and screaming that I had to take a crap, you couldn’t bring yourself to take me outside, rotten boy, but you kept strangling me ( pnigomenos) until I made “caca” on the spot.

This passage, retelling the parabatic narrative through the actions and assertions of Strepsiades and Pheidippides, conflates the satiric violence of Aristophanes’ new rivals, especially Eupolis, with abuse of the audience. In 1375–76, the fight between father and son takes the shape of a verbal wrestling match, in which Pheidippides physically attacks in the same manner as Aristophanes’ rivals figuratively assaulted Hyperbolus in the parabatic account. In jumping on his father, who has fallen to the ground (epanapēdai 1375), Pheidippides literalizes the violence that, in the parabasis, Aristophanes dismissed as alien to his mode of comic invective, anticipating the literary-critical appraisal of his moderate satiric style: “And I did not have the chutzpah to leap on (epempēdēsai) [Cleon] when he was on his back” (550). The verb ēreidomestha further echoes the ferocity of Aristophanes’ adversaries (“And now all the others are setting upon [ereidousin] him [= Hyperbolus]” 558), as do the other terms from the pancratic lexicon that describe Pheidippides’ assault (ephla and espodei 1376). Together, they transfer the parabasis’s satiric boxing ring (epempēdēsai 550; paredōken labēn 551; koletrōsi 552) into the domestic space, replacing Hyperbolus with the comic audience represented by Strepsiades. In Strepsiades’ verbal defense, the resonance between his parental commitment (“I’m the one who reared [exethrepsa] you” 1380) and the fatherly concern that Aristophanes attributes to his audience in the parabasis (“you nobly reared [exethrepsate] [my child]” 532) cues a deeper intratextual connection. To rebuke Pheidippides’ ungrateful behavior, Strepsiades recalls his son’s childhood, when, as a young father, he patiently listened to the inarticulate talk of the baby, recognizing ( gnous) his intentions (1381–82) and promptly responding to his needs. A similar picture of parental care underlies Aristophanes’ representation of his paternal audience’s attentive and supportive response (“sworn pledges of judgment [ gnōmēs]” 533), starting with the first (and probably still “inarticulate”) product of his verbal art, the play

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(Banqueters) to which he “gave birth” while still a maiden. The two sections of the parabasis—focused on Aristophanes’ beginnings and his new rivals— seem thus to be fused into a single narrative centered around Strepsiades and Pheidippides, who evoke the victimized comic audience on the one hand and Eupolis and the class of abusive comedians on the other. In this way, the suspicion raised in the parabasis that the violence of Aristophanes’ adversaries may be extended from their satiric targets to the audience is realized. Pheidippides’ Eupolidean brutality against Strepsiades revives the threat of Cratinus’s suffocating comedy. Strepsiades’ account of his son’s abuse emphasizes Pheidippides’ strangling clutch: epnige (1376); apanchōn (1385); pnigomenos (1389). Pheidippides’ suffocating grasp fulfills the ominous implications of Strepsiades’ Agamemnon-like entry into the Thinkery without his himation and embades, acting out the strangling serpentine coils that seemed to lurk past the threshold. The strangling clutch also replays the father-strangling fevers that, in the parabasis of Wasps, can be seen to figure the tragic effects of Cratinus’s tribōn-like comedy upon the comic audience. The strangulation evoked by epnigen even lies adjacent to a cognate of the word tribōn—epetriben in 1376. The verb, a compound of tribō (“to wear out, crush”) denotes the action that makes a tribōn what it is—a worn-out, ragged cloak. The contiguity of the verb to epnigen in the line underscores the affective danger of the Cratinean cloak. Occurring in a scene that blatantly retells Clouds’ parabatic narrative, the denunciation of Pheidippides’ father-strangling attacks may ultimately suggest that there is no difference between Aristophanes’ new and old rivals. The matriarchal menace against the comic audience that Eupolis and his colleagues incarnate as a result of their associations with the mother’s child Pheidippides, Clytemnestra, and Socrates coincides with the atavistic and chthonic energy of Cratinus’s comedy. In allowing his comedy’s lack of sōphrosunē to erupt into suffocating violence against the audience, Eupolis reanimates the tragic force of Cratinus’s phortikē kōmōidia. Both in Strepsiades’ ostensibly joyous monody and in the subsequent dramatization of his painful arti manthanō (“now Ι know”), we can perceive Aristophanes’ absent presence, “unseen but nonetheless felt”—to borrow the phrase of Caroline Simpson (2001, 11). Strepsiades’ idealized—and utterly misguided—vision of the Socratized Pheidippides emerges from the paradigms of the paternal son Bdelycleon, the daddy’s girl Electra, and their textile counterparts (chlaina and himation). In Strepsiades’ account of the hardships suffered at the hands of his son, Pheidippides’ stifling clutch calls to mind the charge of suffocation unjustly leveled at Bdelycleon in Wasps and underscores the need for the wholesome touch of the Aristophanic chlaina. In addition,

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the failed reciprocity that Strepsiades laments while relating the scatological consequences of his son’s cruelty (1384–90) stands in direct opposition to the ideal of theatrical reciprocity that, in the parabatic narratives of both Wasps and Clouds, informs the representation of Aristophanes’ relationship with the audience. Pheidippides’ violence, conflating Cratinus’s and Eupolis’s comedy, is tacitly opposed to the therapeutic filial touch of the Aristophanic mode. This maneuver, pathologizing the aesthetic modes of Aristophanes’ two rivals under the rubric of harmful affect, has proto-canonical significance. As we will now see, the tragic script that shapes Pheideippides’ sophistic selfjustification causes the absent presence of Aristophanes’ filial comic mode to be effectively carried over into the so-called second agōn, between father and son. Trying to supply a theoretical rationale for father-beating, Pheidippides resorts to the sophistic rhetoric of self-preservation dramatized in a scene of Euripides’ Alcestis—in which the eponymous heroine offers to die in place of her husband, Admetus. Pheidippides’ reference to father-beating roosters encapsulates a valorization of phusis (“nature”) as a principle of crude selfinterest (1427–29) that is more subtly activated when he takes on the voice of Admetus’s father, Pheres, who privileges the individual over community and natural instincts over social obligations in the agōn with his son. The irruption of a tragic voice into Pheidippides’ speech is flagged by the line of trimeter amid the iambic tetrameter that he and his father use in this part of their confrontation (1415): κλάουσι παῖδες, πατέρα δ’ οὐ κλάειν δοκεῖς; (“Children cry [from being beaten]. Don’t you think a father should cry?”). This argument reproduces Pheres’ defense of his refusal to die in lieu of Admetus (Alcestis 691): χαίρεις ὁρῶν φῶς· πατέρα δ’ οὐ χαίρειν δοκεῖς; (“You enjoy seeing the light. Don’t you think that a father should enjoy it?”). Indeed the whole arsenal of Pheidippides’ argument is consistent with Pheres’ sophistic devaluation of nomos (“law, custom”) in favor of phusis. In asking why he should be punished with beating while his father enjoys abiding corporal immunity (1413–14), Pheidippides appropriates the sophistic challenge to social conventions and common beliefs that inspires Pheres to question why the old should be less attached to life than the young (Alcestis 690; 694– 98; 703–4). Responding to Strepsiades’ objection that father-beating violates a universal nomos (1420), Pheidippides dismisses the prohibition as merely the invention of an ordinary, fallible man (1421–22). In so doing, he conforms to the Euripidean depiction of Pheres as “denying the authority of law” (Thury 1988, 207). The incorporation of this tragic agōn in the comic scene results in a reversal of roles for Pheres and Admetus, an extreme expression of the psychologi-

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cal and social dynamics of the Euripidean text: the father (Pheres) recast as an abusive son (Pheidippides) and the son (Admetus) recast as a victimized father (Strepsiades). As Victoria Wohl has observed, “Pheres, by refusing to give his own life for Admetus’s, in effect kills his own child and destroys his oikos [‘household’]” (1998, 134). Pheres’ confrontation with Admetus powerfully stages this paradox by which “the patriarch himself has broken the patriline” (ibid.). In violating the “paternal law” and downgrading it to a set “of economic obligations and little more” (ibid., 155), Pheres poses the same challenge to generational continuity that is usually associated with rebellious, “father-killing” sons. On the other hand, by connecting the preservation of his life with the maintenance of patrilineal authority within the oikos, Admetus acts as a defender of paternal law, if a weak and flawed one. In this respect, Pheres’ attitude prefigures the father-beating philosophy of Pheidippides and Aristophanes’ rivals, while Admetus’s threatened death, which Pheres refuses to prevent, encodes the suffocation of paternal law. The tragic father’s indifference to Admetus’s mortal peril can thus be viewed as analogous to Pheidippides’ attempted strangulation of Strepsiades and, by implication, to the Eupolidean mode’s damaging impact on the audience. At the same time, we can see the contrast between Pheres’ selfishness and Alcestis’s self-sacrifice, which permeates the tragic agōn, looming over the comic scene in the opposition of filial models, Pheidippides’ versus Aristophanes’. In offering to die instead of her husband, Alcestis safeguards the patrilineal continuation of the oikos, pitting her self-denying choice against Pheres’ selfishness. In the agōn, which occurs after the death of Alcestis, the self-sacrifice of the sōphrōn wife—obsessively qualified as aristē (“the best”) throughout the play—is repeatedly invoked in the arguments of father and son (615–16). Imported into the comic scene, which recasts Pheres as the father-strangling son Pheidippides, the father-saving Alcestis embodies the filial model of the sōphrōn Aristophanes, the paternal son who, like the Euripidean heroine, participates in the intergenerational strife only as an absent presence. The comic appropriation of the Euripidean agōn, in other words, “Electrifies” Alcestis, connecting Aristophanes’ self-presentation and her role as a savior of paternal law who is absent from the stage but constantly present in the characters’ (and in the spectators’ or readers’) minds. Just as in safeguarding Admetus the heroic Alcestis foreshadows the intervention of Heracles in the play, an affinity emerges between the tragic woman—an effective “savior of the house,” to use Strepsiades’ words in his earlier monody (1161)—and Aristophanes’ Heraclean self-fashioning in Wasps. About to be “sacrificed” by Socrates and his female allies, Strepsiades, as we have seen, compared himself with the Sophoclean Athamas, condemned to

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death by his wife—and rescued in extremis by Heracles. In the exchange with the Socratized Pheidippides, the suffocation faced by the comic father is informed by the Alcestis narrative, which again evokes the protection offered by an Aristophanes-like figure—heroically self-sacrificing and, in resonance with the poet’s talking name and the ancient critics’ judgment, characterized as “the best” (aristē/aristos). In the second Clouds, Aristophanes leaves his audience alone with his rivals, who, by strangling Strepsiades or stealing his protective himation, tragically destroy paternal authority and undo the Heraclean comedian’s beneficial action. However, by appearing in the parabasis or intruding in the plot through the intertextual surrogates of Electra, Heracles, and Alcestis, Aristophanes infuses the play with a longing expectation of another avenging intervention ex machina of his father-saving comedy. The finale—an innovation of the second version of the play—provides the last and most powerful image of the audience’s longing for Aristophanic comedy by offering the tragicomedy of Strepsiades burning the Thinkery. This action unfolds through symbols (deprivation of the protective cloak, suffocation, madness) that bring the self-reflexive narrative of Wasps into the second Clouds, conflating sophistic philosophy with phortikē kōmōidia in its old and new manifestations. As I will propose, Strepsiades’ tragic destruction of the Thinkery tropes the comic audience’s vengeful punishment of the suffocating comedy of Cratinus and Eupolis, revealing an imperfect reconciliation with the Aristophanic brand after the breach of the first Clouds. Through Strepsiades’ action, Aristophanes proto-canonically manages to occupy the moral high ground while, at the same time, capitalizing on the scene’s spectacular theatrics. Strepsiades’ final exchange with the Chorus, which paves the way for his vengeful plan, presents the old man’s repudiation of Socratic sophistry as a desire for redemption from tragic hamartia (“error”) suggestive of the comic audience’s rejection of phortikē kōmōidia. At the end of the play, the cloudgoddesses change from participants in Socrates’ sophistic performances to critics of Strepsiades’ entanglement with the Thinkery. When Strepsiades, exasperated by his son’s violence, blames his tribulations on the cloudgoddessess, they cast the old man’s Socratic experience as consistent with a typically tragic trajectory from hubris to pathei mathos (“learning through suffering”) that they have orchestrated (1454–55 and 1458–61). The Chorus’s rebuke of Strepsiades’ impulse to solve his family problems through Socratesinspired ponēra pragmata (“bad deeds” 1455) resumes the disavowal of “bad jokes” ( ponēra skōmmata 542) in the parabasis. In Clouds’ parabasis, among the elements defining phortikē kōmōidia are the ponēra skōmmata delivered by an old man who hits passers-by with a stick (541–43), a reflection of the

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Cratinean Philocleon in the final scenes of Wasps. Aristophanes’ trumpeted alignment of his comic mode with beneficial sōphrosunē in opposition to the low comic devices he enumerates in Clouds’ parabasis constructs his new rivals, especially Eupolis, as practitioners of the same kind of base kōmōidia as Cratinus. As a result, when Strepsiades accepts the Chorus’s reproach and vows to punish the denizens of the Thinkery (1462–66), he also seems to express the comic audience’s repudiation of its bad sons: Eupolis and the other Aristophanic rivals whose violent and deceitful comedy behaves like Socrates and Pheidippides. As I argued in chapter 3, Wasps construed the audience’s failed conversion from the Cratinean to the Aristophanic mode as an unrealized tragic transition from hamartia to sōphrosunē. The tragic structure of ethical development that frames the last dialogue between the Chorus and Strepsiades turns the old man’s rejection of ponēria and phortikē kōmōidia into a fulfillment of the conversion manqué of Philocleon—and of the audience of the first Clouds. Strepsiades’ monologue as he enacts his vengeful plan can be seen to present this conversion as an attempt to redirect the violence of phortikē kōmōidia against its practitioners. Revenge enables Strepsiades, previously infantilized and victimized by Socrates and Pheidippides, to regain agency. Invoking Hermes, the god of tricksters, as his xumboulos (“adviser”), the old man instructs Xanthias on besieging and burning the Thinkery (1484–89). In demanding a torch (1490), Strepsiades resorts to one of the dramatic devices that, as we are told in the parabasis, utterly separate phortikē kōmōidia from Aristophanes’ Electra-like comic mode (543). Though in wielding the flame, he appropriates the manic, Erinys-like appearance of the Cratinean Philocleon in the final scenes of Wasps, the similarity foregrounds an important difference between the two comic fathers. The torch carried by Philocleon symbolized the kinship of Cratinus’s phortikē kōmōidia with tragedy, a kinship whose dangerous effects afflicted the comic audience. In the ending of Clouds, the target of Strepsiades’ torch, the fraudulence of the Socratic school, converges with the poetic stance of Eupolis, the inheritor of Cratinus’s father-strangling, tragic comedy. By climbing the roof with a torch in his hand, Strepsiades seems thus to make phortikē kōmōidia the victim of its own weapon, forcing its new practitioners, as evoked by Socrates and his pupils, to experience its violent nature and the consequences of its lack of sōphrosunē. The exchange between Strepsiades and his targets illuminates the strategy of vengeance by resuming two powerful symbols of the comic audience’s victimization in Wasps and Clouds: protective cloaks and suffocation. When, peeking out from the burning Thinkery, one of Socrates’ pupils asks who is responsible (1497), Strepsiades replies: “The one whose cloak (himation) you

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took!” (1498). Read alongside this response, the final reactions of the same pupil and of Socrates himself to Strepsiades’ action recall the nexus between cloaks and suffocation that pervades Wasps and this play (1504–5): Σω. οἴμοι τάλας, δείλαιος ἀποπνιγήσομαι. Μα. β ἐγὼ δὲ κακοδαίμων γε κατακαυθήσομαι Socrates Ah, wretched me, I will die of suffocation (apopnigēsomai). Second Pupil Ill-starred, I will be burned up (katakauthēsomai).

In her study on tragic revenge, Anne Pippin Burnett has remarked that the avenger “imitates the attack once made on himself but takes it into his own control, so that he who was once the passive recipient of an outrage becomes the active author of the replicated deed” (1998, 5). That the comic hero is applying this principle is demonstrated by Socrates’ terrified scream apopnigēsomai. The verb construes the old father’s current enterprise as an imitation of the Socratized Pheidippides’ strangling attacks (epnige 1376; apanchōn 1385; pnigomenos 1389)—echoing Eupolis’s violence—and of the suffocating effects on the comic audience that, as we have argued, Wasps imputed to Cratinean comedy. Furthermore, the Socratic pupil’s fear of “burn[ing] up” (katakauthēsomai) suggests that Strepsiades also turns against Eupolis’s phortikē kōmōidia, figuratively situated in the Thinkery, the prospect of, alternatively, burning up with fevers (like Philocleon, or the city’s fathers and grandfathers in Wasps’ parabasis) or being cooked in a pot (the fate that awaited Philocleon as a Cratinus-afflicted audience at the end of Wasps). All these acts of suffocation and burning, which Strepsiades recapitulates and “takes into his own control,” occur in the absence of the protective cloak (Bdelycleon’s chlaina or the himation stolen by Socrates) that, in Wasps and Clouds, reifies Aristophanes’ filial bulwark. Thus, by introducing himself as the father whom the members of the Thinkery have stripped of his cloak, Strepsiades seems, in a way, to be punishing the new and the old phortikoi comedians because they robbed the audience of this affective bulwark and hindered the Athenian spectators from appreciating its beneficial quality. The inherently problematic status of revenge, poised between law and anger, justice and madness, shows Strepsiades still to be far from acquiring Aristophanic sōphrosunē. Just before wielding the torch, he expresses regret for his earlier mania (“madness” 1476–77). In light of the imagistic connections of this finale with the parabasis and Wasps, the crazy behavior that he repudiates by incinerating the Thinkery comes to include not only his infatuation with Socratic sophistry, but also the comic audience’s liaison dangereuse with the new representatives of phortikē kōmōidia. However, the use of a

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torch contradicts his proclaimed emancipation from madness and visualizes his persistent entrapment in the mania that, according to the reconstruction of Wasps, prevented the Cratinus-afflicted audience of the first Clouds from treasuring the Aristophanic chlaina. In the final lines of the metapoetic section of the parabasis, which directly follow the attack against the new practitioners of phortikē kōmōidia, Aristophanes issues an appeal that seems to have been taken up, albeit imperfectly, by Strepsiades, looking to posterity while encouraging his audience to do the same (561–62): ἢν δ’ ἐμοὶ καὶ τοῖσιν ἐμοῖς εὐφραίνησθ’ εὑρήμασιν, εἰς τὰς ὥρας τὰς ἑτέρας εὖ φρονεῖν δοκήσετε. If you enjoy me and my inventions, in the times to come, you will seem to be sensible.

Strepsiades’ final denunciation of Socrates’ (and Eupolis’s) theft of his himation seems to reflect a longing for Aristophanes’ wholesome textiles, an audience’s wish it had reconnected with the father-saving embrace of Aristophanic comedy and been endowed with the sōphrosunē promised by the Electra-like comedian. While representing progress from Philocleon’s condition in the finale of Wasps, Strepsiades’ dilatory conversion does not liberate the comic audience from its Erinys-like identity, the result of its long-term collusion with phortikē kōmōidia. Nevertheless, Strepsiades’ gesture seems to promote Aristophanes’ own agenda, reducing the gap between the unappreciative audience of the first Clouds described by the comic poet and the enthusiastic one, reflective of his reception in antiquity and beyond, that we see portrayed in Aelian’s account of the 423 contest. In the second Clouds, the proto-canonical narrative—which delegitimated Aristophanes’ comic rivals while manipulatively elevating his own comic mode to something dignified, restrained, and healthful—is showing its first effects, though its full potency has not yet been realized. 5. Conclusions I have explored ways in which the second Clouds can be seen to complement Wasps’ reconstruction of Aristophanes’ failure in 423. The new version of the play suggests an audience that, after experiencing the tragic consequences of its infatuation with the new phortikoi comedians, belatedly yearns for the protection of the paternal son who had offered his therapeutic help in the first version. In the second Clouds, the intratextuality of parabasis and plot

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as well as the intertextuality between parabasis-plot and famous tragic stories merges Socrates’ and Pheidippides’ matriarchal threats against Strepsiades with the violence inflicted on the comic audience by the deceptive and fathersuffocating comedy of Aristophanes’ new rivals, Eupolis in particular. The thematics of suffocation and protective textiles that the second Clouds takes up from Wasps cast these new rivals as heirs of the Cratinean tragic comedy that, in Aristophanes’ narrative, the first Clouds had tried to ward off from the audience. The chlaina with which Bdelycleon had sought to wrap Philocleon in Wasps is rewoven as the himation that the Aristophanic Socrates, as a figure evocative of Eupolis, snatches from Strepsiades, exposing him— and the comic audience—to the infantilizing forces of matriarchal depredation. Strepsiades, whose name entails continual twists and “turns,” enjoys a last minute “change of mode” (metabolē) that turns him against the phortikē kōmōidia that threatens to suffocate him.  Instead of falling victim to the deceptive liberation peddled by Aristophanes’ rivals, Strepsiades becomes an agent of vengeance. But, crucially, as an Erinys-like bearer of torches he remains far from the Aristophanic ideal of sōphrosunē. In a sense, it is too late for Strepsiades to benefit from the invigorating touch of the Aristophanic himation. Still, this ending is not without its elements of creative destruction, as it foreshadows a bright new era for the legitimate heir of the comic tradition. In linking the matriarchal Eupolis with the chthonic Cratinus and exposing the kinship of their aesthetic modes with tragedy’s threatening forces, the second Clouds acts out a coherent and pervasive strategy of delegitimation that contributes to, perhaps even determines, their unfavorable standing against Aristophanes in the ancient canon. Furthermore, in reducing phortikē kōmōidia in both its old and new incarnations to ashes, Strepsiades finally aligns the comic audience with what will prove to be the winning side. In a way, the comic hero seems to dramatize an extreme version of the removal of phortos (“vulgar commodities”) from the realm of comedy that, in the parabasis of Peace, Aristophanes presented as essential to the construction of his monumental comic art. One can imagine the vicarious pleasure with which Aristophanes, through Strepsiades, punished competitors, causing the selfserving narrative of failure and generic affect initiated in Wasps and carried over into the second Clouds to envision its own fortunate reception. From the ashes of defeat, transformed into the ashes of his old and new rivals’ lost works, the paternal son would rise as the unchallenged canonical exemplar of Greek comedy as we know it.

Epilogue All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. S a m u e l B e c k e t t , Worstward Ho

1. “Fail better” Samuel Beckett famously envisions failure as the inescapable horizon of the artist. The obsessive negative wordplay of Worstward Ho (1983), epitomized by the title, acts out the representational void, linguistic emptiness, and tragic communicative shortfall that, in Beckett’s view, any artistic endeavor entails. The “fail better” passage recasts three lines delivered in King Lear by Edgar. After being unjustly disinherited and exiled by Gloucester, his gullible father, Edgar, the legitimate and devoted son, rescues him from a murderous plot, regains his trust and affection, kills Edmund (his illegitimate, treacherous brother), and, at the end of the play, is set to become king. As is commonly recognized, Edgar acts as the male counterpart of Cordelia, who, refusing to conform to her sisters’ adulation and deception of their father, is condemned to a similar failure—disinheritance and exile—followed by a belated recognition of her merits and vicarious, though posthumous, triumph through Edgar. Like Edgar, Cordelia is the child whose goodwill toward her father is misconstrued as something noxious. Her vindication, along with Edgar’s, is the redemptive kernel in this tragic scenario. While in the Shakespearean intertext the outcast Edgar theorizes a cyclical transition from failure to success, from the “worst” to the “best,” which previews his own destiny, Beckett posits stasis if not a movement from “worse” to “worser” (his coinage)—from failure to deeper failure. It is serial despair that is expressed in the paradoxical phrase “fail better,” when read through a pessimistic, “Beckettian” lens. But Beckett’s “fail better” has been appropriated, in turn, for an optimistic interpretation, and this has implications for the triumphant failure we have traced in this book. If Beckett darkens Edgar’s musings on failure, his own “fail better” has become a perversely triumphalist motto of self-assertion in the athletic and capitalist arenas. The tennis player Stanislas Wawrinka was

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reported to have worn the Beckett quotation tattooed on his inner left forearm when he won the 2014 Australian Open. The magnate Richard Branson has similarly coopted “fail better” as a victory cry, trading on the principle, enunciated by Adam Davidson in The New York Times Magazine, that “to truly love innovation, we must love failure  .  .  . innovation’s less-remarkedupon cousin” (November 16, 2014). In these two appropriations of Beckett, failure is “fetishized, even valorized” (O’Connell 2014) as a form of heroic overreaching, the peril boldly confronted by the visionary. The talismanic advertisement of failure on Wawrinka’s skin—a memento of past fiascos and psychological shield against new ones—works not only as a “motivational meme” (ibid.), but also as the self-promoting gesture of the heroic innovator, condemned to initial misapprehension but ultimately destined for lasting victory. To some extent, Aristophanes’ restaging of the failure of Clouds as the tale of an unappreciated paternal son yields the same paradigm of visionary overreaching. Like the slogan of the tennis player and the mogul, who advertise failure as a validation of their lofty aspirations and recast Beckett’s “fail better” as a harbinger of future victories, Aristophanes’ revisionary dramatization of his setback in 423 BC flips gloomy failure into deferred acclamation. Notwithstanding an audience as blinkered as the doddering fathers of Edgar and Cordelia, Clouds was ahead of its time, the narrative goes, and its agonistic failure contains a seed of redemption. Like Lear, Aristophanes’ dramatization thematizes a paternal child’s forward-looking but misunderstood unconventionality, the precursor to a future standard. It is this prescience, charged with proto-canonical potential, that is celebrated in the optimistic, neo-Shakespearean reception of Beckett’s motto. 2. Canonicity: Reenactment, Literary Affections, Enduring Objects The narrative of failure that emerges in Wasps and the second Clouds serves as a restaging of the moment of defeat. Throughout this book, I have considered how the restaging of failure, centered on the self-serving reconstruction of an aesthetic experience, generates canonicity. I will now take a step back to consider several themes that have underpinned my discussion of Aristophanes’ canonical positioning: reenactment, literary affective relationships, and objects that endure. There is something proto-canonical in reenactment itself. Aristophanes’ reenactment of his failure, in Wasps and the second Clouds, paradoxically turns a one-off event into a monumentalizing bid for survival. In this respect, a useful comparison may be found in Marina Abramović’s 2010 exhibition

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at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, in which volunteers reperformed the artist’s programmatically ephemeral live pieces while she herself sat in a chair, adopting a marmoreal stillness that visualized the transformation of her body into a durable object. We have seen how Wasps is similarly a reenactment not of a play but of a performative moment, concerned with the affective connection between dramatist and audience that was broken during the presentation of Clouds. The second Clouds—a literal revision, possibly intended for performance, of the 423 play—also restages this ephemeral dimension, the broken connection, of the original performance. The monumentalizing reenactments of the Abramović exhibition and Aristophanes’ self-serving recreation of the aesthetic impact of a singular live performance function as “re-visions” (seeing again and, necessarily, seeing differently). In “the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes . . . ,” these attempts to recapture an original sensory experience amount to “an act of survival” (Rich 1979, 35). The affective experience in Aristophanes’ “re-vision” of his failure shapes a discourse that looks ahead to his dominant position in the canon of Old Comedy. The notion of affect has recently informed the perennial discussion of the canon, its controversial principles and elusive dynamics. Frank Kermode has re-energized the debate by placing aesthetics at the center, noting, “I hold it to be a necessary though not obvious requirement of the canonical that it should give pleasure” (2004, 20). Whatever specific form the pleasure may take (e.g., the Freudian lowering of tensions within the ego), Kermode emphasizes a material transaction—the energy sprung from the contact between a literary event and its addressees—as an essential factor in the ideology of the canon.  Scholars of English literature have indirectly supported Kermode’s intuition, showing that the formation of a canon in the late nineteenth century was grounded in a discourse of psychological and physical benefit, in a view of literature not just as “an object that might instruct or move” its readers, as Deidre Shauna Lynch puts it (2014, 9), but as a soothing, curative presence conducive to a quasi-personal attachment. Lynch has drawn attention to canonizing discussions of Jane Austen’s Emma, which consistently cast this novel as “wholesome . . . matter” to approach with the “solicitude of . . . valetudinarian[s] scheduling regular appointments with [a] physician” (2014, 183 and 187). In Lynch’s account, the nineteenth century’s canonizing discourse relies on the construction of “literary affections”—invigorating bonds of intimacy between readers and texts that resemble friendship, kinship, and love. In this perspective, “great books (so classified) are not only socially certified sources of great ideas or artistry” (ibid. 153), but health-giving forces in an aesthetic encounter figured as comforting companionship. A comparable therapeutic offer, though refused, emerges from Wasps and the second

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Clouds. The proto-canonical persona resulting from Aristophanes’ re-vision of his failure builds on philopatria (“love of father”), a filial devotion that aims to return an ailing, self-destructive father to the duties of patriarchy, which in itself is, of course, implicated with canonicity. The refashioning of comedy that will grant Aristophanes eventual dominance comes to be rooted in a “literary affection”—the comforting feelings and therapeutic pleasures— transmitted by a caretaker to his charge, in this case a child to his parent. The textiles that embody Aristophanic comedy’s affective force in Wasps and the second Clouds are also icons of its proto-canonical value. John Donne’s celebration of secular over sacred desire in the poem “Canonization” (published in 1633) supplies the famous image of an urn safeguarding the phoenix-like ashes of lovers, martyrs of profane eros. Besides signposting Donne’s subversive sanctification of earthly love, the title alerted readers such as Cleanth Brooks to the literary-canonical symbolism of the urn—an object, standing for a text, that figures its extension into posterity. The chlaina—turned into a less elaborate but still protective himation in the second Clouds—materializes the affect of Aristophanes’ comedy in performance and as a text. Certainly, this object is not as long-lasting as an urn—or, for that matter, a marble monument. However, its finely and tightly woven fabric furnishes it with a measure of staying power that makes it more durable than a shoddy tribōn. Differently from this Cratinean/Eupolidean ragged cloak, the chlaina could be passed down for at least a few generations, enjoying a material longevity that hints at the canonical survival of the comic mode it stands for. The wrapping and hard-wearing texture of Aristophanes’ chlaina seems thus to merge therapeutic affect with canonicity, his comedy’s alleged curative power with a version of the endurance symbolized by Donne’s urn. 3. Affect: Touch, Vibrant Objects, Intertextuality Beyond the canon, affect has been a central concern of my reading of Aristophanes. To recapture Aristophanes’ narrative of his broken bond with the comic audience, I have practiced a kind of affective reading—a “reading for affect” (Brinkema 2014, 36)—aimed at adding a material dimension to classic practices of formalistic analysis. This concept allows us to look at ancient literary, especially theatrical, texts in a new perspective. I now wish to take a moment to consider ramifications of affect in three areas—the sensory dimensions of performance, particularly touch; the vibrant materiality of objects; and intertextuality—and suggest some future avenues of research. The central role of textiles in shaping the affective connection between Aristophanic comedy and its audience has prompted me, in this study, to

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shift emphasis from the visual to the quasi-tactile properties of the performative medium. In linking the material force of Aristophanes’ comedy with the surfaces of chlaina and himation, the plays we have examined define comic performance in synesthetic terms—as a visual and aural phenomenon experienced as a sort of physical contact enabling a passage of experiences and feelings. Analyzing Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000)—a ceaseless parade of the luxuriant, almost architecturally designed garments of a pair of lovers—Giuliana Bruno has shown how the movie realizes a constant identification between the clothes’ texture and the filmic surface, i.e., the screen (2014, 35–51). In this film, fashion is “revealed to be a connective thread between persons and things” (ibid., 38), the material vehicle of feeling that brings the lovers close to each other, enveloping them, as it were. As Bruno observes, the overlap of fabric and filmic surface, in turn, transfers the affective connection between lovers onto the spectators, making them feel enfolded by the visual medium. The synesthetic effects generated in a theater and on the page by Aristophanes, as well as on the screen by Wong Kar-wai, open up a new set of questions on the representation of touch in ancient drama. What kind of dramatic (and metadramatic) work do tactile exchanges—with bodies as well as props—perform? To what extent do they reflect distinct genre-based models of performer-spectator relationship in comedy, tragedy, and satyr drama? Does tragedy feel different from comedy—and are there, in fact, tactile differences among tragedians, as there are among comedians? Looking at genres as sources of distinctive bodily and emotional feelings, I have discussed the unexpected alignments that Aristophanes posits between apparently disparate traditions: Cratinean comedy and tragedy, tragedy and iambos—all embodying and diffusing raggedness. Can we retrieve the particular texture of performance through the texture of contact between human and non-human agents onstage? The function of the chlaina and the himation as conveyors of affective energy ties Aristophanes’ self-reflexivity to these objects’ vibrant materiality. Recent trends in critical theory have complemented the study of objects as signifiers or symbols with an interest in their “energetic vitality,” their ability to “produce effects dramatic and subtle” and to “affect other bodies, enhancing or weakening their power” (Bennett 2010, 3, 5, and 6). Thus, the apparently inert materiality of things has been reevaluated as a source of emotional intensities and sensory and psychic engagement. As garments endowed with a transformative agency, the Aristophanic chlaina and the himation help us defamiliarize the common metaphors of text-as-object and text-as-textile. They invite us to see the textual object as the center of embodied experiences

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binding together dramatist, actors, and audience. If, for example, in Sophocles’ Electra, the heroine’s urn is, as Charles Segal proposed, “a symbol of the play itself ” (1981, 128), how do the emotional investments in the object reflect on the processes of dramatic production and reception? How does the prop’s smooth metallic surface figure the relationship of the play with its audience? In each of the four Plautine comedies named after objects (Aulularia, Cistellaria, Rudens, Vidularia), the title object establishes an identification of prop and play. To what degree are the play’s formal features mirrored in the prop’s materiality? Can we see the affective energies exchanged by objects and characters as suggestions of similar exchanges between text and playwright, play and audience? Retrieving objects’ vibrant materiality may, in other words, lead us to discover new forms of metatheatricality, what I would call affective self-reflexivity. I have indicated, in Wasps and the second Clouds, the ways that tragic intertextuality settles into the minds and bodies of characters, signaling— but also contributing to—their psychological state. Far from a merely formal game, this kind of intertextuality channels emotions, offering the promise (and posing the danger) of mimetic theatrical reception and assimilation. There is a strong structural and functional analogy between intertextuality and affect: they both express a connection, one of texts, the other of minds/ bodies. A variety of metaphors can be employed to characterize both processes: from the neutral (passage, diffusion, circulation) to the highly charged language of embodiment (embrace and even contagion). Bringing the language of affect into the phenomenology of intertextuality helps us broaden the range of metaphors through which to conceptualize relations between texts, and endow them with a new form of materiality. Perhaps more important, the analogy between intertextuality and affect, and their common store of congenial metaphors, express an easy connection between the processes themselves, a slippage between the two, by which they exchange energy and almost merge with each other. Of course, no interpretive paradigm will ever fully grasp the literary garment woven by Aristophanes—or any poet. Nor will any critic ever fully untangle a text’s interpretive possibilities. Confronted with this epistemological limitation, one could despair or, rather—reappropriating Beckett’s slogan— fail better, not in the sense of failing “worse,” or for that matter anticipating definitive triumph, but rather getting ever closer, asymptotically, to some kind of truth. It is, in a sense, our “act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes,” that secures the survival of poetic texts. Let Aristophanes’ own failure inspire us as we wrap ourselves in his belated triumph.

Synopses

The following is a schema for Wasps and Clouds, intended to give a synoptic view of the order of scenes. Line numbers preceded by “esp.” indicate passages highlighted in discussion. Wasps (422 BCE) Section

Location

Description

Prologue

esp. –

Xanthias informs the audience of Philocleon’s condition.

Parodos (incl. Philocleon’s monody)

esp. – and –

The jurors come to collect Philocleon for his daily service. Philocleon launches into a paratragic monody while confined to the house.

Agōn

–

Philocleon faces off with Bdelycleon on the merits of jury service. Bdelycleon wins.

Bdelycleon’s (temporary) victory

–

The Chorus exhorts Philocleon to heed Bdelycleon’s guidance. Bdelycleon offers therapy. Philocleon falls into a depressive state, then reenacts Bellerophon’s flight to Olympus.

Dog trial

–

Bdelycleon persuades Philocleon to stay home by setting up a trial with two dogs as contestants.

Parabasis

esp. –

Aristophanes is presented as a Heraclean hero. The Chorus programmatically reflects on the failure of Clouds.

Dressing scene

esp. –

Philocleon is reluctant to remove his tribōn and wear the chlaina.

Sympotic instruction

esp. –

Bdelycleon offers his father instructions on how to behave at the symposium.

Second parabasis

esp. –

Aristophanes defends himself against the charge of going easy on Cleon.

164

synopses

Account of the symposium

–

Xanthias recounts Philocleon’s altercation with Lysistratus and Thuphrastus.

Post-sympotic chaos

–

Philocleon arrives onstage with torches and a flute girl, whom Bdelycleon removes. Philocleon clocks him. Passers-by attacked by Philocleon threaten to sue, and his attempt to appease them with Aesopic fables backfires. Bdelycleon drags him inside.

Choral ode

–

The Chorus praises Bdelycleon, expressing hope that Philocleon will heed his son’s advice.

Exodos

–

Philocleon appears onstage, ready for a dancing contest with Carcinus and his sons.

(Revised) Clouds (419–417? BCE) Section

Location

Description

Prologue

esp. –

Strepsiades complains about his profligate son and aristocratic wife.

Strepsiades at the Thinkery

–

Strepsiades meets Socrates, a student, and the clouds, and is stripped of his cloak before entering.

Parabasis

esp. –

Aristophanes casts his play and himself as Electra, describes the violence of his rivals, and looks toward posterity.

Agōn

–

The Weaker and Stronger Argument debate pedagogy.

Agōn’s aftermath I

esp. –

Strepsiades’ hope for Pheidippides

Agōn’s aftermath II

–

Strepsiades’ fight with Pheidippides

Second agōn

esp. –

Strepsiades and Pheidippides debate the rightness of father-beating.

Exodos

–

The Chorus chastises Strepsiades for his misdeeds. Strepsiades takes revenge on Socrates by torching the Thinkery.

Notes

Chapter One 1. For discussion of the passage in view of comic agonistics, see Jedrkiewicz 1996, 86–87; Biles 2011, 196–97; and Roselli 2011, 45. On the reference to judges sitting in the front row (kritais anōthen) near the archon basileus, see Marshall and van Willigenburg 2004, 92. 2. This outcome of the comic contest, to which Aristophanes alludes in the parabases of both Wasps and the second Clouds, is recorded in the latter play’s fifth hypothesis—a short explanatory note placed at the beginning of a play by Hellenistic scholars. On Ameipsias, see Totaro 1998. 3. As Roselli (2011, 45) notes, “the anecdote elaborates a common expectation that the audience typically exercises the adjudicatory function in dramatic competitions.” 4. A fallacious connection between Aristophanes’ allegedly superior poetic value and his unique survival was posited as late as 1931 by Norwood (v). 5. For a full treatment of comic festival agonistics, see Sidwell 2009 and Biles 2011 and 2014b; specifically on Aristophanes and Eupolis, see Storey 2003, 281–307, and Kyriakidi 2007, 101–96. 6. On this play, see below. 7. On the practice of drawing up canonical lists, which was established by Aristophanes of Byzantium (ca. 257–185/180 BCE) and Aristarchus of Samothrace (ca. 215–143 BCE), see Pfeiffer 1968, 207; Hägg 2010; and Broggiato 2014. 8. On the tragic triad in fourth-century Athens, see Hanink 2014, 60–91. On the Alexandrian scholars’ work on Old Comedy, see Dobrov 2010, 15–20; Lowe 2013; and Montana 2013. 9. The second Clouds was never produced at a major festival, but it may have been originally conceived for performance: see ch. 5. 10. According to Bourdieu and Chartier (1985, 225), canonicity purports to offer “the only true reading, the reading of the imperishable, the reading of the eternal, of the classical, of what must not be thrown away.” On canons’ strategic erasure of contingencies, see Smith 1984 and 1988; Porter 2006a, 50–53; and Schein 2008. On the ideology of canon formation, see esp. Kermode 1983, 1989, and 2004 and Guillory 1993 and 1995. 11. Levinson (2003, 6) defines aesthetics as “the study of certain distinctive experiences or states of mind, whether attitudes, perceptions, emotions,” triggered by a subject’s encounter with a work of art. For a reclamation of the materiality of ancient aesthetics as grounded in embodied experience, see esp. Porter 2010. My concern is with how Aristophanic comedy imagines the audience’s experience of different comic modes, i.e., their distinctive effects on bodies, minds, and souls: see sec. 3.

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12. See Gowers 2012, 149. Cucchiarelli (2001, 33) observes that Horace self-consciously poses as an Alexandrian scholar. 13. On fluidity within ancient canons, see Citroni 2006, 217 and 220, and Porter 2006a, 50–51; on the canonization of the three tragedians, see Easterling 1997; Hanink 2014, 60–91; and Nervegna 2014. 14. In Poet. 1448a24–28, Aristotle pairs Aristophanes with Homer and Sophocles, the “middle-of-the road” tragedian of Frogs, who, in many respects, can be viewed as the philosopher’s favorite. 15. Proleg. de com. iii (Koster 1975, 9.36–37). See Nesselrath 2000, 239. Although dating back to late antiquity or the early Byzantine era, the treatises of the Comic Prolegomena are “rooted without doubt in ancient learning” (Dobrov 2010, 24). 16. Proleg. de com. iii (Koster 1975, 9.34–35). 17. Proleg. de com. iii (Koster 1975, 9.37). Leptoteros is delimited by “in songs” (melesi) in a context that mentions Euripides but is textually corrupt. On Eupolis’s thematic convergences with Cratinus, see Telò 2013b, 115–18. 18. Platon. Diff. char., Proleg. de com. ii (Koster 1975, 6.2–5): see Hunter 2009, 79. 19. Proleg. de com. v (Koster 1975, 14.20–22): see Nesselrath 2000, 240, and Hunter 2009, 79. 20. Aristophanes’ primacy in the Horatian triad is also suggested by the subsequent assimilation, in Sat. 1.4.11, of Lucilius—the crude, “muddy” father of satire—to Cratinus in a blatant re-creation of the parabasis of Knights: see Gowers 2012, 157; Farmer 2013, 481–84; and FerrissHill 2015, 9–10. 21. See Freudenburg 2001, 181, and Reckford 2009, 10 and 49–51. 22. See Olson 1998, 218. 23. Porter (2010, 272–73 and 2015b, 327–28) reads this passage as an expression of the monumental sublime. On Old Comedy’s play with the opposition between performance and textuality, see Slater 1996a and 2002b; Rosen 1997; and Wright 2012. 24. Hunter (2009, 79) has observed that Aristophanes is a “primary witness to, and source for, the developmental narrative of Old Comedy” from the Hellenistic period onward. 25. On the Hellenistic development of the Aristotelian idea of poetic technē, see, among others, Pfeiffer 1968, 89; Fantuzzi and Hunter 2004, 1–3; and Gutzwiller 2010, 342–43. 26. On krisis, see esp. Too 1998, 115–50; on the monumental ambitions of Hellenistic scholars and poets, see Most 1990, 54–55; Klooster 2011, 26–35; and Porter 2010, 481–90, and 2011, esp. 295. 27. On the Aristophanic fragment, see Wright 2012, 12–13. As we can infer from its source, Aristophanes probably responds to Cratin. fr. 342 KA, which criticizes him for allegedly “Euripidaristophanizing” and presents the typical Aristophanic spectator as hupoleptologos (“excessively subtle and elegant of speech”): see Bakola 2010, 24–29. Cratinus disdains leptotēs in frr. 205 and 206 KA: see Porter 2010, 274. On leptotēs in Hellenistic aesthetics, see, e.g., Fantuzzi and Hunter 2004, 72–74; cf. Porter 2011. 28. On this principle, see also Martindale 1993, 17–18. 29. On phortēgoi, see Bravo 1977, 42–51, and Kurke (1989, 541), who pairs them with the retail traders (kapēloi) in the marketplace, whom archaic and classical elitist ideology stigmatize. The materiality of phortos as a literary-critical term is also relevant to the initial scene of Frogs, where the cheap humor of phortikē kōmōidia (“vulgar comedy”), which Xanthias employs, is reified in the luggage he hauls as Dionysus’s porter: see esp. Silk 2000, 26–33; Wright 2012, 92–95; and Rosen 2015, 459.

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30. On the language of ἐκκρίνειν and excludere—both meaning “to exclude”—in ancient discussions of canon formation, see Citroni 2006, 204–11, and Eidinow 2009, 80–86. On Callimachus’s poetics of exclusion, see Bassi 1989. 31. On the wide knowledge of Cratinus and Eupolis in antiquity, see, e.g., Bowie 2007, 33. 32. See esp. Porter 2010, 272, for discussion of the intertextual connection. On the Pherecratean fragment, see Conti Bizzarro 1999, 119–25, and Biles 2006–2007, 232–33. 33. The tradition of a fifth-century decree instituting the reperformance of Aeschylean drama at the Great Dionysia has been questioned by Slater 1990, 394, and Biles 2006–2007; cf. Nervegna 2007, 15–16. On the earliest phase of Aeschylean reperformance and revival, see Hanink and Uhlig, forthcoming. 34. Biles refers to Sommerstein 1996, 232–33. In an early sign of canonicity, Aristophanes himself was honored with a reperformance of Frogs sometime in the late fifth century: see Sommerstein 1993 and Griffith 2013, 220–21. 35. See Vit. Aesch. 332.21–333.5 Page. On the “cult” of Aeschylus, see Scodel 2003; Wilson 2007b, 356–57; and Kimmel-Clauzet 2013, 149–50 and 242. 36. On this statement and its connection with Peace, see Edwards 1990, 149; Porter 2010, 272; and Biles 2011, 245n140. The Aristophanic Aeschylus’s awareness of his poetic afterlife is evident at 868–69, where he distances his deathless poetry from that of Euripides. 37. Porter (2006b, 305) has observed that “Frogs is a critical study in canon formation and value determination,” but also “an exposure of the process by which value comes to be assigned in a culture.” See also Rosen 2006, 45–46, and Halliwell 2011, 93–154. Awareness of the constructedness of canonicity does not preclude a self-serving appropriation of it. On Cratinus’s possible “self-classicizing” aspirations, see Niall Slater in Porter 2006b, 302n2 ( per litteras), and Bakola 2010, 177. 38. See Rawles 2013, 182–83. For the same pun, see Ach. 644–45 (from a parabasis); and Eq. 873–74 (in reference to the Sausage Seller, a figure suggestive of Aristophanes’ poetic persona). 39. For the blend of monumental imagery and inscriptional moves in authorial selfconstruction, see Martelli 2013, 160–74 (on Ovid), and Peirano 2014, 231–32 (on Horace). 40. On the use of aristos in funerary inscriptions, see, e.g., IG i  1084 (SEG 10.465) and BÉ 1973 no. 463. 41. A commemorative epigram from the Augustan Age, by Antipater of Thessalonica (GowPage, GP 103 [Anth. Pal. 9.186]), ends by addressing Aristophanes as ariste . . . kōmike (“best comedian”). On the author’s name as a source of constructed discursive unity, see Foucault (1969) 1979, 145–47. 42. On Aristophanes’ preoccupation with his textual afterlife, see Rosen 1997 and Wright 2012, 141–43. 43. The fact that there is less evidence for such a narrative in the later works may simply reflect a diminished sense of agonistic intensity for an older, better-established poet. References to rivals are markedly diminished after the second Clouds. Frogs (Lenaia, 405 BCE), in which we see elements of comic agonism and a kind of indirect self-monumentalization through Aeschylus, evinces a reconciliation with the long-dead Cratinus: see Biles 2011 (ch. 6); Hartwig 2012; and Griffith 2013, 216–17. 44. On the “anti-prize” mentality of ancient critics, see Wright (2009 and 2012, 42–60), who refers to an anecdote reported in Vitr. De arch. 7.5–6, according to which Aristophanes of Byzantium, sitting as a juror in a poetic contest organized by Ptolemy Philadelphus, recommended that the victory be assigned to “the poet who least pleased the crowd.”

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N o t e s t o Pa g e s 8 – 1 1

45. Lada-Richards (2004, 60) has observed that Terence’s harping on Hecyra’s double failure in the play’s prologues “amounts to . . . a gesture of identity construction . . . a calculated act of theatrical self-definition.” I do not mean to imply a palinode, as argued by Biles (2011, esp. ch. 5). 46. For the idea of authorial self-extension, specifically in Ovid, see Martelli (2013, 4), who posits it as an effect of textual revision. Though I am more interested in the reimagining of the competitive failure of a performance than in textual revision per se, the second version of Clouds, of course, is an example of the latter. 47. This is what we can call “the authority of failure” (in the phrase of F. Scott Fitzgerald) or “the prestige of failure” (Ball 2015). On Aristophanes’ self-presentation as a lofty visionary in the parabasis of Peace, see Biles 2011, 4. Pseudo-Longinus discusses failure in Subl 33 and 36 (thanks to John Tennant for drawing my attention to these passages). On the sublime Aristophanes, see Porter 2015b, 319–34. 48. On the other hand, the bemusement that, in Aelian’s report, marked the initial response to Clouds recalls Aristophanes’ complaints about his audience’s skeptical response to the play’s novelty in the parabases of Wasps (1043–45) and, to an extent, of the second Clouds (525–26 and 547–48). Porter (2015b, 434–43) sees in Clouds the abuse of Socrates’ philosophical sublimity— abuse which, in a sense, Aelian imputes as the source of the audience’s appreciation. 49. See Sidwell 1995 and 2009, 155–65; Ruffell 2002 and 2011, 377–85; and Biles 2011, 97–133. 50. On Cratinus’s tragic affiliation and manic inspiration, see Bakola 2010 and 2013. 51. For tragedy’s “implicit assertion of semnotēs,” see Platter 2007, 19–20; see also Heath 1987b, 33–35, on the critical tradition of tragic semnotēs from Arist. Poet. 1448b25–49a5 onward. 52. See most recently Wright 2012, 46–66. Aristophanes may also not have been the only comic poet to criticize cheap humor of the sort stigmatized in the parabasis of Peace, like “hungry Heracles” (741). In a textually problematic fragment (346 KA), Cratinus may look down upon this same joke: see Conti Bizzarro 1999, 104–7; for a comparable criticism in Eupolis, see fr. 261 KA. Nor does Aristophanes refrain from the base humor that he imputes to his rivals in the parabasis of Peace: on this tension, see Biles 2011, 163–66, and Bakola 2012. 53. See Storey 2003, 212; Biles 2011, 32n83; and Wright 2012, 21 and 63. See also fr. 392 KA. 54. See Bakola 2010, 40–41, and Wright 2012, 52–53. For what is probably a similar attitude, see fr. 211 KA, on which see Biles 2011, 142. 55. On Pytine as a triumphant reaffirmation of Cratinus’s drunken poetics, see Bakola 2010, 59–63, and Biles 2011, 134–54; for a different opinion, cf. Rosen 2000. 56. See also Smith 1988. Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve (1851–62, 3:46) famously declared, “I call the classic the healthy, and the romantic the sick”: see Compagnon 1995. For the the moral dimension of Hellenistic canonizing activity, see Too 1998, 139–49. 57. On this predilection and the poetological opposition of intoxication and sobriety (emblematized by Archilochus and Hipponax), see Crowther 1979, 4–5; Degani 1984, 171–86, and 1995; and Fantuzzi and Hunter 2004, 448–49. 58. See, most recently, Wright 2012, 71–77. 59. Dobrov (2001, 9) considers the interchangeable terms “metatheater” and “metadrama” as “a theatrical subset of a generalized ‘metafiction’—that process . . . where a narrative or performance recognizes, engages, or exploits its own fictionality.” See also Slater 2002a and Ruffell 2011. On metalepsis as frame-breaking, see Whitmarsh 2013. 60. See, among others, Hubbard 1991; Dobrov 1995 and 2001; Slater 2002a; Biles 2011; and Ruffell 2011. 61. On the central role of the Aristophanic “audience’s or critic’s negotiation” in the con-

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struction of comic meaning, see esp. Goldhill 1991, 196–222; on Aristophanes’ envisioning different interpreters, see Hesk 2000. 62. See esp. Bowie 1982; Hubbard 1991; and Biles 2011. 63. See esp. Hubbard 1991 and Biles 2011. 64. See Derrida (1972) 1981, 7. 65. On the relationship between dramatic plots and ancient biographies of playwrights, see Lefkowitz (1981) 2012, 70–103. 66. On Terentian prologues’ kinship with Aristophanic parabases, see Sharrock 2009, 77–78. 67. I owe this formulation to Donald Mastronarde, per litteras. 68. Laird (2000, 145) makes similar remarks in relation to intratextuality. 69. Clements (2014, 2) characterizes “the notion that we already know the plausible limits of comic audiences and must therefore necessarily delimit our reading of the allusive possibilities of our extant texts” as “predicated upon fallacy.” On the “fallacy of audience limitation,” see Lyne 1994, 197–98. On the Athenian audience’s exceptional aural attunement and mnemonic capacity for intra- and intertextual connections, see esp. Rossi 1995, 276; see also Pucci (1998) and Konstan (2006a), who conceptualize ancient audiences (of both performed and written texts) as attentive interpreters. 70. See also Fowler 1997, 28–29. For correctives in theater studies to the traditional divide between spectators and readers, see Worthen 1998, 1100, and Perris 2010. 71. For a discussion of these references, see Wright 2012, 62–66. Frogs provides the most famous ones: the image of Dionysus reading Euripides’ Andromeda on a ship (52–54) and the mention of well-equipped viewers who even possess the “scripts” (biblia) of the plays (1109–18). See also Slater 1996a; Ford 2003, 30–31; and Revermann 2006b, 120. On the importance of reading in Frogs, see Lowe 1993; Porter 2006b, 303–4; and Bassi, forthcoming. 72. The extent of literacy in fifth-century Athens is notoriously difficult to pin down: see, e.g., Thomas 1989. Wright (2012, 65) suggests that “only the educated . . . elite would have been able to read . . . copies of the texts,” but underlines that the work of fifth-century comedians “was heavily influenced by [the] emerging culture of reading” (142); for a more expansive position on the readership of drama, cf. Bassi, forthcoming. On the legitimacy and advisability of “reading theatrical literature . . . qua literature,” see Perris 2010, 188–89. 73. On non-linear reading as breaking “the tyranny of the forward movement,” see Sharrock 2000, 35–36; on reading as constant re-reading and reappraisal, see esp. Iser (1976) 1978, 127–29, and 1980; Kolarov 1992, 38; and Gray 2006, 32–35. 74. On blending and accretion as essential mechanisms of performative cognition, see McConachie and Hart 2006 and Cook 2007 and 2011. Kawin (1972, 53) has noted that King Lear “requires that the audience have the entire play in its head throughout the performance.” For a different perspective, cf. Revermann 2006a, 38. 75. Carlson (2001, 15) famously applies the metaphors of “ghosting” and “haunting” to theater, which he sees as a highly intertextual space. 76. See most recently Foley 2008; Ruffell 2011, 229–30 and 336–59; and Bakola, Prauscello, and Telò 2013. 77. Acharnians and Thesmophoriazusae are exemplary. On the former, see Foley 1988; Dobrov 2001, 37–53; and Slater 2002a, 51–58; on the latter, Nieddu 2004; Revermann 2006b, 115–17; and Cowan 2008 and 2013, 322–23. For a comprehensive list of the Aristophanic passages where the full appreciation of a joke requires that spectators recall a precise tragic context, see Mastromarco 2006, 157–63.

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78. Fowler discusses the emblematic case of Thesm. 868 (parodically echoing Eur. Hel. 56), where the joke turns on the particle οὖν. 79. Somewhere between the intra- and the intertextual are the numerous connections between Aristophanic plays, e.g., between Knights and Wasps and between Wasps and the second Clouds. The identification of these connections relies on the same conception of the interpreter that I have laid out above. 80. For the ambivalence of the prefix para-, see Martin 2000, 53. Ruffell (2008, 50) views Aristophanic metafictionality as “an act of complicity, even solidarity, rather than an act of alienation.” 81. For comprehensive and theoretically engaged illustrations of this point, see esp. Porter 2010 and 2013 and Peponi 2012. 82. Vit. Aesch. 332.10–13 Page. According to this account, the appearance of the Chorus during the performance of Eumenides also caused children to faint. 83. Gorg. B 23 DK. On the materiality of the Gorgianic logos as described especially in Helen, see Porter 2010, 275–307; on its medicinal and incantatory powers, see Ford 2002, 172–87; Halliwell 2011, 266–84; and Munteanu 2012, 37–47. 84. See, among others, Lada-Richards 1993 and 1996b; Halliwell 1996; and Murray 2011 and 2013. 85. Bernays (1857) 2004 famously saw Aristotelian catharsis as a form of medical purging: on the revolutionary importance of this view, see Porter 2015a. On Aristotle’s catharsis theory, see also Heath 2001 and 2013, 95–97; Ford 2004; Munteanu 2012, 238–50; and Rapp 2015, 447–51. 86. See Biles 2014a, 6–8. On later Greek comedy’s preoccupation with the physiology of drama, see Wright 2013b, 613–15. 87. Seigworth and Gregg (2010, 1–2) define affect as “a body’s capacity to affect and to be affected,” i.e., as something that “is found in those intensities that pass body to body (human, nonhuman, part-body, and otherwise).” See also Brennan 2004, 3: “the transmission of affect . . . mean[s] . . . that the emotions or affects of one person, and the enhancing or depressing energies these affects entail, can enter into another.” Ahmed (2004, 119) observes that instead of “seeing emotions as psychological dispositions,” the notion of affect captures “how they work  .  .  . to mediate the relationship between the psychic and the social, and between the individual and the collective.” For introductions to affect theory, see, among others, Sedgwick 2003; Gregg and Seigworth 2010; and Figlerowicz 2012. On affect and performance, see esp. del Río 2008, 1–13. Visvardi (2015, 13–17) uses the notion of affect to analyze tragedy’s role in shaping Thucydides’ discourse of emotions. Wohl (2015) sees the political dimension of Euripidean tragedy as a function of the affective trajectory delineated by plot structure. For an affect-oriented reading of Sophocles, see Worman, forthcoming. 88. For affect and audience reception in Renaissance theater, see esp. Craik and Pollard 2013. On habitus, see Bourdieu (1980) 1990, 52–65 and 66–79; for the relation between affect and habitus, see Highmore 2010, 135. 89. See also Fischer-Lichte 2010, 33–34, and Harrop 2010, 232; on the idea of theater as a “bodied space,” defined by the interactions of performers’ and audience’s physicalities, see Garner 1994. Peponi (2012, 91) has coined the expression “aesthetics of fusion” to define the blurring of the boundaries between performers and audience, i.e., the process whereby “enchanted listeners attend as virtual performers.” 90. See Lada-Richards 1993, 110. Of course, Socrates’ ostensible praise expresses ethical disapproval; what interests me is the dynamic of affective transmission that the passage describes.

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As noted by Loraux ([1981] 1986, 267), notwithstanding its corrosive critique of the epitaphic genre, the prologue of Menexenus sketches out “a veritable pathology” of those who listen to funeral orations. 91. For similar imagery in the Republic, see Prauscello 2014, 37–39 with notes 47 and 50. Not only sound but also sight is invested with a tactile quality in ancient aesthetics: see esp. Morales 2004, 130–35; Porter 2010, 416–20, and 2013, 16–18; and Purves 2013. Classic theoretical treatments of this intersensory nexus are Benjamin (1955) 2007, 238; Merleau-Ponty (1964) 1968, 130–55, and (1945) 1969; Barthes (1980) 1981, esp. 81; Deleuze and Guattari (1980) 1987, 421–22; and Derrida (2000) 2005, 3. 92. On affect in the practice of reading, see, e.g., Altieri 2003, esp. 231–54, and Lynch 2014 (both focused on English literature). 93. See also Bowie 1993, 63–64, and Slater 2002a, 68–85. On the lawsuit allegedly brought against Aristophanes by Cleon after the performance of Babylonians (Great Dionysia, 426 BCE), see, among others, Sommerstein 2004 and Rosen 2000, 24, and 2007, 78–89, respectively, in favor of and against the historicity of the trial. 94. On this point, see esp. Biles 2011, 121–22. 95. See Biles 2011, 121–32, and Ruffell 2002 and 2011, 376–85. 96. Both Ruffell (2002, 144) and Biles (2011, 122–23) link Paphlagon’s stormy vocality with Cratinus’s assimilation of his comic poetry to an outburst of liquid violence. Paphlagon is compared to the canine monster Cerberus in 1017 and 1030; on Cratinus’s barking satire, see Telò 2014b, 309–12. On Cratinus’s Dionysiac poetics of intoxication in Pytine and earlier, see Rosen 2000; Bakola 2010, 16–20, 59–64, and 275–85; and Biles 2011, 140–49. For its connections with Paphlagon’s alcoholism, see Ruffell 2002, 148–50, and 2011, 378–83. 97. See Ruffell 2002 and 2011, 370–85, esp. 370. 98. The Sausage Seller’s rejuvenation reprises the treatment administered by Medea to Jason’s father in the epic poem Nostoi (Davies, EGF 6.2). In this text, old age is presented as skin to be sloughed off. See Olson 1990 and Telò 2014a, 39. 99. See Telò 2014a, 39. 100. See Hubbard 1991, 87. The job of a sausage maker is to turn offal into an edible product, converting dead material into life-giving nourishment. 101. See Theog. 83–84: on this passage, see Pucci 1977, 19, and Worman 2002, 45. 102. See esp. Ruffell 2002, 144. 103. As noted by Ruffell (2002, 144), the simile implies that Cratinus “takes out his enemies as well as a load of innocent trees” (my italics). 104. On the connection between Cratinus’s metaphorics of inundation and the Aristophanic parabasis, see Bakola 2010, 21–22; Biles 2011, 153–54; and Ruffell 2011, 377 and 383. 105. See esp. Rosen 2000, 30–31. 106. On this portrait and Cratinus’s response to it in Pytine, see Ruffell 2002, 144–48, and 2011, 377 and 384; Bakola 2010, 16–22 and 283–85; and Biles 2011, 144–54. 107. See Telò 2014a, 39–41. For the agonistic symbolism of Cratinus’s withered garland, see Biles 2011, 99, and Ruffell 2002, 145–46, and 2011, 419. 108. The Chorus in the parabasis of Knights describes Aristophanes’ cautious behavior at the beginning of his career in terms that touch upon, without developing, a major theme of this book: sōphrosunē as an affective force transmitted from poet to audience. In the Chorus’s observation that “he acted in a self-controlled way (sōphronikōs) and did not mindlessly leap into producing nonsense” (545), the adverbial form sōphronikōs, etymologically connected to

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sōphrosunē, reinforces for us the imputed association of that quality with Aristophanic comedy that we will find fully dramatized, in the intersection of plot and parabasis, in Wasps and Clouds, but not yet here. 109. In the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, Dawn’s use of “beautiful robes” (heimata kala 232) to comfort Tithonus indirectly substitutes for the removal or replacement of his old skin (224), the process undergone by Demos in Knights. I owe this point to Melissa Mueller. 110. For Aristophanes’ assimilation of tragic and comic plays to clothes, see, e.g., Ach. 400–434 and fr. 58 KA: for more on this assimilation, see ch. 2, sec. 2. 111. Recent theoretical studies have emphasized objects’ ability to materialize relations and feelings: see, esp. Brown 2003, 162–75; Ahmed 2006, 2, and 2010; and Dudley 2010. Sedgwick (2003, 19) views objects as primary conveyors of affect; Fisher (1997, 6) uses “haptic aesthetics” to characterize the material “connections between artists, art and beholders.” 112. Aristides and Miltiades appear as the founding fathers of Athenian manhood in Eupolis’s Demoi: see Strauss 1993, 183–84, and Telò 2007, 91–92 and 424–26. 113. On the thematization of fatherhood in the finale of Knights, see Telò 2014a, 36–41. 114. On the figure of the Aristophanic paternal son in Peace, see Telò 2010. 115. On this point, see Griffith 1983, 56–57 and 62, and Tsagalis 2006, 112–13. Persius’s persona in his Satires—that of the “puer as teacher,” according to John Henderson’s formula (1991)—shows some affinities to the Hesiodic and Aristophanic paternal sons: see also Keane 2006, 124–26. The related figures of the puer senex (“old-spirited youth”) and the sacrificial son are analyzed, respectively, by Curtius ([1953] 2013, 98–107) and Miller (2003), who focus on the relationship between Aeneas and the physically frail but still authoritative Anchises—a somewhat different scenario from one in which the father is afflicted by a childlike lack of responsibility. 116. Gunderson (2003, 59) has argued for a similar dynamic in Roman imperial rhetoric, which constructs its own authority by staging itself as tending to an injured father. On the conceptualization of the principle of authority (the symbolic order, corresponding to the Freudian superego) as paternal Law or Name of the Father, see Lacan (1966) 2002, 65–67, and Shepherdson 2000, 115–41. Wohl (2013) offers a fascinating reading of some scenes of Wasps in light of Lacan’s paternal symbolism. The filial paradigm that I propose emphasizes not the parricidal or castrating impulses defining the Freudian or Lacanian conflictual models, but rather an attempt at reconciliation. The Aristophanic paternal son, as I see him, resembles the character of David in the film Nebraska (2013), “a guy clinging to his own decency—and trying to defend his father’s dignity—in the face of threats from within and without,” as A. O. Scott put it (New York Times, November 15, 2013; my italics). For more on this, see esp. my discussion of Electra in ch. 5. In developing this model of “filial rescue,” as Tromly (2010, 10) calls it in relation to Shakespeare, I cannot completely exclude a power-seeking element, such as the one hinted at by Freud in relation to a father-saving impulse (1910, 172–73)—codified by Abraham (1955, 68–75) as just another manifestation of the father-killing drive. 117. See Bloom (1973) 1997. 118. On clothes and character in Aristophanic comedy, see Robson 2005.

Chapter Two 1. An explicit opposition between tribōn and chlaina is drawn in Ameips. fr. 9 KA and Herod. 2.21–23. See also Plut. 935–40, discussed in sec. 4, and Ar. Eccl. 848–50. 2. For the sake of convenience, here and throughout, I use the unmodified term “parabasis” to refer to the explicitly metapoetic section of the Chorus’s address to the audience (1009–59),

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that is—using the ancient terminology—to the sequence of kommation (1009–14), anapaistoi (1015–50), and pnigos (1051–59). A “second parabasis” (1265–91) is referred to below and in ch. 4. 3. For metatheatrical readings of Wasps, see esp. Slater 1996b and Purves 1997. 4. The aristocratic status of Bdelycleon, which his characterization as a long-haired youth (466) with “horsey-dignified ways” (135) underscores, does not prevent him from reaching “beyond his own generational and class sphere” (McGlew 2004, 18) and acting as a son seriously concerned for his father and the democratic cause: see Olson 1996, 134, and Hutchinson 2011, 63. A quasi-defense of Bdelycleon’s aristocratic character may be located in a parabatic observation concerning Aristophanes, who, as we will see in a moment, is commonly aligned with this father-saving son: “having been elevated as great and honored . . . among you, he (= the poet) says he didn’t end up swollen or puffed up in attitude, nor did he try to cruise the wrestling schools” (1023–25). For a different take on Bdelycleon, cf. Konstan 1985; Heath 1987a, 32; and Crane 1997, 217. 5. See 345 (= 483), 411, and 473–74, where Bdelycleon is labeled a “conspirator,” “hater of the city,” “hater of the people,” and “lover of monarchy.” 6. On Philocleon’s resemblances to Demos, see Hubbard 1991, 126–39; Olson 1996, 139; and Sidwell 2009, 69–75. 7. See, among others, Reckford 1987, 254–55 and 273–75; Hubbard 1991, 30 and 126; Olson 1996, 145–46; and Biles 2011, 163–64. (Biles and Olson 2015, a commentary on Wasps, was released too late to be considered in this book.) 8. See Rosen 2014, 237, and ch. 1, note 93. 9. On this scene, see most recently Major 2013, 105–9; for its self-reflexive implications, see Reckford 1987, 252; Slater 1996b, 34–35; and Biles 2011, 159–64. 10. See Biles 2011, 162. On the interpretation of 876, see Sidwell 1989. See also 886 for a reference to Bdelycleon’s “new regime” (neaisin archais). On Aristophanes’ self-serving rhetoric of kainotēs (“novelty”), see, e.g., Bremer 1993, 160–65; Slater 1999, 359–61; and Wright 2012, 70–98. 11. See esp. Reckford 1987, 246–47; Slater 1996b, 30–31; Purves 1997, 14–15; and Hall 2006, 359–65 and 369–70. 12. On this assimilation of Bdelycleon to the trugōidos Aristophanes, see Olson 1996, 144; Storey 2003, 346 and 371; and Wright 2013a, 207–8. On the terms trugōidia and trugōidos, through which Old Comedians self-deprecatingly position themselves in a parasitic relation with tragedy, see esp. Taplin 1983; Dobrov 2001, 97–98; and Hall 2006, 333–35. See also ch. 4, sec. 3. 13. See esp. Slater 1996b and Purves 1997. 14. It is significant that, after the parabasis, addressed to the audience, Bdelycleon uses the adjective skaios (“foolish”) against his father (1183) when Philocleon rejects instructions on how to tell “dignified stories” (1174): see sec. 3. 15. See MacDowell 1971, 265; Halliwell 1980, 39–40; and Sommerstein 1983, 216. 16. Differently from Wilson, OCT, I follow the manuscript tradition at 1037 (μετ’αὐτοῦ) and 1040: see Telò 2010, 285n24. 17. For the combination of kathartēs and alexikakos in reference to Heracles, see Parker 1983, 229–30. 18. I agree with those scholars who, following von Wilamowitz-Möllendorff (1911, 469–70), believe that perusin at 1038 situates the same dramatic event alluded to at 1044, i.e., the first version of Clouds: see Hubbard 1991, 119; Platter 2007, 93; and Sidwell 2009, 166–72. For a different opinion, cf. MacDowell 1971, 267; Sommerstein 1977, 271–72; and Imperio 2004, 293–94. 19. See Sommerstein 2002, 20–21; Hordern 2004, 179; and Imperio 2004, 292; on the daemon Epialos/Ephialtes, see Roscher (1900) 1972 and Holmes 2010, 54.

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20. For the link between ēpialos and puretos, see, e.g., [Hippoc.] Aer. 3. In a parabatic fragment from the Second Thesmophoriazusae (fr. 346 KA), Aristophanes claims to have suffered from an ēpialos followed by a puretos, which caused him to be sick for four months: see Cassio 1987; Butrica 2001, 46–49; and Austin and Olson 2004, lxxxi–ii. See also note 35. Suffocation is associated with fevers in [Hippoc.] Coac. 271 (en puretoisin . . . pnigesthai). On Heracles as an alter ego of Hippocrates, see Jouanna 1999, 37. 21. In Knights, alluded to in 1029, Paphlagon/Cleon is characterized as a monster: see Sommerstein 2002. On the identification in Wasps’ parabasis of Cerberus (1031–32), Typhon (1033– 34), and Lamia (1035), see MacDowell 1971, 266, and Mastromarco 1989; see also Olson 1998, 221–22, on these lines as they appear in Peace (754–58). For the fever referents, the following have been suggested: unspecified sycophants and meddling politicians (MacDowell 1971, 267); young social climbers (Sommerstein 1977, 271–72); the pupils of Socrates, notorious for their pale complexions (von Wilamowitz-Möllendorff 1911, 469–70, and Sidwell 2005, 73–74, and 2009, 171– 78); and unidentified parasites (Ruffell 2011, 283n81). 22. Storey (2011b, 49) has suggested a connection of the fevers to Phrynichus, a rival of Aristophanes, who authored the play Ephialtes. A hint of the image’s metapoetic potential is supplied by the verb sunkollaō, “to glue together” (sunekollōn 1041), a metaphor of literary composition as exemplified in Pl. Phdr. 278e: see Nünlist 1998, 124–25, and Porter 2010, 270. 23. See Reckford 1987, 272–75; Sidwell 1990, 13–14; and Hubbard 1991, 118–21. 24. The absence of metrical resolutions in 1133 elevates the tone of Philocleon’s complaint, enhancing its resonance with the motif “better not to have children” that we see exemplarily expressed in Eur. TrGF 5.908a (spoken by a father). The conjunction of phuteuein with trephein is tragic: see Telò 2010, 303n107. 25. In pointing out that Philocleon has never been to Sardis (1139), Bdelycleon is alluding to embassies to Persia as a symbol of the privileges that, as he will argue in the agōn, the demagogues refrain from sharing with the jurors: see Miller 1997, 154–55. 26. On the aristocratic ideology of habrosunē in archaic and classical Greece, see Kurke 1992. 27. For an analysis of this dressing scene in terms of class conflict, see most recently Compton-Engle 2015, 70–72. Notwithstanding inevitable ambiguities surrounding embassies to Persia and the use of Persian items, as Miller (1997, 183–87) has shown, the second half of the fifth century registered a remarkable shift in attitude toward the Persian enemy, which resulted in cultural exchanges at all levels, including fashion: in this climate, the incorporation of Persian items in the clothing of the upper class became more acceptable. On the reflections of this attitude in tragedy, see also Griffith 1998, 46–47. 28. In the Ecclesiazusae, the Athenian women wear both Spartan sandals and chlainai to resemble their husbands when they take over the assembly (see esp. 507–8); see also Thesm. 142, where a chlaina, Spartan sandals, and a penis are presented as the distinctive accoutrements of the Athenian gentleman that Agathon lacks. In Athens, the term lakōnikai (“Spartan sandals”) identified a Spartan-style shoe tied with leather straps, not sandals imported from Sparta. The paradox of Philocleon’s hostility against them is that the tribōn has pronounced Laconic associations: see note 29. 29. Geddes (1987, 320) and Battezzato (1999–2000, 349) discuss the garment as an extreme form of Dorian dress; see also Lee 2015, 118. On Socrates’ tribōn, see ch. 5; on the Cynics, see sec. 3. For iconography, see Miller 2010, 318–25, and Hughes 2012, 187–89. 30. The kaunakēs was a type of chlaina, probably Babylonian, “with woollen tufts or tassels . . . arranged in horizontal rows all over the cloak, making it very thick and warm” (MacDowell 1971, 278). See Przyluski 1931 and Miller 1997, 154–55.

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31. In fr. 32 West, the iambographer similarly poses as a trembling underdog and asks Hermes for a chlaina—the typical prize at the Hermaia, the athletic games of Pellene. As noted by Degani (1971, 103), Hipponax reduces the chlaina to sheer materiality, stripping it of its symbolic connections with aristocratic prestige; for a similar utilitarian reduction of the garment in Simon. fr. 25 West, see Rawles, forthcoming. The chlaina is also described as a remedy for cold winds in Pind. Ol. 9.97. 32. On the thematics of chills and cold weather in Acharnians (425 BCE), a play produced, like Wasps, at the winter festival of the Lenaia, see Olson 2002, 282–83, 286, and 292. 33. See [Hippoc.] Acut. (Sp.) 17; Morb 2.42–43 and 3.13; and Int. 52. In Gal. Meth. med. 10.540, a man pretending to have a fever is described as wrapping himself up in his cloak ( periballomenos); the same verb ( periballō) is used by Bdelycleon in his offer to wrap up his father (1154). 34. See Hes. Op. 536–37: “and at that time (= in the winter), wear, as I bid you, a soft chlaina and a tunic that reaches your feet as a protection of the skin.” 35. The notion of infectious diseases as seasonal is well rooted in ancient medical theory (from Hippocrates onward). In particular, the fevers attacking children and old people are associated with the winter and imputed to an excess of phlegm, the cold and wet humor: see, e.g., Gal. Febr. diff. 7.334–35. As explained in Gal. Febr. diff. 7.347, the ēpialos is a phlegmatic inflammation, interpreted either as a combination of fever and chills or as a chill preceding a fever, as in Ar. fr. 346 KA (on which see note 20). 36. Whether the holes in the tribōn are due to its basic construction, to the threadbare quality of Philocleon’s particular tribōn, or both, they strikingly duplicate the gaps in the walls of his home. 37. The beneficial force of the chlaina (and similar garments) also emerges from Aristophanic passages where the garment expresses utopian fantasies of collective prosperity without class distinction: Pax 1002, Lys. 574–86, and Eccl. 848–50. In Wasps’ agōn (676–77), Bdelycleon includes chlanides—festive chlainai—among the items of bounty coming from Athens’s allies that the demagogues greedily keep for themselves. 38. On Aristophanes’ assimilation of poetry to weaving, see the exemplary case from Birds examined by Martin (2009, 84–85). In the scene from Acharnians (400–434) in which Dicaeopolis asks Euripides to lend him the costume of Telephus, all the rags in the tragedian’s skēnēshaped closet probably represent “copies of the Telephus and other Euripidean plays” (Macleod 1974, 221). In Thesm. 164–67, Agathon famously establishes a correspondence between a dramatic poet’s clothes and the aesthetic quality of his plays: see Robson 2005, 37, and Clements 2014, 141. As Leslie Kurke has pointed out to me, Pind. Ol. 1.105 (κλυταῖσι . . . ὕμνων πτυχαῖς) assimilates epinician poetry to an enfolding garment similar to the chlaina. 39. The plagiarized play that this chlanis objectifies may well be Knights: see Sommerstein 1992, 17n7; Storey 2003, 293; and Kyriakidi 2007, 178–84. In Ran. 1459, the chlaina is probably associated with ethical and sociopolitical chrēstotēs (“honesty”), a quality that, in this play, shapes Aristophanes’ parabatic self-presentation: see Dover 1993, 377, and Biles 2011, 253–54. 40. The presence of textile language in this line is noted in schol. Ar. Nub. 88a Holwerda: see ch. 5, sec. 1. 41. On these Spartan-style sandals, see note 28. 42. The almost complete lack of resolutions (1 in 1159; 0 in 1160) indicates that this distich “is tragic in manner” (MacDowell 1971, 281). See also Sommerstein 1983, 224, on ἐχθρῶν παρ’ ἀνδρῶν. 43. The resonance between the two passages is discussed by Mastromarco (1987). 44. The readings of Aristophanes’ judgment have ranged from patronizing praise to open

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criticism of Crates’ dry and cheap Muse: see Bonanno 1972, 39–41; Ruffell 2002, 147; and Wright 2012, 131–32. 45. I agree with Bonanno (1972, 41, 137) in accepting the reading parabeblēmenon (“tossed out,” as to an animal) instead of the incomprehensible parakeklēmenon (“summoned up”), chosen by Kassel and Austin (1984, 197). I consider the expression not a quotation from Crates, but part of the Aristophanic portrait of him. On ponos (“toil”) in relation to comedy making, see Wright 2012, 56. In Ach. 852 Cratinus is criticized for his poetic haste. 46. The similarity between the dressing scenes in Wasps and Knights is noted by Hubbard 1991, 130n34, and Sidwell 2009, 74. 47. See ch. 1, sec. 3. 48. On the Cynics’ use of the tribōn, see Desmond (2008, 79 and 191), who suggests a comparison between Philocleon and Diogenes of Sinope. On the Cynics’ identification with the Cyclops, see Romm 1996, 128–32. 49. See Telò 2014a and 2014b and below. 50. The translation presupposes the text of Henderson 2000. 51. In Ach. 848–53 Aristophanes offers a somewhat different account of Cratinus as an adulterer with a sharp hairstyle, but malodorous armpits: see Olson 2002, 283–84; Bakola 2010, 19–20; and Telò 2013a, 58–59. 52. Orib. inc. 39.15–18 Raeder: “As those who, during the summer, have worn out (katatripsantes) the chlaina spend the winter wearing the tribōn, so those who have consumed their strength in their youth barely tolerate the dress of old age.” Before this simile, Oribasius describes the physical deterioration typical of old age: “The mental and physical strengths that hold us together and preserve us wither, and their effects are dissolved, while the body becomes ragged (rhakoutai) and . . . porous (chaunon) and dry (xēron).” This image of the senile body as a porous “rag” (rhakos) looks ahead to the subsequent mention of the tribōn, incorporating the garment’s distinctive features. 53. After a first, unsuccessful attempt to re-dress Philocleon by the slave, Bdelycleon takes over (“Here, let me dress [peribalō] you” 1154). The “grudging acquiescence” (MacDowell 1971, 280) detectable in Philocleon’s response (1155) as well as the lack of further references to the act of wearing the new garment makes one believe that the old man has put on the chlaina malgré lui. See the stage directions of Sommerstein 1983, 109–13, and the discussion of Poe 2000, 267. 54. Similarly, in the same agōn, Philocleon claims (597) that Cleon “protects us (= the jurors), holding us in his hand, and wards off (apamunei) flies.” 55. On Philocleon as Cratinus in this scene, see Sidwell 2009, 198. For Wasps’ intertextuality with Pytine, see Sidwell 1995 and Biles 2011, 154–66. 56. In connecting the fevers referred to in the parabasis with Cratinean comedy, I may appear to raise a problem of chronology. Though strict logic need not apply here, one could say that, whereas in the course of the festival Cratinus was afflicting the audience with maddening fevers, Aristophanes was trying to fight them off. 57. For a possible similar meaning of ēpialos in the parabasis of Aristophanes’ second Thesmophoriazusae (fr. 346 KA), see Cassio 1987, 11. 58. For a reference to Cratinean imagery at the end of the parabasis (1049–50), see below. Toward the beginning (1024–25), we find another expression of interpoetic rivalry, directed against Eupolis: see Bakola 2008, 20–26. 59. On Odysseis, see Telò 2014b. Reckford (1977, 301) ascribes a poetological dimension to Aristophanes’ Heraclean katharsis.

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60. On the Hesiodic language behind the second monster, see esp. Mastromarco 1989 and Biles 2006, 246. 61. See Telò 2014a for the Typhonic aspect of Paphlagon’s kinship with Cratinus. Cratinus’s self-presentation as a barking satirist in the programmatic play Archilochoi (fr. 6.1 KA) converges with Paphlagon’s canine, Cerberus-like vocality: see Worman 2008, 91, and Telò 2014b, 309–12. Typhon has canine traits, too: see Hes. Theog. 834. 62. On Typhon’s anger, see [Aesch.] PV 370; on Cerberus as a chthonic symbol of angry speech, see Worman 2008, 34. 63. Differently from most recent translators, who have rendered the term as “spirit,” I favor a reading that preserves the core sense of “anger” (see Konstan 2006b, 68) while taking this as a constructive form of the emotion in opposition to the one exhibited by Philocleon. 64. On the evocation of Heracles’ trip to the underworld through the intertext of Bacchyl. 5.60–61, see Mastromarco 1989 and Olson 1998, 222. 65. On the pre-Euripidean versions of Heracles’ filicide, see Papadopoulou 2005, 70–76. 66. I use the opposition “tragic” and “epinician” heuristically, drawing upon the generic contrast between the “mad” Heracles represented in some tragedies and the portrait of the hero as a public benefactor customary in epinician poetry: see, e.g., Swift 2011, 400. 67. On satiric anger, which encompasses a range of genres, from iambos to Roman satire, see Rosen and Baines 2002; Rosen 2007; and Keane 2015, esp. 9 and ch. 1. 68. On Polyphemus as an Archilochean satirist in Odysseis, see Telò 2014b. On Cratinus’s programmatic affiliation with Archilochus, see Rosen 2000, 33–34; Bakola 2010; and Biles 2011, 140–45 and 153–54. 69. See ch. 1, sec. 3. The effect of commonality is, primarily, a reflection of the intense intertextuality between the two poets: see esp. Biles 2011, 121–32 and 134–54, and Ruffell 2011, 370–85. 70. Though the prepositional phrase μετ’ αὐτοῦ (“along with [the monstrosity]”) at 1037 marks the shift from 424 to the events of 423 (“last year”), suggesting two temporally distinct political targets for Aristophanes’ Heraclean anger, the continuities argued for here point toward a single poetic target. 71. In Diod. Sic. 20.41.3 and schol. Ar. Pa. 758d Holwerda, we observe Lamia’s angry response to Hera’s action: see Crane 1987, 173–75. 72. Like Iambe, Baubo, Mormo, Empusa, and Canidia, Lamia exemplifies “the relationship between the terror of the monstrous and ridicule of the grotesque, a nexus . . . basic to iambic poetry” (Barchiesi 2009, 245); see also Pellizer 1981, 36–37; Rosen 1988b and 2007, 49–51; and Rotstein 2010, 176–82. Oliensis (1991, 109) applies the phrase “indecorous female” to Canidia and Scylla—Lamia’s mother, according to Stesich. PMGF 220. 73. The allusion is discussed by Bonanno 1972, 103; on Crates’ Lamia, see Storey 2011a, 218–22. Even though Crates is famously said by Arist. Poet. 1449b7–9 to have “abandoned” the iambic form, the line quoted by Philocleon seems to display genuine iambographic spirit: see Bowie 2002, 48n23. 74. Lamia’s drunkenness is described in Diod. Sic. 20.41.5–6. Lucil. 1065–66 presents Lamia as a sharp-toothed old woman. 75. On Cratinus’s olfactory offensiveness in Acharnians and Knights, see Telò 2013a. For dusosmia (“malodorousness”) as a self-reflexive generic marker in satyr drama, see Cowan 2014, 3–7. 76. See ch. 1, sec. 1. On the theme of purification in Peace, see Tordoff 2011, 180–85. 77. As argued by Reckford (2009, 50–51), the influence of the cleansing imagery in Wasps can be perceived in Persius’s Satire 1, where the Roman poet envisions for his satire a reader

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with a “steam-cleaned ear” (vaporata . . . aure 126)—not a “dirty” (sordidus 128) one. In the same passage, Persius refers to the canonical comic triad (123–24), presenting Aristophanes as praegrandis—an adjective that recalls Aristophanes’ self-portrayal as megas in the parabasis of Wasps (1023). Persius seems thus to have read Aristophanes’ self-presentation as kathartēs in aesthetic terms and to have implicitly connected it with his canonical supremacy, which the satirist implicitly aspires to emulate. Bartsch (2015, 73) has suggested that Persius presents his satires as “a decoction whose effect upon the audience is . . . claimed to be curative.” 78. On the appropriation of Cratinean imagery in these lines, see Biles 2014a, 5–6. An equestrian metaphor also appears at 1022, where Aristophanes presents himself as “holding (ēniochēsas) the reins of [his] Muses”—a hint of poetic restraint that, as suggested by Worman (2014, 232), contrasts with Cratinus’s notorious “volubility.” 79. See esp. Hubbard 1991, 137. 80. On Aristophanes’ manipulation of the notion of sophia, see, among others, Silk 2000, 46–48; Platter 2007, 105–6; Wright 2012, 25–30; and Clements 2014, 177–81. 81. On this passage, see esp. Porter 2010, 272, and 2015b, 323. 82. In comedy, semnos can sometimes have a negative valence, denoting the attitude of “the man who ‘gives himself airs’ ” (Hunter 1983, 119). Indeed, we see this sense of the word reemerge in the second Clouds in reference to Socrates, Strepsiades’ wife, and the clouds themselves (as discussed in ch. 5). Yet, as the examples just enumerated indicate, the positive sense of “dignity” could be brought out in certain contexts. The ambivalence surrounding the term is reflected in the skepticism with which the Chorus of Wasps initially greets Bdelycleon as well as the resistance of the audience of Clouds to Aristophanes’ “dignified” comic mode. For the suspicion toward Bdelycleon, see note 4. On the other hand, the positive sense of the word is captured by Aristotle in Rh. 1391a27–28, in which he defines it as “a temperate (malakē) and decorous (euschēmōn) form of gravity (barutēs).” 83. See also Il. 24.768–72, where Helen acknowledges Hector’s fatherly restraint of his extended family with his “gentleness (aganophrosunēi) and gentle (aganois) words” (772). 84. On this fragment, possibly layered with an anti-Aristophanic polemic, see Storey 2003, 300–303, and Wright 2012, 52–53. 85. Thesm. 93 plays on the ambiguity of tropos as both “character” and “poetic style”; in Eq. 889, in a context of marked metapoetic suggestiveness, as we saw in sec. 2, tropos may conflate political techniques with comic devices. See also Eup. fr. 326.1–2 KA, which opposes a modern singing style with “the old way” (archaion tropon). 86. See, e.g., Gal. Temp. 1.581–82, where the physical configurations of young and old people—moistened and dry—are compared to thriving and moribund plants, respectively. 87. Similarly, Electra’s physical self-presentation to her brother in Eur. El. 239 collapses her withered (xēron) body and her tattered robes (truchē 185) into a unified paradigm of physical degradation. In the Hippocratic corpus, bathing is classified as a “softening” procedure, alousia as a “desiccating” one (xērantikē): see Villard 1994. 88. See Reckford 1977, 301–2; Sommerstein 1983, 244; and Konstan 1985, 44. 89. See note 34. 90. See Proleg. de com. xxvii (Koster 1975, 134.33–35) for the quotation of Vesp. 1038. The Life (133.7–17) describes Aristophanes as a talented yet cautious comedian, who initially “worked for others” and, at a later stage, competed on his own, battling against Cleon in Knights. This account recalls the career shift described in the parabasis of Wasps: from delivering comedy disguised “in other poets’ bellies” (1020) to attacking the monstrous Cleon head-on in Knights (1029–30). For connections with other parabases, see Lefkowitz (1981) 2012, 105.

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91. Koster 1975, 133.2–6. 92. Agōgē is glossed as tropos in Hsch. α 937 Latte. On metagō (“to change”) as a synonym of methisthēmi—a form of which appears in the Aristophanic strophe (metestē 1451)—see schol. Ar. Plut. 994 Chantry. 93. Lefkowitz ([1981] 2002, 104) remarks that the Life’s idea “that Aristophanes was not only a better poet but more elegant and less crude than his predecessors and contemporaries comes from several parabaseis in his own plays (Eq. 516–50; Nub. 533–48; Pax 734–51).” As I contend, the parabases of both Peace and the second Clouds presuppose Wasps’ specific development of Knights’ metapoetic discourse in both plot and parabasis. In Frogs, as we have seen, semnotēs is implicated in the poetic definition of Aeschylus (1004–5 and 1020), one with which Aristophanes’ own selffashioning in the play arguably manifests points of convergence. However, in this comedy there is no longer any hint of interpoetic competition against Cratinus or Eupolis. See ch. 1, note 43. 94. See ch. 1, sec. 1. 95. Phortikos and semnos are precise antonyms: see esp. Com. Adesp. fr 648 KA, where “vulgar laughter” ( phortikon gelōta) is contrasted with that which is semnon. On the compound phruagmosemnakous, see ch. 3, sec. 3. 96. On the identification of the “vulgar men” with Cratinus and Ameipsias, see, e.g., Sommerstein 1982, 187; for this phrase’s connection with phortikē kōmōidia in Wasps, see most recently Biles 2011, 157. 97. Schol. Ar. Nub. 296d Holwerda indicates that the lowbrow comedians (trugodaimones) whom Socrates criticizes in Clouds (296)—in a way that resembles Aristophanes’ own criticism of his rivals in that play’s parabasis (540 and 542)—do things that are asemna (“undignified”). See ch. 5, note 66. 98. Vit. Aesch. 331.6–8 Page. See Porter 2015b, 325–26. 99. On the idea of madness as wandering, see Padel 1995, 104–12. I discuss Philocleon’s madness in the next two chapters. 100. See Vit. Aesch. 331.6–8 Page. According to this Vita, it is also as a result of the semnotēs of Aeschylus’s choruses that he “greatly surpassed his predecessors,” thereby earning the same supremacy that, in the domain of comedy, ancient scholars assigned to Aristophanes. Ancient critics with a pro-Sophocles bias equally ascribe semnotēs to him: see Dio Chrys. Or. 52.15. Aristid. Or. 46.133 pits the semnotēs of Aeschylus and Sophocles against Euripides. 101. See note 31.

Chapter Three 1. In this chapter I intend alienation not in the Brechtian sense of emotional detachment from theatrical spectacle (Verfremdungseffekt), but as a synonym of estrangement of identity—a condition that can be viewed as characteristic of tragedy. According to G. Steiner (2008, 30), “the axiomatic constant in tragedy is that of ontological homelessness . . . of alienation.” 2. The chlaina may appear more in tune with tragedy’s grandiose costuming, while, as a poor piece of clothing, the tribōn may be seen as a more natural icon of comedy. However, as I will argue, what associates the tribōn with the tragic realm is its material convergence with the emotional raggedness that tragedy induces in its audience; the embodiment and transmission of physical and psychological composure, in turn, make the chlaina a suitable emblem of Aristophanes’ self-styled comic affect. On the link between body and architecture—suggested in Greek by the cognate nouns demas (“body”) and domos (“house”)—as well as between clothing and sheltering surfaces, see esp. Bruno 2002, 320–23, and 2014, 322.

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3. See Arist. Poet. 1454a37 and esp. 1455b24–56a10, on which see Dupont-Roc and Lallot 1980, 290–92, and Belfiore 1992, 128–31. 4. On the various expressions of the opposition in Hippolytus, see Zeitlin 1996, 225–32. The opposition pervades other plays: see Segal 1997, 91–92 (on Bacchae), and Worman 1998, 100 (on Heracles). 5. For discussion of this passage, see Silk 2000, 413–14; Platter 2007, 86–91; and Biles 2011, 8, 156–57, and 208. 6. For a different view, cf. Biles 2011, 157. 7. See ch. 1, sec. 4. Connecting Cratinus with Megarian entertainment may add pungency to the charge of producing phortikē kōmōidia. For the association of phortikē diaita (“a vulgar life”) with intoxication—the distinctive source of Cratinus’s comic inspiration—see, e.g., Pl. Phdr. 256b. 8. See Sidwell 1995, 70–71, and 2009, 73–74; Ruffell 2002, 162–63; and Biles 2011, 157. 9. On characters speaking from above in tragic prologues, on the crane or on the roof of the skēnē, see Mastronarde 1990, 275–77. It is precisely Bdelycleon’s rooftop appearance in the prologue that lends his elevated position a paratragic quality. 10. Another appropriation of the same prologic structure appears in Peace. 11. See also Reckford 1987, 234, and Wright 2013a, 212–13. On nosos and cognates in Hippolytus, see Kosak 2004, 51, and Holmes 2010, 252n104. On the characteristically tragic nexus of eros and madness, see Thumiger 2013b. 12. See Harvey 1971, 365n2. On Aristophanes’ borrowings from Hippolytus throughout his corpus, see Gibert 1997, 96n47. 13. The absence of metrical resolutions in Vesp. 88–90 is a further marker of paratragic quality. 14. On Aphrodite’s superior knowledge in the prologue, see Mastronarde 2010, 177–78; on the thematics of awareness and concealment in the play as a whole, see Segal 1988; Goff 1990, 12–20; and Zeitlin 1996, 243–57 and 264–78. 15. On Aphrodite’s location on the skēnē roof, see Mastronarde 1990, 275–77. 16. Aristophanes also dramatizes the process of theatrical decoding in the prologue of Peace: see esp. Slater 2002a, 116. 17. Literally “does begin with ‘philo.’ ” 18. On the figures (Amunias, Dercylus, Sosias, Nicostratus, Philoxenus) mentioned in these lines, see MacDowell 1971, 139–41. The Sosias referred to at 78 is an unidentified member of the audience distinct from the homonymous colleague of Xanthias: see Sommerstein 1983, 159. 19. On the Euripidean coloring of Aristophanes’ guessing games, see Fantuzzi and Konstan 2013, 265. 20. It is possible to see philothutēn and philoxenon as two aspects of the same desire for feasting, in the context, respectively, of sacrifice and the guest-host relationship. In philopotēn Ruffell (2002, 162) sees an allusion to Cratinus’s intoxication in Pytine. 21. See Hipp. 268–69: “we see this miserable condition of Phaedra, but it is unclear (asēma) to us what her malady (nosos) is.” On this passage, see Holmes 2010, 253. 22. On the emotional proximity of anger and erotic desire in Greek culture, see Winkler 1990, 71–98, and Allen 2000, 50–55, and 2003, 82. 23. See also Faraone 2003, 161–62; Harris 2003, 126–28; and Mirhady 2009, 386–87. 24. See 1082–83: “We fought [the Persians] . . . having stood man to man, biting our lips in anger (orgēs).”

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25. See ch. 2, secs. 2 and 3. On the rhetoric of andreia (“courage”) in Aristophanes’ parabatic fight against monsters, see Rosen and Sluiter 2003, 15–16. 26. In 154–55, Bdelycleon expresses concern that his father may “chomp on the bar of the door,” trying to escape from the house: this is one of the behaviors that Galen (Anim. affect. dign. 5.16) attributes to subjects veering from anger into madness. The resemblance between anger and madness, already recognized in Homer, is developed in fifth-century literature: see, e.g., Harris 2001, 339–61, and 2003, 124. 27. On Philocleon’s fear of losing his virility, see Allen 2003, 88–89. 28. This song’s metrical texture—an unusual combination of ionic and dactylo-epitrite—is probably modeled upon the parodos of Phrynichus’s Phoenissae: see Parker 1997, 216–18. 29. The lines that follow the Chorus’s reference to Philocleon’s fevers reinforce Xanthias’s assimilation of the old man’s anger to tragically colored despondency (286–87): “Get up, comrade, and don’t gnaw at yourself in this way.” On the first imperative’s tragic flavor, see Schwinge 1975, 36–38. The second command indicates that Philocleon has transformed the gesture of biting one’s lips, emblematic of virile anger (see note 24), into a gnawing at one’s own soul characteristic of lovesickness: see Sapph. fr. 96.17 Voigt, discussed by Bonanno (1990, 119–24). 30. On Eros as a daemonic agent and the link of the daemonic with the female in the tragic representation of disease, see Holmes 2010, 49, 66–67, and 268. 31. The topos of love-induced fevers is exemplified by the “burning” Sappho famously described in fr. 31.9–10 Voigt, on which see, e.g., Lanata 1966, 77–78. 32. On Phaedra’s feverish appearance, see, e.g., Lattimore 1962, 11. For the association of insomnia and fevers, see, e.g., [Hippoc.] Prog. 24 and Epid. 3.3; and Gal. Meth. med. 10.687. Fevers, insomnia, and lack of appetite—another symptom that the Nurse attributes to Phaedra (Hipp. 275)—appear together in [Hippoc.] Mul. 41. 33. See Gal. San. tuend. 6.40: “anger and . . . rage (orgē) and the abundant insomnia coming with them produce fevers”; on anger as a trigger of fevers, see also Febr. diff. 7.279; Meth. med. 10. 667; and Hipp. vict. acut. 15.740. 34. The combination of ēpialoi and puretoi—feverish chills and regular fevers—recalls Sappho’s paradoxical erotic symptoms in fr. 31.9–10 and 13 Voigt, which have been compared to the opposed sensations of heat and cold typical of psychosomatic diseases recorded in [Hippoc.] Int. 47–48: see Di Benedetto 1985, 145–46, and Bonanno 1990, 153. 35. See [Hippoc.] Morb. sacr. 1, 6.362 Littré. On the connection between this passage and the parabasis of Wasps, see Faraone 2011, 10–13. 36. These elements, not necessarily consistent, may capture different snapshots of Philocleon’s behavior. 37. See Hutchinson 2011, 65. 38. On estrangement from home as a symbol of tragic madness, see Padel 1995, 112–17. Sleeping outside is a marker of alienation in the Odyssey, as shown by Purves (2014). 39. On Phaedra’s fervid utterances, see esp. Segal 1965, 124–25; Goff 1990, 32–35; and Zeitlin 1996, 241 and 283–84. On the impulse toward evasion, a constant of her character in both ancient and modern depictions, see Critchley 2008, 182–83. 40. See Padel 1990, 358, and 1995, 141, and esp. Holmes (2010, 254–55), who discusses Eur. TrGF 5.138a, where Eros is said to dwell in the “worst part” (kakistōi) of the “mind” ( phrenōn). 41. The Nurse repeatedly addresses Phaedra as “child” (teknon; pai): see Karydas 1998, 124–25. 42. In Od. 11.189, Anticleia contrasts the use of chlainai as blankets with Laertes’ habit of

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sleeping on the ground: see Purves 2014, 232. The medical writer Aretaeus of Cappadocia describes insomniac subjects who assimilate the ground to a “soft” (malthakē) sleeping surface (CD 2.6.7). On the refusal of warm and enfolding clothes as a symptom of estrangement from home, see Flugel 1950, 80–81. 43. See Bachelard (1958) 1994, 74–89, on the power of drawers and closets to express the “protected intimacy” of the house as a symbol of psychic stability. 44. On swaddling clothes in ancient pediatric discourse, see Hanson 2003, 196–98. In Adesp. TrGF 2.7.1, the nurse of Niobe’s children refers to swaddling chlanidia (etymologically connected with chlaina) as a remedy for physical and psychological discomfort. 45. In his treatise On Anger (Dial. 3.20.3), Seneca presents the bodies of pathologically angry people as intolerant of any kind of contact; in Gal. Anim. affect. dign. 5.22, subjects affected by manic anger are depicted as tearing their “cloaks” (himatia). 46. Phaedra’s complaint about the physical “heaviness” (baru) of the epikranon at 201 recalls Philocleon’s protest against the alleged suffocating powers of the chlaina. As an architectural term, epikranon has, like the chlaina, a symbolic association with the house: see Barrett 1964, 200; Zeitlin 1996, 245; and Holmes 2010, 254. For a comic rendering of the Hippolytus scene on a late-fifth-century Lucanian vase, see Green 2014. 47. In Eur. TrGF 5.1063.9–11, a female character discusses the ineffectiveness of “bolts (mochlois) and seals” in restraining women’s “desire” (erōs) to enjoy outdoor pleasures. Handling bolts is a masculine prerogative, as shown by the gender reversal in Ar. Lys. 246. 48. See Collard, Cropp, and Lee 1995, 89 and 94–95, and Jouan and Van Looy 2002, 25. 49. Although ἀλύει at 111 does not have an etymological relation to λύω (see Beekes 2009, s.v. ἀλύω), we can easily imagine the force of a paretymological pun activated by the contrast between ἀλύει and ἐνδήσαντες in 113. Ἀλύω often indicates the convulsive movements of sleepless or feverish patients in bed: see, e.g., [Hippoc.] Morb. 2.17 and Int. 7. 50. Differently from Wilson, OCT, who prints the variant ἐγκλῄσαντες of the manuscript J (fifteenth century), I follow MacDowell (1971) and Henderson (1998) in accepting the reading ἐνδήσαντες (the lectio difficilior) transmitted by the manuscripts RV and probably by P. Oxy. 4512 (third century CE): see Telò, forthcoming. 51. The use of “rags” need not be at odds with the impervious, chlaina-like surface they contribute to producing. 52. On the tribōn as poluthuros, see Lucian Dial. mort. 1.2, discussed in ch. 2, sec. 2. 53. See Jouanna 1999, 196–97; on the rituals of Asclepius, see Wickkiser 2008. 54. See Linforth 1946. 55. On maenads as birds, see Eur. Bacch. 748 and 957–58 and the discussion by Segal (1997, 91–92). At Bacch. 753, the participle epespesousai (“having burst in upon”), describing the maenads, indicates a movement similar to Philocleon’s irruption into the law court at Vesp. 120 (empesōn). 56. The link between Bdelycleon in the prologue and Aristophanes in the parabasis is reinforced by the the epithet megas (“great”), reserved, tongue-in-cheek, for both of them: see 68 and 1023. 57. On the privileged association between maenads and tragic madness, see Schlesier 1993. 58. See Zeitlin 1996, 226, and Holmes 2010, 262. 59. On Phaedra’s maenadic assimilation, see esp. Schlesier 1993, 104 and 108–9. In 289–90, the plea that the Nurse addresses to the silent Phaedra relies on the same imagery of “loosening” (lusasa), which she ill-advisedly encourages.

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60. See Resp. 10.605c–6d. On Plato’s ideas of tragic empathy, see esp. Lada-Richards 1993, 106–7, and 1996b. 61. The thrust of this critical attitude toward tragedy is carried over from the Republic to the Laws: see most recently Murray 2013. 62. See Resp. 3.395d–96a on mad subjects and grieving and lovesick women as affecting the audience in body, voice, and judgment. Plato condemns comic madness, too, although he seems to perceive comedy as less dangerous than tragedy, and, in the Laws, he assigns comic spectacle an educational role as a performance of a negative model: see Folch 2013, 345–56; Murray 2013, 297–98; and Prauscello 2014, 192–222. 63. On the shift to femininity, see Zeitlin 1996, 370–71; Bassi 1998, 210–11; and Murray 2011. As noted by Prauscello (2014, 189), Plato’s condemnation of tragedy also draws upon the assumption that “the Tragic Muse . . . appeal[s] to a state of infancy of the soul.” In Resp. 10.604c8, the soul’s grief-oriented instincts, to which, Plato says, tragedy appeals, are explicitly connected with infantile psychology; see Leg. 791e4–7 for similar language describing tears and cries as infantile modes of communication. 64. See esp. Zeitlin 1996. On Plato’s affinities with Brecht’s notion of theatrical empathy, see Lada-Richards 1993 and 1996a and b; Easterling 1996; and Segal 1996. 65. For the relevance of Ran. 1050–51 to the debated presence of female spectators in the fifth-century theater, see Roselli 2011, 182. Bassi (1998, 238) and Halliwell (2011, 127n58) see the Aristophanic Aeschylus’s mimetic theory as anticipating Platonic concerns; cf. Rosen 2008, 159–63. In Ran. 961–62, Euripides accuses Aeschylus of driving the spectators “out of their wits” (apo tou phronein); in so doing, he presents his adversary’s tragedy as transmitting its own ecstatic insanity to the audience: see Lada-Richards 1996b, 399, and 1999, 235–36. 66. See Bakola 2010, 17 and 27. 67. For discussions of the Archilochean fragment, see Mendelsohn 1991–1992; D’Angour 2013, 200–201; and Ieranò 2013, 369–70. On Dionysus lusios, see Zeitlin 1996, 227, and Segal 1997, 21–22 and 91–93. 68. See Acosta-Hughes 2002, 54–55, and Rosen 2007, 184. Alcmeon figures in Timocles’ catalog of tattered heroes emblematic of tragedy (fr. 6.12 KA). 69. See Rosen 2000, 33; Bakola 2010, 17 and 48; and Biles 2011, 142–43. 70. See Bakola 2010, esp. 24–29, and 2013. Aristophanes may hint at the nexus between Cratinean inebriation and tragic madness in Ach. 1162–73, which describes a group of rowdy revelers including Cratinus himself and another drunkard identified as “the crazy (mainomenos) Orestes.” Aeschylean tragedy is assigned manic and Bacchic features in Ran. 816–17 and 1259: see esp. Lada-Richards 1999, 242–47. 71. Cratinus’s “energetic” madness, depicted in Pytine, and Philocleon’s Phaedra-like despondency, which characterizes the beginning of Xanthias’s report, can be seen as the complementary expressions (manic and depressive, respectively) of the same condition: see ch. 4. From a modern psychological standpoint, this combination is utterly unsurprising, and its appearance in Philocleon as well as Phaedra and Bellerophon (as we will see) strongly suggests that ancient dramatists perceived it, even if Hippocratic medicine saw the two poles as arising from distinct humoral disorders: see Jouanna 2013. A connection between fevers and Cratinean aesthetics, discussed esp. in ch. 2, is also suggested by the febrile condition associated with intoxication by ancient medicine: see, e.g., [Hippoc.] Morb. 1.26 (where pleuritis, typically producing fevers, is said to be caused by excessive consumption of wine). See Cavarra 2002, 254; Jouanna 2002, 120–23; and Villard 2002, 90. The construction of Cratinus’s affective force can, to an extent, be

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compared to the nexus of fevers, tragedy, and madness in Lucian Hist. conscr. 1, which reports that after attending a performance of Euripides’ Andromeda the inhabitants of Abdera were struck by fever. The pyretic attack is a hyperbolic representation of the affective impact of tragic madness—which, in the love-centered plot of Andromeda, corresponds to the force of eros: see von Möllendorff 2001 and Wright 2013b, 615. 72. The Nurse’s metatheatrical, quasi-authorial agency is highlighted by her command of oral performance (sophistic rhetoric, poetic incantations) and written communication: see Goff 1990, 48–49, and McClure 1999, 136–41. 73. On the Nurse’s double role, see Michelini 1987, 310–15; Karydas 1998, 114–80; and Mastronarde 2010, 223–25. That the Nurse serves as Aphrodite’s doppelgänger is indicated by the resonance of her speech (443–46) with the prologue (1–2 and 5–6). 74. Both characters lament the challenges of healing: see Vesp. 650–51 and Eur. Hipp. 186–88. 75. Proleg. de com. xi(c) (Koster 1975, 45.56). My analysis of this passage is indebted to Whitmarsh (2011, 230–31), who employs it to theorize the interplay between the anti-closural and closural, the tragic and comic, in the Greek novel. 76. In employing this interpretation of lusis and desis, I use the concepts differently from Aristotle, as noted before. However, the substance of the Byzantine treatise’s formulation—the notion of tragedy as a transition from “good” to “bad fortune” (from eutuchia to dustuchia)— dates back at least to a partial reading of Aristotle’s Poetics (1453a12–15). Wise (2008 and 2013) has suggested that this notion, presupposed in later literary criticism, underestimates the tendency of fifth-century tragedies, especially if organized in tetralogies, to conclude happily—a position persuasively criticized by Hanink (2011), who emphasizes the autonomous value of the single plays. 77. See Whitmarsh 2011, 230. Wohl (2013, 178–83) reads the contrast between Bdelycleon and Philocleon as a version of the Lacanian conflict between “the voice of the symbolic Law within us” and libidinal energy (or jouissance). 78. The association of Philocleon with tragic lusis may seem surprising in light of the ending, in which he triumphantly dances, but, as I will show in ch. 4, sinister elements call into question the jolly surface. 79. One sees laughter itself as a kind of unbinding of sōphrosunē in the tragic representation of manic subjects: see Soph. Aj. 303 and Eur. HF 935, on which see Halliwell 2008, 17–18. Porter (2015b, 320), observes that “laughter borders on violent ecstasy.” The lack of sōphrosunē that Aristophanes’ tendentious mapping of Philocleon onto Phaedra retroactively attributes to the Euripidean heroine does not take account of her genuine, if unsuccessful, efforts in the tragic play to preserve this virtue: see Holmes 2010, 252–64, and Mueller 2011. On the contrast between sōphrōn and phortikos in the parabasis of the second Clouds, see ch. 5, sec. 1; see also Pl. Phdr. 256b, Plut. Cleom. 13, and Iambl. VP 31.202. 80. See ch. 2, sec. 4. The juvenile intemperance suggested in the compound phruagmosemnakous by phruagmo- (“whinny”)—a reference to horse racing as a stereotypical occupation of young aristocrats—is mitigated, if not contradicted, by the responsible behavior emerging, in this scene and throughout the play, from Bdelycleon’s concern for his father: see ch. 2, note 4. For the link between sōphrosunē and semnotēs, see, e.g., Dem. 25.24 and [Dem.] 61.13. 81. On the tragic deus ex machina as an authorial figure, see Dunn 1996, 29. 82. Whitmarsh (2010, 345) explores the various levels of “constraining structurality” (textual, social, psychological) that the home embodies in Achilles Tatius’s Leucippe and Clitophon. 83. See ch. 1, sec. 1. On the metaphor of the text-as-building, see Frank 1979; Cowling 1998; and Whitmarsh 2010.

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84. Niobe and Bellerophon are paired as melancholic icons in Cic. Tusc. 3.61–63: see Kazantzidis 2013, 263–64. Here and in what follows, I use the terms “melancholic” and “melancholy” in the modern, Freudian sense of “painful dejection . . . , loss of the capacity to love . . . , and . . . lowering of the self-regarding feelings” (Freud 1917, 244)—distinct from the Hippocratic sense, “which is not exclusively or primarily psychological, but does display psychological implications from early on,” with “limited trace of the ‘depressive’ quality melancholic disturbances will acquire in subsequent literature” (Thumiger 2013a, 63). In [Arist.] Pr. 30.1, however, we do find a notion comparable to the modern idea: see, e.g., van der Eijk 2005, 155–160. 85. See Parker 1997, 220–22; Mastromarco 2006, 158–59; and Wright 2013a, 219. 86. On the paratragic style and meter of Philocleon’s monody, see Rau 1967, 150–52; Parker 1997, 224–25; and Vetta 2007. 87. On the Homeric and tragic uses of tēkō and tēkomai as metaphors of consuming sorrow, see Arnould 1986. The verb and its compounds often characterize Electra’s melancholy in both Sophocles and Euripides: see notes 88 and 90. Although we do not see the verb used in reference to Phaedra, katatēkomai can express the consuming force of eros, as shown, e.g., by Eub. fr. 102.7 KA. 88. In Eur. El. 239–40, Orestes describes Electra’s “withered” (xēron) body as “having melted” (suntetēkos) because of incessant lamentations. On tēkō as signifying dessication, see Arnould 1986, 269–70. 89. On melancholic introjection, by which the mourner identifies with and assimilates himself into the lost object, see Freud 1917. Niobe’s petrification reifies the confusion between self and other, subject and object, life and death, that is typical of melancholic mourning: see Wohl 1998, 126. As observed by Brinkema (2014, 58), “the melancholic is a frozen  .  .  . statue.” For Niobe’s petition to Zeus, see Pherec. FGrH 3 fr. 38 and Apollod. Bibl. 3.5.6. 90. I reproduce, with minimal alterations, the rendition of Griffith 1999, 269–70. Similarly, the Sophoclean Electra, who repeatedly employs tēkomai to describe her abnormal mourning (187, 283, and 835), evokes Niobe’s petrifying grief as a precedent for her condition (150–52): see Finglass 2007, 149–50, and Swift 2010, 342. The Niobe paradigm may also lurk behind Medea and Andromache, whose condition Euripides describes through the verb tēkō (Med. 25 and Andr. 116): see Schadewaldt (1934) 1970, 149; Stevens 1971, 109–10; and Seaford 2005, 118. 91. This subtext of imprisonment is enhanced by the fact that the Niobe-like petrification invoked by Philocleon takes the form of internment in a rocky enclosure in Sophocles’ Antigone and Electra: see Seaford 1990, 87, and Steiner 1995, 197–98. 92. MacDowell (1971, 210–11) observes that Aeschylus’s Niobe “is probably the play meant here.” 93. On the Sophoclean play, see Easterling 2006, 11–15. For reconstructions of Aeschylus’s Niobe, see Seaford 2005; Taplin 2007, 74–77; and Pennesi 2008, 12–20. 94. See TrGF 3.154a.6–8, on which see esp. Seaford 2005; on Frogs’ depiction of the Aeschylean Niobe’s silence, see Taplin 1972, 60–62, and Montiglio 2000, 216–20. 95. See Steiner 2001, 142, and Seaford 2005, 120. 96. See TrGF 3.154a.10. Niobe’s father is the speaking character in frr. 158 and 159. 97. The presence of a nurse among the characters, which has been postulated on the basis of Adesp. TrGF 2.7 (see note 44) and the iconography, may have enhanced the sense of a regression: see Garzya 1987, 186; Taplin 2007, 75 and 77; and Pennesi 2008, 14. From a psychoanalytic point of view, the experience of loss resembles the infantile separation from the mother, and melancholy stems from a reenactment of such a separation during adult life: see Freud 1917; Klein 1940; and Wohl 1998, 121–31.

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98. In Pl. Resp. 3.380a3–4, a quotation from Aeschylus’s Niobe (TrGF 3.154a.15–16) exemplifies the idea that “outpourings of emotion on the part of major characters in tragedy . . . [have] the capacity to imprint the . . . feelings of the characters on the audience’s own minds” (Halliwell 2000, 112). 99. For Niobe as an emblem of tragedy, see Loraux (1999) 2002, 36–37. 100. On the tragic coloration of Philocleon’s silence, see Rau 1967, 152–53, and Montiglio 2000, 219–20. For the metrical analysis of this ode, see Parker 1997, 240–41. 101. See 1017 “he (= the poet) says that he was wronged first, in spite of having benefited (eu pepoiēkōs) them (= the spectators) in many ways.” 102. For the language of divine epiphany activated by emphanēs (733), see Soph. OT 96 and Eur. Or. 365 and Bacch. 22. 103. The adjectives aphrōn and atenēs are not attested anywhere else in comedy. Atenēs qualifies Niobe’s rocky enclosure and, by implication, her obstinate mourning in Soph. Ant. 826. Aphrōn can, of course, also designate madness. 104. On this resemblance, see esp. Montiglio 2000, 219–20. 105. In [Hippoc.] Superf. 34 the verb sōphroneō expresses sanity in opposition to the pathological derangement captured by mainomai. 106. The association of hamartia with the tragic plot precedes Aristotle’s Poetics, as indicated not only by its thematization in the surviving tragedies (see, e.g., Bremer 1969), but also by its appearance in Thucydidean narratives with tragic tinges: see Lebow 2003, 116. 107. The classic formulation of pathei mathos is in Aesch. Ag. 176–81; Clytemnestra ironically appropriates it at 1425: “having been taught, you will finally, if late, learn ( gnōsēi) self-control (sōphroneîn).” See also, e.g., Soph. Ant. 926 and OT 402–3, and Eur. Hipp. 730–31. For a survey of the critical interpretations of pathei mathos, see Rademaker 2005, 105–12; for its connection with sōphrosunē, see North 1966, 45 and 80. On arti manthanō, see Eur. Alc. 940 and Bacch. 1296. For the tragic opposition between hamartia and sōphrosunē, see Gregory 1991, 59–64; Sherman 1992; and Padel 1995, 197–206. 108. For the closural use of anagnōrisis, see the emblematic finale of Bacchae, in which Agave’s recognition, which enacts tragic reversal ( peripeteia), is paired with Dionysus’s intervention ex machina: see Segal 1999–2000, 289. The Eumenides, which enacts the acquisition of sōphrosunē-through-suffering, takes the closural potential of moral recomposition in the direction of an “untragic” happy ending, even providing a “model for the saving deus ex machina” (Mastronarde 1999–2000, 30); see Revermann 2008. 109. At 752, we find the language of eros that we saw in the prologue. Schol. Ar. Vesp. 750 Koster suggests that the longing expressed here is borrowed from Hippolytus—probably from the initial scene of Phaedra’s delirium (219, 230): see Rau 1967, 152–53, and Harvey 1971, 365. 110. On Philocleon’s sword, see Revermann 2013a, 78. 111. See MacDowell 1971, 234, and Sommerstein 1983, 204–5. For the assignment of the two fragments to the scene of Bellerophon’s flight on Pegasus, enacted through the crane, see Collard, Cropp, and Lee 1995, 111; Jouan and Van Looy 2000, 15; and Dobrov 2001, 96. The same scene is parodied at the beginning of Peace: see Telò 2010, 314–16, and Ruffell 2011, 319–26. 112. On Bellerophon’s melancholia, see in particular [Arist.] Pr. 30.1 (esp. 953a15–25) and [Gal.] Intr. seu med. 14.741. In the former passage, he is paired with two other icons of tragic madness, Ajax and Heracles. For discussion of the plot of Euripides’ Bellerophon, see esp. Dobrov 2001, 92–93; Jouan and Van Looy 2000, 8–20; and Collard and Cropp 2008, 289–93. 113. On the role of Glaucus in the play, see Di Gregorio 1983, 369 and 372–75; Dobrov 2001,

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93 and 95; and Jouan and Van Looy 2000, 13. For discussion of the fragments of the play that may feature Glaucus as a character, see Telò 2010, 310–11nn136–37. 114. On Glaucus as an archetype of philopatria (“love of father”), see Telò 2010, 312–14. 115. Two other famously unsuccessful highflyers in Greek myth, Phaethon and Icarus—with whom Bellerophon is sometimes associated—are both inexperienced and impetuous sons. 116. See esp. Pind. Isthm. 7.43–47, to which Euripides’ account probably conforms. Two fragments (TrGF 5.309 and 309a) seem to describe the effects of Zeus’s thunderbolt on Pegasus: see Jouan and Van Looy 2000, 15. The disastrous outcome of Bellerophon’s flight can be seen as a literalization of the melancholic affect, which Brinkema (2014, 73) describes as a “felt experience of heaviness . . . a dragging of the body down to earth.” 117. For the reconstruction of Philocleon’s movements, see Mastronarde 1990, 260. 118. See esp. Muecke 1982, 21; Slater 2002a, 53–55; Milanezi 2005, 75–76; and Wyles 2011, 98. Timocl. fr. 6.14 KA probably features Aeschylus’s mourning Niobe in a list of ragged tragic characters that includes Telephus, Philoctetes, and Oineus, all referred to in the Acharnians scene: see Halliwell 2005, 394–96; Olson 2007, 169–72; and Rosen 2012. Chapter Four 1. See, e.g., MacCary 1979; Hubbard 1991, 136–37; Pütz 2003, 184; and Wright 2013a, 220–25. Among those offering more ambivalent readings, Whitman (1964, 161) saw the end of the play as “unresolved.” Henderson ([1975] 1991, 82) suggests that, “despite our amusement and sympathy” with Philocleon, “we must agree with . . . Bdelycleon, that home is the best place for the old man.” Riess (2012, 293), perceiving “an almost depressing” atmosphere, wonders whether the outcome of the finale is “all that positive.” McGlew (2004, 34–35) observes that Philocleon’s abusive conduct at the end of the play is “not a happy sight,” while Halliwell (2008, 211) adheres to the optimistic reading, but notes “the character’s extreme absurdity.” 2. See also Sidwell 1995, 70, and 2009, 198. 3. Silk (2000, 430) comments that the ending of the play shows “Philocleon . . . as performerpoet.” On Philocleon as an actor, see esp. Purves 1997. 4. On the continuity between the finale and Philocleon’s jury-addled past, see Whitman 1964, 160; Vaio 1971; and Wohl 2013, 181. Differently, Bowie (1993, 95) contends that the rejuvenated character is “the very antithesis of the adult Philocleon serving in courts”; see also Paduano 1974, 100–101. 5. On this complementarity, see ch. 3, note 71. 6. On atē and atēros in tragedy, see esp. Padel 1992, 166–77, and 1995, 170, 188–96, and 249–59. 7. The Erinys “is atē’s daemonic associate” (Padel 1995, 189). 8. See Whitman 1964, 157; Halliwell 2008, 209n151; and Telò 2010, 294. 9. See Telò 2010, 293–94; Biles 2011, 206–8; and ch. 5, sec. 1. 10. See ch. 5, sec. 1. 11. See Biles 2011, 165, with note 122. 12. On this imagery, see Worman 1998, 100. In Eur. Bacch. 445–46, skirtaō expresses the effects of the maenads’ liberation (lelumenai) from Pentheus’s ineffective desis (444). See also note 19. The only other Aristophanic occurrence of skirtaō is in Plut. 761. 13. I borrow this phrase from the title of ch. 13 of Padel 1995. 14. At 1309, I accept the transmitted reading τρυγί, following Henderson (1998). 15. Similarly, in Plut. 1085–86, an old woman masquerading as young is referred to as trux.

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Philocleon’s apparent rejuvenation is implied at 1307, where Xanthias reports having been “vigorously” (neanikōs) beaten by his old master. On the ambiguity of trux, see Vaio 1971, 340–41. 16. The image of the fugitive donkey en route to the chaff pile is “proverbial for having a thoroughly good time” (MacDowell 1971, 304). The phrase “summons-witness” refers to a party who served as a witness that a summons had been delivered or who delivered the summons himself: see Harrison 1968–71, 2:85–86. 17. See Vaio 1971, 341–42. On Philocleon’s Odyssean impersonation, see Revermann 2013b, 118–19. 18. At 185, Philocleon introduces himself as “Ithakos Apodrasippidou” (“Ithacan, son of Escape-Man”), creating a patronymic based on the same verb (apodidraskō) used by Lysistratus for his mocking comparison (apodedrakoti 1310). 19. Aristophanes employs pōlos/pōlion only in paratragic or stylistically elevated contexts: see Pax 75 and 126 and Lys. 1307. A pōlos struggling against the yoke figures frenzied escape attempts in Eur. Or. 45 and Soph. TrGF 4.444.6. For the link between skirtaō and crazed animals, see [Aesch.] PV 599 and 675, and Eur. Phoen. 1125 and Bacch. 165–69. 20. This connection is signaled by Sidwell (2009, 198n90). 21. On the associations of drunkenness and comic coarseness with donkeys, see Griffith 2006, 227–28. 22. Philocleon’s assimilation of Lysistratus to a locust—a symbol of parasitic behavior (see Av. 588)—strongly supports the traditional identification of the latter with Lysistratus of Cholargus, portrayed as a parasite in a few Aristophanic passages: see MacDowell 1971, 238, and Sommerstein 1983, 206. 23. On vase paintings depicting sympotic revelers believed to be garbed in chlainai, see Heinemann 2013, 302n83. 24. At Od. 18.27, Iros compares Odysseus to a loud old woman tending an oven, moving Antinous to laughter: see Steiner 2010, 161. Fehr (1990) connects Odysseus and Iros with the parasites of classical Athenian symposia; on these two characters as prototypical iambic satirists, see Rosen 1990, 15–17, and Steiner 2009. The image of Philocleon as a fugitive donkey could evoke the Archilochean posture of the runaway soldier (Archil. fr. 5 West): see Rosen, forthcoming. 25. I borrow the phrase from Oliensis (1998, 29), who is concerned not with Aristophanes, but with Horace’s self-positioning in relation to the satiric match between Sarmentus and Messius Cicirrus in Sat. 1.5.51–70. 26. For more on Sthenelus, see Kaimio and Nykopp 1997, 33, and Wright 2013a, 217. Aristotle cites him for his “wretched (tapeinē) poetry” marked by banal diction ( Poet. 1458a20). In Gerytades, Aristophanes likewise pokes fun at his insipid words (fr. 158 KA). Sthenelus’s “parasitic” plagiarism, which was satirized by the comic poet Plato in the play Spartans or Poets (fr. 72 KA), may establish a further affinity with Lysistratus. 27. On the link between iambos and poverty, see, e.g., Rosen 2007, 231, and Steiner 2007a and 2009, 92. 28. See Sfyroeras 1995, 242–47. In Plut. 935–40, as we saw in ch. 2, the tribōn is presented as incompatible with Plutus (“Wealth”), the god of comedy; thus, this ragged cloak is implicitly aligned with tragic Penia. In Plato’s Symposium the deities Poros (“Resource”) and Penia are similarly mapped onto comedy and tragedy, respectively: see Clay 1975. 29. On Thuphrastus’s mysterious identity, see Storey 1985, 327–28. 30. On Cratin. fr. 342 KA, see Bakola 2010, 24–29; Wright 2012, 7–9; and Clements 2014, 178. In fr. 182 KA, we find another Cratinean reference to “elegant (kompsoi) spectators”: see Wright 2012, 54.

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31. On this and other unfounded accusations of conspiracy raised by the Chorus against Bdelycleon before its conversion to his viewpoint, see ch. 2, sec. 1. On Amunias as an icon of aristocratic pomposity and effeminacy in Aristophanes, see esp. MacDowell 1971, 139–40. 32. For historical readings of this passage, see Storey 1995; Totaro 1999, 179–95; and Sidwell 2009, 123–24. 33. Cleon’s torture resembles Paphlagon’s hubristic behavior in Knights: see Storey 1995, 5. 34. On epithēkisa as clowning, see Hubbard 1990, 75n8; Totaro 1999, 190; and Rosen, forthcoming. 35. See Sidwell 1995, 70, and 2009, 198, and Biles 2011, 165. Cratinus is represented as a reveler in Ar. Ach. 1162–73: see ch. 3, note 70. 36. See Bakola 2010, 275–81. 37. For the sexual meaning of sapron, see Henderson (1975) 1991, 82 and 130. On Philocleon’s impotence, see Halliwell 2008, 209. 38. See Perusino 1982 and Hawkins 2008, 104–5n32. 39. See also Riess 2012, 291–95. 40. On Penia’s rags, see Milanezi 2005, 77; for her paratragic style, see Sfyroeras 1995, 33. 41. The verb anakrazō (“to shout”) is used of both Philocleon and Penia: see Vesp. 1311 (anakragōn) and Plut. 428 (anekrages). 42. On this iconography of the Erinyes, see Trendall 1990, 214, and Taplin 2007, 67 and 275n56. 43. See Aesch. Eum. 68–69, discussed by Easterling (2008, 228–29). 44. The Erinyes are used as tragic markers in theater-based vase paintings: see Padel 1995, 243–44, and Taplin 2007, 55. 45. Though the earliest visual representations of torch-bearing Erinyes date back to the beginning of the fourth century (see Taplin 2007, 60), they seem to presuppose a much earlier tradition: see Finglass 2005 on Pind. Pae. 8a Rutherford. 46. On this scene, see Rehm 1994, 128–35, and Mazzoldi 2001, 219–44. Cassandra and Philocleon start their monodies with the same formula (ἄνεχε πάρεχε): see Lee 1976, 124–27. 47. See Cic. Rosc. Am. 67 and Leg. 1.40. In both passages, the instrumental ablative taedis ardentibus (“with flaming torches”) indicates that the Erinyes employ the torches as a means of aggression: compare the instrumental dative ταυτῃὶ τῇ δᾳδὶ (“with this torch”) in Philocleon’s threat. See also Plaut. Men. 841, where a fit of paratragic madness assimilates Menaechmus of Syracuse to an Erinys, ready to burn his brother’s wife “with flaming torches” (lampadibus ardentibus). 48. On the imagistic resonances between torch and thunderbolt in Aeschylus, see Chaston 2010, 90–91. The nexus of thundering, judicial addiction, and drunkenness appears in the agōn, where Philocleon touts his Zeus-like jury-service thundering (620–24) after celebrating the literally intoxicating power of his jury pay (616–18). On Philocleon as would-be Zeus, see Wohl 2013, 179. 49. [Arist.] Pr. 30.1, 953a33–36 and 953b3–7; cf. 953a15–25. 50. See Beta 1999, 136. 51. On atē as emblematic of tragedy, see Padel 1995, 190. In Aesch. Eum. 1007, atēron designates the chthonic world to which the Erinyes belong before their transformation into Eumenides. 52. On the daimones ploutodotai, see Hes. Op. 126. 53. See Bakola 2010, 49–53 and 135–41. On the representation of Aeschylean tragedy as a chthonic force in Frogs, see O’Sullivan 1992, 120–21.

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54. Such a gesture might have been key to Cratinus’s almost entirely lost Eumenides, on which see Bakola 2010, 174–77. 55. Wohl (2013, 181) observes that “the same lawless jouissance that drives Philocleon’s drunken carousing also drove his earlier juridomania.” 56. See Freud 1925, 238. Picking up on Freud’s idea, Orlando ([1973] 1978, 10) has argued that the phrase “I do not like it” can express, if only through the censuring filter of a negation, something secretly pleasing. 57. On Cratinus’s sublime poetics, see Porter 2010, 274, and Telò 2014b. 58. On the contrast between muthoi and logoi semnoi, see ch. 2, sec. 3. 59. Bdelycleon seems to respond to the blow when, in 1387, he observes, “By Zeus, you certainly learned the lesson about Olympia!” See Sommerstein 1983, 135; Henderson 1998, 397; and Riess 2012, 290. 60. A similar metaphor appears at 1022; see ch. 2, note 78. 61. See Hom. Od. 18.89–104 and Hippon. frr. 120–21 West. On the intertextuality between the Odyssean episode and Hipponax’s boxing match, see Rosen 1990 and Steiner 2009, 92. Ar. Lys. 360–61 alludes to the latter: see Henderson 1987, 113. “Trading blows” is a self-conscious iambic marker in Call. fr. 191.89 (from Iamb 1): see Acosta-Hughes 2002, 57–58. 62. See Kyle 2007, 124. On the poetic contest of Knights as an iambic confrontation, see Hawkins 2008, 103–8. 63. See, most recently, Steiner 2007b, 182–86, and 2012, 7–9 and 12–29. In the Archilochean fable of the eagle and the fox (frr. 172–81 West), Irwin (1998) also recognizes a competitive stance against Hesiod. 64. On Aesop as a quasi-iambic figure, see also Rosen 2007, 98–104; Kurke 2011, ch. 5; and Hall 2013. 65. On the generic kinship between iambos and Old Comedy, see most recently Rosen 2013. 66. See Rosen 1984 and 1988a, 30–34; Zanetto 2001, 66–72; Schirru 2009; and Hall 2013. 67. On Aesop’s double identity, see esp. Kurke 2011, 176. Hunter (2014a, 227–56) underscores Aesop’s connections with Hesiodic didactic. See also Hawkins 2014, 99–101, on the fabulist Babrius’s reference to the “old wise (sophou) Aesop.” 68. See Rosen 1988a, 33; Rothwell 1995, 252; and Hall 2013, 291–92. 69. On the different aspects of Aesop’s identity as a sage, see Kurke 2011, chs. 3 and 4. 70. See, e.g., Aesop. Fab. 154 and 245 Hausrath. On sōphrosunē in the extant collections of Aesopic fables, see Zafiropoulos 2001, 65–9 and 177–80. On Aesop’s grotesque body, see Kurke 2011, ch. 5. 71. Drunkenness is a quintessentially anti-Aesopic condition, as shown by the episode recorded in Vit. Aesop. G+W 68–69: see Kurke 2011, 218 with note 40. 72. At 596, Philocleon refers to Cleon as kekraxidamas (“scream champion”). On the intersections between the Cerberus-like Cleon/Paphlagon and Cratinus, see ch. 2, sec. 3. 73. On this important point, see Rosen, forthcoming. 74. Philocleon’s misuse of his tongue, which matches that of the she-dog in the fable, leads to quarrels and litigations—the consequences of the “abominable tongue” (miarōtatē glōtta) deplored by Aesop in Vit. Aesop. G 55: see Kurke 2011, 218–22. 75. According to Gell. NA 2.29, Aesop clothed (induit) the minds of his listeners with “salubriously” (salubriter) conceived tales. See ch. 1, sec. 3, on Plato’s use of the cognate enduō (“to clothe”) to describe the affective force of epitaphic discourse. 76. Generically speaking, wisdom literature and literary invective have unexpected affinities: see Hunt 1981; Martin 1992, 22; and Lardinois 2003.

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77. See Taillardat 1965, 214–15; Kannicht 2004, 442; and Milanezi 2005, 81. 78. On the plot of the play, see Webster 1967, 98–101; Jouan and Van Looy 2000, 185–196; and Collard and Cropp 2008, 438–41. 79. In describing the histrionics of the law court, Philocleon depicts himself as the addressee of multiple acts of supplication, expressed through different verbs: hiketeuō (555), hupokuptō (555), aitoumai (556), antiboleō (559, 560, 571, and 586). On the Aesopic fables deployed to entertain him (566), see Rothwell 1995, 245–47. 80. For discussions of this fable, see esp. Kurke 2011, 53–94, and D. T. Steiner 2008 and 2012, 29–37. 81. This account is based on Vit. Aesop. G+W 135–40 and Aesop. Fab. 3 Hausrath (preserved in three versions). Other accounts of the fable are analyzed by Van Dijk (1997, 149–50). 82. See, e.g., Rosen 1984, 394–95; Rothwell 1995, 253; and Hall 2013, 292–93. 83. Vaio (1971, 343) and Van Dijk (1997, 197) note the discrepancy between Philocleon’s actual theft and the false accusation against Aesop. On the erotic symbolism of hares, see Schnapp 1997, 348–50. In Vit. Aesop. G+W 135 and Aesop. Fab. 3 (iii) Hausrath, the eagle’s pursuit of the hare is expressed through the verbs diōkō and harpazō, which also describe sexual predation. 84. On Aesop’s warning to the Delphians (Vit. Aesop. G 139), see Kurke 2011, 89. In Vit. Aesop. W 135 and Aesop. Fab. 3 Hausrath, the hare is characterized as hiketēs (“a suppliant”), while, according to Vit. Aesop. G 135, the dung beetle “supplicated” (hiketeuen) the eagle not to violate divine law. 85. On the eagle’s rage (orgē), see Vit. Aesop. W 135 and Aesop. Fab. 3 (iii) Hausrath. Vit. Aesop. G 135 depicts the slaughter of the hare with the verb diasparattō (“rip to shreds”), which has tragic connotations: see Aesch. Pers. 195 and Eur. Bacch. 1220. 86. See esp. Dobrov 2001, 97. On the initial scene of Peace, see also Hall 2006, 338–41, and 2013, 294–95; Telò 2010, 308–14; and Ruffell 2011, 317–26. Mann 2011 has observed that every time an eagle is mentioned in Birds “he seems to bring along not only violence but also tragic quotation.” 87. Schol. Ar. Vesp. 1446 Koster (scil. Αἴσωπον) ἀποσκῶψαι εἰς τοὺς Δελφούς, ὅτι  .  .  . περιμένοιεν ἀπὸ τῶν τοῦ θεοῦ θυμάτων διαζῆν (“[they say that] Aesop mocked the Delphians for waiting around to live off the offerings for the god [= Apollo]”). See also P. Oxy 1800, where the Delphians are depicted as “standing around the altar (bōmon)”—a clear gloss of the etymological meaning of bōmolochia. 88. See ch. 1, sec. 1. Ran. 358 is another example of an Aristophanic self-distancing gesture from bōmolochoi, on which see Reckford 1987, 413–17. In EN 1128a4–5, Aristotle associates bōmolochoi and phortikoi to indicate producers of excessive laughter, the opposite of “decorous” (euschēmona) conversation: see Hunter 2009, 81, and 2014b, 385, and Rosen 2015, 466–67. The adjective euschēmōn (“decorous”) is central to Aristotle’s definition of semnotēs: see ch. 2, note 82. As noted above, Myrtia, to whom Philocleon unwittingly assimilates himself, is a peddler of phortia (1407). 89. On the tragic playwright Carcinus and his three sons, see Olson 2000. In Pax 789–90, Aristophanes lampoons the small, quail-like stature—physical and, above all, poetic—of Carcinus’s offspring. In the same play, he refers to their famous balletic pirouettes (strobilōn 864). 90. See Slater 1996b, 46–47, and Wright 2013a, 221. 91. Contrary to Wright (2013a, 221), I take the “closural effects” of the deus ex machina here to be teasingly deceptive and ironical. 92. The idea of god-sent apora pragmata makes Xanthias’s statement comparable to Eur. Med. 362–63: “How a god has brought you into a bewildering (aporon) wave of evils, Medea!”

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In Aesch. Choe. 648–52, an Erinys is said to “bring into the house” (epeispherei domois) Orestes as the agent of revenge. 93. On the connection between the bolting of the doors in the prologue and their unbolting in the finale, see Paduano 1974, 120–21. 94. On the tragic use of chalaō to indicate the opening of doors, see Rau, 1967, 155–56. 95. On Theseus’s “significant act of opening,” see Zeitlin 1996, 244; see also ch. 3, sec. 3. 96. See Rossi 1978. I agree with MacCary (1979, 144) that this scene evinces “a conscientious attempt to evoke the dance of old tragedy,” especially in its early stages. See also Prauscello 2014, 180, on emmeleia, referred to by Philocleon at 1503, as a technical term for tragic dancing. 97. On Phrynichean dances, see Borthwick 1968. Line 1490, “Phrynichus crouches like a rooster” (πτήσσει Φρύνιχος ὥς τις ἀλέκτωρ), probably reworks Phryn. Trag. TrGF 1.17: “The rooster crouched after having turned his wing like a slave” (ἔπτηξ’ ἀλέκτωρ δοῦλον ὣς κλίνας πτερόν). Lawler (1945, 66–73) posits a connection between Philocleon’s second posture (the skyward leap) and the so-called podismos (or dipodismos), a dance move, perhaps mimicking avian hopping, that is probably referred to in Cratin. fr. 234 KA. 98. Schol. Ar. Vesp. 1490a Koster. On the Athenian audience’s negative reaction to The Capture of Miletus, see Rosenbloom 1993. 99. On Philocleon’s various animal metamorphoses, see Paduano 1974, 112–14; Brillante 1987; and Reckford 1987, 234. 100. See Euph. fr. 4 Powell. 101. For limpets as a seafood delicacy, see, e.g., Epich. 40.2 KA. The Chorus’s address to the crustacean tragedians in 1518–19 (“you great-named scions [tekna] of the lord of the sea [thalassioio]”) recalls the definition of the limpet in Alc. fr. 359 Voigt (“child [teknon] of the rock and the white sea [thalassas]).” 102. According to Auger (2008, 522), the connection between this passage and Philocleon’s monody suggests his transformation from victim to victimizer. In Archilochoi (fr. 6 KA) and Odysseis (fr. 150 KA), Cratinus associates his Archilochean persona with spicy sauces for fish: see Telò 2014b. 103. The same tale appears in later fable collections, but it is likely to have already been popular at the time of the composition of the Histories: see Kurke 2011, 401. 104. The link between crabs and fish is well-established: see, e.g., Simon. T 108 Poltera and Ath. 7.300f (quoting from a section of Dorion’s treatise On Fish that includes crabs among fish for stew). 105. I borrow this definition of the grotesque from Jennings (1963, 16). 106. For the metrical analysis of this song, composed of a sequence of Archilochean dicola and permutations, see Parker 1997, 256–61. 107. “Lord of the sea” and “ruler of the sea,” which translate θαλασσίοιο (1518–19) and ποντομέδων ἄναξ (1531–32) respectively, play on the ambiguity between Poseidon and Carcinus, the “marine” father of Philocleon’s adversaries, who served as a trierarch as well as a general and may have won a naval victory, as proposed by MacDowell 1971, 326; cf. Olson 2000, 66. 108. See fr. 360 KA, probably belonging to the parabasis of an unidentified play: see Bakola 2010, 40–41, and Biles 2011, 136–37. See also fr. 11 KA (from Archilochoi), which adapts Archil. fr. 168 West. The second-century CE metrical writer Hephaestion cites both Cratinean fragments (Enchir. 47.17 and 49.20 Consbruch) to show that “Cratinus consciously adapted the metrical components of the asynartetic cola found in Archilochus” (Rosen 1988a, 44). See also Parker 1997, 260–61.

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109. For such a reading, see Wright 2013a, 223–25. 110. Phillis of Delos, author of On Music, was probably a follower of Aristoxenus of Tarentum (fl. 335 BCE). 111. Kaibel (1887–90, 1:48) accepts Arnoldt’s athetesis of Κρατῖνος, considering the name of the comic poet an incorrect reading generated by the similarity with Πρατίνας. Kassel and Austin (1983, 121), who exclude the passage from the testimonia on Cratinus, posit a similar confusion, evidently following a dittography. Olson (2006, 121n178) retains Κρατῖνος but observes that he “seems out of place in this list.” In support of Κρατῖνος, the adjective ἀρχαῖος qualifies Cratinus’s comic style in Proleg. de com. v and xxvii (= Vit. Ar.) (Koster 1975, 14.20–21 and 133.2–6). More important, as Lucia Prauscello points out to me, the broad introductory label “poets” (ποιηταί) instead of “tragedians” (τραγικοί) could be meant to encompass the three genres of Greek drama (satyr drama, comedy, tragedy), since Pratinas was known in antiquity especially as the first author of satyr plays and Thespis was regarded as the inventor of drama tout court. Though, in such a reading, Cratinus would appear as the representative of comedy, it remains telling that he is grouped stylistically with three writers of tragedy. 112. See Phryn. Trag. TrGF 1.13, referred to by Parker (1997, 261). Archaio-meli-sidōnophrunichērata—“old-sweet-Sidon-Phrynichus-pretty songs” in the translation of Wright (2013a, 215)—is Bdelycleon’s definition of his father’s songs. 113. Chamael. fr. 43b Martano. 114. On Chamaeleon’s treatment of Aeschylus as a choreographer, see Mirhady 2012, 402. 115. See Bakola 2010, 27. On Chamaeleon’s blend of biography and literary-critical evaluation, see Mirhady 2012, 389–92, and Schorn 2012, 426–29. 116. Sarah Morris points out to me that Aristophanes may be self-consciously exploiting the assonance between “Cratinus” (Κρατῖνος) and “Carcinus” (Καρκίνος). 117. On tragedy’s choruses of bystanders witnessing “the traumas of a tragic plot,” see Murnaghan 2009. 118. Wright (2013a, 224n88) contemplates but ultimately rejects τραγῳδῶν (“tragic Chorus members”)—transmitted only by the fifteenth-century manuscript J—as a replacement for τρυγῳδῶν to convey the idea that the chorus “was literally a tragic one rather than a trugic one.” 119. On the link between trux and trugōidia, see Edwards 1991. Jay-Robert (2003, 443) suggests that, in this finale, the dancers’ twirls seem to project the image of a “tourbillon stérile.” 120. On the comic occurrences of trugōidia and cognates, see Taplin 1983. 121. I borrow the concept of literary affections from Lynch 2014. Chapter Five 1. On the dating, see Henderson 1993 and Storey 1993. That the play was never performed emerges from schol. Ar. Nub. 553 Holwerda, which refers to the Alexandrian scholar Eratosthenes, and from the sixth hypothesis, which claims that the play was revised “as though the poet intended to reperform it” but “for whatever reason” did not. 2. See Revermann 2006a, 326–32; Sidwell 2009, 236; Biles 2011, 167–210; and Marshall 2012; for the opposite view, cf. Dover 1968, lxxx–xcviii; Rosen 1997; and Wright 2012, 63–64 and 98. 3. A play’s embeddedness in an agonistic context is compatible with a concern for its survival after performance (see ch. 1, sec. 1, on the Peace parabasis)—revision makes this concern programmatic. In the case of the second Clouds, the agonistic drive and the concern for posterity clearly coexist. As Martelli (2013, 11) observes, “the impetus to revise comes from . . . [Ar-

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istophanes’] participation in a competition that pits playwrights against other playwrights in a single festival,” together with “the impetus that comes from . . . playwrights competing against themselves over time and across festivals.” 4. At the Great Dionysia of 421, Eupolis’s play Flatterers won first prize, while Aristophanes’ Peace ranked second; in 420, Eupolis produced one of the plays entitled Autolycus, in which anti-Aristophanic polemic may have heavily informed the plot: see Storey 2003, 81–93. 5. Both Hubbard (1991, 95–96 and 106) and Biles (2011, ch. 5) have emphasized the centrality of sōphrosunē to Aristophanes’ self-presentation in the second Clouds. For Hubbard, sōphrosunē is how Aristophanes, to a degree, distances his own intellectual model from Socrates’. For Biles, differently from me, it palinodically separates the first Clouds from the new version. 6. By “parabasis,” here and throughout, I refer to the parabasis proper (518–62), the section in Eupolideans. 7. Sidwell (2009, 175–76) has suggested a historical connection between Eupolis and Socrates. Here I am not concerned with Eupolis’s political or philosophical affiliations, but rather with the representational continuities between the second Clouds’ Socrates, Aristophanes’ portrait of his adversary, and, to an extent, Eupolis’s own poetic self-construction. 8. Although Strepsiades’ himation is contrasted with the fancy robe (xustis 70) worn by aristocratic charioteers, it need not be considered “threadbare,” as Compton-Engle (2015, 63) asserts on the basis of the joke at 54; see Henderson’s translation of the following line (1998, 15): “Woman, you go too heavy on the thread!” On this line and the himation’s protective materiality, see sec. 2. 9. The hypothesis mentions the parabasis, agōn, and finale as innovations of the second version of the play, but it also describes the revision as a pervasive operation of removal, addition, and transformation that affected “almost every single part.” 10. See esp. Platter 2007, 94. 11. On the assimilation of plays to children as an indication of their fixed, textual status, see Rosen 1997, 407–8. For the poet-as-mother metaphor in Greek literature, see Leitao 2012; on its psychoanalytic and aesthetic implications, see Payne 2013. 12. Differently from Wilson, OCT, at 528, I accept the transmitted text λέγειν and the correction of οἷς to οὓς. 13. For the paternal connotations of the combination of the two verbs, see esp. Pl. Cri. 54a (ekthrepsēis . . . paideusēis), where Socrates’ friends are presented as potential foster-fathers for his children; see also Eur. Ion 821–22, suggested to me by John Gibert. 14. As observed by Olson (1994, 34), Aristophanes “treats Clouds I and Clouds II as a single entity, to which he . . . refers simply as ‘this comedy.’ ” 15. Developing an idea of Newiger (1961), Leitao (2012, 127n72) suggests that the passage “could allude to Euripides’ Electra,” but the circumstances of the Euripidean recognition scene are different (Electra does not go to the tomb of Agamemnon but receives news about Orestes’ offerings from the Old Man). 16. See Dover 1968, 168; Sommerstein 1982, 188; and Leitao 2012, 126–27. 17. See esp. Foley 2001, 35, and Auer 2006, developing in new directions the approach of von Wilamowitz-Möllendorff 1896, 163, and 1914, 205–10. 18. Tarkow (1979, 16) and Conacher (1987, 104–5), for example, see a weak Electra. 19. See Goldhill 1986, 22; Konishi 1990, 146; and Auer 2006, 260. 20. On the polysemy of euphrona (“well-meaning,” but also “welcome”), see Goldhill 1984, 111. 21. On Electra’s concern with correct language in prayer, see Goldhill 1984, 110–11, and 1986, 22–23; on the theme of nikē, see esp. Wilson 2007a, 265.

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22. On Electra as an archetypal defender of patriarchal order, see Kristeva (1974) 1977, 32. In 530–33, one may detect other resonances with the depiction of familial relationships in the Libation Bearers and in Sophocles’ Electra: see Telò 2010, 292–93. 23. For the paretymological link of Electra’s name with alektros (“unwed”), see Ael. VH 4.26. 24. See ch. 4, sec. 1. For sōphrosunē as a key term of the agōn, see 961–62 and 1061–62: on the connection of the agōn with the parabasis, see Telò 2010, 294, and Biles 2011, 203–7. 25. On 1018–19, see Nussbaum 2005, 160–61, and Worman 2008, 102–3. For the tongue-incheek quality of Aristophanes’ remark, see esp. Hubbard 1991, 99; Major 2006, 140; Wright 2012, 76; and Rosen 2015, 460–61. 26. For Aristophanes’ self-referential jokes on his baldness, see esp. Borthwick 1979. As suggested to me by Mark Griffith, Aristophanes’ emphasis on his baldness may be interpreted as another signal of his poetic kinship with Electra, depicted as shorn in the iconography postdating Libation Bearers as well as in the eponymous plays of Sophocles and Euripides: see Finglass 2007, 226, and Taplin 2007, 56–57. However, Aristophanes’ appropriation of Electra excludes the ragged aspects of her characterization, which become prominent in the pathologically mourning heroine of Sophocles and Euripides: see Goldhill 1986, 245–59, and Wheeler 2003. In spite of her shorn hair, “Aeschylus’s Electra is dignified in her grief for her father” (Bakogianni 2011, 43). 27. See esp. ch. 4, sec. 1. 28. See Jung (1955) 1961, 154. Symptoms of the Electra complex as a pathology have been detected in the Sophoclean Electra (see, e.g., Fréris 1977, 23, and Wheeler 2003, 381), but its defining elements—strong attachment to the father and contempt for the mother—are, to an extent, already visible in the Aeschylean heroine. On the Electra complex in Antigone, see Johnson 1997 and Griffith 2005, 2010. 29. For the genealogy of Strepsiades’ wife, see Ambrosino 1986–87; Sidwell 2009, 226–28; and Rawles 2013, 188n37. 30. On this allegation of plagiarism, see esp. Sommerstein 2000, 438–39; Storey 2003, 202–4 and 291–97; and Kyriakidi 2007, 183–91. 31. For the comparison of Knights to a himation, which ekstrepsas activates, see schol. Ar. Nub. 88a Holwerda, explaining Strepsiades’ exhortation to his son at the beginning of the play to change his lifestyle (“Turn inside out [ekstrepson] your habits as quickly as possible!” 88): “from the metaphor of cloaks [himatiōn] made rags and turned inside out [ekstrephomenōn]. [Performing the action denoted by] ekstrepsai [on] a cloak [himation] means to turn the inside portion out.” As Leslie Kurke points out to me, trepein conveys a metaphorical “turning out” of himatia in Pind. Pyth. 3.82–83. In schol. Ar. Nub. 554b Holwerda, the gloss of the participle ekstrepsas as “having pillaged” (sulēsas) emphasizes the potential violence of the act. For a related charge of plagiarism as cloak-stealing, see Ar. fr. 58 KA, discussed in ch. 2, sec. 2. Phrynichus—the contemporary comic poet—probably staged a burlesque version of the Andromeda myth by replacing the young girl with a drunken old woman: see Sommerstein 1982, 190–91, and Guidorizzi 1996, 263. 32. On Hermippus’s attack against Hyperbolus in the play Bakery Women, see Sonnino 1997, 46–47; Sommerstein 2000, 438; and Ruffell 2011, 367. The eel simile allegedly stolen by Aristophanes’ rivals appears in Eq. 864–67. 33. The “regular” form of the so-called Eupolidean meter, in which the second half of the line corresponds to a lecythion, is attested before Eupolis, while the “irregular” form, in which the same part of the line departs from the lecythion, seems to appear first with Eupolis. Consequently, “the obvious explanation of why [the Eupolidean] bears [Eupolis’s] name is that he did invent the irregular form” (Parker 1988, 117). In the parabasis of the second Clouds, twenty-two

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lines (roughly half) present the Eupolidean verse in the “irregular” form. On Eupolis’s metrical ataxia, see Heph. Enchir. 54.25 and 57.13 Consbruch. 34. On pareilkusen as a clothing metaphor, see Taillardat 1965, 449. On the robe dragging of Alcibiades and young aristocrats, see Wohl 2002, 132–34, and Telò 2007, 241–57. 35. The plot of Banqueters was probably similar to that of Clouds—with the counterpart of Pheidippides (the katapugōn) enchanted by a mysterious transgressive teacher: see Cassio 1977, 19–37, and Segoloni 1994, 111–35. 36. Adelman (1992, 105–6) has analyzed a similar opposition between Edgar and Edmund in King Lear. On Hyllus’s transition from a mother’s to a father’s son in Sophocles’ Trachiniae, see Wohl 1998, 11–16. 37. On the Aristophanic Socrates “as a jumbled type-portrait of the fifth-century sophistscientist” (Nussbaum 1980, 46), see, among others, Bowie 1998; Noël 2000; and Edmunds 2007. 38. On the neologism sphragidonuchargokomētas—“long-haired idlers with onyx signet rings,” in the translation of Henderson (1998)—see Dover 1968, 145, and Guidorizzi 1996, 238–39. During the agōn, a long-haired spectator (1100) is associated with the Weaker Argument and thus with his father-beating philosophy. 39. See Proleg. de com. xxvii (= Vit. Ar.) (Koster 1975, 133.4–5)—“Cratinus and Eupolis practiced slander more bitterly and shamefully (aischroteron) than necessary”—examined in ch. 2, sec. 4. See also ch. 1, sec. 1. 40. On the imagery of trampling, see Lebeck 1971, 74–79, and Crane 1993. A further convergence between the violence of Aristophanes’ rivals and that of Clytemnestra is the mutilation (maschalismos) inflicted on Agamemnon’s corpse (Cho. 439)—a gruesome cutting and reassembling comparable to Eupolis’s despoiling of Knights. 41. Both Clytemnestra and Strepsiades’ tyrannical wife privilege luxury over sōphrosunē. On the latter’s expensive lifestyle, which has squandered Strepsiades’ savings, see Nub. 46–55. In Electra’s prayer to her father, she contrasts the wandering existence to which she and her brother have been relegated with the extravagant lives of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, who use up the fruits of Agamemnon’s toils (Cho. 136–37). 42. On the staging, see Revermann 2006a, 186–87. 43. See Slater 2002a, 116; Ruffell 2011, 280 and 411; Rosen and Sluiter 2012, 3–4; and Hall 2013, 294. 44. On Old Comedy’s object-based humor, see esp. English 2000 and 2005 and Revermann 2006a, 185–87 and 203–5. Strepsiades’ reaction to the explanation and visual display of “geometry” includes language with self-reflexive potential: see, e.g., asteios (204), which qualifies comic conceits in Eq. 539 and Ran. 5, and sophisma (205), designating comic routines in Ran. 17. At 790, Socrates dismissively addresses Strepsiades as skaiotaton gerontion (“very foolish old man”): on the use of skaios for the audience and Philocleon in Wasps, see ch. 2, sec. 1 45. On this scene see Purves 2010, 112–17. 46. On Socrates as a deus ex machina, see Strauss 1966, 64, and Porter 2015b, 437–38. 47. O’Reagan (1992, 44) makes the connection with sophistic epideixis (“show”), on which see Morgan 2000, 91–93 and 119–34, and Clements 2014, 28–32. On the overlap of sophistic and dramatic epideixis in Ran. 771–73, see Hunter 2009, 11. 48. See 323–24 (“look over here . . . I see them coming down . . .”) and 326 (“by the eisodos”). On the choreography of this entrance, “marked by extensive metatheatricality” (Ruffell 2011, 254), see Revermann 2006a, 197–203. 49. On this meaning of the cloud-goddesses, see Reckford 1967, 223; Hubbard 1991, 108; and O’Reagan 1992, 53–54.

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50. At 489–90, Socrates likens his intellectual dominance over Strepsiades to dog-feeding (“whenever I toss [probalōmai] you something clever about cosmology, you’ll snatch it quickly”). The same metaphor (expressed by parabeblēmenon) probably depicts Crates’ relationship with his audience in Ar. fr. 347.3 KA: see ch. 2, note 45. 51. At 137, the reference to the Thinkery’s “aborted” (exēmblōkas) ideas could be connected with the charge of intellectual “sterility” that Aristophanes implicitly levels against his unoriginal rivals, in the parabasis, by assimilating his poetic creations to babies. 52. On the staging of Strepsiades’ Socratic initiation, see Revermann 2006a, 203–7. On its resonances with mystic rituals, see Marianetti 1992, 41–75; Bowie 1993, 106–7; and Byl 1994. 53. See Pearson 1917, 1:2, and Lloyd-Jones 1996, 10–11. 54. Nephele’s revenge is mentioned in schol. Thomano-Tricl. Nub. 257a Koster. 55. The adjective semnos also defines the cloud-goddesses or their songs at 291, 315, and 364. At 363, Socrates, too, is accused of haughtiness (semnoprosōpeis). 56. As Melissa Mueller has pointed out to me, Aeschylus’s play on the ambiguity of spathē— meaning both “a weaver’s batten” and “blade of a sword”—in Cho. 232 articulates the opposition between Electra as a weaver and Clytemnestra as a husband murderer. As we have already seen (and will further see), Strepsiades’ wife is a Clytemnestra-like figure. 57. On Strepsiades’ use of the himation for sexual defense, see Kleve (1989, 81), who discusses two striking parallels. In Lucian Dial. meret. 11.1, a courtesan complains about her lover’s lack of sexual interest: “It is evident that you don’t love me; otherwise . . . you wouldn’t set up a barrier between us with your cloak (himatiōi), for fear that I may touch you.” In Tib. 1.9.55–56, a husband betrayed by his wife is told, “After she has worn out her young lover in secret encounters, let her come into your bed exhausted, with her robe put between you and her.” 58. As shown in the initial scene of the play, Strepsiades always wears his himation even when he is in bed. For the sexual overtones of sungignomai, see Henderson (1975) 1991, 159, and Byl 1987. 59. As we have seen, semnotēs can draw suspicion as well as praise. For the positive and negative senses of semnos and its derivatives, see ch. 2, sec. 4, and note 82, and sec. 1, above. 60. On trugōidia, see ch. 4, sec. 3; see also note 66. 61. I do not posit a connection between the historical Eupolis and the Socratic circle: see note 7. 62. On Eupolis as a teacher in Maricas, see fr. 192.13 and 18 KA, where he compares his long absence from the stage to the dismissal of his spectator pupils from school and urges them to rub out their tablets: see Tammaro 1975–77, 98–99. This persona must have preceded Maricas, as argued by Bakola (2008, 23). 63. Vesp. 1024–25 and Pax 762–63. See esp. Storey 2003, 288–90, and Bakola 2008, 21–26. On Athenian anxiety regarding propriety in pederastic relationships, see esp. Fisher 2001, 25–53, and Davidson 2007, 551–79. 64. See schol. Ar. Nub. 223d Holwerda, which cites the Pindaric line (fr. 157 Maehler). By reusing it, Socrates draws attention to his own notoriously silenic appearance. Marshall (1999, 194) suggests that in the play’s first version Socrates wore a satyric mask; Revermann (2006a, 190) leans toward a “a more individualized caricature mask with Silenus features.” Plato’s Symposium responds to the characterization of Socrates as a satyr tutor and sexual predator to which Aristophanes’ Clouds contributed: see Usher 2002 and Hunter 2004, 98–112. 65. See Papageorgiou 2004, esp. 289. 66. At 296 (“Don’t be crass, and don’t do what poor comedians [trugodaimones] these days do”), Socrates scornfully associates Strepsiades’ scatological language with the repertoire of

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lowbrow comedians. Hubbard (1991, 95n23) has observed that Socrates’ rebuke “parallels Aristophanes’ pretended rejection of the cheap theatrical tricks” of phortikē kōmōidia. However, since the parallel language in the parabatic discourse (540 and 542) is ostensibly directed at rivals, I suggest that a measure of irony also touches Aristophanes’ lowbrow imitators, especially Eupolis, who are aligned with Socrates. 67. See ch. 2, sec. 2. In the agōn, Heracles is named as the favorite hero of the Stronger Argument (1050), who by acting as a defender of sōphrosunē and philopatria aligns himself with the Electra-inspired posture of Aristophanes in the parabasis. 68. Although the text makes no mention of the sandals, Strepsiades’ later complaints (719 and 856–59) indicate that in this scene he had to remove both his sandals and his cloak: see Revermann 2006a, 206. 69. The removal of the himation is primarily motivated by the ritual connotations of Strepsiades’ introduction into the Thinkery (see note 52), but, left only with his tunic, the old man conforms to the parsimonious Socratic habitus lampooned in comedy: see Patzer 1994; Totaro 1998, 157–64; and Brown 2004. The play presents Socrates as barefoot (103 and 363) and wearing a tribōn, as implied by the joke in 870 (see Guidorizzi 1996, 291, and Revermann 2006a, 189). 70. The consulters of Trophonius’s subterranean oracle in Boeotia had to bring cakes for the snakes awaiting them at the bottom of the cave. Ancient sources describe the consultation of this oracle as a descent to the underworld, an experience of paralysis and hallucination similar to death: see Bonnechere 1998 and 2003 and Ustinova 2009, 90–96. 71. Discussing the scene of Clouds, Revermann (2006a, 206) parenthetically refers to “Aesch. Ag. 972 ff.” as “the most memorable example” of crossing a threshold. 72. Rutherford (2012, 300) finds metatheatrical implications in Clytemnestra’s control of the threshold, on which see Taplin 1977, 299–300, 306–8, and 316–17. On Clytemnestra’s infantilization of Agamemnon in the carpet scene, see esp. Wohl 1998, 104, and Jacobs 2007, 111–12. 73. As observed by Jacobs (2007, 111–12), by leaving Agamemnon “shoeless and swordless (deprived of phallic power),” Clytemnestra acts as “a projection of the castrating mother.” For the thematic centrality of disrobing in the Oresteia, see Griffith 1988. The protective quality of sandals, already apparent in Homer’s arming scenes, is thematized in Alcman’s oxymoronic phrase apedilos alka (“barefoot defense” PMGF 1.15): see Bonanno 1991 and 2002, 34–35; TsitsibakouVasalos 1993; and Wyles 2010, 177. By defining Agamemnon’s footwear as “a sandal serving ( prodoulon) the foot” (945), Aeschylus emphasizes this safeguarding quality. 74. On Agamemnon as a sacrificial victim, see Zeitlin 1965; Goldhill 1984, 78; and Seaford 1984. On stripping as an emasculating, tragically charged act in other Aristophanic plays, see Compton-Engle 2003, 2005. 75. For the imagistic merging of net and serpent, see Cho. 247–49, on which see most recently Catenaccio 2011, 215–16. Although the assimilation of Clytemnestra to a snake is typical of the Libation Bearers (994 and 1047), a trace of it can already be found in Ag. 1233. On Clytemnestra as a serpent, see Lebeck 1971, 13–15; Peradotto 1969, 259; and Goldhill 1984, 159–95. 76. On Strepsiades’ delusion, see esp. Segal 1969; O’Reagan 1992, 64–65; and Zimmermann 2006, 331–32. 77. In Cho. 46 and 525, Clytemnestra is called “godless” (dustheos). In addition, in the prayer that Electra addresses to her father, she asks him to make her not only more restrained, but also “more pious” (see sec. 1). In her speech delivered after the murder of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra famously “turns her murder into a blasphemous religious sacrifice” (Rutherford 2012, 305): see Wohl 1998, 108. 78. On Clytemnestra as a symbol of matriarchal rebellion, see esp. Irigaray (1987) 1993, 7–21;

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Zeitlin 1996, 87–119; and Jacobs 2007, 110–12. The agōn between the traditionalist, anti-Socratic Stronger Argument and the subversive, Socratized Weaker Argument replays the father-mother conflict laid out by Strepsiades in the prologue: see O’Reagan 1992, 26. 79. Revermann (2006a, 207–9) notes that Pheidippides’ Socratization in the second part of the play symbolically merges the two spaces, marked by two distinct doors. I propose that the convergence of Strepsiades’ old and new fears (of his wife and of the Socratic school) enacts this spatial fusion much earlier, and thus programmatically, before the parabasis. A single door, which Dale (1957) argues for, would make this fusion even more pronounced. 80. See Eup. fr. 395 KA, discussed by Patzer (1994, 69–70) and Storey (2003, 322–23). At 179 there is mention of another himation stolen by Socrates. 81. Klopē (“theft”) is the customary term for plagiarism in Greek literary criticism: see Stemplinger 1912. Aristophanes’ “plagiarizing” rivals (first and foremost Eupolis) are assimilated to kleptai (“thieves”) in Pax 730–31: see Olson 1998, 216; Storey 2003, 291–92; and Kyriakidi 2007, 195–96. 82. On Socrates’ tribōn, see note 69. 83. On props’ power of intertheatrical connectivity, see Sofer 2003, 1–29; Marshall 2001; Wyles 2010, 175–79, and 2011, 88–89; and esp. Mueller 2015. 84. See, e.g., Rau 1967, 148–50, and Guidorizzi 1996, 322–23. The beginning of Strepsiades’ monody (1154–55) alludes to Soph. TrGF 4.491, from the play Peleus, which thematized the eponymous hero’s hardships after Achilles’ death. See O’Reagan 1992, 110. 85. Text as printed in Gregory 1999. 86. In 148–49, the Chorus describes her as an “orphan” of her daughter, defined in 280–81 as “a consolation with many roles—a city, a nurse, a support, a guide.” See Rabinowitz 1993, 113, and Mossman 1995, 109–10. 87. See ch. 2, secs. 2 and 3. 88. See von Wilamowitz-Möllendorff 1895, 2:144n51; Dover 1968, 189; Sommerstein 1982, 198; and Guidorizzi 1996, 280. 89. See Gregory 1999, 66 and 201. 90. On the monody’s metrical structure, see Parker 1997, 202–7. 91. As noted by Spatz (1977, 77), the rhythm suggests that “the parody is ominous.” See also Mauduit 2013. 92. On Pheidippides’ refusal to sing to the lyre, an expression of his Socratic conversion, see Prauscello 2006, 90–92; see also Ford 2003, 27–28, and Rawles 2013, 183–90. 93. On this contrast of Aeschylus versus Euripides, see Rosen 2006, 32–33. Euripides’ Aeolus presented a father-son relationship similar to the one between Strepsiades and Pheidippides, in which the “bad” son Macareus used sophistic rhetoric to convert his father Aeolus to immoral behavior: see Telò 2010, 297–308, and Ruffell 2011, 322–24. 94. Epanapēdaō and epempēdaō are interchangeable technical terms of the pankration: see Campagner 2001, 141. In the parabasis, 550 echoes a metaphorical attack at the beginning of the play: after Pheidippides dismisses Strepsiades’ threat to kick him out of the house, the old man compares his son’s attitude to a knockdown (126): see Taillardat 1965, 337; Dover 1968, 109; and Guidorizzi 1996, 206–7. 95. On ereidō, phlaō, spodeō, and koletraō as part of the vocabulary of combat sports, see Poliakoff 1982, 35 and 168, and Campagner 2001, 147–48, 191, 288–89, and 330–31. 96. In this complex of paternal imagery, no strong division is made between the poet and his products. 97. Gnōmē in the parabasis of Clouds is cognate with gignōskō, which is associated with audience appreciation in the parabasis of Wasps: see ch. 2, sec. 2.

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98. Although the battle between Strepsiades and Pheidippides delineates an opposition between Aeschylean and Euripidean tragedy (see note 93), I do not associate the tragic dimension of Eupolis’s phortikē kōmōidia with Euripides specifically, but rather with the violent lack of sōphrosunē that, in Wasps, emerges as the defining affect of tragedy as a whole. 99. Though at one point in Wasps, Bdelycleon desperately commands Xanthias to “strike” ( paie 398) Philocleon with a festive wreath as he tries to lower himself out a window, this moment feels very different from Pheidippides’ programmatic father-beating philosophy. On the Wasps scene, see most recently Marshall 2014, 143. 100. For the connections between the first and second agōn, see Biles 2011, 203–4. I sympathize with the suggestion, made by Gelzer (1960, 145), that neither the first nor the second agōn figured in the first version of the play. 101. On these themes in the confrontation between Admetus and Pheres, see Thury 1988, 205–11. 102. The same line is quoted in Ar. Thesm. 194. 103. See Thury 1988 and Strauss 1993, 138–39. On the unflattering characterization of Pheres, see, among others, Golden 1970–71, 118–20; Smith 1983, 134–37; and Wohl 1998, 155–56. 104. It may be worth noting that Pheidippides (Φειδιππίδης) and Pheres (Φέρης) begin and end with the same letters (Φε . . . ης). 105. See Wohl 1998, 133–34. 106. See Alcestis’s farewell speech to Admetus at 280–97, esp. 290. As recorded in Diod. Sic. 4.52.2–3, Alcestis was the only one of Pelias’s daughters to refuse to participate in dismembering and boiling him: see Rabinowitz 1993, 75, and Wohl 1998, 135–36 and 247n19. In the Euripidean play, the references to the heroine by her patronymic (37, 82, and 435) may play up her role as a “daddy’s girl.” 107. Alcestis’s sōphrosunē is also referred to at 182. On Alcestis as the “best” (aristē) wife, see 83, 151, 235, 241–42, 324, 442, 742, and 899. 108. H. von Hofmannsthal, author of a post-Freudian Electra, saw a deep connection between Electra and Alcestis: “Das Alkestis- und Ödipus-Thema sublimiert in der ‘Electra’” (1959, 217). 109. The connection between Heracles and Alcestis was visually underscored by the fact that the same actor probably played both parts: see Di Benedetto and Medda 1997, 222. Admetus indirectly applies the term sōtēr (“savior”) to Alcestis at the end of his tirade against his father (667). Heracles parallels Alcestis not only as a savior, but also as a reinforcer of patrilinearity in the finale: see Wohl 1998, 164 and 167–69. 110. In Alcestis, Heracles is the only character to share the qualification of aristos (559) with the eponymous heroine. On Aristophanes’ onomastic predisposition to canonicity, see ch. 1, sec. 1. 111. This ending’s tragic tonality has been noted by several critics: see, e.g., Whitman 1964, 129; Silk 2000, 352–56, and 2013, 37–39 and Revermann 2006a, 235. For comic, vitalistic readings, see Segal 1969, 157, and O’Reagan 1992, 121. I agree with Parker (1996, 205) that the occasional obscene humor “only slightly mitigates the grim violence of this ending.” 112. Pheidippides’ escalation of violence climaxes with his announced intention to apply his parent-beating philosophy to his mother too (1443). The dialogue between Strepsiades and the Chorus conjures all the watchwords of tragic ethics: “suffering, responsibility, god, justice, punishment, delusion, recognition . . . too late” (Silk 2000, 353). On pathei mathos in this scene, see also Rau 1967, 173–75, and Zimmermann 2006. 113. See O’Reagan 1992, 126, and Biles 2011, 208.

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114. On the theme of deception, connecting Socrates and Chaerophon (exēpatōn 1466) with Aristophanes’ rivals in the parabasis (exapatan 546), see sec. 1. 115. See 832 and 846 for other references to Strepsiades’ infatuation with the Thinkery as mania. 116. As noted by Harvey (1981), from a performative perspective the actual incineration of the skēnē building or of its occupants seems quite a remote and unpractical possibility. It is undeniable, however, that, in symbolic terms, Strepsiades’ gesture reduces the phrontistērion to ashes. On the motif of the collapsing house in tragedy, see Rodighiero 2013. 117. On these lines, see Rosen 1997, 410, and 2015, 460. Regarding the burning down of the Thinkery, Ruffell (2013, 251) has observed that “the visual violence is tightly woven into the articulation of comic victory . . . looking beyond the end of the performance into the judging and beyond.” 118. On Strepsiades as a talking name, see Marzullo 1953; Silk 2000, 355; and Kanavou 2011: 67–70. Epilogue 1. Worstward Ho is a pun on two titles: the 1607 play Westward Ho by Thomas Dekker and John Webster and Westward Ho!, an 1855 novel by Charles Kingsley. On wordplay and incommunicability in Worstward Ho, see esp. Teo 2013; on Beckett’s notion of failure as intrinsic to art, see Bersani and Dutoit 1993, 14. 2. The lines in question (from act 4, scene 1) are “The lamentable change is from the best / The worst returns to laughter”; “Who is’t can say, ‘I am at the worst’?”; and “The worst is not / So long as we can say, ‘This is the worst. ’ ” See Knowlson 1996, 593–95. 3. For discussion of this intertextual relationship, see Fitzsimons 2007 and Chattopadhyay 2012. On Beckett’s aesthetics of failure, see Tereszewski 2013. 4. For Branson’s use of the Beckett quotation, see http://www.virgin.com/richard-branson/ what-will-virgin-look-like-in-. I owe the pairing of Wawrinka and Branson to O’Connell (2014). In a way, Branson’s credo aligns him with those artists who, according to Bourdieu (1993, 40), follow “the autonomous principle (e.g., ‘art for art’s sake’)” as opposed to bourgeois or popular taste, “seeing temporal failure as a sign of election.” Ball (2015, 7) analyzes the central role that the writers of American modernism assigned to “the rhetoric of failure,” that is, “the transvaluation of failure as a watchword for literary success.” With a radically different agenda, Žižek (2008, 7, 210, and 361) uses Beckett’s “fail better” as an entry point for an attempt to reclaim the idealistic kernel in the catastrophic revolutionary experiences of the twentieth century. 5. On Abramović’s show, see Biesenbach 2010 and Schneider 2011, 3–7. 6. Rich defines “re-vision” in a feminist context. For a repurposing of this conception in relation to reenactment and reperformance, see Schneider 2011, 6. 7. The list of Kermode’s canonical pleasures also comprises the expectation of release from fear theorized by Plato in Phlb. 32c and more-problematic notions such as Barthes’s jouissance ([1973] 1975): for a critique, see Hartman 2004. 8. Lynch sets out to reconstruct the role of feeling, pleasure, and “affective attachments” in the construction of the English canon. For the idea of “feeling classical” in antiquity, see Porter 2006b. 9. Walter Scott’s induction in the canon was similarly based on his fiction’s alleged ability to relieve readers of mental disorders: see Felluga 2005, 42.

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10. The title of Lynch’s book, Loving Literature, plays on the ambiguity of gerund and participle to suggest the image of literature as not only an object of affection, but also as an affective force, an active conveyor of love. See the title of Ellen Oliensis’s forthcoming book on Ovid’s Amores—Loving Writing. 11. On patriarchy and the canon, see Most 1990. 12. “As well a well-wrought urn becomes / The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs, / And by these hymns, all shall approve / Us canonized for love” (33–36). 13. See Brooks 1947, 17–21. As the title of Brooks’s book—The Well Wrought Urn—and the blurb of a recent reprint suggest, Donne’s urn, discussed in the first, programmatic chapter, is a figure of “the greatest poems of the English language” (my italics), for which the book provides a commentary. On Donne’s poem, Cleanth Brooks, and the discourse of the canon, see Guillory 1984. Hinds (2010, 370) establishes a further link with John Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn. 14. On the tactile quality of filmic and performative vision, see esp. Sobchack 2004; Fisher 2007; and Barker 2009. 15. For a reassessment of the phenomenology of touch in ancient literature, see Purves, forthcoming; Worman, forthcoming, explores the relationships between Sophoclean characters in light of the aesthetics of touch. 16. In fr. 663 KA, Aristophanes is said to define Aeschylus’s poetic “hardness” (sklērotēs) as a tactile sensation by comparing it to the tough skin of pigs and cows: see Conti Bizzarro 1999, 48. 17. On fabric’s affective vibrancy, see esp. Papapetros 2012, 45–48. On Homer’s “vibrant materialism,” see Purves 2015. For a wide-ranging analysis of “objects as actors” in Greek tragedy, see Mueller 2015, 111–33. 18. On this topic, see, among others, Ahmed 2010; Dudley 2010; and Casella and Woodward 2014. 19. On the self-reflexivity of Electra’s urn, see also Ringer 1998, 188–89. For the multiple meanings of Electra’s urn as a stage object, see Mueller 2015. 20. I will try to answer these questions in a book tentatively entitled The Titular Object: Props and Pregnancy in Plautus and Beyond. 21. For example, Smith (1997) conceptualizes intertextuality in Virgil and Ovid as a form of “embrace,” adapting Martin Buber’s theological model in I and Thou.

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Index

For works listed below, italics set off specific passages. Abramović, Marina, 158–59 Acharnians, 86; 300–301: 39; 314: 39; 418–34: 86; 426–29: 86; 848–53: 176n51; 852: 176n45; 857: 93–94; 1162–73: 183n70 Achilles, 81–82 Admetus, 150–51 Aegisthus, 135 Aelian: on Clouds, 1–2, 8–9, 155; Historical Miscellany 2.13: 1 Aeschylus, 99–100; as bacchic, 117; choreography of, 116–17; drunkenness of, 117; in Frogs, 6, 8, 10, 50, 60, 73, 80–81; memorial of, 6–7; in tragic canon, 2, 6, 8, 50 Aeschylus, Life of, 15, 54, 170n82, 179n100 Aeschylus, works of: Agamemnon 176–81: 186n107; 945: 198n73; 1188–90: 98; 1357: 135; 1380–92: 135; 1385–86: 135; Eumenides, 15; 644: 99; 1007: 189n51; Libation Bearers, 142; 46: 198n77; 86–93: 130; 98–102: 130; 136–37: 196n41; 138–48: 130; 140: 131; 232: 197n56; 247–49: 198n75; 525: 198n77; 994: 198n75; 1047: 198n75; Niobe, 84; fr. 154a: 185n94, 185n96, 186n98 [Aeschylus]: Prometheus Bound 675–76: 91 Aesop: as abject, 104; as Aristophanic predecessor, 103–4; and Delphians, 106–8, 191n87; as iambic performer, 103–4; as sage, 103, 105 Aesopic fables, 8, 22, 30, 88; Aesop and female dog, 103–4; as anti-tragic, 101; and comedy, 101–3, 108; in defendants’ speeches, 106; eagle and dung beetle, 106–9, 191n83, 191n85; fish and aulos player, 114; hawk and nightingale, 103; and iambos, 101–3, 108; metapoetic valence of, 103; Philocleon’s misuse of, 89, 101–9; salubriousness of, 190n75

Aesop, Life of, 104, 106, 190n71, 190n74, 191n81, 191nn84–85 aesthetics: and canonicity, 2, 19; defined, 3, 14, 165n11; and the haptic, 20, 160–61, 172n111, 202n16; and the prestigious object, 3; and trans-historical values, 3 affect: aristocratic, 108; cathartic, 120; as contagion, 15, 55, 73–74, 78–80; Cratinean, 57, 101; defined, 15, 57, 170n87; empathic transmission of, 16, 170n87, 170n89; engulfing, 18; as felt on the skin, 20, 55; of genre, x, 88, 156; harmful, 80, 150; as material transaction, 15, 159; metaphors of, 162; and objects, 172n111; protective, 21–22, 101, 109–10, 135, 143; ragged, 56, 83, 86, 88, 90, 95; restrained, 101; therapeutic, 15, 17, 19–22, 31, 40–41, 87, 95, 126, 160; tragic, 23, 55, 69, 76, 101; wrapping, 20, 40, 41, 115. See also touch affections, literary, 121, 159–60, 201n8, 202n10 affective intertextuality, 65, 80, 83, 142, 145; defined, 57, 63. See also intertextuality affective mimesis, 56–57, 60, 68–69, 72–73, 78–80, 83, 86–90, 98, 105, 162 affective self-reflexivity, 162 affective turn, 14–15, 160 Agamemnon: in Agamemnon, 135, 140–43; hubris of, 135, 140; in Libation Bearers, 129–32 aganos, 49–51 Agave, 83 agōgē, 53–54, 101, 117, 121 agōn, 52; of Alcestis, 150–51; of Clouds (first agōn), 90, 131, 139; of Clouds (second agōn), 150; of Knights, 40; of Wasps, 29–30, 44, 79–80, 84–85, 93 agoraios, 4–5

230 aischros, 53; aischrotēs, 54 aissō, 71, 91 Ajax, 84, 99 Alcestis, 150–151, 200n106 Alcman: fr. 1: 198n73 Alcmeon, 74 aleōrē, 44 alexanemos, 37, 44, 139 alexikakos, 33–34, 37, 44, 139, 145 alousia, 42–43, 47, 52; aloutos, 42, 46 aluō, 69–70, 182n49 Ameipsias, 1, 91 anagnōrisis, 76, 83, 186n108 anallomai, 90–91; exallomai, 70–71, 91, 112 anapēdaō, 33, 66; epanapēdaō, 147–48, 199n94; epempēdaō, 133, 135, 147, 199n94 anchō, 33; apanchō, 148–49, 154 anger: and civic identity, 63–64. See also orgē Antipater of Thessalonica, 167n41 Aphrodite (Hippolytus), 60–63, 74 aplutos, 33, 46 Apollo, 79, 98–99, 106 apolouō, 71–72 archaios, 53, 100–101, 117, 119, 121, 193n111 archaiotēs, 4; of Cratinus, 4, 53–54, 117, 120–21, 193n111; of Eupolis, 53 Archilochus (and Archilochean meter), 46, 73–74, 115–17, 192n108; fr. 120: 73; fr. 168: 192n108; frr. 172–81: 190n63 architecture: and textiles, 22, 85–86; in Peace, 4–6 Aretaeus of Cappadocia, 182n42 Aristocles, 117 Aristophanes: absence in Clouds, 149–52; as Alcestis, 151–52; as anti-Oedipal, 133; as anti-tragic, 75; baldness of, 132–33, 195n26; as dignified, 8, 53–55, 155, 178n82; as Electra, 126–135, 139, 142–43, 146, 152–53, 155; as Heraclean, 33–34, 37, 43–46, 48, 50, 63, 65, 99, 102, 145, 151–52; irony of, 10, 19, 52–53, 82, 119, 121; as restrained, 8, 54–55, 87, 101, 132, 155; self-mockery of, 96 Aristophanes (canon): biographical tradition of, 12, 49, 53–55; delegitimizing strategy of, 55, 75, 86–90, 108, 127, 135, 140, 143, 155–56; favored by Hellenistic critics, 1–7, 9, 22, 53; supremacy of, 1–3, 12, 22–23, 27, 46, 48, 53–54, 75, 86–87, 89, 121, 127, 143, 156, 159–60. See also canon Aristophanes (fragmentary plays): Anagyrus fr. 58: 38; Babylonians, 29; Banqueters, 128, 134, 148– 49; Second Thesmophoriazusae fr. 346: 174n20, 175n35; fr. 347: 40, 197n50; unattributed fr. 663: 202n16; fr. 688: 15 Aristophanes (genre): as cleanser of comedy, 42–43, 46, 48, 177n77; innovations of, 32–33, 36, 38–39, 46–47, 121; as protector of comedy, 87; as stabilizer of comedy, 5, 10, 22, 69, 121 Aristophanes, Life of, 49, 53, 55, 75, 101, 121, 135, 178n90, 179n93, 193n111, 196n39

index Aristophanes, works of. See Aristophanes (fragmentary plays) and specific titles aristos, 1, 8, 152; Alcestis as aristē, 151, 200n107; Aristophanes as, 6–7, 167n41 Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics 1128a4–5: 191n88; Poetics, 15, 57, 170n85, 184n76, 186n106; 1448a24–28: 166n14; 1449b7–9: 177n73; 1453a12– 15: 184n76; 1454a37: 180n3; 1455b24–56a10: 180n3; Rhetoric 1391a27–28: 178n82 [Aristotle]: Problems, 99; 30.1: 185n84, 186n112, 189n49 Artemis, 74, 79 ataxia, 4–5, 18, 45, 76, 83, 86, 196n33; of Cratinus, 4–5, 18, 45, 48, 54, 86, 99, 108 atē, 90; atēros, 90, 99, 189n51 Ate, 99 Athamas: in Athamas (Sophocles), 138, 151–52; in Ino (Euripides), 105–7 Athenaeus: 1.22a: 117, 193n111 atrugetos. See trux audience: abused by comic poets, 126, 148; alienation of, 86, 100; broken bond with Aristophanes, 27–28, 31, 34, 36, 39, 43, 66, 75, 159–60; criticized by comic poets, 8–9; destined for cooking pot, 154; as diseased, 63, 66–67, 80, 96, 112–13, 119, 160; as Erinys, 155; false liberation of, 110; as fathers, 20–22, 129–31, 133, 135–36, 138–39, 142, 148, 160; fevers of, 31, 55, 63, 66, 74, 154; healed or protected by Aristophanes, 10, 28, 34, 37, 40–41, 44–45, 52–55, 63, 65–68, 72, 75–76, 81, 88, 102, 107, 120, 135, 142–43, 150, 153, 155, 159–60; infantilization of, 55, 81, 87, 126, 143, 156; and matriarchal threat, 156; melancholy of, 80–81; as old, 20; protection removed in Clouds, 126; as ragged, 57, 86–87; as readers or spectators, 12, 16; and reciprocity, 143, 150; sophistication of, 12; as tragic parent, 76, 138 Austen, Jane, 159 Baubo, 47 Bdelycleon: absence of, 89, 118–21, 125–26; as Aesopic, 104–5, 107–8; as Aristophanes, 20, 27–31, 72, 75, 119, 142, 145; as deus ex machina, 74–75, 81, 83, 110, 112, 119, 145; filial caretaking, therapy, and rescue offered by, 22, 27–31, 34, 37, 43, 47, 49–54, 68–71, 74–75, 81–83, 86, 88–89, 94, 99, 104–5, 107–9, 112, 115, 118–19, 121, 126, 129, 131, 145, 173n4; long hair of, 132, 173n4; as paternal son, 20, 22, 28, 51, 74–75, 80, 85, 121, 149; political sympathies of, 28–29, 173n4; as potential tyrant, 95; as superego, 75 Beckett, Samuel, 158, 162; Waiting for Godot, 120; Worstward Ho, 157 Bellerophon, 70; (Euripidean character) 83–84, 107, 112; as infantilized, 80, 85, 87; melancholy of, 57, 76, 85–86, 98–99, 105, 187n116; as ragged, 80, 85

index binding and loosening, 22. See also desis; lusis Birds, 103 Bloom, Harold, ix, 21 bōmolocheuma, 4, 108–9; bōmolochia, 108, 191n87; bōmolochos, 191n88 Brecht, Bertolt, 73 Brooks, Cleanth, 160, 202n13 Callimachus: Iambs 1: 73–74 Canidia, 47 canon: as binding (desis)/closure, 56–57, 76, 83; as cleansing, 42; constructedness of, 167n37; and demotion, 2, 10, 58; developmental scheme in, 48, 53, 87; as durable object, 3, 22, 159, 202n13; and exclusion, 4–5, 9–10, 42, 48, 75, 108–9, 156; fixed by Hellenistic critics, 2–7; and generic norms, 6, 9; and generic stability, 56, 69; health benefits of, 159, 168n56, 201n9; as hierarchy, 2–3, 6, 48, 54, 75, 87; as monumentality, 4–7, 54, 156, 158–59; as “objective,” 7, 165n10; and pleasure, 159, 201n7; and tragic poets in Frogs, 3, 6, 8. See also Aristophanes (canon) Carcinus and sons, 89, 109, 113, 118; as birds, 113, 191n89; as marine creatures, 113, 118 Cassandra, 119; in Agamemnon, 98; in Trojan Women, 98 Cerberus, 34, 45–46, 48, 104, 174n21, 177nn61–62 chalaō, 111; chalaros, 112 Chamaeleon, 117 charis, 4 chitōn, 19, 40 chlaina, 19–22; affective force of, 48–49, 55; architectural analogs of, 56, 70, 76; as Aristophanic, 89, 120, 139, 154–55, 160; in Bdelycleon’s therapy, 35, 43, 50, 71, 89, 94, 105, 156; class connotations of, 27, 36, 53, 55, 132, 174nn27–28; description of, 37–38; as dignified, 38; as durable object, 40, 160; as materialized affective force of first Clouds, 19–21, 31, 38–40, 50, 54, 140, 143, 160; and paternal son, 149; protective and therapeutic properties of, 37–39, 43, 52–53, 55, 82, 87, 95, 110, 121, 126, 135, 142, 153, 160, 175n31, 175n37; as refined, 19, 35, 40, 82, 121; softness of, 36–37, 51–52, 67–68, 76, 82, 121; like swaddling clothes, 68, 74, 80; warmth of, 20, 27, 37–38, 55–56, 67, 82, 86; wrapping quality of, 21, 37, 76, 87, 109, 160. See also chlanis; himation chlanis, 38, 175n37, 175n39 choking. See suffocation Chrysothemis (Sophocles’ Electra), 125 chthonic madness, anger, violence: Cerberus and, 45; Cratinus and, 99; Heracles and, 45; Philocleon and, 45, 90; as tragic, 90, 101; Typhon and, 45 Cicero: For Sextus Roscius of Ameria 67: 189n47; Laws 1.40: 189n47; Tusculan Disputations 3.61– 63: 185n84

231 class: in Clouds, 132, 134; in Wasps: 28–29, 99, 132–33 Cleon, 16, 29–30, 34, 39, 45–48, 84, 104, 133, 135– 36, 148 clouds (divinities), 137–40, 152; as comic eikones, 137; as matriarchal threat, 141 Clouds (original version), 1–2; and domestic comfort, 67; as fever fighter, 37–38, 65–67; novelty of, 32–33, 36, 38–39; as protective and purifying, 115; as therapy, 121; toil to produce, 40 Clouds (revised version): agonistics and, 193n3; background of, 121; and Electra (see Aristophanes: as Electra); and original version, 126–27; as reconfiguration of Wasps, 126; 14–16: 132; 41–55: 133, 196n41; 48: 139; 50: 139; 53–55: 138; 54: 145; 59–74: 133; 70: 194n8; 124–25: 133; 126: 199n94; 137: 197n51; 179: 139; 181–85: 136; 201–2: 136; 222–23: 139; 226: 136–37; 250–57: 138; 265: 138; 267: 138, 145; 269: 137; 296: 197n66; 323–24: 196n48; 326: 196n48; 331–32: 134–35; 400–434: 175n38; 429–30: 141; 489–90: 197n50; 493: 140; 503–4: 140; 507–8: 140; 523–24: 40; 524: 54, 59, 91; 524–27: 127; 528–48: 128–29; 529: 134; 532–33: 148; 537: 90, 131, 139; 537–43: 91; 538–39: 131; 541–42: 131; 541–43: 152; 542: 91, 152; 543: 153; 544: 130; 545: 132; 545–46: 133; 546–48: 29; 549–59: 133–35; 550: 147, 199n94; 552: 147; 555: 91; 561–62: 155; 718–19: 146, 198n68; 832: 201n115; 846: 201n115; 856–59: 198n68; 944–45: 140; 961–62: 195n24; 1018–19: 131; 1036–48: 32–33; 1050: 198n67; 1061–62: 195n24; 1078: 90; 1154–55: 199n84; 1158–66: 144–45; 1161: 151; 1162–66: 146; 1321–24: 147; 1351–52: 147; 1354–58: 147; 1359–60: 147; 1371–74: 147; 1375–90: 147–50; 1376: 154; 1385: 154; 1389: 154; 1413–14: 150; 1415: 150; 1420–22: 150; 1427–29: 150; 1454–55: 152; 1458–61: 152; 1462–73: 49; 1464–66: 134; 1476–77: 154; 1484–90: 153; 1497–98: 153–54; 1504–5: 154. See also specific themes and characters Clytemnestra: in Agamemnon, 135, 140–42, 198nn72–73; in Electra (Euripides), 125; in Libation Bearers, 129, 132, 135, 198n77 Comica Adespota: fr. 648: 179n95 Comic Prolegomena, 184nn75–76; judgment of Aristophanes and rivals, 3–5, 166nn17–18, 193n111 Corybantes, 71, 99 Crates, 40; Lamia, 177n73; fr. 20: 48 Cratinus: as abject, 120; and Aeschylus, 74, 99– 101; as aggressive, 120; and Archilochus, 46, 73–74, 116–17; as Aristophanic “brother,” 21; as canine, 34, 45–46, 48, 104; choreography of, 116–17; as chthonic, 149, 156; and Cyclops, 42; as decrepit, 18–19, 42, 48; as drunk, 9, 17–18, 20, 44, 48, 59, 73, 93, 96–97, 99–100, 108, 117; as dry, 55; and Erinyes, 99; as fever-inducing, 82, 183n71; fragmentary survival of, 1, 156; generic

232 Cratinus (continued) alienation of, 90; and hamartia, 83; as hard, dry wine, 15; as iambic, 47–48, 73, 100, 108, 116, 121; as impotent, 18, 97; as infantile, 75, 143; liquid aggression of, 17–19; and madness, 73–75, 83, 183n71; as malodorous, 176n51, 177n75; as manic, 9, 59, 74, 87, 183n71; mocked in Knights, 2, 18; as monstrous, 42, 45–46, 99, 121; as old, 2, 18, 42–43, 48, 59; as primitive, 42, 47, 121; as quasi-tragedian, 8, 10, 14, 21–22, 55–58, 68–69, 73, 75–76, 80, 87, 89, 96, 98–101, 109–10, 117–21, 139, 149, 153, 156, 161, 193n111; as ragged, 56, 63, 88, 90; suffocating comedy of, 149, 154; victory of 1–2, 27, 54, 72, 74, 101–102, 109, 112. See also tribōn Cratinus, works of: Archilochoi fr. 6: 177n61, 192n102; fr. 11: 192n108; Odysseis, 42, 45–46; fr. 150: 192n102; Plutoi, 99–100; fr. 171: 117; Pytine, 2, 9, 27, 44, 59, 97; fr. 196: 78; fr. 198: 9, 18; fr. 199: 74; unattributed fr. 342: 95, 166n27; fr. 346: 168n52; fr. 360: 9, 192n108; fr. 395: 9 Cyclops. See Polyphemus Cynics, 36, 38, 42 Cyrus, 114–15 daemons and the daemonic, 34–35, 42, 45–48, 56, 65–67, 69, 72, 91, 98–99 dapanē, 39–40 Dardanis (Wasps), 96, 101, 107 dēmos, 15, 137 Demos (Knights), 16–20, 29, 40–41, 43, 52; as audience, 16–20; and Philocleon, 29 desis: of Bdelycleon’s therapy, 69–71, 74–75, 91, 99, 110–12, 119; and chlaina, 57, 69; as closure, 57; as comic and Aristophanic, 57, 69, 76, 83, 87, 89, 114, 119; as composure, 57; defined, 57, 184n76; and failure of first Clouds, 71 desmos, 111; sundesma, 72; endeō, 69–70, 182n50. See also desis dexios, 47, 92, 95 dexiotēs, 47, 95; of Aristophanes, 32, 38, 40, 43, 46 didaskalos, 31–32, 34, 46, 139; chorodidaskalos, 136; kōmōidodidaskalos, 6, 139 Diodorus Siculus: 4.52.2–3: 200n106 Dionysus, 18, 33, 42, 72, 92, 99; as loosening god, 73 Donne, John: “Canonization,” 160, 202n13 dramatic festivals: format of, 2; Great Dionysia, 1–2, 4–5, 29; Lenaia, 1–2, 37, 134; Rural Dionysia, 6 drimus, 64 eikōn, 133, 137 eiskukleō, 110 ekstrephō, 133–34, 142, 195n31 Electra: in Electra (Euripides), 125, 129; in Electra (Sophocles), 125, 129; in Libation Bearers: as

index audience seeker, 129–131; as dignified mourner, 195n26; as paternal defender, 126, 131–32, 149. See also Aristophanes: as Electra Electra complex, 132, 195n28 embas, 146, 149 enduō, 16 Ephialtes, 34 Epialos (or Epiales), 34 ēpialos, 33–34, 38, 44–45, 65, 82, 174n20, 175n35, 176n57, 181n34 epikranon, 182n46 epinoia, 16 ereidō, 133, 147–48 Erinyes, 15, 96–101; in Agamemnon, 98; in Eumenides, 99; as iambic, 96; and torches, 189n45, 189n47; as tragic icons, 97–98, 189n44 eros (and Eros), 60, 63–67, 69, 72, 75, 81, 160 Eupolis: as angry, 4; as anti-paternal, 126, 134, 152; as Aristophanic “brother,” 21; as cloak stealer, 126, 142, 155; and Clytemnestra, 135, 139, 142, 196n40; in Comic Prolegomena, 4; as Cratinean, 4–5, 8, 10, 21, 23, 121, 125–26, 132, 140, 143, 153, 156; deceit of, 135–36, 142, 153, 156; as emasculating, 143; and Eupolidean meter, 134, 195n33; fragmentary survival of, 1, 156; as infantilizing, 143; loidoron of, 4; as lustful teacher, 139; and matriarchal threat, 136–39, 142–43, 149, 156; as mother’s son, 134–35; and Pheidippides, 126, 134–35, 139, 143; as plagiarist, 38–39, 133–35, 142; as quasi-tragedian, 8, 14, 21–22, 149, 156; shamefulness of, 54; skaion of, 4; and Socrates, 126, 134–36, 139–40, 143; and Strepsiades’ wife, 139; violence of, 133–34, 147–49, 153–54, 156 Eupolis, works of: Maricas, 8, 39, 133–34, 197n62; fr. 192: 139, 197n62; fr. 205: 8; Prospaltians, fr. 261: 168n52; unattributed fr. 392: 52; fr. 395: 199n80 Euripides: in Acharnians, 86; in canon, 2; in Frogs, 10, 79 Euripides, works of: Aeolus, 147, 199n93; Alcestis, 144; 37: 200n106; 82: 200n106; 182: 200n107; 435: 200n106; 615–16: 151; 690–91: 150; 694–98: 150; 703–4: 150; Andromeda fr. 138a: 181n40; Bacchae 444–46: 187n12; 753: 182n55; 1296: 83; Bellerophon, 83; fr. 307a: 84; fr. 308: 84–85; fr. 309: 187n116; fr. 309a: 187n116; Electra 239: 178n87; 239–40: 185n88; 1103–4: 125; Hecuba, 144; 148– 49: 199n86; 154–76: 145; 159–64: 145–46; 172–74: 145; 177–96: 146; Heracles 835–37: 91; 1055–57: 111; Hippolytus 38–40: 60–61; 141–69: 62; 173–75: 63; 198–238: 67; 199: 72; 201: 182n46; 202: 68; 215–22: 72; 243: 68; 245: 68; 250: 68; 289–90: 182n59; 375–76: 65; 808: 111; 809–10: 72; 1459–61: 74; Ino, 105–7; Stheneboea, 60, 64, 69–70, 73; fr. 665: 69; Trojan Women, 98; 308: 98; 457: 98; unattributed fr. 908a: 174n24 exapataō, 129, 133–34, 201n114 exelaunō, 5

index fable. See Aesopic fables failure: and “fail[ing] better,” 157–58, 162, 201n4; and lofty aspirations, 8, 158; as narrative, ix, 7, 9, 16, 20, 27–28, 39, 55, 74, 88, 95, 110, 119–21, 127, 156, 158; productivity of, 88; as site of authorial self-construction, 7–8, 168n48 festivals. See dramatic festivals fevers, 33–38, 42, 44–46, 48, 50, 55, 63–67, 82, 109, 115, 149, 154, 175n33, 175n35, 183n71. See also puretos; suffocation Freud, Sigmund, 21, 75, 100, 159, 172n116 Frogs, 3, 6, 8; 911–20: 79; 912–13: 81–82; 931: 65; 961–62: 183n65; 1004–5: 6, 50, 54; 1020–22: 73; 1050–51: 73, 183n65; 1059: 50; 1061: 50 Galen: Affections and Errors Peculiar to Each Person’s Soul, 182n45; Method of Medicine, 175n33; On Hippocrates’ Prognostic, 65; On the Differences between Fevers, 175n35; On the Preservation of Health, 181n33 Gellius: Attic Nights 2.29: 190n75 genre. See Aristophanes (genre) gignōskō, 33, 35–36, 82–83, 148; gnōmē, 128, 148, 199n97 Glaucus (Bellerophon), 85–87 glōtta, kakē, 103–4 Gorgias, 15

233 Homer: Iliad 2.189 (cf. 164, 180): 50–51; Odyssey 2.230–34 (= 5.8–12): 50–51; 11.189: 181n42; 14.520–21: 37; 14.529: 37; 18.27: 188n24; 18.89– 104: 190n61 Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite: 224: 172n109; 232: 172n109 Homeric Hymn to Demeter: 385–86: 71 Horace, 5, 47; Satires 1.4: 3–4, 166n20 Iambe, 47 iambos, 8, 22, 37, 47, 88–90, 96, 109, 121; abjection of, 37, 55, 92, 100, 120; and Aesopic fables, 101–3; anger and madness in, 73; as boxing, 102, 109, 190n61; and poverty, 94–95; as ragged, 95, 161; sympotic parasite as figure in, 94; and tragedy, 161 Ino, 105 intertextuality, 6; analogy with affect, 162; metaphors of, 162; methodological considerations and use of, 13–14, 58–59, 63, 68–69, 86–87, 99, 140, 155–56, 162, 169n69. See also affective intertextuality intratextuality: methodological considerations and use of, 13–14, 27, 31, 36, 40, 44, 72, 86–87, 93, 104–5, 113, 127, 155–56, 169n69 Iros, 94, 102, 188n24 Jung, Carl Gustav, 132

halmē, 113; oxalmē, 77, 98, 113 hamartia, 76, 82–83, 85, 152–53, 186nn106–107 Hecuba, 145–46 Hellenistic scholars: on Aristophanes, 1–7, 9, 22, 53; audience mistrusted by, 9; as canon-fixers, 1–7; “water-drinking” poets favored by, 9 Hephaestion: Metrical Manual, 192n108 Hera, 46, 105 Heracles: in Alcestis, 151–52, 200nn109–110; in Athamas (Sophocles), 138–39; as healer, 34; madness of, 91, 99, 111; as purifier, monster slayer, and protector, 34–35, 37, 44–46, 48, 50, 65, 99, 139, 145 Herodotus: 1.141.1–2: 114; 9.120.1: 114–15 Hesiod, 17, 20, 37, 45, 50, 53, 82, 99, 103; Theogony 83–84: 17; Works and Days 536–37: 175n34 himation, 19–21, 23, 36–37, 43, 50, 54, 141; as Aristophanic, 127, 134, 142, 146, 154, 156; as chlaina substitute in revised Clouds, 126, 136, 139–40, 142–43, 156, 160; as protective, 136, 138–40, 142– 46, 152, 154, 160, 197n57 [Hippocrates], 31, 34, 37, 66; Koan Prognoses, 174n20; On Diseases, 175n33, 183n71; On Internal Affections, 181n34; On Regimen in Acute Diseases (Appendix), 37, 175n33; On the Sacred Disease, 181n35 Hippolytus (Euripidean character), 74, 111 Hipponax, 73–74, 102; fr. 32: 175n31; fr. 34: 37; frr. 120–21: 190n61

kainos, 29, 32, 33, 129; kainotēs, 40, 121; kainotomeō, 29 katakaiō, 154 katakluzō, 9, 18 katapugōn, 128, 134 kathairō, 71–72; katharos, 33–34, 37, 43. See also kathartēs kathartēs, 33–34, 43, 72; Aristophanes as, 119, 177n77; Bdelycleon as, 119 kattuma, 39; kattuō, 39 kaunakēs, 35, 37 Knights: aesthetic modes in, 14, 16–20, 22–23; agonistics in, 16; Cleon leniently treated in, 95–96; Cratinus mocked in, 2; as monster-cleansing operation, 34; plagiarized by Eupolis in Maricas, 38–39, 133–34; skin imagery in, 16–20, 52; victory of, 1, 27, 31, 47–48, 74, 120; 490–91: 102; 511: 45; 526–28: 17; 531–36: 18, 42; 532–33: 97; 534: 52; 538–39: 40; 545: 171n108; 864–67: 195n32; 868–74: 40; 881–86: 14; 1017: 45; 1018–20: 53; 1029–30: 53; 1030: 45; 1043: 60; 1323: 19; 1325: 19; 1329: 19. See also specific characters knōdalon, 99 koletraō, 133, 135, 147–48 komaō, 95, 129, 132–34 kōmōidia, 54–55, 118. See also phortikē kōmōidia kompsos, 92, 95, 188n30; kompsotēs, 95

234

index

kordax, 91, 128, 133–34 kosmeō, 50, 54; katakosmeō, 49–50, 54 krisis, 5; ekkrinein, 167n30 Kristeva, Julia, 84–85, 195n22

Orestes, 129–31 orgē, 65, 67, 80; of Aristophanes, 45–47, 64, 102; of Heracles, 33, 45–46, 64 Oribasius: Medical Compilations, 176n52

Lacan, Jacques, 21, 172n116 Lamia, 33–34, 46–47, 174n21, 177n72 leptotēs: of Aristophanes, 3–5, 166n27 Leucon, 5 liparos, 18–19, 42–43, 52 [Longinus], 8; On the Sublime 33: 168n47; 36: 168n47 Lucian: Dialogues of the Courtesans 11.1: 197n57; Dialogues of the Dead 1.2: 38; How to Write History 1: 184n71 luō, 72, 75; ekluō, 72, 99; lusanias, 144; lusimelēs, 72; lusios, 73. See also lusis lusis: architectural, 72, 111–12; bodily, 72, 94, 111–12; and daemonic passions, 57; defined, 57, 184n76; and laughter, 184n79; as tragic and Cratinean, 57, 69, 72, 74–76, 87, 89, 94, 99, 111, 184n78; and tribōn, 57, 72, 87 Lysistrata: 278–80: 42 Lysistratus (Wasps), 92–96, 108, 188n22

Paphlagon (Knights), 19, 40–41, 104; as Cleon, 16, 39, 45; as Cratinus, 16–17, 41–42, 45, 102 parabasis: defined, 3; kommation in, 31; and plot, 11–14, 19; as preface, 11–12 parabasis, in plays: in Clouds, 14, 38–40, 54, 59, 90–91, 126–27, 129, 131, 134–35, 138–40, 142–44, 146–50, 152–56; in Knights, 16, 40, 42–43, 102; in Peace, 4–7, 10, 48, 54, 76, 108, 139, 156; in Wasps, 14, 27–41, 43–48, 52–53, 56, 59, 63–68, 71–72, 74–75, 81–82, 86, 89, 95, 102, 107, 119–21, 127, 139, 149–50, 154 parelkō, 133–34, 196n34 paroinikos, 90, 99 paternal son, 20–22, 51, 74–76, 80, 85, 109, 121, 149; Aristophanes as, 151, 155–56, 158; defined, 20, 172nn115–116 pathei mathos, 76, 82–83, 126, 141, 152, 186n107 Peace: dung beetle in, 107, 136; proto-canonical discourse in, 3–7, 23; 43–47: 136; 730–31: 199n81; 736–38: 6; 743: 5; 748–50: 4–5, 48, 108; 752–58: 48; 762–63: 197n63 peripeteia, 83, 186n108 Persius: Satires 1.123–24: 4, 177n77; 1.126: 177n77; 1.128: 177n77 Phaedra (Hippolytus), 57–69, 72, 74, 78, 80, 87, 98, 111, 182n46, 183n71, 184n79; insomnia of, 65, 67 pharmakon, 37–38 Pheidippides: as abusive, 144, 149, 200n112; and Clytemnestra, 133, 135; and Cratinus, 144; and Eupolis (and other rival comedians), 126, 133, 143–44, 149–50; as father-beater and fatherstrangler, 146–52, 154; fight with Strepsiades, 127; hippomania of, 132; long hair of, 132; and matriarchal threat, 156; as mother’s son, 126, 132–33, 149; as Oedipal father-destroyer, 132, 134; and Pheres, 150–51; and Socrates, 133; as sophistic, 150; as would-be father protector, 144–46 Pherecrates: Crapataloi fr. 100: 6 Pheres (Alcestis): as breaker of patriline, 151; and phusis vs. nomos, 150 Phillis of Delos: fr. 3: 117 Philocleon: as abject, 77–80, 90, 94, 96; aggressive tragic madness of, 90, 98; as ailing spectator, 110; alienation of, 66–69, 71, 78, 80, 86, 91, 99, 115; anger of, 37, 64–65, 67, 181n26, 181n29; as asinine, 92–93; as Bellerophon (see Bellerophon); as bird, 71, 107, 112, 117; as canine, 104; as comic audience, 20, 22, 27, 29–30, 54, 72, 74; as Cratinean, 102, 106, 109, 113, 131, 153; dancing of, 72, 89, 91, 109–115, 117–20; as debilitated

madness as tragic emotion, 72–75, 83, 85, 90, 99, 101, 106–9, 126 maenads, 71–73, 91 malakos, 37, 51–53, 82; malthakos, 37, 182n42 mania, 91, 111, 154–55; epimainomai, 82–83; manikos, 97, 112 manthanō, arti, 82–83, 149, 186n107 melancholy, 82, 185n84, 185n89, 187n116: as infantilizing, 80 metaballō, 51–52; metabolē, 57, 156 metagō, 53 metapiptō, 51 metatheatricality. See self-reflexivity methistēmi, 51, 82, 104 mimesis. See affective mimesis muthos, 47 Myrtia (Wasps), 103–106 Nephele (Sophocles’ Athamas), 138 Niobe, 57, 76, 78, 81–82, 87; infantilism of, 80, 85, 87; melancholy of, 57, 76, 78–80, 185n89 noseō, 60; nosos, 60–63, 65 Nostoi: fr. 6: 171n98 noutheteō, 69, 81–83 Nurse (Hippolytus), 63, 67–68, 74, 81, 87 Odysseus, 93–94, 102 opē, 70, 77 orcheomai, 113, 116; orchēsis, 117; orchēstēs, 113, 117 Oresteia, 98, 127, 135, 140, 142. See also Aeschylus, works of

index father, 20, 22, 67, 79–80, 99, 115; destined for cooking pot, 113, 118, 154; drunkenness of, 44, 88, 96–97, 99, 104, 106; as Erinys, 90, 97–101, 113, 153; false liberation of, 79, 109, 111, 113–15, 120; false rejuvenation of, 88–89; false triumph of, 112–13; fevers of, 27, 63–67, 75, 154; hubris of, 99–100, 120; as id, 75; impotence of, 97–98, 101–102; infantilism of, 30, 51, 55, 66–67, 75, 81, 85, 96; insomnia of, 64–67; judicial madness of, 27–30, 37–38, 44–45, 51, 54, 56–72, 75, 77–86, 92–94, 99–101, 111; as limpet, 66, 112–13; as maenad, 71–73, 91; as manic, 64–65, 71, 88, 91–92, 96, 98–101, 105, 120, 153; as melancholic, 76–78, 80–81, 87–90; misuse of Aesopic fables, 89, 101–9; mock suicide of, 83–85; as Niobe (see Niobe); as old man with stick, 152–53; outdoor sleeping of, 63, 66–67; as Phaedra (see Phaedra); as quasi-performer (Cratinean), 22–23, 31, 88–91, 96, 109–10, 120; as ragged, 93; as torch wielder, 96–99, 103, 113–14, 153; tragic disease of, 112; and tribōn, 35, 38, 44, 68, 115; violence of, 88, 90–91, 97–99, 101, 103, 108, 113, 120, 131–32; as vocally intemperate, 97 philōidos, 64 philopatria, 28, 49–51, 54, 121, 127, 187n114; of Aristophanes, 132, 160 phortax, 5; phortēgos, 5, 166n29; phortikoi andres, 127, 132; phortikos, 3, 5, 8, 75, 91, 154–55, 179n95, 184n79, 191n88; phortikos, anēr, 59; phortion, 105, 191n88; phortos, 4–5, 10, 48, 54, 108, 156, 166n29 phortikē kōmōidia, 82, 90, 94–95, 101, 105, 144, 153–56, 166n29, 198n66, 200n98; and Cratinus, 4, 5, 8, 54, 58–59, 69, 75, 86–87, 91, 93, 120, 126–27, 135, 138, 143, 180n7; and Eupolis, 126–27, 134–35, 139, 143, 149, 154; and lusis, 58, 69; and Philocleon, 101, 104, 108, 131; and sophistry, 152 Phrynichus (comic poet): fr. 74: 45 Phrynichus (tragic poet), 64, 77, 112, 114–18, 134, 192n97; The Capture of Miletus, 112; unattributed fr. 13: 193n112; fr. 17: 192n97 Pindar: Olympian Odes 1.105: 175n38; Pythian Odes 3.82–83: 195n31; unattributed fr. 157: 139, 197n64 planaō, 53–54 Plato, 80; affective mimesis in, 15, 72–73; Laws, 15, 183n63; 790d–91a: 71; 791e4–7: 183n63; Menexenus, 170n90; 235a–c: 16; Republic, 15, 72–73, 183nn62–63; 3.380a3–4: 186n98; 3.395d–96a: 183n62; 10.604c8: 183n63; 10.605c–6d: 183n60 Platonius, 4–5, 166n18 Plautus, 162; Menaechmi 841: 189n47 Plutarch: How to Listen to Lectures 42d–e: 43 pnigō, 147–49, 154; apopnigō, 33, 35–36, 154 pōlos, 93, 188n19; pōlion, 93, 188n19 poluthuros, 38, 70

235 Polyphemus, 42, 46, 93 Polyxena, 145–46 ponēria, 153; ponēros, 129, 131, 152 problēma, 44; probolos, 144–45 proto-canonical: defined, 2. See also Aristophanes (canon); canon puretos, 33–34, 38, 44, 64–65, 82, 174n20, 181n34; purettō, 64 putinē, 93 reenactment: as proto-canonical, 158; as re-vision, 159 reperformance, 143; of Aeschylean plays, 6. See also reenactment Sappho: fr. 31: 181n31, 181n34 sapros, 97 Sausage Seller (Knights), 40–41, 52; as Aristophanes, 16–17, 19–20, 102 Scholia on Aristophanes: Clouds 88: 195n31; 296: 179n97; Wasps 1446: 191 self-reflexivity, ix, 10–14, 23, 31, 39, 41, 44–45, 48, 52–53, 55, 58, 62, 74, 86, 95, 102–3, 110, 131, 136, 152, 155, 161–62 semnos, 6, 47, 49–50, 52, 54, 75, 101, 138–39, 178n82, 179n95, 197n55; asemnos, 179n97; phruagmosemnakos, 54, 75, 184n80. See also semnotēs semnotēs, 1, 6, 16, 52, 87, 99, 104–5, 178n82, 179n93, 184n80; of Aeschylus, 54, 179n100; of Aristophanes, 8, 21–22, 53–55, 75, 90, 95–96, 108, 120–21, 132; of Bdelycleon, 95, 108, 120–21, 178n82; of chlaina, 126; and Clouds, 132; of tragedy, 168n51 Shakespeare, William, 15; King Lear, 157–58, 196n36 shivers. See ēpialos. See also fevers Silenus, 139 Simonides, 147 skaios, 4, 32–33, 173n14 skirtaō, 90–91, 187n12; skirtēma, 91, 93 Socrates, 16, 105: as anti-paternal, 126; as chorodidaskalos, 136–37; as cloak stealer, 126, 142, 153–56; and Clytemnestra, 141–42; as deceitful comic poet, 137; as deus ex machina, 136; and Eupolis, 126, 135, 139–40, 143, 153, 156; as lustful teacher, 139, 197n64; and matriarchal threat, 149, 156; as sophist, 134, 136–37, 152, 154; as tribōn wearer, 36, 142; sophia, 9, 49–50, 108; sophistēs, 134; sophos, 8, 48, 50 sophistry, 134, 136–37, 150, 152, 154 Sophocles: Antigone 822–33: 79; Athamas, 138–39, 151–52; Electra, 125, 129, 162; 187: 185n90; 283: 185n90; 365–67: 125; 835: 185n90; Niobe, 79; Peleus fr. 491: 199n84

236 sōphrōn, 91, 104, 128, 130–32, 139; Alcestis as, 151; Bdelycleon as, 132; Clouds as, 128, 131–32; Electra as, 126, 130–32 Sophron: frr. 67–68: 34 sōphroneō, 82, 103–5, 126, 186n105; sōphronikōs, 171n108 sōphrosunē, 76, 82–85, 87, 91, 131, 134, 138–39, 147, 171n108, 184nn79–80, 186n107, 200n98; and Aesopic fables, 89, 101, 104–6, 108, 190n70; of Aristophanes, 8, 21–22, 83, 108, 121, 132, 151–52, 155–56, 171n108, 194n5; of chlaina, 126; Cratinus’s lack of, 75, 149; Eupolis’s lack of, 126, 146, 149, 153; of himation, 126 Spartan sandals, 39 spathaō, 138; spathē, 138, 197n56 spodeō, 147–48 Sthenelus, 94, 188n26 Strepsiades, 126–27, 132–56; as Admetus, 150–51; and Agamemnon, 141, 149; and Athamas, 151–52; as comic audience, 136–37, 143, 147–49, 152, 196n44, 197n50; conversion of, 152–56; as Erinys, 153, 155–56; as Hecuba, 145–46; hubris of, 141, 152; infantilized, 141–42, 153; and Philocleon, 153; revenge of, 144, 152–54, 156; as sacrificial victim, 141; shoe removal of, 140–41; Socratic initiation of, 137–41; as torch wielder, 153–56 Strepsiades’ wife, 132–33, 138; and clouds, 138–39; as domineering, 138, 145; and matriarchal threat, 136–39, 141–42; as semnē, 139 stripping: of audience, 126, 142–43; of Strepsiades, 126–27, 140–44, 146, 149, 152 Stronger Argument (Clouds), 90, 131, 139 suffocation, 33–36, 38–39, 41, 45, 50, 109, 115, 126, 142, 144, 147–49, 152–54, 156. See also fevers sungignomai, 138 supplication, 30, 105–107, 191n79, 191n84 Tantalus, 80–81, 85, 87 technē, 4–6; technikos, 4–5 tēkō, 77–79, 185n87, 185n90; ektēkō, 78 Terence, 12 text, directionality of, 10, 13, 127 textiles. See architecture: and textiles Theseus (Hippolytus), 72, 74, 111 Thesmophoriazusae: 164–67: 175n38; 414–16: 69 Thespis, 110, 117 Thinkery (Clouds), 126–27, 135–37, 139–40, 144, 146, 152–54, 201nn116–117; as Agamemnon’s house, 141–42, 149; as chthonic space, 140, 143; and snake imagery, 140–41, 149; as uncanny maternal space, 142 Thuphrastus (Wasps), 92, 95–96 Tibullus: 1.9.55–56: 197n57 Timocles: Dionysiazusae fr. 6: 183n68, 187n118 touch: affect and, 160–61; caring, 146; and genre, 161; invigorating, 156; morbid, 48; performative

index synesthesis of, 160–61; purifying, 52; and sight, 161, 171n91; soft, 68, wholesome, 19, 21, 68, 132, 143, 149, 150. See also aesthetics: and the haptic tragedy: affective force of, 23, 55, 69, 76, 101; and alienation, 8, 56, 63, 72–73, 80, 113; as chthonic, 90, 101, 120–21, 135; as emasculating, 73, 143; figured by poverty, 94–95; and iambos, 161; and infantilization, 8, 56–57, 63, 73, 75, 143; and “otherness,” 73; and raggedness, 57, 95, 120, 161; as unleashing of destructive emotions, 8, 56. See also Cratinus: as quasi-tragedian Tragica Adespota: fr. 7: 182n44, 185n97 tribō, 149; epitribō, 147, 149; tribōnikōs, 35; tribōnion, 38, 50, 66. See also tribōn tribōn: affective force of, 31, 48; as Cratinean, 22, 28, 41–45, 56, 68, 76, 89, 115, 142, 144, 149, 160; description of, 36; as Eupolidean, 160; and exposure, 38, 45; as false liberation, 22, 28, 38, 41–43, 68, 115, 142; as fever-inducing, 48, 109, 115, 149; and iambos, 92; and old age, 43; as porous, 27, 38, 43, 67, 70, 76, 86; as ragged, 22, 50, 52, 63, 67, 86–87, 120, 149, 160, 179n2, 188n28; as rough, 28, 35, 56, 76, 94; and squalor, 42–43, 47, 52; as suffocating, 144; and tragedy, 179n2, 188n28; wearers of, 36, 42 tropos, 51–54, 75–76, 78, 82–83, 86, 104–5 trux, 92, 94, 119, 139, 187n15; trugodaimōn, 197n66; trugōidia, 118–19, 139; trugōidos, 30, 116, 118–19, 193n118; atrugetos, 116, 118–19 Trygaeus (Peace), 107, 136 Typhon, 34, 45–46, 48, 50, 174n21, 177nn61–62 vibrant materiality, 161–62 Vitruvius: On Architecture 7.5–6: 167n 44 Wasps: 4: 99; 54–57: 58; 64–66: 54, 58; 67–68: 59; 71–73: 61; 74–84: 62–63; 86: 63; 88–89: 63; 88– 90: 60; 91–96: 65–66; 93: 71; 100–105: 66; 105: 112; 110: 112; 111–12: 60, 81; 111–13: 69–70; 112–13: 72, 111; 115–24: 70; 116: 66; 116–17: 44; 118: 34; 118–20: 71–72; 120: 91; 121–24: 71; 125–32: 70; 126–27: 38, 86; 129–30: 71, 85; 130: 91, 112; 131: 112; 131–32: 70; 135: 54, 75; 184–91: 93; 188–89: 93; 208: 85, 112; 254: 81; 269–70: 64; 273–89: 64; 283–84: 37, 64; 286–87: 181n29; 316: 77; 317–33: 77–78, 98; 322: 100; 331: 113; 340: 100; 389–93: 66; 398: 200n99; 464–66: 95; 523: 84; 529–30: 30; 538: 30; 546–724: 29; 576: 30; 579–80: 79; 597: 176n54; 616–17: 93; 616–18: 44, 189n48; 620–24: 189n48; 650–51: 119, 184n74; 652: 30; 725–26: 29; 725–28: 80–81; 727: 80–81; 729–35: 81; 734–44: 104; 736–38: 37, 51–52; 736–40: 82; 741–42: 81; 743–49: 82–83; 747–49: 104; 750–59: 83–84; 805– 1008: 29; 813: 37; 886: 173n10; 1013: 32; 1015: 34; 1016–17: 32; 1017: 29, 64; 1022: 178n78; 1023–25: 173n4, 197n63; 1029–36: 29; 1029–50: 32; 1030: 64; 1030–45: 102; 1031–35: 45; 1033–34: 50; 1035:

index 46; 1036–48: 32–34; 1037–39: 44; 1038: 53, 173n18; 1038–39: 50; 1042: 66; 1043: 37, 43–44; 1043–48: 45; 1044: 29; 1045: 36, 43; 1048: 36, 50; 1049: 50; 1049–50: 48; 1050: 102; 1051–59: 32, 47; 1052–54: 39; 1055–59: 67; 1057–59: 46; 1059: 95; 1071–72: 136; 1077–78: 64; 1131–41: 35; 1146: 39; 1146–47: 40; 1150–53: 38; 1157–60: 39; 1159–60: 36; 1174: 50; 1174–80: 47; 1175: 95; 1186–87: 47; 1190–94: 47; 1284–91: 29, 95–96; 1285–89: 96; 1296: 91, 132; 1299–1300: 90; 1305: 90, 93; 1306: 93; 1307: 188n15; 1308–21: 91–96; 1311: 104; 1319–21: 132; 1322–23: 132; 1323: 91, 96; 1326–30: 96–97; 1330: 98, 113–14; 1334–40: 100; 1343: 97; 1366: 107; 1368–69: 107; 1379–81: 107; 1379–86: 101–102; 1381: 103; 1389–91: 103; 1399–1405: 103; 1401–5: 103–4; 1406: 104; 1406–8: 105; 1407: 105; 1412–14: 105; 1415–40: 106; 1443–44: 49; 1443–45: 106; 1446–49: 106–7; 1450–61: 51–52, 82; 1462–73: 49;

237 1465: 50–51; 1467: 51; 1471–73: 50; 1472–73: 54; 1474–75: 110; 1479–81: 110; 1484–86: 111; 1490: 192n97; 1494–95: 111–12; 1512–15: 113; 1518–37: 115–16; 1521: 118; 1531–37: 118. See also specific themes and characters Weaker Argument (Clouds), 90, 139 Wealth: 95, 97; 415–16: 97; 418–21: 97; 423–25: 97; 426–28: 97; 713–15: 38; 715: 70; 730–32: 70–71; 842–46: 36–37; 935–37: 50, 188n28; 939–40: 50; 1085–86: 187n15 Wong, Kar-wai, 161 wrapping. See affect: wrapping Xanthias, 54, 58, 61, 64–67, 69–72, 75, 80, 85–87, 90, 93, 95–96, 99–100, 110, 112–13 xēros, 51–52, 78, 178n87; xērotēs, 53 Zeus, 30, 46, 76–77, 85, 106