Greek Comedy and the Discourse of Genres 9781107342132, 1107342139, 9781107345881, 110734588X, 9781139519601, 1139519603
Recent scholarship has acknowledged that the intertextual discourse of ancient comedy with previous and contemporary lit
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Table of contents :
pt. I. Comedy and genre : self-definition and development --
pt. II. Comedy and genres in dialogue --
pt. III. The reception of comedy and comic discourse.
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G R E E K CO M E DY AND THE DIS CO U R S E O F G E NRES
Recent scholarship has acknowledged that the intertextual discourse of ancient comedy with previous and contemporary literary traditions is not limited to tragedy. This book is a timely response to the more sophisticated and theory-grounded way of viewing comedy’s interactions with its cultural and intellectual context. It shows that in the process of its self-definition, comedy emerges as voracious and multifarious with a wide spectrum of literary, subliterary and paraliterary traditions, the engagement with which emerges as central to its projected literary identity and, subsequently, to the reception of the genre itself. Comedy’s self-definition through generic discourse far transcends the (narrowly conceived) ‘high–low’ division of genres. This book explores ancient comedy’s interactions with Homeric and Hesiodic epic, iambos, lyric, tragedy, the fable tradition, the ritual performances of the Greek polis, and its reception in Platonic writings and Alexandrian scholarship, within a unified interpretative framework. e m manue la b a k o l a is Leverhulme EC Fellow at King’s College London. She has published a monograph on Cratinus (Cratinus and the Art of Comedy, ) and several articles which explore the relationship of comedy to other genres. Her current project, entitled Aeschylean Tragedy and Early Environmental Discourse, arises from her study of fifth-century comedy as reception of tragedy. Using a cultural-anthropological framework, this project rereads the tragedies of Aeschylus, arguing that their dramaturgy, imagery, stage action, and engagement with cult and ritual show that Aeschylean tragedy is profoundly preoccupied with the human relationship to the Earth and its resources. l u c i a p r a u s c e l l o is Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Trinity Hall. She is the author of Singing Alexandria: Music between Practice and Textual Transmission () and has variously published on Greek archaic and Hellenistic poetry, drama, Greek religion and ancient music. m a r i o t e l o` is Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research interests mainly focus on Attic drama, and especially on Old Comedy, but he has also published in other areas of Greek literature (the Greek novel, ecphrastic literature, Roman tragedy and comedy). In he published a commentary on Eupolis’ Demoi, the best-preserved fragmentary play of Old Comedy. He has now completed a book entitled Aristophanes’ Wasps and the Generation of Greek Comedy.
GREEK COMEDY AND THE DISCOURSE OF GENRES edited by ` E. BAKOL A, L. PRAUSCELLO AND M. TEL O
cambri dge uni versi ty p re s s Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, S˜ao Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb ru, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/ C Cambridge University Press
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Contents
List of figures Notes on contributors Acknowledgements Note to the reader List of abbreviations
page vii viii xii xiii xiv
Introduction: Greek comedy as a fabric of generic discourse
Emmanuela Bakola, Lucia Prauscello and Mario Tel`o
part i: comedy and genre: self-definition and development
The Greek dramatic genres: theoretical perspectives
Michael Silk
Comedy and the Pompe: Dionysian genre-crossing
Eric Csapo
Iambos, comedy and the question of generic affiliation
Ralph Rosen
part ii: comedy and genres in dialogue comedy and epic
Paraepic comedy: point(s) and practices
Martin Revermann
Epic, nostos and generic genealogy in Aristophanes’ Peace Mario Tel`o v
Contents
vi comedy and lyric
Comedy and the civic chorus
Chris Carey
Aristophanes’ Simonides: lyric models for praise and blame
Richard Rawles
comedy and tragedy Comedy versus tragedy in Wasps
Matthew Wright
Crime and punishment: Cratinus, Aeschylus’ Oresteia, and the metaphysics and politics of wealth
Emmanuela Bakola
From Achilles’ horses to a cheese-seller’s shop: on the history of the guessing game in Greek drama
Marco Fantuzzi and David Konstan
comedy, the fable and the ethnographic tradition The Aesopic in Aristophanes
Edith Hall
The mirror of Aristophanes: the winged ethnographers of Birds (–, –, –)
Jeffrey Rusten
part iii: the reception of comedy and comic discourse Comedy and comic discourse in Plato’s Laws
Lucia Prauscello
Comedy and the Pleiad: Alexandrian tragedians and the birth of comic scholarship
Nick Lowe
References Index locorum General index
Figures
Attic red-figure fragments by the Berlin Painter, c. bc; Athens, National Archaeological Museum, Akr.. Courtesy of the National Archaeological Museum. Photo: M. C. Miller page . Attic red-figure cup fragments, Antiphon Group, – bc; Paris, Louvre C. Photo: F. Lissarrague 2.3a Attic red-figure cup, Pistoxenos Painter, c. bc; Orvieto. and b Faina . Drawing: Hartwig , pl. a,b 2.4a Attic red-figure cup, Sabouroff Painter, c. bc; Malibu, and b J. P. Getty Museum .AE.. Courtesy of J. P. Getty Museum . Attic red-figure lekythos, c. bc; Athens. G´ Ephoria, inv. no. A. Photo: E. Csapo, with permission . Attic red-figure chous, c. bc; Hermitage . Fa. Courtesy of the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg . Attic red-figure bell krater, Hare-Hunt Painter, c. – bc; S. Agata de’ Goti. Drawing from Gerhard a, pl. . Attic red-figure bell krater, – bc; Naples, Private collection. Photo: courtesy, K. Schauenburg . Fragments of an Attic red-figure bell krater, – bc; Castulo, (Linares, Ja´en) . A. J. Dom´ınguez and C. S´anchez , fig. , with permission .
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Notes on contributors
emmanuela bakola is Leverhulme EC Fellow at King’s College London. She has published a monograph on Cratinus (Cratinus and the Art of Comedy, ) and several articles which explore the relationship of comedy to other genres. Her current project, entitled Aeschylean Tragedy and Early Environmental Discourse, arises from her study of fifthcentury comedy as reception of tragedy. Using a cultural-anthropological framework, this project rereads the tragedies of Aeschylus, arguing that their dramaturgy, imagery, stage action, and engagement with cult and ritual show that Aeschylean tragedy is profoundly preoccupied with the human relationship to the Earth and its resources. chris carey is Professor of Greek at University College London. He has published extensively on Pindar and early lyric, Homer, drama, Greek law and politics, and the Attic Orators. His most recent work includes a new OCT edition of Lysias. He is currently writing a commentary to Book of Herodotus for Cambridge University Press, Athenian Law and a book of essays on Pindar’s Olympian Odes. eric csapo is Professor of Classics at the University of Sydney. He has a special interest in ancient drama and theatre history and is author of Actors and Icons of the Ancient Theater (), Theories of Mythology (), and co-author with William Slater of Context of Ancient Drama (). In collaboration with Peter Wilson, he is preparing a multi-volume history of the Classical Greek theatre to be published by Cambridge University Press. marco fantuzzi is Professor of Greek Literature at Columbia University, New York, and at the University of Macerata (Italy). He is the author of Bionis Smyrnaei Adonidis epitaphium (); Ricerche su Apollonio Rodio (); Tradition and Innovation in Hellenistic Poetry (co-authored with R. Hunter, Cambridge ); Achilles in Love (). He co-edited viii
Notes on contributors
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(with R. Pretagostini) Struttura e storia dell’esametro greco (–) and (with T. Papanghelis) Brill’s Companion to Greek and Latin Pastoral (). He is now co-editing for Cambridge University Press (with C. Tsagalis) A Companion to the Epic Cycle, and completing (under contract for the ‘Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries’) a fullscale commentary on the Rhesus ascribed to Euripides. edith hall, after holding posts at the Universities of Cambridge, Reading, Oxford, Durham and Royal Holloway (–), where she also directed the Centre for the Reception of Greece and Rome, is now Research Professor at King’s College London. She is also Co-Founder and Consultant Director of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama in Oxford. Her research focuses on representations of ethnicity, the role played by theatre (especially Greek tragedy) in both the ancient and modern worlds and the uses made by classical culture in European education, identity and political theory. Her books include Inventing the Barbarian (); a commentary on Aeschylus’ Persians (); Greek Tragedy and the British Theatre (, with Fiona Macintosh); The Theatrical Cast of Athens (); The Return of Ulysses: a Cultural History of Homer’s Odyssey (); Greek Tragedy: Suffering under the Sun (). david konstan is Professor of Classics at New York University, and Professor Emeritus at Brown University. He is the author of Roman Comedy (); Sexual Symmetry: Love in the Ancient Novel and Related Genres (); Greek Comedy and Ideology (); Friendship in the Classical World (); Pity Transformed (); The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature (); Terms for Eternity: Aiˆonios and a¨ıdios in Classical and Christian Texts (with Ilaria Ramelli, ); ‘A Life Worthy of the Gods’: The Materialist Pyschology of Epicurus (); and Before Forgiveness: the Origins of a Moral Idea (). He is currently working on a verse translation of Seneca’s Hercules on Mount Oeta and Hercules Furens, and a book on the ancient Greek conception of beauty. nick lowe is Senior Lecturer in Classics at Royal Holloway, University of London, and author of The Classical Plot and the Invention of Western Narrative (Cambridge ). His research interests include Greek and Roman comedy, formalist literary theory, and the reception of antiquity in the nineteenth century. He is currently writing a book on the construction of ancient Greece in modern fiction.
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Notes on contributors
lucia prauscello is Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Trinity Hall. She is the author of Singing Alexandria: Music between Practice and Textual Transmission () and has variously published on Greek archaic and Hellenistic poetry, drama, Greek religion and ancient music. richard rawles has taught at the University of St Andrews, University College London and the University of Edinburgh, and is now at the University of Nottingham. He is the author of a number of articles on Greek poetry and of a forthcoming book about Simonides and his ancient reception. With Peter Ag´ocs and Chris Carey, he is the editor of Reading the Victory Ode (Cambridge ) and Receiving the Komos (). martin revermann is Associate Professor in Classics and Theatre Studies at the University of Toronto. His research interests lie in the areas of Greek drama (especially its performance analysis, iconography and cultural history), Brecht, theatre sociology and theatre theory. He is the author of Comic Business: Theatricality, Dramatic Technique and Performance Contexts of Aristophanic Comedy (). In addition to various articles he is the co-editor (with P. Wilson) of Performance, Iconography, Reception: Studies in Honour of Oliver Taplin () and co-editor (with I. Gildenhard) of Beyond the Fifth Century: Interactions with Greek Tragedy from the 4th Century BCE to the Middle Ages (), as well as the editor of the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Greek Comedy. ralph rosen is Rose Family Endowed Term Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He has published widely on ancient Greek literature (especially comic genres), philosophy and ancient medicine. His most recent book is Making Mockery: the Poetics of Ancient Satire (). He is also co-founder (with Ineke Sluiter, of Leiden University, NL) of the Penn–Leiden Colloquia on Ancient Values. jeffrey rusten is Professor of Classics at Cornell University. He has published widely in the field of Greek literature, including Hellenistic mythography, historiography, tragedy and comedy. With J. Henderson, D. Konstan, R. Rosen and N. Slater, he has co-edited The Birth of Comedy: Texts, Documents, and Art from Athenian Comic Competitions, 486–280 (). He is now working on a Loeb edition of Philostratus’ Heroicus and Gymnasticus and completing a commentary on Thucydides, Book .
Notes on contributors
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michael silk is Professor of Classical and Comparative Literature, and from to was Professor of Greek Language and Literature, at King’s College London. He is also Adjunct Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has published on a wide range of topics, from Aristotle to Nietzsche, and Homer to Ted Hughes. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in . His current project is a co-authored book (with Ingo Gildenhard and Rosemary Barrow): The Classical Tradition: Art, Literature, Thought. mario tel o` is Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research interests mainly focus on Attic drama, and especially on Old Comedy, but he has also published in other areas of Greek literature (the Greek novel, ecphrastic literature, Roman tragedy and comedy). In he published a commentary on Eupolis’ Demoi, the best-preserved fragmentary play of Old Comedy. He has now completed a book entitled Aristophanes’ Wasps and the Generation of Greek Comedy. matthew wright is Senior Lecturer in Greek and Latin at the University of Exeter and Blegen Research Fellow at Vassar College. He has worked extensively on ancient and modern ideas of genre, and his publications include Euripides’ Escape-Tragedies () and The Comedian as Critic: Greek Old Comedy and Poetics ().
Acknowledgements
Most of the chapters in this volume are based on papers presented at a conference entitled ‘Comic Interactions: Comedy across Genres and Genres in Comedy’, held at University College London in July . The conference was organized under the joint auspices of the Institute of Classical Studies and the Department of Greek and Latin, UCL; it was generously sponsored by the Institute of Classical Studies, the British Academy, the Classical Association, the UCL Graduate School and the Department of Greek and Latin. It is our pleasure to thank all of these institutions and organizations for their support. Our thanks also go to the then Head of Department, Chris Carey, for his encouragement and helpful advice during the organization of the conference and the preparation of this volume. Above all, we are deeply indebted to all the scholars who contributed to this event by presenting material or discussing it, thus helping us immensely in forming the outlook of this volume; these include Chris Carey, Eric Csapo (keynote speaker), Giambattista D’Alessio, Pat Easterling, Edith Hall, Stephen Halliwell, Simon Hornblower, Nick Lowe, Regine May, Richard Rawles, Martin Revermann, Ralph Rosen (keynote speaker), Michael Silk, Alan Sommerstein, Oliver Taplin, and a very lively and knowledgeable audience from over fifteen countries. The volume has benefited from the patient and efficient work of Michael Sharp, the Senior Editor at Cambridge University Press. We would also like to thank the anonymous readers of the Press for their constructive corrections and comments, and for the time they patiently dedicated to reading the typescript. We are most grateful to the following for supplying photographs and for permission to reproduce them: the J. P. Getty Museum; the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Archaeological Receipts Fund and G´ Ephoria; the Louvre Museum; the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg; Natalia Antonova; Eric Csapo; Franc¸ois Lissarrague; Margaret Miller; Inna Regentova; Carmen S´anchez; Konrad Schauenburg. xii
Note to the reader
Editions of principal texts: the fragments of the comic poets are cited after Kassel and Austin (K–A). The extant Aristophanic plays follow Wilson, OCT. Aristophanic scholia are quoted from the general editorship of W. J. W. Koster and D. Holwerda. Extant Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides are cited from Page, Lloyd-Jones and Wilson, and Diggle, OCT respectively. All the tragic fragments refer to Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta. Translations of ancient passages, when not otherwise indicated, are the contributors’ own rendition.
xiii
Abbreviations
The abbreviations of the names of ancient authors and their works follow those in the Oxford Classical Dictionary (rd edn) when available, otherwise those of Liddle, Scott and Jones, A Greek–English Lexicon (th edn). Abbreviations of journals are cited after L’Ann´ee philologique. Addend. Arnott ARV Bergk Bernab´e Bolton, Aristeas Campbell Davies, APF Diggle, OCT D–K FGE FGrH
T. H. Carpenter, Beazley Addenda: Additional References to ABV, ARV 2 & Paralipomena, nd edn. Oxford . W. G. Arnott, Menander, vols. i–iii. Cambridge, MA and London –. J. D. Beazley, Attic Red-Figure Vase-Painters, nd edn. Oxford . Th. Bergk, Poetae lyrici Graeci, th edn., vols. i–iii. Leipzig –. A. Bernab´e, Poetae epici Graeci. Testimonia et fragmenta, pars I, nd edn. Stuttgart and Leipzig . J. D. P. Bolton, Aristeas of Proconnesus. Oxford . D. A. Campbell, Greek Lyric, vols. i–v. Cambridge, MA and London –. J. K. Davies, Athenian Propertied Families 600–300BC. Oxford . J. Diggle, Euripidis fabulae, vols. i–iii. Oxford – . H. Diels, and W. Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, vols. i–iii. Berlin . D. L. Page, Further Greek Epigrams, rev. R. D. Dawe and J. Diggle. Cambridge . F. Jacoby, Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker. Leiden –. xiv
List of abbreviations G–P Hausrath Henderson IG K–A Koster LGPN LIMC LSJ M MMC MNC MPG MTS2 M–W OCD PMG PMGF POxy. Rose Rutherford
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B. Gentili and C. Prato, Poetae elegiaci: testimonia et fragmenta. Pars altera, nd edn. Munich and Leipzig . A. Hausrath, Corpus fabularum Aesopicarum, vols. i– ii, vol. prius, rev. H. Hunger. Leipzig . Jeffrey Henderson, Aristophanes, vols. i–iv. Cambridge, MA and London –. Inscriptiones Graecae. Berlin –. R. Kassel and C. Austin, Poetae comici Graeci. Berlin and New York –. W. J. W Koster, Scholia in Aristophanem, pars i: fasc. iA. Prolegomena de comoedia. Groningen . Lexicon of Greek Personal Names. Oxford –. Lexicon iconographicum mythologiae classicae, vols. i– viii. Zurich and Munich –. H. G. Liddell and R. Scott, A Greek–English Lexicon, th edn, rev. H. S. Jones and R. MacKenzie, and suppl. P. G. W. Glare. Oxford . H. Maehler, Pindarus. Pars II. Fragmenta. Stuttgart and Leipzig . T. B. L. Webster, Monuments Illustrating Old and Middle Comedy, rd edn, rev. J. R. Green. London . T. B. L. Webster, Monuments Illustrating New Comedy, rd edn, rev. J. R. Green and A. Seeberg, vols. i–ii. London . J. P. Migne, Patrologiae cursus, series Graeca. T. B. L. Webster, Monuments Illustrating Tragedy and Satyr Play, nd edn. London . R. Merkelbach, R. and M. L. West, Fragmenta Hesiodea. Oxford . S. Hornblower and A. Spawforth, The Oxford Classical Dictionary, rd edn. Oxford . D. L. Page, Poetae melici Graeci. Oxford . M. Davies, Poetarum melicorum Graecorum fragmenta, vol. i: Alcman–Stesichorus–Ibycus. Oxford . The Oxyrhynchus Papyri. London –. V. Rose, Aristotelis qui ferebantur librorum fragmenta. Leipzig (repr. Stuttgart ). I. C. Rutherford, Pindar’s Paeans: a Reading of the Fragments with a Survey of the Genre. Oxford .
xvi SEG S–M TrGF Voigt W Wehrli Wilson, OCT
List of abbreviations Supplementum epigraphicum Graecum. Leiden –. B. Snell and H. Maehler, Pindarus. Pars I. Epinicia. Stuttgart and Leipzig (repr. ). R. Kannicht, S. Radt and B. Snell, Tragicorum Graecorum fragmenta, vols. i–v (vol. ii, nd edn). G¨ottingen –. E.-M. Voigt, Sappho et Alcaeus. Fragmenta. Amsterdam . M. L. West, Iambi et elegi Graeci ante Alexandrum cantati, vols. i–ii, nd edn. Oxford –. F. Wehrli, Die Schule des Aristoteles, vols. i–x. Basel –. N. G. Wilson, Aristophanis fabulae, vols. i–ii. Oxford .
Introduction Greek comedy as a fabric of generic discourse Emmanuela Bakola, Lucia Prauscello and Mario Tel`o
Tragedy is a lucky kind of poetry in every respect (makrion . . . po©hma kat pnt’). First of all, the plots (o¬ l»goi) are known to the spectators, even before anyone opens their mouth. The only thing the poet has to do is to refresh their memory (Ëpomnsai). I just need to say Oedipus, and they know the rest . . . When the tragic poets are short of things to say and have completely run out of ideas in their plays (Âtan . . . komid d’ peirkwsin n to±v drmasin), they just lift the mechane like a finger and this is enough for the spectators (kaª to±v qewmnoisin pocrÛntwv cei). But we don’t have such an easy life (¡m±n d taÓtì oÉk stin). We need to invent everything (ll pnta de± eËre±n): new names (½n»mata kain), what happened in the past (t dikhmna pr»teron), what’s going on now (t nÓn par»nta), the resolution (tn katastrofn), the prologue (tn e«sboln). (Antiph. fr. .–, –)
In these few lines from the only extant fragment of Antiphanes’ Poiesis, an unidentified character (probably a personification of Poetry or Comedy) launches into a tirade on generic unfairness. Tragedy resorts to a prepackaged repertoire of subject matters and stage devices to release dramatic products that never disappoint the spectators’ expectations. Comedy, on the other hand, is always confronted with the challenge of concocting original plots and new theatrical artifices easily liable to audience disapproval. The rhetorical strategy behind this synkrisis of tragedy and comedy seems to flip the terms of a recusatio. Instead of exposing its ‘low’ status and lamenting its inability to take up the demanding tasks required of ‘high’ genres, comedy advertises its artistic superiority and purports to lay bare the injustice of an audience-based hierarchy of genres that devalues the hardwon inventiveness of the comic poets. It is evident that, by approaching
Our sincerest thanks to Richard Hunter and Jim Porter for having offered invaluable advice on earlier drafts of this introduction. See most recently N. W. Slater : – and Olson : –.
emmanuela bakola, lucia prauscello and mario tel o`
genre in such explicit terms, the mouthpiece of comedy speaking in this fragment is adopting the righteous stance of the abject hero, the innocent victim of social abuse and marginalization that comic poets assume as a favourite mode of authorial self-positioning. In this respect Antiphanes’ fragment, even if narrowly focused on tragedy, offers a privileged entry point into some of the distinctive features of Greek comedy’s interactions with the whole generic landscape of archaic and classical literature. The high degree of self-awareness that the surviving comic texts bring to their dialogues with this wide range of traditions turns Greek comedy into a fabric of generic discourse that sets the terms of the theory and practice of genre in antiquity. This book considers Greek comedy’s interactions with different traditions, both literary and non-literary, by situating them within a unified interpretative framework. It explores some of the ways in which Greek, especially Aristophanic, comedy employs the self-reflexive discourse of genre, turning it into a primary imaginative force and an essential tool of poetic self-representation. By absorbing diverse strands of tradition, which are made to confront and comment on each other, Greek comedy constructs and projects its literary existence. Although, as is well known, the first explicit theoretical reflections on literary genre date back to Plato and Aristotle, Greek comedy prefigures these concerns in many ways. Over the entire chronological arc of Greek comedy, generic issues are raised and made the subject of poetic discourse. As the Antiphanes fragment eloquently shows, confrontation between genres can infiltrate even dramatic dialogue. It can also morph into an overarching plot device, casting actors in the role of individual genres, or operate as a pervasive subtext, investing characters with parallel metaliterary identities. In other words, Greek comedy engages in a programmatic ‘theatralisation
On this characteristic stance of the comic voice cf. esp. Rosen and Baines : – and Rosen , passim. On the connections between ‘genre’ and (intertextual) ‘dialogue’ see Bakhtin . On the relevance of Bakhtinian dialogism to the ancient practice and theory of genre cf. Farrell : –, Branham , Whitmarsh : –; on the application of Bakhtinian theory to Old Comedy see Dobrov and Platter . For a theoretical discussion of this function of genre, see Depew and Obbink : –. Depew and Obbink : remark that ‘theorizing about genre rose quite apart from conceptualizations of genre that were production- and performance-based’. The most emblematic instances of this tendency are Aristophanes’ Frogs and Women at the Thesmophoria, but many other plays of Old Comedy must have featured scenes of intergeneric confrontation. In Cratinus’ Archilochoi, for example, epic was probably pitted against iambos in the course of the agon (cf. Bakola : –). See also Wright and Tel`o in this volume.
Greek comedy as a fabric of generic discourse
of genre.’ While doing so, it also appropriates, manipulates and ridicules ancient discourse on literary criticism. Commenting on Women at the Thesmophoria, Helene Foley has observed that in this play ‘comedy moves closer than before to intertwining as well as competing with tragedy’. Foley’s observation fits in well with scholarly approaches to other Aristophanic comedies (such as Knights, Clouds, Peace and Frogs) which have also shown that in its obsessive process of self-definition comedy tends not only to antagonize but also to absorb other genres. Foley’s use of the verb ‘intertwining’, however, is particularly apt for comedy’s systematic incorporation of elements from other literary forms. ‘Intertwining’ builds on a metaphor that evokes the ideas of crossbreeding and hybridization, which are associated with the concept of Kreuzung der Gattungen. The biological paradigm of the Kreuzung, which positivistic scholarship recognized as the driving force behind the Hellenistic literary system, relies on the belief in the existence of pure and uncontaminated poetic forms, which allegedly second-rate (or at least epigonal) authors commingle as a remedy for their dearth of originality. Yet, as scholars have pointed out, the implausibility of this model of ‘generic engineering’ is demonstrated precisely by the flexible, anti-essentialist idea of genre reflected in Cratinus’ famous coinage EÉripidaristofan©zein (fr. ). Old Comedy paves the way for later enterprises of generic codification and classification, but even before the rise of such enterprises it undermines any essentialist position about genre by presenting genreintertwining not as artificial crossbreeding, but as the necessary condition of literary self-consciousness and definition. The postmodernist revaluation of Kreuzung in Hellenistic and Roman literature has shifted attention from ‘genres as begetting genres to texts
Barchiesi : , who applies this concept to the generic system of Augustan literature. On this point see N. O’Sullivan and Hubbard ; on comedy’s role in ancient literary criticism see Hunter a: –. Foley : . See, for instance, Hall : – (on Peace); Rosen (on Frogs) and : – (on Knights); Silk (on Clouds). See also Vetta , Zanetto , Biles : –. For a stimulating reassessment of this concept see Barchiesi . We borrow this expression from Barchiesi : . On generic anti-essentialism cf. Bakhtin , Derrida and, with particular reference to ancient literature, Hinds ; Barchiesi : –; Farrell : –; Harrison : –; Rotstein : –. On Cratin. fr. see most recently Bakola : –. For the loosening of generic boundaries in late fifth-century Athens see Gibert –, Revermann b and Foley . Foley : : ‘it seems likely that comedy played, because it could and needed to defend itself, the critical public role . . . in popularizing generic aims and differences’.
emmanuela bakola, lucia prauscello and mario tel o`
as mobilizing genres’, laying emphasis on ‘how texts construct and invoke genres, and re-create a genealogy, not on how literary species transmute and survive.’ This concern with genealogy holds a central position in Greek comedy’s own negotiations with other literary traditions, which constantly foreground a ‘kinship versus otherness’ dialectic. The antagonistic attitude of Antiphanes’ fragment does not exhaust the range of stances that the Greek comic texts adopt in engaging with these literary and non-literary traditions. Comedy sets its voice not only against, but also alongside that of other genres, putting on a ‘drama of appropriation and legitimization’ that unfolds through the reconstruction of its origins and the impersonation of its ancestors. This volume sets out to enhance our appreciation of Greek comedy’s generic receptivity by following in the footsteps of recent scholarship that has illuminated the sophisticated strategies of self-positioning at work in comic texts’ exchanges with other genres. We have now come to the point where generic interaction in comedy is not understood as amounting only (or mainly) to its engagement with tragedy. On the contrary, it is gradually entering scholarly consciousness that the comic genre is voracious and multifarious in its interactions with generic discourse. The present collection, therefore, shifts the focus from tragedy as the privileged or even exclusive object of intertextual investigation to a wider spectrum of genres. Although in articulating its generic identity Greek comedy assigns to tragedy the role of an obligatory point of reference, as the fragment of Antiphanes’ Poiesis indicates, the interactions with tragedy need to be understood within the wider fabric of comedy’s generic discourse. Through a more comprehensive (and less tragedy-centred) approach to comic texts’ ‘echoes of genre’, we aim to show that in incorporating and manipulating other traditions comedy displays the same degree of selfconsciousness and creativity that it deploys when it confronts its dramatic sister-genre. Consequently, the chapters of this volume attempt to reach beyond comedy’s favourite self-definition as trugd©a and to examine how its
Barchiesi : . Barchiesi : . Platter conceptualizes Old Comedy’s intergeneric dialogism through the Bakhtinian opposition between ‘high’ and ‘low’. But Old Comedy thrives on staging its generic kinship with iambos – as the emblematic case of Cratinus’ Archilochoi shows (see Rosen in this volume) – and high traditions as well. On Aristophanes’ affiliations with Odyssean epic and Hesiodic didactic see Tel`o in this volume. For comedy and tragedy, see in particular Foley ; Sfyroeras ; Zeitlin : –; D. P. Fowler : –; Gibert –; Dobrov : –; Bakola : –; Tel`o . For comedy and other genres, see nn. and . Even Platter’s most recent investigation of Aristophanes’ ‘carnival of genres’ (Platter ) is mainly focused on tragedy (on his approach see above, n. ).
Greek comedy as a fabric of generic discourse
‘kinship versus otherness’ dialectic plays into the interactions with other traditions, literary and non-literary. In other words, the individual chapters try to determine by what means and with what results comedy projects its trugedic stance even when it sets itself against other generic matrices. In this way, this volume hopes to enrich the picture of comedy’s generic self-awareness and to open up new avenues for interpreting the ways in which comic texts construct their identity by thematizing genre. Our attempt to reconstruct comedy’s fabric of generic discourse proceeds along three main trajectories. The first part of the volume (‘Comedy and genre: self-definition and development’) endeavours to recover some of the governing principles of this fabric by addressing the questions of generic self-definition and evolution from a theoretical standpoint (Silk) and through exemplary case studies (Csapo; Rosen). Key to this section is the ever-changing relationship between context and text: in particular the contributions of this section all discuss, from complementary perspectives, how and in what degree contextual determination affects the generic identity of the comic text. To what extent does context, understood both as a socio-cultural background and the material conditions of the performance, shape and condition the generic identity of the comic text? How does comic poetry’s inclusion of non-literary forms influence the textual configuration of literary identity and foster generic development? Finally, what criteria define comedy’s notions of generic dependence and affiliation? Within this framework, Silk’s paper (‘The Greek dramatic genres: theoretical perspectives’) provides an important starting point by drawing attention to three essential factors for a proper understanding of the generic system of classical drama and, in particular, comedy’s self-positioning: () the interplay between context and text; () the impact of non-literary or sub-literary culture on the historical development of dramatic genres, with special attention paid to comedy; () the role played by value judgements in the ancient and modern assessments of tragedy, comedy and satyr drama. These hermeneutic conundrums are central to the interpretation of the surviving, never staged version of Clouds, whose lack of ‘contextual authority’ evinces, as the paper suggests, Aristophanes’ intention to present the play as a generic hybrid (a ‘tragicomedy’ or a ‘comitragedy’). The importance of comedy’s interaction with non-literary genres and the need to extend our definition of its context to include the other Dionysiac choruses contemporary with the comic performances held at the Athenian Dionysia are at the heart of Csapo’s contribution (‘Comedy and the Pompe: Dionysian genre-crossing’). Nine Attic vase-paintings (some of them previously unpublished), which date from c. to c. bc, are shown to
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represent choruses of phallic entertainers at the Pompe of the Dionysia. This identification is a springboard for re-examining how the phallic processions may have influenced the evolution of the comic genre and how comedy in its turn may have contributed to shaping the form of these phallic performances. Finally, Rosen (‘Iambos, comedy and the question of generic affiliation’) revisits the topic of his book Old Comedy and the Iambographic Tradition. Building on recent scholarship on iambography, Rosen addresses the thorny questions of what generic dependence really entails and what kind of ‘work’ (as in Aristotle’s ergon) a genre is supposed to do. Approaching the two genres, comedy and iambos, with these questions in mind allows us to conceptualize a close generic relationship between them that relies less on lexical similarities than on the literary dynamics that govern all forms of comedy rooted in satire. Despite obvious differences between iambos and Old Comedy in literary form, performative structures or even localized social function, they remain powerfully and uniquely affiliated as genres of satire in ways that go well beyond whatever surface similarities we may detect in them. The second part of the volume (‘Comedy and genres in dialogue’) scrutinizes comedy’s interactions with some specific traditions (epic, lyric, tragedy, fable, ethnography) through new or hitherto underexplored approaches. Scholars have long acknowledged comedy’s intertextual engagement with the two major genres of archaic Greek literature, namely epic and lyric. Yet the investigation of such an engagement has rarely moved beyond the survey of isolated verbal borrowings and the mere recognition of their parodic valence. Recent studies on paratragedy have brought to the fore the complexity of comedy’s intertextual referentiality and elucidated the forms of detailed and intense allusiveness that comic dramatists put to use in their plays. Building on this sophisticated model of comic dialogism, the chapters of this section that are focused on epic (Revermann; Tel`o) and lyric (Carey; Rawles) highlight the appropriative gestures foregrounded by the comic exchanges with these traditions. In particular, they analyse significant examples of the strategies by which
The investigation of Old Comedy’s engagement with lyric poetry that is offered in the helpful study of Kugelmeier is emblematic of this approach; Platter : – examines significant aspects of Aristophanes’ appropriation of epic but without detailed intertextual analysis. See, on the other hand, Rosen (on comedy and iambos), Biles (on Cratinus and Archilochus, in particular), Hall : – (on comedy, lyric and epic), Bakola (on comedy and the poetic ‘I’ of archaic lyric). See also Biles : –. As remarked by D. P. Fowler : n. , Aristophanic comedy is ‘significantly intertextual with its tragic source-text down to the level of the marked use of particles’. On the study of paratragedy in Old Comedy see the bibliography quoted above, n. .
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comedy conjures different strands of epic and lyric tradition, mobilizes and distorts their techniques of generic self-representation. This approach has important bearings on our understanding of epic and lyric as well, as it casts retrospective light on their modes of textual self-construction, brings out their manipulation of generic boundaries and discloses the implicit dialogues between different strands of tradition that lie behind the evolution of the literary system. In particular, Revermann’s and Tel`o’s chapters both investigate the variety of ways in which comedy, ever the self-interested and self-promoting genre, capitalizes on the specific cultural valence of epic poetry (Homer and Hesiod). Revermann’s chapter (‘Paraepic comedy: point(s) and practices’) analyses comedy’s relationship with Homer and the Epic Cycle, and seeks to situate it relative to comedy’s dialogue with tragedy and satyr-play. Two claims are at the core of Revermann’s argument: () comedy exploits the specific cultural valence of epic poetry, which is higher and of a different order from that of comedy’s performative rivals, tragedy and satyr-play; () by contrast with tragedy, comedy’s interaction with epic tends to oscillate between two poles. Comedy is either more ‘Homer-centric’ than tragedy (that is, its focus is on the Iliad and the Odyssey, while tragedians show a greater interest in the Epic Cycle) or it tends towards what the author calls ‘epic modality’, a looser form of genre interaction that conjures an epic atmosphere for the recipient through a combination of metre, Homeric Kunstsprache, dramatic character, plot and situation. This interaction does not follow one single template but needs to be teased out in each case. In a complementary way, Tel`o’s chapter (‘Epic, nostos and generic genealogy in Aristophanes’ Peace’) explores the strategies of generic self-definition in the finale of Peace, where a rhapsodic contest takes place between a waraddicted boy obsessed with Iliadic epic and a peace-oriented and Hesiodinspired paternal figure acted out by Trygaeus. Tel`o shows how, in framing the strife between the boy and Trygaeus as an intergenerational conflict between a Homeric son and a Hesiodic father, Aristophanes is appropriating a central moment of the epipolesis of Book of the Iliad and transmuting it into a literary-critical comparison. The author suggests that what is at issue in the mise en sc`ene of this intergenerational encounter is the tracing of the genealogical tree of Aristophanic poetic identity. Aristophanes presents Hesiod as an ancestor of the iambic-comic mode, but he also dramatizes the Homeric roots of Hesiodic poetry and in this way he brings to the surface the Homeric origins of the comic self. Comedy’s complex dialogue with the lyric voice, monodic and choral, is the overarching theme of Carey’s and Rawles’ chapters. Carey’s chapter
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(‘Comedy and the civic chorus’) challenges the common view of the comic chorus as a distinctly civic voice. A comparison with non-dramatic choruses reveals that the comic chorus appropriates a civic choral mood in a highly selective and idiosyncratic way. Non-dramatic choral performances generally present the undivided voice of the polis, with some important exceptions, most notably epinician poetry. Comedy straddles this divide within the tradition, slipping into and out of the civic voice at will. The comic chorus frequently defines itself as distinct from and at odds with the polis but can also approximate the more conventional choral civic voice. This complexity of the comic choral voice reflects comedy’s awareness of its ability to create new effects with traditional forms of expression. Rawles’ contribution (‘Aristophanes’ Simonides: lyric models for praise and blame’) shifts the focus to comedy’s interaction with the epinician tradition. While previous scholarship has looked mainly at Aristophanes’ Pindar in terms of comedy’s indebtedness to the lyric tradition, Rawles explores the ways in which Aristophanes uses a strikingly democratic Simonides as an advocate of a comic poetics of praise and blame. Differently from Pindar and Bacchylides, Simonides constructs epinician as both blame of the defeated and praise for the victor. The author argues that we should see Aristophanes’ Simonides as one possible route to our own view of the earlier poet, but as a highly selective one, focusing on aspects of Simonides that facilitated an analogy between a Simonidean and a comic poetics. Three chapters (Wright, Bakola, Fantuzzi and Konstan) illuminate comedy’s much-discussed relationship with tragedy by exploring, among other themes, its reflections of and on socio-political discourse. Genre has been aptly defined as ‘the mediating term between the literary work and the various cultural discourses and social functions within which literature operates.’ The first two contributions show that comedy uses social conflict to trope the agonistic dimension of its intergeneric engagement with tragedy, but it also capitalizes on this engagement to participate in the socio-political arena of the democratic polis. In ‘Comedy versus tragedy in Wasps’ Wright argues that this intergeneric contest is what lies behind the multiple thematic contests of the plot (father–son, old–young, aristocracy– democracy). The lower genre presents itself as a serious challenger to the higher genre, and Aristophanic comedy implicitly emerges as superior not just to other comedy but to tragedy as well in both its literary and its social dimensions.
Segal in Conte : xiii.
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Bakola’s reading of Plutoi (‘Crime and punishment: Cratinus, Aeschylus’ Oresteia, and the metaphysics and politics of wealth’) assesses how generic identity may be mapped onto contemporary perceptions of ‘classic’ tragedy as well as cultural change. Cratinus’ engagement with Aeschylus’ Oresteia shows how comedy engaged with a timeless theme of Aeschylean tragedy while at the same time using Aeschylus to respond to contemporary political and economic concerns of the Athenian society of the s. Furthermore, given the importance of Aeschylean poetics for the comedy of Cratinus, Plutoi constitutes further evidence for the self-positioning of the comic author in relation to the tragic master as a ‘classic’ and may suggest the comic poet’s appropriation of an Aeschylean anti-hegemonic political stance in his persona. In ‘From Achilles’ horses to a cheese-seller’s shop: on the history of the guessing game in Greek drama’ Fantuzzi and Konstan illustrate the functioning of generic discourse in Menander by examining a case of tragic interaction that not only illustrates his Aristophanic self-positioning against a tragic model but also lays bare the comic potential of the original tragedy. A generic variation of the dramatic guessing-game motif shows that in the Perikeiromene Menander defines the boundaries of comedy against the background of Pseudo-Euripides’ Rhesus, a unique example of hyperepic tragedy. What is gained from this analysis is a better understanding not only of the Menandrian play, but of Rhesus as well. In fact, Menander’s reception of this play enables us to situate the Pseudo-Euripidean scene between Hector and Dolon alongside the Aristophanic versions of the guessing game in Acharnians, Wasps and Frogs. The interconnections of genre and social discourse are also at play in Old Comedy’s dialogue with the fable tradition. As Hall’s chapter (‘The Aesopic in Aristophanes’) argues, Aristophanes’ absorption of the Aesopic mode lies at the core of his generic persona and is at the root of some of his distinctive ideological postures. In particular, Hall explores how Aesopic fables are used in Aristophanic comedy (above all Acharnians, Knights, Wasps and Peace) to trigger humorous ‘knowingness’ as a strategy for social and ideological manipulation. Classical scholars generally agree that the fables reflect at some level their origins as low or popular culture, oral stories generated and circulated by slaves and lower-class individuals in antiquity, while paradoxically often reaffirming the slave-owning agenda in their validation of force majeure. The author instead proposes that the
On the continuities between Old and New Comedy see Csapo .
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socially low knowingness in which this apparent paradox is expressed is the greatest debt ancient comedy owes to Aesop. This stance may even take us into an intergeneric dialogue of a far more ancient and international kind, since fables in what is similar to an Aesopic form appear in Sumerian, Akkadian and Aramaic texts from the third millennium onwards. Comedy’s creative incorporation of paraliterary forms is also instantiated by Aristophanes’ dialogue with ethnography, as Rusten shows in ‘The mirror of Aristophanes: the winged ethnographers of Birds (–, –, –)’. This dialogue converts comedy’s construction of its generic self into an exploration of the intersections between utopia and para-history. Aristophanes’ absorption of ethnographic discourse raises the question: to what extent can ethnography be regarded as a parodic version of historiography? Furthermore, in Birds Aristophanes’ customary exercise in generic self-definition draws upon the subversion of ethnography’s identity–alterity dialectic. The third and final part of the volume (‘The reception of comedy and comic discourse’) maps out two significant aspects of the reception of comedy’s discourse on genre outside the world of drama. If it is true that our readings of ancient texts ‘are, in complex ways, constructed by the chain of receptions through which their continued readability has been effected’, the understanding of comedy’s generic identity has to be inscribed against the background of its interpretations and reinterpretations throughout antiquity. The concept of genre as ‘a succession of texts within a continuous process of horizon-setting and horizon-changing’ is itself bound up with the hermeneutics of reception. The reception of comedy is investigated here as a twofold phenomenon that provides insights not only into the diachronic making of comic identity, but also into the ways in which comedy’s fabric of generic discourse is re-employed and manipulated by later genres to articulate their strategies of self-definition. Offering a comprehensive survey of the appropriations of comedy in antiquity is beyond the scope of this volume. We concentrate, instead, on two key moments of its critical reception, which mark crucial and similar turning points in the history of the ancient visions and revisions of comedy. Both contributions in this section (Prauscello, Lowe) consider the reflection on comedy in genres (Platonic philosophy and Hellenistic scholarship) that programmatically adopt a prescriptive and normative viewpoint and may even exhibit a ‘hostile’ attitude towards comic discourse. How do self-declared ‘enemies’ of comedy (such as Plato) or practitioners of the
Martindale : .
Skoie : , referring to Jauss’ Rezeptiontheorie.
Greek comedy as a fabric of generic discourse
adversary genre (such as the Hellenistic scholars who are authors of tragedies) contribute to its generic codification and canonization? To what use does Plato put comedy’s own tactics of self-presentation? What influence does his and the Hellenistic tragedians’ authoritative, yet tendentious, categorization exert on the later takes on comedy? And how does it reflect back on our perceptions of comedy’s generic identity? Along these lines, Prauscello’s chapter (‘Comedy and comic discourse in Plato’s Laws’) considers how comedy and the comic discourse of abuse and ridicule are absorbed, metabolized and redefined within the ‘communicational utopia’ of Plato’s Magnesia. In the Laws Plato’s revisionist account of comedy and its psychology of emotions, while coherently integrated into his previous reflections on comic laughter and ridicule (Republic and Philebus), draws extensively on rhetorical strategies of self-representation advertised by comedy itself (in particular the typically comic poetics of innovation and the trope of the comic poet and comic character as a madman). Plato’s ways of selecting, adapting and deconstructing comic metapoetics are mirrored also in one of the most remarkable features of Magnesia’s policy towards its own citizens: the necessity to exert control over citizens’ modes of speech. Comedy provides a model of what must be avoided: experiential and representational mimesis as well as specific speech-acts. Lowe’s contribution (‘Comedy and the Pleiad: Alexandrian tragedians and the birth of comic scholarship’) moves further down the centuries to the defining moment for the canonization of comic texts: their Alexandrian reception. Though comedy had been the subject of treatises by Aristotle and his school for half a century, it was only with the scholars of the Alexandrian Museum and Library under Ptolemy II that comedy became an object of systematic study. Strikingly, the main figures here were all numbered among the stars of the ‘Pleiad’ of early Hellenistic tragedians: Lycophron of Chalcis, Dionysiades of Mallos and Euphronius of Chersonesus. The activity of these tragedian-scholars as a group suggests that their role in the formation of the Alexandrian tradition of comic scholarship marked a philological as well as a generic and a professional turn in the ways in which comedy would be studied, canonized and conceived. The variety of approaches followed in this volume mirrors the broad range of techniques of self-representation and dynamics of self-perception that are at stake in Greek comedy’s discourse on genre and its repercussions in later literature. At the same time, all of the chapters pose and attempt to answer questions within a coherent interpretative frame. In investigating a wide spectrum of mises en sc`ene du genre and tackling them from
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different, if tightly interconnected, angles, they offer a snapshot of the omnivorous, open and intensely dialogic nature of Greek comedy. They also show that dialogism not only is the instrument through which certain literary traditions construct their parasitic identity but represents a defining condition of genre as such. In fact, ‘genre always involves a balance between consistency and innovation, framework and deviation’ or, to put it another way, a complex negotiation between prescription and description, langue and parole. It is precisely this programmatic manipulation of the divide between norm and distortion, conservatism and transgression, that lies at the core of the comic voice and makes Greek comedy the ideal venue for generic discourse.
Braund : .
c ha p te r 1
The Greek dramatic genres: theoretical perspectives Michael Silk
preliminaries I wish to draw attention to three relatable and under-discussed issues in genre theory and then consider their relevance for our understanding of the dramatic genres of classical Athens and their relationships. These issues are: (i) the distinction between text and context; (ii) in the evolution or development of a genre, the distinction between (a) cross-generic or intergeneric influence and (b) influence from external factors; (iii) the question of value. I shall have most to say about (i), because (ii) and (iii) are in part contingent on it. In what follows, I leave largely to one side problematics concerning the demarcation of the generic and the supra-generic (including my own arguments elsewhere about the supra-generic status of comedy). Conversely, I shall discuss examples pertaining to tragedy and satyr-play as well as comedy – partly because ‘the comic’ might be thought to figure in all three genres, but chiefly because the three constitute a miniature system, such that the elucidation of any part of the system is facilitated by the elucidation of the rest. A better understanding of all three genres, and their relationships, requires a better theoretical grasp of genre itself. This is a goal to which classical scholarship has, in principle, much to contribute – but only on the basis of a critical attitude to theory as it currently exists.
The first version of this chapter was delivered as a paper at a conference on ‘Greek Drama and its Genres’ in Barcelona in : my thanks to Xavier Riu for the invitation to present my thoughts then and for his understanding when it proved impossible to revise the paper for publication afterwards; also to the organizers of the conference at University College London and the editors of the present volume for the opportunity to adapt and expand the piece for a new context; and then to all those who have offered helpful comments on different versions. In Silk a: –. Among recent discussions of genre by classicists, some of the contributors to Depew and Obbink show an admirable awareness of current theories – but much less sign of any interest in confronting them. Cf. Silk (b).
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Modern theory (theory of the last two hundred years, from the Romantics to our own age) is diverse, often very sophisticated, and – if critically handled – unquestionably facilitates understanding of the Greek genres. In several of its favourite emphases, though, modern theory is seriously deficient. In the first place, it tends to assume the condition of modern Western literature and generalize from that. It does this most obviously by taking the modern novel as representative. Bakhtin, writing in , spoke for many: ‘Faced with the problem of the novel, genre theory must submit to a radical restructuring.’ It is questionable, however, whether the novel, though clearly dominant within modern literature, of and since the nineteenth century, is also representative of it – while, for the twenty-six centuries of Western literature before the nineteenth century, any such proposition is simply absurd. But even for the modern period, the novel surely represents an extreme: a major kind of literature (a supra-generic kind, in fact), which has never had a context. Initially, modern genre theory (rightly) assumed the Kantian separation of ‘disinterested’ literature and art from (the rest of ) ‘life’, making a clear distinction between literary or artistic genres and non-literary or nonartistic phenomena. By contrast, theory of the last hundred years (from the Russian Formalists onwards) tends to resist this opposition by identifying, as ‘genres’, a wide range of social behaviour patterns, especially but not only verbal patterns: that is, it tends to identify as ‘genres’ both the novel and tragic drama (etc.) and forms of non-literary discourse, from technical prose to (even) ordinary conversation. Thus Bakhtin again, in –: Secondary (complex) speech genres – novels, dramas, all kinds of scientific research, major genres of commentary . . . During the process of their formation, they absorb and digest various primary (simple) genres that have taken form in unmediated speech communication. These primary genres are altered and assume a special character when they enter into complex [genres]. They lose their immediate relation to actual reality and to the real utterances of others.
Compare, more recently, John Frow (in ), quoting Anne Freadman (from ):
Bakhtin : . The dominance of the novel within modern literature was proclaimed, as early as , by Friedrich Schlegel (Schlegel : ), listing ‘Three dominant genres: ) In Greece, tragedy. ) In Rome, satire. ) In the modern world, “Roman”’ (‘Drei herrschende Dichtarten. ) Trag¨odie bei den Griechen. ) Satire bei den R¨omern. ) Roman bei den Modernen’) – where the momentous term ‘Roman’ (already prefiguring the distinctive association between modernity and what comes to be called Roman-ticism) is both ‘novel’ and ‘romance’. Bakhtin : .
The Greek dramatic genres: theoretical perspectives
Any performance of a text . . . takes place within a broader ‘ceremonial’ frame and involves all the constituents of the occasion: the audience, the actions of opening and closing the performance, talk about the performance, and its demarcation from other performances. Such things as ‘reading a book, attending and giving lectures, dinner conversations, filling in forms, interviews . . . are all ceremonial frames and/or the genres that occur within them’.
Hence such expansive formulae as ‘genre classifications . . . have an organising force in everyday life’ (Frow) and ‘blurred genres: the refiguration of social thought’ (Clifford Geertz). This development is doubtless illuminating for the understanding of the non-literary forms which are the concern of social scientists like Geertz. But by flouting the Kantian principle, it is deeply unhelpful for the understanding of literature or art in any age. Contrary to many claims, the Kantian principle is not to be seen as simply a modern construction. Even though (as is endlessly, and correctly, pointed out) the specific boundaries of literature or art shift significantly from era to era, the principle is itself a cross-cultural reality. It is no coincidence that it is substantially anticipated, in pre-modern antiquity, by Aristotle (Poet. –). Correspondingly, most theory of the last hundred years (again, from the Formalists onwards) has put great emphasis on cross-generic (or intergeneric) interplay – at the expense of any discussion of interplay between literature (or art) and that which is not, or not regarded as, literature (or art). This emphasis is implicit in Bakhtin’s propositions about ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ genres, just quoted, as it is, more fully, in earlier Formalist doctrine, as sketched by Erlich in : the distinctive Formalist contribution to the theory of literary history . . . lay . . . in a recognition that a new art form or style is not an antithesis of the preceding one, but its reorganisation, ‘a regrouping of old elements’. Hence an important role of parody, with its capacity to present the old in a new key, as a mechanism of literary change. Moreover, a healthy distrust of rigid definitions and official hierarchies made the Formalists alive to literary affinities and cross-connections . . . They knew that literary conflict, like politics, makes strange bed-fellows: ‘In the struggle with the father, the grandson turns out to resemble his grandfather.’ Shklovsky urged a still more heterodox genealogy: ‘In the history of art, the legacy is transmitted, not from father to son, but from uncle to nephew.’ This ‘law’, which became known
Frow : –, citing Freadman : . Frow : and Geertz (‘Blurred . . . thought’ is Geertz’s title). Erlich : –. So Eagleton , among others. The quotation is from Tynyanov : as translated by Erlich . Shklovsky : (= : ). Tynyanov : .
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as ‘canonisation of the junior branch’, posited that periodically, in order to renew itself, literature should draw upon motifs and devices of subliterary genres, e.g. journalism, vaudeville, folksong, detective story.
The principle was summed up – with brutal simplicity, it has to be said – by Tzvetan Todorov in . In response to the claim that talk of genre, in today’s world, is outmoded, because the genres have all disappeared, Todorov counters: it is not genres as such that have gone, but only ‘the genres of the past’, which have in fact been ‘replaced by other genres’. Hence his elegant, but oversimplified, formula: ‘Where do genres come from? Quite simply, from other genres.’ The recent (structuralist and subsequent) theoretical fetishizing of ‘text’ symptomatizes and intensifies various of these developments. In Frow, representatively, a postmodern-sociological theorizing of the relation between ‘text’ and ‘genre’ is almost unrelatable to the realities of literature in, for instance, classical Greece. Frow writes: texts respond to and are organised in accordance with two distinct but related levels of information, that of the social setting in which they occur . . . and that of the genre mobilised by the setting and by contextual clues.
The premise here is that ‘text’ is something separate from its realization. Though this premise fits the modern world of the novel, consideration of even the single counter-example of fifth-century Attic drama serves to undermine it as a universal principle: there, the realization is the text. And Frow’s conclusive-sounding general formulae – ‘genre . . . is a universal dimension of textuality’; ‘texts as performances of genre’ – are, as universal principles, correspondingly suspect. One can only applaud Frow’s aspiration to formulate universal principles (there can be no theory which does not aspire towards the universal), but a principle that is contradicted by even a single example, or group of examples, cannot be universal. Finally, much contemporary theory (as, again, in Frow) broadly shows an implicit (sometimes explicit) shift from a literary-critical or art-critical comprehension of literature or art to a sociological understanding of genres, which tends to evade issues of value (as live issues). Among the earlier Formalists, the relevance of value is still properly apparent (witness Erlich’s summary, and note, especially, Shklovsky’s talk of ‘renewal’); in
This phrase comes from Shklovsky : (= : ). Todorov : , : ‘Ce ne sont donc pas “les” genres qui ont disparu, mais les-genres-du-pass´e, et ils ont e´t´e remplac´es par d’autres’; ‘D’o`u viennent les genres? Eh bien, tout simplement, d’autres genres.’ Frow : , . Frow : .
The Greek dramatic genres: theoretical perspectives
Bakhtin’s reflections on ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ genres (undeniably interesting though these reflections are), it is hardly visible. Rather differently, the influential doctrines of reception theory privilege response but tend to minimize assessment – even though Hans Robert Jauss’ foundational principle of genre as ‘horizon of expectations’ (Erwartungshorizont) specifically assumed a Formalist-like connection with value. generic text and context Recent literary (and literary-cultural) theory interests itself in context, but fetishizing text, as it does, is strikingly confused about it: witness Frow. For literary genres, context, where operative, is operative as a socio-cultural reality, generally an institutional reality. For and within a given culture, it is (where operative) primary and determinative for the understanding of a genre on the most fundamental level, which means: at the point of identification. For and within that culture, it is – in principle – specific, definite, unmistakable, uncontroversial: a right identification of a genre is available which is not subject to interpretation in any ordinary sense. Someone who went to a London cinema in (say) would see a film; films would only be seen (unless exceptionally) in a cinema, where (unless exceptionally) nothing else remotely resembling a film would ever be seen. Here, the context (cinema) would, in effect, predetermine the identification (film), and any experienced cinema-goer would read that context correctly: there would be no room for ambiguity beforehand about what was to be seen, but only an overwhelming sense of expectation to steer the identification as soon the first familiar cue (probably the lights darkening) became apparent. As the qualification – ‘nothing remotely resembling’ – suggests, there is, in practice, likely to be an element of textual corroboration in the process; even so, it is still the context that is determinative and primary. In the example given, conversely, that context would have done nothing in itself to identify a specific genre. Generically, the film might have been a newsreel; or a documentary (if so, probably a wartime propaganda film); or a cartoon comedy; or a feature film – and, if a feature film, it might have been a western, a musical, a war film, a horror film, a love story, a historical romance, or whatever. All these and other genres of film would indeed be
¨ Erfahrung (= Jauss ) and elsewhere, Jauss sees challenges to, or subversions In his Asthetische of, existing ‘horizons’ as constitutive of artistic achievement. Comparable views are associated with a wide range of modern critics – from Leavis to Althusser and Eagleton (cf. Silk a: ) – but without specific reference to literary genre.
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available in only that one context – but at this level, plainly, context is not operative as a determinant. Determination of the specific genre, rather, would be effected on a textual basis, by identifiable characteristics of the film, albeit probably with help from ‘paratexts’ (trailers, titles, posters) and indeed reviews – but, with or without such help, individual viewers would be free to read the genre in different ways: ‘it’s a horror film’; ‘no, it’s really a love story’. On the textual level, the very existence of a genre is open to challenge and debate: ‘I don’t think a film can just be “a horror film”.’ Whereas the ideal ‘reader’ of context is an informed (experienced) contemporary, text presents its readers with different demands. By comparison with context, text is open, unspecific, indefinite; even in the given culture, it calls for interpretation, which will be more or less illuminating, rather than ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. Its ideal reader is unlikely to be a contemporary reader (who lacks comparative perspective). Notwithstanding characteristic advantages of the contemporary (such as relevant language skills and fuller access to closely related texts), there are no grounds for privileging any contemporary reading of text merely because it is contemporary – either at the time or (in a historicist spirit) subsequently. This applies to overall judgements about ‘what sort of text this really might be said to be’, just as much as it does to judgements of a more specific or technical kind about the workings of the text. Contextual identifications are a given within a given culture; textual ‘identifications’, along with all textual readings, are ours to decide, where ‘we’ means the ‘community’ of readers – a cross-cultural, cross-temporal community, whose members debate alternative readings and seek more persuasive ones. More specifically: within the given culture, operative contextual identifications are determinative and – unless there is some significant conflict with textual indicators – unchallengeable. If there are such conflicts, textual identification will probably take over but may or may not seem to be decisive. In most cases – across all periods and cultures, no doubt – there may be minor disagreement about text, but without any major conflict between text and context: either because there is no fully operative context (as there is no context to tell us when a film is a horror film); or because contextual expectation and textual reality are still substantially aligned. Where
See n. below. ‘Reader’ is used, here and hereafter, as cover term for reader, spectator, viewer, listener, etc. Cf. the classic principle announced by Eliot in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (in Eliot ): the literature of the past is altered by subsequent literature. Homer is read differently in the light of Virgil, Virgil in the light of Milton, and so on.
The Greek dramatic genres: theoretical perspectives
there is conflict, it will often take the disguised form of alternative textual readings: ‘this is x’ – ‘no, this is y’ (‘this is tragedy’ – ‘no, it’s romantic melodrama’). Meditations of the kind ‘does it really make sense to think of “horror film” as a separate genre?’ are characteristic only of cases where there is no contextual guidance at all – where, in fact, there has never been any institutionalized context. The situation is common in the contemporary West, but it also applies to antiquity too. Was ‘philosophy’ ever a genre? For instance: does it make sense (did it ever?) to read Heraclitus’ aphorisms, Plato’s dialogues, Aristotle’s treatises, as members of one genre? They share no common form; they might or might not be thought to share a common trajectory, as in effect Aristotle supposes in Book of Metaphysics; but no institutionalized context ever existed to interrelate them, and that fact leaves – even – Aristotle’s reading as no more than one possible reading. As a paradigm of contextual determination, I suggest the Greek epigram in the archaic age. Contextually, the epigram was unmistakable (words inscribed on – almost always – stone). Textually, it was variable. It was usually in verse (but sometimes in prose); when in verse, there was variation in the verse-type (most commonly, but not always, elegiac couplets); there was also variation in length, and indeed in function, where the chief distinction was between epitaphs and dedications, which might themselves be distinguishable by context and, if so, in effect constituted separate genres (with one broad genre, ‘epigram’, comprising two specific genres). As a paradigm of textually identifiable genres, with no contextual determination, I suggest the modern novel, or any of its more specific types – from science fiction to the Bildungsroman. The scope of ‘text’ and ‘context’ needs clarification. Consider the Greek dramatic genres. Here ‘context’ is the institutional festival(s) in its (their) theatrical location; ‘text’ is . . . everything else. It would make no sense to restrict ‘text’ to the words and associated features. The textual ‘repertoires’ of Attic and include their combination of actors and chorus, their music, their masks and acting styles, their movement and dancing styles – irrespective of the fact that all these features are lacking, or become purely notional, when the ‘text’ in the limited sense is read privately. Putting it another way, one might say that, with or
See below, pp. , . I first touched on the relation of ‘text’ and ‘context’ in connection with Greek drama in Silk : –. Some elements of that discussion recur in the present chapter, but various of its formulations now seem to me loose or otherwise inadequate. See below, p. .
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, ‘text’ subsumes all of Aristotle’s six ‘parts’ (": Poet. ): the visual and musical aspects (which Aristotle subsumes under the headings of 34 and " ), as well as the verbal or verbally realizable features (from (! to "5 ). The fact that 34 and " are more obviously performance-related than other parts is irrelevant. Performance (as the epigram example shows) is not the point: the point is the institutionalized occasion and location in which performance – if any – takes place. As the wartime cinema example indicates, contexts may be operative as determinants at one level, but not necessarily at the strictly generic level. Then again, they may not be operative as determinants at all. Take another modern example – in fact, another supra-generic modern example. In the modern Western world, paintings (usually originals) are commonly displayed, as prospective art objects, in institutionalized settings (art galleries or the like), where they are (commonly again) hung on walls. That is their context, which, for any viewer, guarantees their status as prospective art objects – though not actually their genre (the paintings might be portraits, abstracts, landscapes, still lifes; crucifixion scenes; memento mori paintings; and so on). At the same time, paintings (usually copies of originals) are often hung on walls in private houses. That again is a characteristic context, but this context is not operative as a determinant, partly because it is not a recognizably institutionalized context, but also because various other objects, which are not art objects, are also commonly hung on such walls (mirrors, for one). Then again, there are institutional contexts which are hardly operative as determinants, unless on levels too broad to matter. The London O (formerly the Millennium Dome) houses a wide variety of musical and other events; in ancient Greece the symposium hosted a range of genres, musical and literary (including lyric poems, declaimed passages from tragedy and competitive speeches). Contrast the definitive contexts of lyric poetry in archaic Greece. In the words of Claude Calame: ‘en Gr`ece archa¨ıque les genres po´etiques, quand ils ont une consistance, se d´efinissent surtout par rapport aux diff´erentes c´er´emonies qui en constituent r´eguli`erement l’occasion d’ex´ecution’. That is: stability in the genres characteristically depended on their special relation to the different ‘ceremonies’ which constituted their defining contexts. Confusingly, and confusedly, ‘ceremony’ is one of the terms Frow uses – as ‘metaphor’ – to expound his account of ‘everyday’ genres:
Pace a misstatement at Silk a: . As, respectively, at Ar. Nub. – and in Plato’s Symposium.
Calame : .
The Greek dramatic genres: theoretical perspectives
‘Any performance of a text . . . takes place within a broader “ceremonial” frame.’ The crucial issue of text and context may be usefully restated with reference to a productive but flawed account of genre by Alastair Fowler. One of Fowler’s important contributions to the debate is the concept of ‘generic repertoire’. Genres change over time, but every genre, sooner or later (especially later), acquires a repertoire of textual features, which, however, is not invariable, either collectively or in respect of any one feature. Thus: with early epigrams, the repertoire includes metre (usually elegiac couplets), length (short, more or less) and function (epitaphs or dedications). What we should not add to the list is what Fowler, faced with this example, probably would add: ‘and they are usually inscribed on stone’. The fact of inscription is not part of the textual repertoire: it is the context, which, by itself and even without any of the features listed, determines that the words in question constitute ‘an epigram’ in the first place. In later Greece, of course, that determinative context becomes – let us say – optional, though even then, it makes no sense to construe it as a variable part of the textual repertoire itself. At all events, later compositions which later Greeks (or we) identify as epigrams will have some or all of the repertoire, and are identified, not through the hitherto determinative context, but on the basis of that repertoire. Correspondingly, any similar texts from later ages – texts with the same repertoire (more or less) – may be plausibly identified as ‘epigrams’ by suitably informed readers from those or subsequent ages. On this basis, one identifies as ‘epigrams’ texts from Rome, from the Renaissance, from more recent centuries. The attempt by Fowler, among others, to downgrade such (‘less impressive’) relationships between cross-cultural similars to the status of ‘modes’ rather than genres – restricting the title of genre to similars within a single culture, irrespective of interpretation – is futile. In such cases: Identification, whether modal or generic, is a matter of interpretation, and we [as Fowler concedes] are to be the interpreters. But if so, it must also be for us, as part of our interpretative function, to decide which sets of similarities are in fact the more impressive sets. And it follows . . . that our interpretations, based on perceived likenesses and unlikenesses, are not, after all, limited to historically based [sc. single-culture] identifications and may, if need be, override them.
At this point my argument draws on Silk a: –, discussing A. Fowler . Silk a: . Silk a: –; A. Fowler : – and (‘probably’) .
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It follows that, for instance:
we might interpret as a genre . . . instances of the comedy of manners from Menander to Moli`ere (and beyond), on the grounds of their perceived likenesses. But if so, and by the same argument, we would find it difficult to interpret as a genre a group of instances drawn partly from the Menandrian comedy of manners and partly from the early comedies of Aristophanes, notwithstanding the fact that all these instances belong to what is, by comparison, a single culture and a single period, and share an unchallenged right to a single [sc. contextual] label, and notwithstanding the fact that Aristophanic comedy (or at any rate its earlier instances) itself seems to be, by any standards, a genre.
The lesson of this last example – /comedy – is threefold. First, the example represents a paradigm of the difference, and the potential divergence, between context and text. In textual terms, Aristophanes’ Old Comedy and Menander’s New are too distinct (their repertoires are too different) to be identified as ‘the same’ genre, even though, in contextual terms – as instances of , sharing the same festival context – they of course belong together. And whereas the knowledge of context is vested in the original culture, the judgement about text is the world’s. Secondly, the example makes it evident how necessary it is to confront these issues from a perspective wider than a historically delimited ‘single culture’. It is only from this wider perspective that the difference of repertoires between what later antiquity properly distinguishes as ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Comedy becomes fully unmistakable; in effect, the scholars of later antiquity who formulate the distinction already have the advantage of a wider perspective. Thirdly, we cannot assume a correspondence between context and text – quite the contrary – and should be ready to acknowledge any mismatch whenever it arises. And if this seems untidy, then so be it: art, like life, often is untidy. It will be apparent, then, why one must take issue with a recent response to Euripides’ ‘escape-tragedies’ by Matthew Wright. Referring to modern characterizations of plays such as Helen as ‘romantic tragedy’, ‘tragicomedy’, ‘melodrama’, Wright objects: The practice of attaching modern labels to ancient plays is a totally anachronistic and misleading exercise . . . [Every Athenian drama is] either a comedy, a tragedy or a satyr-play, and the context of the festival would have left the audience in no doubt as to what type of play they were watching.
Here Wright in effect equates text and context – elides text into context – seeking thereby to eliminate the interpretative procedures that are
Silk a: .
Cf. Puttenham, n. below.
Wright .
Wright : –.
The Greek dramatic genres: theoretical perspectives
necessarily involved in reading any text. He is right (in principle) about context, wrong (in principle) about text, which he assumes to be readable in ideal-contemporary (historicist) terms, to the exclusion of the noncontemporary’s ‘anachronistic’ terms. He adds: ‘Familiarity with the works of Shakespeare, Racine, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Freud (etc.) may make possible rich and fascinating discussion about comparative literature – but it can only hinder an understanding of Greek tragedies.’ Wright’s clarity here is as admirable as his correlation of text and context is untenable. Once again: no such correlation can ever be assumed as a matter of procedure, even though it may often be found in practice. It is up to readers of texts (of whom Wright is one) to debate whether it exists or not, in any given case, and to make use of any conceptual tools that seem to enhance the debate. Symptomatically, for all his distaste for ‘anachronism’, Wright repeatedly finds it necessary to reach for ‘anachronistic’ characterizations himself. His very label ‘escape-tragedies’ is hardly an ancient category. Then again, he raises the question of the presence of ‘humour’ in Greek tragedy: It would be wrong to suppose that humour in tragedy is a distraction or an aberration; in fact, humorous elements, far from inhibiting the ‘correct’ response to a tragedy (if there is such a thing) may enhance it. This is, in essence, the view taken by Seidensticker in his Palintonos Harmonia. First of all, Seidensticker makes a very important and necessary distinction between ‘comical’, i.e. humorous, elements (‘komische Elemente’) and elements belonging to the genre of comedy (‘Kom¨odienelemente’): his interest is with the former type. He believes that, in Helen and other plays, certain ‘comical’ elements or effects exist in a fruitful tension with this context, which enhances the tragic effect of the whole work.
Seidensticker’s distinction (between ‘komische Elemente’ and ‘Kom¨odienelemente’) is relevant to the next section of our discussion. Meanwhile, one notes that, though it is not entirely clear how specifically Wright means to invoke ‘humour’, this, in any event, is another modern category (not formulated or identified until, at the earliest, the end of the seventeenth century). The phenomena that the ‘label’ circumscribes are indeed observable in Greek literature, but ‘humour’ as a category has no counterpart in Greek (the phrase 6 is not comparable). Conversely, Wright’s scepticism about ‘correct’ responses
Wright : . And as his logic that ‘rich and fascinating discussions’ of multiple items somehow carry no implications for the items individually is remarkable. See p. below. Wright : –, referring to Seidensticker . In Poet. Aristotle famously connects 6 (‘the laughable’) with 6 .# (‘the shameful’: cf. Halliwell : –) and such negativity is never far away from the phrase. ‘Humour’ (though
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(to tragedy) is itself correct, and constitutes an implicit recognition that text points to debate. Contemporary-historicist readings of text have no claim to determinative status. No readings of text do, not even authorial readings, which are notoriously debatable. A classic instance is recorded by the Russian theatre-director Stanislavsky, concerning a first, private reading of Chekhov’s Three Sisters () in the presence of the playwright himself: ‘after the reading . . . our impressions . . . amazed Chekhov . . . He had written a . . . comedy and all of us had considered the play a tragedy and even wept over it.’ Here, we do not conclude: they got it wrong; Chekhov knew it was a comedy and told them so. We conclude: the play, textually, is elusive; it is not surprising that it provoked quite different readings, even from the word go; the author’s own reading and identification is interesting, important, revealing, but not, in itself, definitive. Like Three Sisters at its first play-reading, modern literature (and quintessentially the novel) is largely without contextual determination; hence modern readers become used to decision on a textual basis as a norm and as a substitute for contextual determination. But in pre-modern literature too, wherever contextual determination is lacking, decision on a textual basis will be a norm and a substitute likewise. In practice, most pre-modern literature in most periods exhibits generic coherence at the textual level (so that identification of a Roman epigram or a Renaissance pastoral is usually uncontroversial in the event). Nevertheless, in any literature, ancient or modern, the openness of text is an operative and
loosely invoked by many in recent decades) is quite different. It is a refined species of ‘the comic’, associable with the sympathetic emotions, and elucidated by such theorists as Jean Paul, Kierkegaard and Pirandello: Silk a: –, –, –. For an early discussion of ‘humour’, where the term can be seen in the process of its evolution from reference to a psychological type (as in the ‘four humours’) to something like ‘humour’ in the modern sense, see William Congreve’s letter to his fellow playwright John Dennis ( July ) in Congreve, Dennis et al. . Stanislavsky : . Cf. Puttenham : : ‘The election is the writers, the judgement is the worlds, as theirs to whom the reading apperteineth.’ In much literature (from the early modern period onwards), what Genette calls ‘paratexts’ – generic indicators, such as titles and prefaces, supplied with the work – play a significant role in this process, as ancillaries to the text. Genette’s discussion is of considerable interest, but I leave it out of account here for two reasons: (i) paratexts are usually authorial glosses on the text and, as such, subject to the non-determinative status of all authorial response; (ii) in the age of classical Greek drama, either such indicators hardly existed or (an additional complicating factor) their provenance and status are unclear (as with play titles – though here cf. Sommerstein : –). For drama, one might argue that the information provided at the Proagon was significant paratext, albeit (unusually) within the institutional context (the arrangements at the city Dionysia) – but our evidence for what information was actually provided there is so limited that it seems unprofitable to pursue the point. Usually: contrast e.g. the well-known case of Shakespeare’s ‘problem plays’ (Measure for Measure, etc.).
The Greek dramatic genres: theoretical perspectives
ongoing reality. It follows that it is our ‘right’, and even duty, to make, or consider, proposals on a textual basis. We can propose that in textual terms it makes more sense to think of (say) certain Euripidean as examples of ‘romantic melodrama’ than as examples of ‘tragedy’ – or vice versa. These plays are still : that is a contextual given; but from this contextual given no specifiable textual consequences follow. Where contextual realities exist, one can, in principle, establish them, by historical-scholarly reconstruction, after the event (just as a contemporary can, presumably without any need for reconstruction, at the time). In practice, though, most literary responses in any age will soon be faced with the need for textual interpretation (and debate), if only to confirm or qualify or challenge contextual realities – or else to provide a substitute for them. Even in a culture used to contextual determination, a thoughtful reader of text can be led to query it. Note the instructive example of Aristotle in the Poetics. In general, he assumes (though without any discussion) the determinative-contextual status of Greek , but at a crucial moment shifts (with a revealing sense of debate) towards a textual identification of the genre. In Poetics , commending 7 -plays that end ‘in adversity’, he defends Euripides against ‘those who criticize him’ for favouring such a pattern: ‘if handled correctly, tragedies of this kind show themselves to be the most tragic ( $ ) – and Euripides, even if he mishandles everything else, is nevertheless shown to be the most tragic ( $ ) of the poets’. Without ever saying so, Aristotle customarily assumes that all plays staged as are equally – but here he argues that some are ‘more tragic’ than others. His own argument about textual structures leads him to challenge the primary status of context: he takes one significant step away from towards ‘tragedy’. The three Attic dramatic genres are contextually determined by institutional arrangements at specific festivals. Two of them – tragedy and satyrplay – show striking textual stability (set repertoires); comedy (especially Old Comedy), less so: quite apart from the remarkable range of material and treatment in Aristophanes’ extant fifth-century plays, we must reckon with the – rather different – range represented by the lost work of Crates and Pherecrates. Once again, there is no necessary correlation between contextual stability (which all three genres have in equal measure) and textual stability.
‘Social comedy’ and love-plots: Silk a: . Confusion between the two is latent even in the otherwise admirable formula proposed by Calame : (see above, p. ): by ‘consistance’ does Calame mean textual stability, as well as (and ‘arising from’?) contextual stability? – or what?
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In a culture used to context as a determinative factor, it is characteristic that, when context is expected, without context the reader is liable to feel destabilized, even perplexed – but chiefly, or specifically, when textual indicators are themselves elusive. In principle, Attic drama assumes its institutional context, so that any drama introduced outside Athens (therefore without such a context) might prompt such perplexity. In practice, unless textual elusiveness is prominent (unless, in effect, the text is ‘unclassifiable’), the contextual awkwardness is ignored. Take Andromache, on which a scholiast informs us that the play ‘was not produced at Athens’. Without a second thought, we read the play, and likewise the ancients read the play, as ‘a tragedy’, even though our evidence is that contextually it was not actually a . We read it as such, first and foremost because textually (in terms of repertoire) it looks like the others (it is easy to ‘classify’) – though also, in such a case, because its author is known as ‘a tragedian’ (another habit of mind that we share with the ancients). Contrast the curious case of Aeschylus’ Women of Etna. The ancient Life of Aeschylus informs us that ‘Aeschylus went to Sicily at the time when Hiero was founding Etna, and staged Women of Etna’, while fragments of an ancient hypothesis, newly recovered, seem to indicate significant departures from the familiar tragic repertoire. Oliver Taplin’s comments are to the point: the hypothesis goes on to tell of four or five scene changes in a single play . . . Scholars have accepted this new information with remarkable equanimity. They say calmly that the peculiar circumstance of the first production will have produced peculiarities of scenic technique . . . [But] the play will have been . . . utterly unlike fifth-century tragedy as we know it.
This play, then, was both decontextualized and textually elusive (‘unclassifiable’ in repertoire): any ancient spectator familiar with Attic will have been puzzled, even if modern scholars are not. A more momentous, and more readily discussible case is Euripides’ Alcestis, produced in bc, ‘in place of’ a satyr-play. Here there is a clear
Scare-quotes around ‘classify’ and ‘classifiable’ (etc.) here and elsewhere, in deference to philosophical objections (by Derrida and others) to treating generic identification on a par with classification in botany and other sciences. 8 Eur. Andr. . We use the authorial name to help ‘classify’ the work: so, acutely, Foucault . Aristotle already assumes the use in Poet. , where ‘Homer’ represents epic, ‘Sophocles’ tragedy, ‘Aristophanes’ comedy. TrGF : (cf. ), POxy. , fr. (= TrGF : –). One implication is that the chorus might well have been different in each act. Taplin : –.
The Greek dramatic genres: theoretical perspectives
conflict between context (everyone, then and now, knows it should be a satyr-play, as fourth play in a tetralogy) and text (there are no satyrs . . . ). In addition, though, the play is textually elusive (in textual terms, clearly not a satyr-play, but not quite an ‘ordinary tragedy’). With Alcestis, in fact, we have another paradigm: an extant example of flagrant contextual contradiction matched by unmistakable textual elusiveness. The hermeneutic upshot is chaos, then and (this time, also) now: witness the Alexandrian hypothesis to the play – and, equally, modern characterizations. The ancient hypothesis, after informing us that Alcestis was the fourth play in its tetralogy, offers a series of awkward, and contradictory, identifications: The play has a more or less comic ending ( " . . . , 9 - ) . . . It is more or less satyric (2 $ ), in that it ends in happiness and joy out of line with the tragic ( 6 ). Like Orestes, Alcestis deviates from what is appropriate for a tragic composition ( / :
): it starts with misfortune, but ends in happiness, which is more like a comedy ( # ).
In Seidensticker offered a list of generic labels attached to the play in recent years: ‘Sie reichen u¨ ber das gesamte Spektrum dramatischer Genera, von “romantic comedy” und “near comedy” u¨ ber “tragisches Satyrspiel” und “Tragikom¨odie” bis zu “melodrama”, “inverted tragedy” und schliesslich “Tragodie”.’ More contextually minded, Dana Sutton and others call it ‘prosatyric’, whereas Wright (this time, in clear defiance of his own context-centred principles) decides on ‘tragedy’ himself. In such a case, one is reminded of the ongoing hermeneutic crisis associated with lay response to much modern art (‘is it . . . art?’), prefigured by Duchamp’s urinal (‘Fountain’), a cautionary tale if ever there was one. A
Seidensticker : . Hypothesis (a) in Diggle, OCT, vol. i. Sutton : –; Wright : . The compositions of the fourth-century writer Chaeremon may well present a comparable instance. It seems likely that these compositions were not always staged but ‘written to be read’, with or without staging. This is the apparent implication of Arist. Rh. .,
, ; (.e), and elsewhere (e.g. c) refers to Chaeremon as 6 , whereas the Suda calls the (presumably) same Chaeremon (s.v.) : ‘I taught the public how – within the confines of dramatic art-speech – to manage ordinary talk’, says ‘Euripides’, ‘by bringing things from ordinary life on stage’ (Ran. –). Likewise, 6 ! "# | "4 : ‘I put logic and debate into my compositions’ (Ran. –). Ordinary , and
. , and then sophistic and "4 : all these are felt to belong, not to other art, but to non-art. Hence the eventual pronouncement: Euripides has ‘done away with art’ altogether ( / 2 , Ran. ). Here one is reminded of Samuel Johnson’s reading of Shakespeare in the eighteenth century. Johnson feels able to excuse, and even celebrate, Shakespeare’s use of ‘tragic’ elements in comedy and ‘comic’ elements in tragedy – because that ‘only’ involves transference from one genre to another (‘That the mingled drama may convey all the instruction of tragedy or comedy cannot be denied’). Conversely, he castigates Shakespeare’s wordplay (apparently even in comedy) – perhaps partly because, in Johnson’s mind, what he dismisses as ‘idle conceits’ and ‘contemptible equivocations’ are associated with everyday fashionable conversation. Furthermore – with Euripides in mind – we might use the same line of thought to help shed light on a familiar conundrum of Aristophanic comedy itself. The intellectualizing experiment of Clouds fails to find popular favour – perhaps not surprisingly. But then why is Aristophanes so obsessed with this popular response that he both rewrites the play and (in that revised version and elsewhere) harangues his public about their lack of enthusiasm? The answer – perhaps – has a Craigian dimension. Given the affinity, at a deep level, between Aristophanes and Euripides – an affinity of which Aristophanes himself (at a deep level, again) is surely uncomfortably aware – could it be that the popular rejection of Clouds is partly due (on Aristophanes’own reckoning, even) to a perception of a sophistic presence (a presence, again, of non-art) in his own creative work? The irony, that the satire on ‘sophistic’ Socrates, shockingly violent as it is, should be seen as sophistic itself, goes without saying – but the very terms Aristophanes employs to identify his own intellectuality in the play could be said to suggest it: his ‘novel conceptions’ ( . . .
, Vesp.
There are traces of the ‘sophistry = non-art’ attitude in later antiquity, without reference to Euripides. Cf. e.g. 8 Soph. Aj. : ( - * . . Johnson : . Silk a: –. Johnson : .
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) and their almost explicitly sophistic ingenuity (. ." .9 -" - 1 | . . . 5 , Nub. –). The production of a - , 5 is, after all, the explicit object of Socratic-sophistic education (Nub. ). value Though modern theory is largely (and damagingly) silent on this issue, all discussion of, and all response to, genres is implicated in evaluation. In contextual terms, genres (even in transient popular culture) are not institutionalized unless they are achieving, or have achieved, something distinctive (something which a culture or class or age group, or a subset thereof, thinks is something worth institutionalizing). In textual terms, genres and their repertoires are invariably understood, not by samples or random instances, but by reference to what are, or what are taken to be, their leading representatives. Identification of the leading representatives – or, one could say, the construction of a genre’s ‘canon’ – inevitably changes over time. In any event, the principle operates cross-culturally: ‘epic’ is understood by reference to Homer, Virgil and Paradise Lost, not Apollonius, Lucan and Beowulf. It operates also within a single culture: we take Juvenal as the representative or defining figure of Roman satire, even if Juvenal is not always typical. Aristotle (Poet. ) likewise takes Homer as representative of epic, and Aristophanes as representative of comedy, even though on his own evidence most epic was unlike Homer (‘less unified’, Poet. ), and most comedy, by his day, unlike Aristophanes (more ‘typical’, Poet. ). Then again, labels for genres may be evaluative per se: positive (‘tragedy’), neutral (‘novel’), negative (‘soap-opera’). The labels ‘art’ and ‘literature’, conversely, are specifically and necessarily value-laden, as the concepts of ‘art proper’ and the ‘subliterary’ attest. Genres are in any case open to comparative valuation (as already by Aristotle). And any meaningful understanding of generic development depends on the model (which cannot be purely neutral) of growth, maturity and decline (as, variously, in Shklovsky and Craig). Here as elsewhere, value judgements are neither (in themselves) arbitrary nor detachable nor optional extras – but
On the paradoxical nature of Aristophanes’ claim of see Wright and Prauscello in this volume. See Silk a: . A positive is already implicit in Aristotle’s use of ‘tragic’ (cf. above, p. ). Aristotle’s valuation of tragedy over epic, in Poet. , is procedurally sound, however problematic in detail. In modern usage, ‘good of its kind’ is sometimes used as an argument-stopper, as if debate could go no further (‘from Duchamp onwards, conceptual art can only be judged by its own standards’). Here, Aristotle knew better.
The Greek dramatic genres: theoretical perspectives
rather organic corollaries of comparative (and, of course, more or less informed) readings of particular texts. It is worth pondering the evaluative implications of Shklovsky’s ‘junior’ genre principle, whereby a ‘junior’, ‘subliterary’, genre – especially one related to the canonical ‘branch’ – exercises a positive influence on it (helps to ‘renew’ it). This principle is not, on the face of it, an especially good match for the Greek dramatic genres. Though tragedy obviously had the most esteem (the ‘canonical’ branch), neither comedy nor satyr-play (the two ‘junior’ genres) could plausibly count as ‘subliterary’ (or not as we know them: their early fifth-century proto-forms would have been, precisely, sub-literary). And on any reckoning, fifth-century comedy is far more influenced by fifth-century tragedy than vice versa. Conversely, any influence of comedy on (for instance) Euripides is a perfect example of this principle in action: Euripides ‘renews’ his genre by drawing on elements from the ‘junior’ genre of comedy (as well as on elements from outside literature or art altogether). Interestingly, there is no apparent counterpart to this pattern with satyr-play, where the relationship appears entirely one-way, with satyr-play totally under tragic influence. In that sense, consideration of the Formalist principle serves again to draw attention to the anomaly of satyr-play within the miniature system of the dramatic genres. It is hard to get a theoretical handle on satyr-play and its relation to the canonical genre of tragedy. Satyr-play is not only contextually dependent on tragedy, and textually derivative on tragedy, but also, on all the extant evidence, hugely inferior to tragedy. Whatever wonderful profundities Nietzsche may have teased out as the deep meaning of satyrs per se, satyric drama as we know it offers no hint of any stylistic, formal, imaginative breakthroughs, no ‘satyric’ vision of life comparable to the tragic or comic visions, and yet no ‘entertainment value’ comparable to that offered by Old Comedy either. Satyr-play is quaint, limited, effectively parasitic on tragedy: in evaluative terms, entirely marginal. What is the synchronic rationale of its persisting contextual attachment to tragedy? – a low-value
Nietzsche : : ‘Der Satyr . . . war das Urbild des Menschen, der Ausdruck seiner h¨ochsten und st¨arksten Regungen, als begeisterter Schw¨armer, den die N¨ahe des Gottes entz¨uckt, als mitleidender Genosse, in dem sich das Leiden des Gottes wiederholt, als Weisheitsverk¨under aus der tiefsten Brust der Natur heraus, als Sinnbild der geschlechtlichen Allgewalt der Natur . . . Der Satyr war etwas Erhabenes und G¨ottliches’ (‘The satyr was . . . the archetype of man, the embodiment of his highest and most intense emotions, the ecstatic reveler enraptured by the proximity of his god, the sympathetic companion in whom the suffering of the god is repeated, one who proclaims wisdom from the very heart of nature, a symbol of the sexual omnipotence of nature . . . The satyr was something sublime and divine’, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Kaufmann : ). Cf. the clear implication of limited value, and perhaps of quaintness too, in Aristotle’s reference to 6 2 in Poet. .
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text embedded in a high-value context. It must be more than a sentimental antiquarian gesture (sometimes offered as a diachronic ‘explanation’). If the institutional pattern had involved three tragedies and one comedy, one would have understood. For the fifth century, actually, it is not clear in what sense satyr-play was valued. Though certain satyrographers (Pratinas, Aeschylus) were apparently esteemed within their own genre, there is only the presumption that the institutional attachment to tragedy was ‘popular’. Euripides, indeed, might have felt less emboldened to forgo a satyr-play in favour of the non-satyric Alcestis, if satyr-play really had been prized as such; and certainly there is no evidence of anyone ever experimenting the other way round (adding satyrs to a tragedy). One might see the limited survival of (‘even’?) fifth-century satyr-plays as symptomatic of a lack of perceived value: Cyclops, our only manuscript survival, only survives ‘accidentally’ as one of the alphabetical Euripidean set. But such arguments ex silentio are hardly satisfactory, and this one, in any case, presumably says more about post-classical taste than about fifth-century attitudes. In point of fact, any evidence for fifth- or fourth-century responses to satyr-play is extraordinarily – but revealingly? – limited. In particular, the genre is largely ignored by contemporary comedy; and as a genre it is entirely ignored in Aristotle’s Poetics, as also, generally, by Plato. The decisive evidence, if any were needed, of the inconsequentiality of satyr-play in general esteem is provided by Plato’s celebrated appeal to ‘satyrs’ in the closing part of Symposium (–, –). At a–b Alcibiades compares Socrates to ‘Silenus figures that sit in the craft shops’, then to ‘the satyr Marsyas’; and picking up these allusions at d, Socrates then refers to ‘this satyr-play of yours’, but at once adds ‘or Silenus play’ (6 2 2 ( ). Plato’s hero Socrates, that is, is represented (by Plato’s Alcibiades) as a satyr – but not as a satyr in a
‘Satyric drama was . . . formally instituted in the festival to preserve what was being lost from tragedy as it turned to non-Dionysiac stories’ (Seaford ). In the Hellenistic period there seems to have been a latter-day interest in satyr-plays – perhaps partly a learned interest in a marginal proto-Alexandrian genre (cf. Hor. Ars P. –); in any event, papyrus finds show that they were read in Egypt. In the late Renaissance, once again, Greek satyrplay has a limited influence on learned drama-theory (though hardly on practice), as a supposed paradigm for some tragicomic experiments, especially in Italy: see e.g. Battista Guarini’s Compendio della poesia tragicomica (). Cf. Dobrov , but conversely Bakola : –. In so far as it is ignored by comedy, is this also because satyr-play and comedy have no significant connection within the institutional system? The relation between satyr-play and tragedy, by contrast, is contextual (as well as textual). The formula offered by Pseudo-Demetrius (n. above) might seem to allow an inference about status (as a ‘junior’ genre) – though only for the Hellenistic period.
The Greek dramatic genres: theoretical perspectives
satyr-play, except for one passing joke by Socrates himself. And in the final paragraph of the dialogue (c–d) it is made entirely obvious that tragedy and comedy are the genres that are worth talking about (worth ‘thinking with’?), along with their putative relationship (supposedly oppositional, but supposedly reconcilable authorially). Agathon and Aristophanes, Plato’s narrator tells us, ‘were the only ones still awake . . . and Socrates was forcing them to agree’ – in the teeth of Greek experience, of course – ‘that one and the same man should be able to compose comedy and tragedy – that is, the qualified tragedian could be a comic writer as well’. One notes, in passing, the privileging of tragedy against the ‘junior’ genre of comedy: no doubt, it might be that the comic poet should be able to compose tragedy too, but Plato fails to say so. More particularly, the schematism of the situation is unmissable. Of all the speakers in the dialogue, the only three left awake are the comic poet Aristophanes (who, as the ‘junior’ partner, falls asleep first), the tragic poet Agathon (who, as the canonical-genre figure, outwakes Aristophanes, and falls asleep next) and Socrates himself (awake and o’ermastering all). This remarkable last paragraph is revealing – as much for what it does not say as for what it does. Although Plato’s schematic argument here could easily have accommodated – and schematically might have been enhanced by – appeal to the satyr-play, he ignores it. In particular, if satyrplay had suggested itself to him as a genre of the same order as tragedy or (even) comedy, he could easily have used the satyric motif to present satyr-play itself as a via media between the supposed opposites – or to present Socrates himself as a superior ‘satyric’ alternative to the tragic Agathon and the comic Aristophanes. But he says nothing of this. He even forgets to remember that Agathon, his tragedian, is also (presumably) a satyrographer himself. Plato’s tour de force, rather, serves to confirm the huge anomalousness of satyr-play within the generic system of classical Attic drama, albeit without explaining it. genre theory and the clouds In the light of these various observations, a final thought on Aristophanes’ Clouds is worth considering. The play, we know, was staged (that is,
This order corresponds also to the ascending order in which the symposiasts deliver their speeches: after the earlier speakers, we get Aristophanes, then Agathon, then Socrates. Which is roughly how Horace seems to think of satyr-play in the Ars Poetica (cf. Brink : –) and, in the wake of Horace, some Renaissance theorists (notably Guarini: n. above). Cf. Ar. Thesm. .
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presented institutionally, as a ) in bc. Aristophanes revised it, but the revised version was never produced. As such, it indeed lacks the contextual authority for calling it a , though (understandably) the writer continues to call it one in the revised parabasis (Nub. ). At line , however, in one of his many self-characterizations, he registers his claim to be a writer of ." , ‘new modes’. Could it be that Aristophanes (who never much enjoyed producing his own plays) failed to restage this version because, in the end, he was content for it to stay on the page (for all his talk of ‘spectators’, Nub. )? Now that – in fifth-century Athens – would be a , ." . . . Or, more specifically, that Aristophanes now (plausibly) identifies this play as a ‘new mode’ in the particular sense of a textual hybrid, a ‘serious comedy’, a tragicomedy (or comitragedy) even (hence the reference to a tragic ‘Electra’ at line )? – and that therefore he never quite feels comfortable with the thought of having the play restaged as (sc. in the normal institutional context of ) a ? His instinct, that is, like most people’s instinct, would be to have text and context aligned – at the opposite pole from Euripides (with Alcestis) or Duchamp (with his urinal), both of whom (though Duchamp more ostentatiously and abrasively) seek polemically to have the two clash. The issue of value is relevant here, as well. With his urinal, Duchamp is challenging not only the expectation of textual-contextual alignment, but the expectation of value attached to an art object. Both as a ‘readymade’ and as an emblem of taboo bodily functions, the urinal constitutes a direct challenge to all the traditional associations of high aspiration that characterize an art exhibition in a designated art space. With his Alcestis, Euripides, one thinks, is hardly doing that, but a rather different issue of value does arise in his case too. His play, in its context, is surprising and anomalous – but also affecting, charming, sophisticated, quite unlike any satyr-play we know of. Its artistic aspiration, simply, is higher, much higher. It too, therefore, is challenging an expectation of low-value inconsequentiality traditionally associated with the fourth, satyric slot. And Aristophanes, with his revised and unstaged Clouds: if we are right to suspect a reluctance, on his part, to stage the play in the expected komoidic context, we might also read that reluctance as an acknowledgement that this new hybrid (however problematic some of us judge it to be in the event) is too sophisticated, too high-value, for that context, after all.
Silk a: –. Hypothesis Nub. vi in the edition of Wilson, OCT. Silk a: –, ; cf. Wright : . On the interpretative problems raised by the revision of Clouds, see generally Rosen b and Biles : –. See Silk a: –, –.
The Greek dramatic genres: theoretical perspectives
‘I sowed some utterly new ideas,’ he muses in Wasps, ‘which you, my public, could not make sense of ’ – even though the sower of new ideas is ready to swear that ‘no one has ever heard better komoidic poetry’ (–): ) *6
, ? 6 ( , @ !@
) A . . . 3 2 [sc. B ] . . . , $ ) ) % o> " ) ( . he [sc. the poet] sowed a crop of brand-new ideas that you made fruitless by your failure to understand them clearly. And yet . . . he swears . . . that no one ever heard any comic verses better than that.
Clouds (or so its creator thinks) exceeded the expectation of value associated with its komoidic context – so why submit it to that context again? Is it, indeed, symptomatic that when Aristophanes sums up the value of Clouds in that last verbal flurry, he thinks of it not as a drama or (labels he uses freely elsewhere), not, then, as staged spectacle or dramatic production at all, but as komoidic verses? Theoretical considerations prompt these thoughts on the generic status of Clouds. I suggest that theoretical considerations (though not necessarily fashionable theoretical considerations) should also be kept in mind when considering the relations – any relations – between Attic and other genres, dramatic or otherwise, as also the relations between this artistic genre and elements that (in Craig’s words) are not felt to belong to ‘art proper’. The status of ‘art proper’ is certainly what Aristophanes supposes he has achieved with Clouds, above all else, whatever his contemporaries – his readers – may have made of it. And indeed, when it comes to reading text (one can agree with Aristophanes on this), contemporary response (like all response to text) may or may not seem plausible, but in any event carries no special authority.
Translation by Jeffrey Henderson (but with ‘verses’ for Henderson’s ‘poetry’). A standard fifth-century use of % : LSJ s.v. IVc (Herodotus, Aristophanes elsewhere, and others).
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Comedy and the Pompe Dionysian genre-crossing Eric Csapo
This chapter presents some new and some neglected evidence for the phallic processions of the Dionysian Pompe (Parade). The phallic choruses performed on the first official day of the Dionysia at Athens, only one or, at most, two days before the comic contests. If for no other reason, their place in this volume is justified by Aristotle’s notorious claim that: ‘comedy arose from those who led off the phallic rites’ (Poet. a–). But it is not just the diachronic relationship between these genres that interests me here. The new evidence I present is iconographic and, unlike the iconographic material normally adduced to support or contest the theory that comedy evolved from phallic choruses, this iconographic material is contemporary with comedy. My series of vase-paintings extends from the time of the formal introduction of comedy at the Athenian Dionysia to a date well within Aristotle’s lifetime. This permits me at least to pose the question of a synchronic relationship between phallic choruses and comedy. Aristotle may of course have been guessing and he may have been wrong. Neither of these possibilities really supports the claim of PickardCambridge and others that this ‘unhappily robs his statements of all historical value’. I should at once confess that I have trouble in understanding what ‘arose from’ and the like might mean, since comedy as we know it
I thank E. Bakola, L. Prauscello and M. Tel`o for inviting me to contribute this chapter. For assistance and advice I would like to thank J. R. Green, A. Hartwig, I. McPhee, M. C. Miller, S. Nervegna, E. G. D. Robinson, J. Rusten, P. Wilson and The Centre for Classical and Near Eastern Studies of Australia. For the provision of photographs and permissions I owe special thanks to E. Bakola, A. Christopoulou and the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, E. Kalinovskaya, V. Matveyev and the Hermitage Museum, A. Koronakis and C Ephoria, F. Lissarrague, S. Paspalas and the Australian Archaeological Institute at Athens and K. Schauenburg. This paper was prepared with the generous assistance of an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant. Further thanks to J. R. Green, who recently brought Masseria to my attention, but unfortunately too late for me to include it here in my discussion of the Pistoxenos Painter’s cup in Orvieto. On Aristotle’s claim and its historical and cultural value, see also Rosen in this volume. Pickard-Cambridge : –; cf. Scullion : .
Comedy and the Pompe: Dionysian genre-crossing
shows affinities with many genres (iambos, dithyramb, hymn, tragedy and satyr-play, to name just a few) and has manifestly absorbed the influence of all of them by the time we catch sight of it. Genres are not like biological forms, with only two parents, let alone like single-cell protozoa with only one, and they are rarely ‘born’ at any discrete or determinable moment. The historical value of Aristotle’s testimony lies elsewhere. It lies in the fact that a perceptive and intelligent eyewitness readily believed that comic and phallic choruses had something important in common and that this something probably included elements of spectacle as Aristotle’s statement is notably based on autopsy (that is why to his statement that ‘comedy arose from those who led off the phallic rites’ he adds ‘that even now they continue as a custom in many of our cities’). One can still doubt, of course, whether Aristotle’s belief was a good one, but one should not doubt that it was at least based on close knowledge of the genres and rational reflection. Cultural history, unlike biology, needs to account for beliefs, true or false. So Aristotle’s statement does have historical value even if we reject the literal truth of the statement. The material I present has implications for both diachronic and synchronic history of comedy’s relationship with a sub-literary and (despite Aristotle) generally overlooked performance genre. Considerations of space, however, dictate that the focus must be on the presentation and interpretation of a group of nine vase-paintings. I need to establish the claim that they do in fact relate to the phallic entertainments of the Dionysian Pompe: the few people who know these vase-paintings attribute them directly to comedy or to non-Greek cults. The first three sections of this chapter examine the iconographic evidence for phallic performers in the fifth century; the fourth clears away some misconceptions about the Pompe; it is only in the fifth that I can begin very briefly to sketch out how the phallic performances influenced the comic genre and in the sixth to ask how the comic genre impacted on the form of phallic performances. The treatment will be very far from exhaustive. It aims to open new territory: in it one will find underdeveloped and empty spaces.
For the influence of biology on Aristotle’s evolutionary theories, see in the first instance Depew . There is no question therefore of a ‘contradiction’ with Aristotle’s later statement that the early history of comedy is unknown (Poet. b). Despite Aristotle’s assurances, even as careful a scholar as Rusten (b: , ) writes that phallic processions ‘ceased with the introduction of comedies to the Dionysia’ and that comedy simply ‘replaced’ them. The possibility that Aristotle had historical evidence should not, however, be dismissed, and especially not in the case of dithyramb: see Csapo and Miller b: ; Depew : . See also Storey : –.
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Figure . Attic red-figure fragments by the Berlin Painter, c. bc
phallic choruses in fifth-century attic vase-painting Two small fragments of a water jar or wine jug were unearthed in the nineteenth-century excavations of the Athenian acropolis (Figure .).
Attic red-figure (hereafter rf ) fragments, Berlin Painter, c. bc, Athens, NM Acropolis Collection G , .; Beazley, ARV 2 .. The fragments were found in September and October of . The upper fragment measures . m., the lower . m. in height.
Comedy and the Pompe: Dionysian genre-crossing
The jar was manufactured close to the traditional date of the introduction of a competition for comedy at the Athenian Dionysia, bc. The fragments are by the Berlin Painter -– the Michelangelo of red figure. Yet, despite the artistry, and despite preserving tantalizing bits of one of the most extraordinary scenes in all Greek art, these particular fragments have never received more than a few rare and passing glances – and glances from scholars in various subdisciplines (iconography, religion, theatre history) that have lost contact over the years. The subject is not an easy one. Even the great John Beazley threw up his hands in genuine perplexity asking: ‘Who can this be?’ Beazley rarely missed a detail, but he did here. He should have asked ‘Who can these be?’ There are certainly two figures, not the single figure implied by Beazley’s question or the manner in which the fragments are joined and displayed in the National Museum in Athens. The upper fragment from the shoulder of the vase preserves the head of a man described as ‘ugly’ and ‘middle-aged’ in the literature. It is the unusual costume that is mainly responsible for the impression of deformity or dereliction. Most particularly, it is the large phallos that emerges from his forehead. The effect is reinforced by another phallos attached to his nose (only the stump is preserved – but what else could it have been?). A third phallos sits atop a lost stick, which he once carried in his lost right hand. Phallos-sticks of this sort characterize the entertainers who are the subject of this essay. Their hand-held phallos-sticks regularly descend to ground level. Since no trace of the stick appears on the lower fragment we can be sure that the surviving fragments were not originally in vertical alignment and that the restoration is wrong. Graef and Langlotz correctly assigned the lower fragment to a second man. The Berlin Painter, therefore, showed at least two men in shin-length tunics of an identical ivy-leaf pattern, a costume so unusual – to say nothing of the phalloi – that it permits no doubt that the artist intended to show part of a costumed chorus. We can guess that the second man wore a crown of ivy leaves like the first, perhaps also phalloi. He may even have carried a phallos-stick, but if so, he held it in a different position. The costume
Suda s.v. Chionides. The date receives some rough confirmation from restorations of the Dionysian Victors’ Lists (IG ii ) but it is certainly not beyond dispute. See most recently Olson : –. Beazley : no. , pl. .. Cf. the drawing in Hoffmann : fig. , or Frontisi-Ducroux : . Graef and Langlotz : ; Beazley : . Graef and Langlotz : no. and pl. . Cf. Herter : ; Herter a: –.
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is completed by the boots we find on the lower fragment. These boots are a recurrent feature among the phallos-stick bearers: they are laceless and unadorned except for a vertical seam that appears on the side. Some examples show that the upper boot can be turned down to form a cuff. Most scholars identify this boot with a type that writers of the fifth century bc called kothornoi: notoriously loose and formless (the same boot could be worn on either foot). Interestingly kothornoi later became the hallmark of tragic actors, but these later kothornoi look very different. In the first half of the fifth century we find boots of this type on contemporary symposiasts and on tragic choreuts. Kothornoi appear already to have developed strong Dionysian associations, even if not exclusively so. Possibly earlier in date than the Berlin Painter’s phallos-bearers is a solitary and generally obliterated figure from a cup attributed to the Antiphon Group (Figure .). No phallic protrusions emerge from the head. We see only a ribbon. The figure also carries a phallos-stick. The phallos-stick is covered with dots. Many of these dots when viewed closely have a heart shape or at least a triangular shape. We are evidently to think of the stick as entwined in ivy. Like the Berlin Painter’s phallos-bearers, this phallos-bearer also wears a long shin-length garment, but this one is fringed. One can make out a few dots above the fringe. On his feet the phallos-bearer wears the boots we have identified as kothornoi. They have the same vertical seam running up from the ankle as the Berlin Painter’s pair, but apparently with an added piece to reinforce the heel. A horizontal line just under the fringe of his garment shows that his boot is folded over into a cuff. A cup by the Pistoxenos Painter in Orvieto shows phallos-stick bearers of a similar stamp (Figure .). It is a decade or so later than the Berlin Painter’s chorus. Two men in the tondo (a) and four men on the side (b) sport kothornoi and shin-to-ankle-length garments with fringes. Long garments of this sort are mostly worn by women. The garments are belted. Belts too are almost exclusively used by women: these are particularly
Pickard-Cambridge : –; E. Simon : –. Genre scenes with tragic choreuts have the same simple undecorated form, unlaced, either cuffless or cuffed, and usually showing a vertical seam and narrow pointed toes, sometimes markedly curved up at the ends (see our Figures .–.): 1. Attic rf oinochoe fragments, Near Hermonax, c. bc, Agora P , MTS2 AV , Moore : no. ; Froning : fig. . 2. Attic rf bell krater, – bc, Ferrara T C, MTS2 AV and pl. a; Pickard-Cambridge : fig. . 3. Attic rf pelike, Phiale Painter, c. bc, Boston MFA .–, MTS2 AV , Pickard-Cambridge : fig. . Dionysus himself prefers the Thracian style embades: Carpenter : –, . Attic rf cup fragments, Antiphon Group, – bc, Louvre C; ARV 2 , . The fragments have never been published. F. Lissarrague very generously photographed the fragments at my request. Attic rf cup, Pistoxenos Painter, c. bc, Orvieto, Faina ; ARV 2 ., ; Addend.2 . The cup was excavated in the s from a cemetery just North of Orvieto: see G. K¨orte .
Comedy and the Pompe: Dionysian genre-crossing
Figure . Attic red-figure cup fragments, Antiphon Group, – bc
emphasized by overfolds with fringes at the waist. Two of the men are pipers and they wear a type of hat elsewhere associated with rustics. The pipers also have sleeves. The other four men are evidently members of the chorus. Their heads are bald and tied with ribbons. All sport scruffy beards. Their garments are spotted. Even in the drawing, which was executed with a very different interpretation in mind, the spots frequently reveal the distinctive heart shape of ivy leaves. A crown of ivy leaves is very clear on the hat of the piper in the tondo (a). The phallos-sticks held by four of
See Pipili : –.
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A
B
Figure .a and b Attic red-figure cup, Pistoxenos Painter, c. bc
the men are also very clearly meant to be seen as wrapped in ivy. The ivy theme is picked up by the decoration under the handles. Sadly none of these chorusmen has phalloi emerging from his head, but the phallic theme is nonetheless very prominent: the phallic tip of the sticks is emphasized
Comedy and the Pompe: Dionysian genre-crossing
A
B
Figure .a and b Attic red-figure cup, Sabouroff Painter, c. bc.
with added red and the artist has been very careful to outline the distinctive eye-spots that often characterize Greek phalloi. A cup by the Sabouroff Painter shows a chorus in much the same costume as the Pistoxenos Painter’s chorus (Figure .). It is accompanied by the phallos-stick on the less well-preserved side (far right of b, before
Attic rf cup, Sabouroff Painter, c. bc, Malibu .AE.; ARV 2 , ; Kavvadias : –, no. , pls. –.
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handle). The stick has the characteristic eye and is decorated not with ivy but with a ribbon. The chorus have nearly bald heads bound with red ribbons and shaggy beards like those of the Pistoxenos Painter (Figure .). The choreuts also have long tresses dangling from the sides and back of their heads. In this case, the details of the relative size of the heads, the wide staring eyes, stiff gaping mouths and a general similarity of features suggest the possibility of a uniform mask. The chorus wear ankle-length garments with effeminate overfolds, like the Pistoxenos Painter’s chorus, but this time the garments are still more effeminate, with overfolds under the breasts and with the addition of elaborate pleats. The choreuts wear kothornoi, like the Pistoxenos Painter’s chorus, but this time with the more stylishly upturned toes, which may underscore their effeminacy. They are more obviously dancing than any of their colleagues. Only the absence of ivy in the costume makes this chorus unlike other phallos-stick bearers, but ivy at least is present on the pot: ivy-leaf decoration appears prominently above the handles. Probably related to our phallos-stick bearers is a figure on a lekythos in Athens who marches with a vigorous step (Figure .). His garment is sleeved like those of the Pistoxenos Painter’s chorus and covered with tadpole-like blobs with descending tails: a few of them attain the heart shapes of ivy leaves that were evidently intended, even if quickly and carelessly applied. One can make out the horizontal lines above the figure’s hip to show that his garment has a belt or possibly a hem. This is female fashion if not quite the feminine overfolds of the Pistoxenos and Sabouroff Painters’ choruses. He wears boots. This is clear from the folded cuff visible on the right below his knee. His head suggests a mask (or at least the elaborate disguise) of a wild man. The nose is pointy and his ears are satyrlike. He also has a very large extra eye on his forehead. If he is supposed to be a Cyclops, his eye is far off centre. Nothing impels us to determine his species: he is a creature of fantasy, not nature. The stringy hair reinforces the general impression that whatever he is meant to be, it is of a low order of civilization. In his right hand he holds a large knife in a very aggressive
This less well-preserved side, generally ‘B’, was probably intended as the principal decoration: see Kavvadias : . See Simon : . There is a suggestion of curvature of this sort on the boots of Figures . and . but nothing explicit as here and on the choral genre scenes. Attic rf lekythos, c. bc, found in Athens in and currently in the storerooms of Gamma Ephoria (inv. no. A). The vase was found in ‘Grave VIII’ excavated near Veikou and Aglaurou Streets in Koukaki (south of Philopappos Hill). See Alexandri : and pl. . J. R. Green first brought this vase to my attention.
Comedy and the Pompe: Dionysian genre-crossing
Figure . Attic red-figure lekythos, c. bc
posture. The shape of the knife and the way he holds it is unparalleled. The painter clearly wished to emphasize the superfluous extension of the
Two curving lines rise up from the back and appear to extend beyond the neckline. They do not appear to be part of the knife.
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handle beyond the grip, because he interrupts the otherwise fairly tidy upper frieze in order to show it. The handle curves abruptly upwards. It appears likely that a phallos is intended. In his left hand he holds the remnant of a torch (one can see a vertical line separating two bits of wood and horizontal lines binding them together). It curves slightly to the right above the point where he grasps it (not visible in the photograph). The top is lost. One should perhaps infer that the painter means to incorporate the torch in the wildman’s gesture of menace towards his imaginary victim. phallic choruses and the dionysia So who are these men? The Pistoxenos Painter’s cup is the only one that has received much comment. The Beazley Archive calls this group ‘bearded barbarians’, ‘Northerners’ and ‘Agathyrsoi’. The line of interpretation goes back to nineteenth-century German scholarship and its conviction that Greeks do not dress or behave in this way. Gustav K¨orte thought them Asiatic and probably Lydian. Friedrich Hauser seized upon Herodotus’ description of the Argippaioi, a tribe of Scythian mountain dwellers, who, he says, ‘from birth are all bald, snub-nosed and long-bearded, both males and females’. From this promising beginning Hauser gleaned passages from Herodotus’ description of completely different tribes and races of people, concluding that our dancers wore beaver-pelts fringed with human scalps, and deciding with curious precision that the Pistoxenos Painter had drawn Agathyrsoi, a people about whom the only relevant information we have is Herodotus’ claim that they ‘live in luxury and wear lots of gold’. Some of these ornaments are visible, he thought, on the pot and highlighted in added red. They were obviously difficult to interpret: the man right of centre on Figure .b is said to wear a phiale around his neck. Hauser thought the phiale an obscure allusion to Heracles’ visit to Scythia. Near the beginning of his account of Scythia, Herodotus records that the Pontic Greeks claimed that Heracles came to Scythia, had intercourse with the mistress of the country, who was half-woman and half-snake, and left her pregnant with triplets, giving instructions that any son of his who proved able to string his bow and put on his belt remain in Scythia and that any who could not should be banished. Only the youngest, named
The prevailing assumption at the time was that Dionysus himself was foreign and Asiatic: see Isler-Ker´enyi : –. Hauser in Hartwig : – quoting Hdt. .. G. K¨orte : . On the Scythian snake-goddess, see Ustinova . Hdt. ..
Comedy and the Pompe: Dionysian genre-crossing
Scythes, succeeded. He and his line became the kings of Scythia, ‘and to this day Scythians carry bowls (phialai) hanging from their belts’. Even in the matter of the gold ornaments Hauser manhandles his only witness. The myth does not explain why the Agathyrsoi wear phialai but clearly indicates that they do not. The banished sons of Heracles are called Agathyrsos and Gelonos. It is a misrepresentation to call Scythes, Agathyrsos and Gelonos ‘die drei Stammv¨ater der Skythen’, as does Hauser, let alone ‘die drei Stammesv¨ater der Agathyrsen’ as Bulle calls them. The tale clearly marks Scythes alone as the ancestor of the Scythians. It functions to establish the Scythians’ exclusive right to their territory. For the purpose of the tale Agathyrsos and Gelonos serve as the ancestors of non-Scythians: they are as Corcella describes them ‘eponyms of other peoples of the region’; indeed most modern scholars are inclined to regard the Agathyrsoi as Thracians (Herodotus himself says that ‘their ways most resemble the Thracians’). But it would be a mistake to give the impression that the value of the analysis depends on the precise designation of the tribe to which our chorus of ‘Scythians’ belong. Although archaeology offers no confirmation that Scythians decorated their persons with bowls, the testimony may well be true. But Hauser’s evidence is irrelevant no matter which Scythians you choose. Herodotus reports that Scythians wear phialai ‘hanging from their belts’ (zosteres is used of girdles that go around the waist), not strung around their necks as we see them on Figure .b. Far more disturbing is the fact that not a single item of clothing in any way resembles anything that archaeology or iconography can show was ever worn by an ancient Scythian or Thracian. Despite the fact that it had very little going for it, Hauser’s theory was accepted as ‘schlagend’ and ‘geistvoll’ by Bulle and as ‘very probable’ by Beazley, who extended the barbarian label to our other dancers by the Berlin Painter, the Sabouroff Painter and the painter belonging to the Antiphon Group; current iconographers still treat the connection with Agathyrsoi as
Hauser in Hartwig : ; Bulle : . Hdt. .–. See Corcella : on Hdt. ... Hdt. .. Corcella : , . The standard modern treatments are Tsiafakis and Raeck . Hauser’s methodology required no real knowledge of Scythian material culture. He was happy to draw upon a generic stereotype of the savage, in what would now seem a parody of the more outrageous trends in nineteenth-century comparative anthropology: the fringes on the garments of the chorus from Orvieto, Hauser admits, are too string-like for furs or beaver pelts, so he did not hesitate to argue from the customs of North American Indians that they must be human scalps: ‘die Angabe, dass die Kahlk¨opfe ihren besiegten Feinden das Fell vom Kopfe ziehen, [hat] eine innere Warscheinlichkeit f¨ur sich’ (Hauser in Hartwig : ).
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established fact. For Hauser and Bulle the only real question was how the painter came to acquire ‘such a detailed knowledge of Scythian costume and customs’: Hauser thought he must have been a Scythian slave trained as an artist in Athens; Bulle thought that the requisite knowledge for a portrait of ‘such ethnographic precision’ could ‘scarcely be credited to an artisan of the Athenian potters’ quarter’ and must therefore have been copied from a drama based on the antics of the Agathyrsoi (as if we might not just as easily ask how a poet came to portray a distant central Asian tribe with ‘such ethnographic precision’). Hauser’s far-fetched theory may not deserve a formal refutation. In light of its reception, unfortunately, a refutation is required. If not to advertise their barbarism, why would choruses prance about in unusual costumes, carrying phallos-sticks and wearing masks or otherwise distorting their facial features through the application of extraneous penises? Had it not been for Hauser, the answer would have been obvious. They do this to advertise their connection with Dionysus. Ironically, the Dionysian context is most urged by the very features that led Hauser to conclude that the Pistoxenos painter drew Scythians. Hauser took the spots on the garments of the dancers in Orvieto as indications of shagginess and – with the help of Herodotus on Scythians – decided that they wore beaver fur. On closer inspection the spots indicate varying degrees of care in attempts to render the shape of ivy leaves. Ivy is in fact very much on the menu. Some of our performers wear ivy wreaths (Figures ., .), others red ribbons. Ivy is entwined around most of the phallos-sticks (Figures .–.). And ivy leaves appear in the marginal decoration of the scenes (Figures .–.). All of this should have indicated that the images have nothing to do with Scythia and everything to do with Dionysian art and cult. Ivy is of course ubiquitous almost anywhere where Dionysus is present. It is especially worn at the Dionysia. Sacred law required all inhabitants of Attica to garland their heads during the Dionysia. This was true even outside Athens: a Euboean decree of / bc, for example, requires everyone to wear ivy garlands during the Pompe of the Dionysia, with a free distribution to all residents and a mandatory rental fee for visitors. The pendants around the necks of the Orvieto entertainers are very unlikely to be phialai. On Hartwig’s line drawing, Figure .b, the ghostly half-circle around the neck of the second dancer from the right, with its
Bulle : – (quotation ); Beazley at ARV 2 p. (‘Addenda I’); Kavvadias : –. Blech : –; Bierl : . Hauser in Hartwig : ; Bulle : . IG xii , . Sacred laws in Dem. Meid. –; Philoch. FGrH F .
Comedy and the Pompe: Dionysian genre-crossing
phiale-like central knob and the suggestion of metalware lobes, is a pretty clear instance in which Hauser’s interpretation guided Hartwig’s hand in rendering what was obviously a faint and much-damaged image (no photograph of the side of the cup has ever been published). Originally, the neck ornament probably resembled that of the man at the lower left of Figure .b, which does not at all resemble the shape of a phiale. Both ornaments are coloured with added red, not because they represent the gold frippery of the decadent Agathyrsoi, but because the colour and shape of the ornaments echo the phalloi on the tips of the choruses’ phallos-sticks (which are also marked with added red). The phalloi emerging from the head and nose of the Berlin Painter’s entertainer may be iconographically unique, but ancient sources, albeit late, consistently mention the neck, in addition to the loins, as a common place to tie on a phallos to celebrate the Dionysia. Dionysian processions were rife with phallic imagery: some even came to be known by the term periphallia meaning something like ‘phalloi all over the place’. Finally, the bald heads and long beards have a simpler explanation than the putative effects of inbreeding in the remote mountain communities of Central Asia. Baldness and long beards not only are a familiar feature of comic ugliness but follow a pattern well known from the depiction of phallic and Dionysian creatures. Baldness and shaggy beards are above all characteristic of satyrs. The many minor phallic deities who came to be connected with Dionysus are also, according to Herter, characterized by baldness and wedge beards. The reasons require no explanation. Ancient physiognomists, who habitually deduce human character on the analogy of natural forms (in this case assimilating heads and genitals), consistently identify baldness and shaggy beards as signs of lewdness and erotic hyperactivity. The proof that our choruses are connected to Dionysus, however, is their use of phallos-sticks. In Greek art such phallos-sticks otherwise appear only in the hands of the mythical counterparts of our Dionysiac dancers:
Suda s.v. -
(- ), cf. Suda s.v. .!2- ( ); Etym. magn. p. Kallierges; [Nonnus], Or. . and .; Apostol. .. See further Herter : and nn. – below on the martyrdom of Saint Timotheus. I am not convinced that the Attic black-figure (hereafter bf ) fragment, found at Segesta and attributed to Sophilos, shows a man wearing a hat with phalloi (Fuchs and Tusa : fig. ; cf. Blech : n. ; Bierl : n. ). Hesych. s.v. - ( ); Herter a: ; Herter : . Herter : , cf. . Arist. Hist. an. a–b, Gen. an. b; Comm. in Arist. Graeca .. (Johannes Philoponus); Della Corte : . Baldness and wedge-beards become the distinguishing characteristics of pimps in New Comedy (who also have phallic names and display phallic behaviour): Poll. .; MNC 3 vol. i.–.
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komasts, satyrs and at least once Dionysus himself. Some of the satyrs sporting phallos-sticks have already been closely associated with Dionysian processions, in particular a red-figured amphora by the Flying Angel Painter: on one side we see a satyr holding a phallos-stick and on the other a satyr father holds his son up on his shoulder as if to watch the parade (whence the name ‘Flying Angel’). Otherwise satyrs consistently use phallos-sticks as a weapon, either in the hunt or in battle. Though essentially mythical fantasy, we will see (below) that the visual simile that turns the phallos-stick into an aggressive weapon is also very much rooted in ritual. The link between phallos-sticks of this sort and Dionysus and his retinue is in Greek iconography virtually exclusive. It was the presence of the phallos-stick that urged Bulle to suppose that we must have a Dionysian scene, but he contented himself with the observation that the Agathyrsoi must also have worshipped Dionysus and that the image was in any case mediated by drama. Since Bulle’s time, more judicious scholars have interpreted the Dionysian quality of our phallic choruses in one of two ways: as performers in comedy and as choral entertainers belonging to Dionysian processions.
Lissarrague : : ‘It should be noted that the phallos as weapon is the specific attribute of satyrs. The maenads of course do not have such weapons, nor does Dionysus.’ Dionysus: he does appear once with the phallos-stick on a now largely forgotten fragment of a late bf hydria, once Rhusopoulos Collection, Athens. The fragment known only from a murky drawing in Vorberg : may be a processional scene (there are curving lines that hint at the Dionysian ship-cart). Komast: Corinthian fragment of unknown vessel shape, early sixth century bc?, Corinth (KP ); Seeberg : no. bis; Stillwell and Benson : no. , pl. . For the interpretation of the fragment, cf. the Middle Corinthian phiale, Athens NM , illustrated in Smith : fig. , at twelve o’clock. Satyrs: Attic rf cup from Vulci, Painter of Berlin , once Rome market, ARV 2 , ; Attic rf volute krater, Nikosthenes Painter, c. bc, Munich , ARV 2 , ; Attic rf amphora, Flying Angel Painter, Boston MFA ., ARV 2 , , Addenda2 ; Attic rf skyphos, Brygos Painter, c. bc, Thebes Museum, ARV 2 , ; fragmentary rf cup, Foundry Painter, ARV 2 , ; Attic rf cup-skyphos from Capua, Near the Painter of Bologna , – bc, Brussels, Biblioth`eque Royale , ARV 2 . The phallos-sticks used by satyrs resemble those used by phallic dancers except in so far as the bottom end of the stick is consistently shaped like testicles. A rf pelike fragment (Louvre G , Pan Painter, ARV 2 , ) shows a phallos-stick beside a man catching a boar or pig. The man is bald on top with shaggy sides and beard and, though the ears are not obviously those of a satyr, his appearance and primitive hunting techniques make it likely that assimilation to a satyr is intended (the other side shows a young man catching a deer with his bare hands): see Peirce : . Another possible exception is the phallos-stick held by Pothos in the sculpture in Samothrace by Scopas, if the reconstruction by Bulle is correct. But the trefoil-shaped appendages on either end of the ‘phallos-stick’ on the gem in Berlin, upon which the reconstruction ultimately depends, make it unlike any other. The trefoil shape brings it much closer to sceptre iconography, though it would still be unusual for a sceptre to have trefoil-like tips on both ends. See Herter a: and esp. Hedreen : . The amphora by the Flying Angel Painter (see previous note) was produced c. bc. This is true of the Corinthian komast as well: for the link with Dionysus, see esp. Csapo and Miller b: –. Bulle : .
Comedy and the Pompe: Dionysian genre-crossing
Erika Simon first ascribed the Sabouroff Painter’s chorus (Figure .a–b) to a comedy with a chorus of old men dressed up as women, citing for example Cratinus’ Effeminates (Malthakoi). Of all the phallos-stick bearers we have examined, the Sabouroff Painter’s chorus have the best credentials for illustrating a comic chorus: they may indeed wear masks (as may our wildman in Figure .), and if the old men are disguised as women, there may be a reason for de-emphasizing the typical comic somation with its padded bellies and buttocks, and its bodytights. Transvestism could also excuse the shin-length garments and boots that would otherwise be unexpected and unparalleled for comic choreuts (and rare for comic actors). Three problems remain, however, for any identification of the Sabouroff Painter’s vase as a comic chorus. In the iconography comic choruses otherwise dance with a uniform step and this must have been standard practice in the theatre as well. Moreover, a comic chorus of transvestites has no obvious reason to dance with a phallos-stick unless they are cultic transvestites (but if they are, then what is left to support the notion that they are also comic?). Most importantly the closest parallels in time, style, costume and movement are the choruses of the Berlin Painter, Antiphon Group and Pistoxenos Painter (Figures .–.). None of these appears to wear a mask. Two (Figures .– .) are certainly not transvestites and so have no excuse for not wearing or de-emphasizing normal comic padding. Most importantly, even though the jury is still out on whether comic choreuts normally wear the phallos, these choruses do, and do so in a way that no comic actor or choreut ever does: they wear them only in unnatural places and they wear them erect, quite unlike the standard limp and unimaginatively located phalloi of comedy. The unique costumes and above all the phallos-sticks (and other phallic paraphernalia) were rightly perceived by a tiny minority of scholars to be key to the identity of two of the vase-paintings of our group. Herter first recognized that the Berlin Painter’s chorus (Figure .) are entertainers at a Dionysiac procession: he specifically identified them as a kind of entertainer called ‘ithyphalloi’. Green first recognized that the effeminate
E. Simon : . Kavvadias’ suggestion that the chorus might belong to satyr-play arises from the mistaken belief that satyr-play could have other than a satyr chorus (: ). For other examples of effeminate choruses in comedy, see Bakola : –. Which is why Green excluded this vase from his list of early comic choruses (: n. ). Herter a: –; Herter : ; cf. Blech : n. , who compares their headgear with Semos’ description of phallophoroi; and Hoffmann : , who refers them to the Anthesteria. Although Herter cited the Pistoxenos Painter’s vase in this context, he nonetheless accepted their identification as ‘Agathyrsoi’ (a: ).
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chorus of the Sabouroff Painter had much in common with the description of the costume of the ithyphalloi described by Semos of Delos (c. bc). Semos evidently contextualized his work On Paeans with a general discussion of processional choruses, among them choruses from Dionysian parades. The description of the ithyphalloi is the fullest example. The ithyphalloi ‘wear the masks of drunken men, are garlanded and have flowery [or “ornate”] sleeves. They wear whitish chitons and gird them with a tarantinon that reaches down to their ankles.’ The effect of effeminacy is in this case evidently desired: the Suda adds that the ithyphalloi ‘are guardians of Dionysus and accompany the phallos, wearing women’s clothing’; from Synesius we learn that the ithyphalloi also wore their hair in tresses. The descriptions of the figures on our vase-paintings are by no means precise, but they come interestingly close in the case of the Pistoxenos and Sabouroff Painters’ choruses. Both choruses seem to wear girded effeminate ankle-length robes and one of them (the Sabouroff Painter’s) certainly gives a strong suggestion of masks. More problematic is the fact that both choruses wear ribbons rather than garlands, that only the Sabouroff Painter’s choreuts have tresses, that only the Pistoxenos Painter’s auletes wears sleeves, and that these sleeves are not exactly ‘flowery’, but have ivy patterns. Semos’ description of the costume of the ithyphalloi actually coincides with only half the details we see in the Pistoxenos and Sabouroff Painters’ choreuts. Against these inaccuracies we must reckon that Semos lived some two hundred and fifty years after the production of our vases and in an age when literary science displayed a compulsion for over-nice and often arbitrary genre-distinctions. More important is the fact that, from Semos’ description of the ithyphalloi’s song, it is clear that the chorus carried a phallos or phalloi of some sort. In the archaic and classical periods genres were still embedded in specific performance occasions and practices and it is to these that we must look if we are to understand the identity and function of the phallic dancers depicted in late archaic and early classical vase-paintings.
Green : n. . Semos FGrH F (Athen. a); Suda s.vv. - - ( ), .!2- ( ), 8 ( ); Phot. Lexicon s.v. .!2- ( .); Hesych. s.v. .!2- ( ); Syn. Calvitii encomium . (= Suda s.v. /2# (/ )). Thorough discussion of Semos’ fragment in Bierl : –. We do not know what a tarantinon is. It is also worn by the Spartan dancers called Gypones (Poll. .), where the material is described as ‘diaphanous’. See Bierl : n. , with further literature. Semos FGrH F : ‘Make way, open wide for the god. He wishes to march through your midst upright and bursting.’
Comedy and the Pompe: Dionysian genre-crossing
ithyphalloi , phallophoroi and others In Attica phallic choruses are only attested, whether in literary or epigraphic sources, for the Pompe of the Dionysia in the city or in the demes. We hear from our Hellenistic sources, principally Semos of Delos, of various kinds of phallic performers (autokabdaloi, phallophoroi, ithyphalloi and phalloidoi), but classical sources only certainly attest the ithyphalloi as a distinct genre or subgenre of phallic performers. It is, however, likely that classical Athenians would have recognized at least two types of phallic chorus, even if they did not have distinct labels. I infer this not from different elements of costume (I doubt very much that costumes were ever as regular as Semos implies), but from the two very different types of phalloi that were processed at the Dionysia and the very different kinds of choral performance they presuppose. The Pompe of the Dionysia included very large phallic ‘floats’ that had to be carried by choruses of men or carried on wagons. Inscriptions and iconography make it clear that Athenian colonies (and subject states) were obliged to contribute gigantic phalloi of this sort, doubtless along with
Herter a: –; Pickard-Cambridge : , –, , ; R. Parker : –. The one apparent exception is ithyphalloi singing a hymn for Demetrius the Besieger in or bc on the occasion of his ‘epiphany’ in Athens at the time of the procession to Eleusis (Democh. FGrH F ; Duris FGrH F ). But this is probably only an apparent exception. The ithyphalloi were incorporated into the Eleusinian procession for this particular occasion in order to honour Demetrius (who identified himself with Dionysus and because he identified himself with Dionysus). See Csapo : – citing earlier literature. Knowledge of performers known as ‘ithyphalloi’ is indicated by Cratin. fr. from his Archilochuses produced sometime between and bc (Luppe ). Youth gangs named after the phallic performers are attested by Dem. In Conon. , , , which cannot be precisely dated but was most likely delivered in the s (Carey : ). Ithyphalloi are certainly described by Hyp. fr. Jensen. ‘Phallophoroi’ may, however, also be pre-Hellenistic: see below, n. . Rotstein denies that the autokabdaloi are phallic on the grounds that both Semos and Sosibius list various forms of entertainers in order to draw strict distinctions and infers that, because phallophoroi and ithyphalloi did, autokabdaloi and iamboi ‘wore no mask, mocked no one in the audience, carried no phalloi ’ (: ). The lists of Semos and Sosibios represent varieties of Dionysian entertainers, often only regional variants, and invite one to see them as overlapping, not mutually exclusive categories. The principal evidence is the cup in Florence, below with n. . Note also the intriguing [D5 ]2 at line of the lamentably fragmentary inscription IG ii which deals with the Pompe of the Dionysia including the phallic procession ( -[ ] at line is an inevitable supplement). See Cole : and Wilson : . There are a few non-Attic parallels or near parallels to the phallic float: a rf calyx krater argued to be from Boeotia (Brommer ; Auffarth : , figs. –); the bf ‘Clazomenian’ amphora fragments in the Ashmolean museum, Oxford . (Boardman ; Csapo : –, details pl. ). As reconstructed by Boardman it is a Dionysiac ship with phallic attributes rather than a phallos. It would, however, be easy to reconstruct the image as a phallos with naval attributes. It is carried in the same manner as the contemporary phallic ‘floats’ on the Florence cup. The giant phallus in Ptolemy’s parade was carried on a wagon (Kallixeinos in Athen. e). Other evidence for phallos-wagons from Hellenistic Delos and Edessa in Csapo : .
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choruses of men to carry them, to the Pompe of the Athenian Dionysia. Images of this kind of gigantic phallos survive on an Athenian black-figured cup of about bc, now in Florence. On the cup we see two choruses of six and seven men (probably meant to represent pairs, one man on either side of a phallos, so twelve to fourteen men), visibly bending under the weight of enormous phallos-poles (in fact they are complex double poles ridden by sculpted satyrs and komasts). Carrying floats of this size is heavy work and allows little freedom of movement – certainly no independent movement – and little breath for more than a periodic refrain. Indeed the choreuts need close co-ordination if the phallos-pole is to remain upright. It is for this reason that they are furnished with a leader, or exarchos, who directs their movements and takes up the principal burden of the song. In the miniature phallic procession staged in Aristophanes’ Acharnians, a pair of slaves carry the phallos-pole (presumably a simplified and much smaller version of the sort of thing we see on the cup in Florence). Their exarchos, Dicaeopolis, does most of the singing: the slaves’ task is limited to singing refrains of ‘O Phales, Phales’ and to holding the phallos upright. On the Florence cup the phallos-bearers appear to be unmasked and, except for erect phalloi tied to their loins, naked, as we might expect of Greek men involved in very demanding physical exertion. It is these performers whom Aristotle thinks of when inferring an origin for comedy: it is the separation of, and interactivity between, exarchos and chorus that strikes him as the minimally necessary combination of fission, and fusion, to trigger the evolutionary process that led to Old Comedy with its entirely separate but integrally linked components of chorus and actors. Aristotle refers to these ritual choruses only with vague descriptive periphrasis ‘those who led off the phallika’ (Poet. a). If we are justified in giving a name to these performers we should probably think of the men on the Florence cup as phallophoroi. ‘Phallophoroi’ may not have been a technical term for this genre of performance until much later.
IG i .–; SEG p. ; IG ii ; Accame : –; Krentz : –; Dreher : , –; Rhodes and R. Osborne : – no. ; Dio Chrys. .; Cole ; Csapo . Attic bf cup, Florence ; see most recently Iozzo , with further literature. Csapo –: –. Ar. Ach. indicates that two slaves carry the phallos (not one as suggested by R. Parker : ) so it is apparently something larger than a phallos-stick that they carry. Philomnestos, a historian of unknown date (FGrH F ), refers to an Antheas of Lindos who composed ‘comedies’ which he ‘led off for his phallophoroi’ (? 5# !’ ( - 9 - ( ). Sourvinou-Inwood : would place Antheas in the sixth century bc (contra Pickard-Cambridge : n. ‘a poet of late but unknown date’): that Philomnestos thinks of Antheas as early should surely be inferred from Philomnestos’ report that ‘he first invented the use of compound nouns in poetry which technique was later used by the Phliasian Asopodoros
Comedy and the Pompe: Dionysian genre-crossing
Phallos-sticks are very different from these huge phalloi. Our ancient texts also connect them exclusively with Dionysian processions, and most often with Dionysian processions in Athens. The scholiast to Aristophanes’ Acharnians a describes them as: ‘a long piece of wood fitted with a leather penis at the end’. ‘Long’ of course is relative, but the detail ‘fitted with a leather penis at the end’ shows that the scholion does not refer to the gigantic phallic floats such as we see on the Florence cup, which are evidently entirely of wood, each phallos-pole carved from a single timber, and which would more accurately have been described as ‘representing large penises’ rather than ‘fitted’ with them. In the case of phallos-sticks, the division between wooden stick and leather phallos is emphasized by the use of added red for the phallic tip of the sticks by the Pistoxenos Painter (Figure .). Moreover, the scholiast informs us that Athenians furnished themselves with both ‘public and private’ phalloi. The large floats provided by City or deme and colonies and subjects are clearly beyond the means of most private citizens. Unlike the phallos-bearers we see on the Florentine cup, our phallosstick-bearing choruses are highly mobile and active. Although there is some evidence to suggest that phallos-stick bearers could also make use of an exarchos (see on Figure ., below, pp. –), the exarchos is in this case a far less necessary role. Certainly the vase-paintings we have studied show groups of men without obvious leaders and with little co-ordination in their movements. Far from appearing regimented and measured, their movements in Figures .–. are lively and wild, with all the choreuts equally engaged in song and dance. The phallos-stick itself, like a baton, appears to serve both the spectacle and the music. In the Sabouroff Painter’s cup (Figure .b) it appears to move (autonomously?) with the movement of the dance. In the other cases it seems to be held more or less vertically
[also undatable] in chanted iambics’. Crusius (: –) suspected that later antiquity acquired this information through the peripatetic literary historian Lobon of Argos (late fourth or early third century bc, see Garulli : –): Crusius and other nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars characterize Lobon as a forger or hoaxer, but this has been discredited as a philological conspiracy theory: Farinelli . The term ‘phallophoroi’ is otherwise first attested by Sosibius c. bc (FGrH F ). A late lexicographer perhaps guesses (from the name) that men who tie phalloi to their loins are ‘ithyphalloi’: [Nonnus], Or. .., ... The phallos-stick (as opposed to other forms of phalloi) is described by 8 Ar. Ach. ; 8 Clem. Al. Protr. . p. , – St.; Suda s.v. -
(E ); Atil. Fort. p. , – K.; Terent. Maur. (Keil, Gramm. Lat., vol. vi) –. 8 Ar. Ach. . The images listed in n. and n. indicate a single timber for the large ‘floats’ or ‘phallos-poles’ and this is explicitly attested for the phallos at Delos: Vallois : . Possibly we are to think of it as fixed in the ground: see Suda and Phot. s.v. ithyphalloi ( , .).
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like a walking stick, but even so it surely served as more than just an idle prop: Terentianus Maurus implies that the ithyphalloi beat the ground with them in rhythmic accompaniment to their song. Indeed, two out of the three sources that connect phallos-sticks with any particular genre, connect them with ithyphalloi. Lively dance, song and aggressive behaviour are certainly more consistent with what we know of this genre of performer. the character of the pompe or why do phalloi have sticks? In a recent book Kenneth Rothwell describes the Pompe of the Athenian Dionysia as a ‘formal and dignified’ ritual, stressing its religious and sacrificial function and contrasting it with the free, wild and creative aristocratic komos in which he seeks the origin of comedy. Was the Pompe really ‘formal and dignified’? Surely the costume and processional accoutrements of the choruses that participated in the Dionysian Pompe are not easily reconcilable with formal dignity. Apologists have for centuries excused the phalloi as religious and fertility symbols, tolerated, we are encouraged to believe, by the piety of an otherwise mortified populace. Piety certainly licenses the phalloi. But our archaic and early classical images of drunken men on the march bristling with erect phalloi tied to heads and necks, or with them fixed like spearpoints on wooden sticks, are at best indifferent symbols of piety, and poorer still, if they are meant to represent love and fertility. Surely the images, like the sticks themselves, express the Pompe’s carnival mood of playful transgression and aggression. This is why phallos-sticks consistently appear as weapons in the hand of satyrs in Athenian vase-imagery. And surely the phallic knife poised in the hands of the Dionysian clown on the redfigured lekythos signifies ritually licensed aggression (Figure .), as does the rhinoceros-like placement of phalloi on forehead and nose on the face of the entertainers captured (or imagined) by the Berlin Painter (Figure .). Even the large phallic floats are not just passive dolmens. The phallophoroi, according to Semos, frequently rushed forward thrusting the phallos into
Terent. Maur. (Keil, Gramm. Lat., vol. vi) –: ithyphallica porro citarunt musici poetae, | qui ludicra carmina Baccho versibus petulcis | Graio cum cortice phello tres dabant trochaeos, | ut nomine fit sonus ipso, Bacche Bacche Bacche. Mar. Plot. p. , ff. K.; Terent. Maur., previous note. The exception, Atil. Fort. p. , ff. K., connects them with phallophoroi and phalloidoi. Song and dance: Hyp. fr. Jensen; Democh. FGrH F . Aggression: see below. Rothwell : . Cf. Sourvinou-Inwood : , who claims that the Pompe of the Dionysia ‘involved a certain solemnity’.
Comedy and the Pompe: Dionysian genre-crossing
the watching crowd and then paused (or ‘performed a stationary dance’) while mocking the spectators. Semos’ ithyphalloi advertised the invasive quality of their eponymous props: ‘make way, open up wide for the god, because, upright and bursting, he wants to march through your midst’. The name ‘ithyphalloi’ became popular among disaffected, vandalistically minded aristocratic Athenian youth gangs, not because the ritual performers were famously ‘formal and dignified’, but surely because they came to symbolize the physically aggressive and transgressive behaviour to which these alienated and arrogant youths aspired. You do not put on a mask and phallos in order to look like a satyr, but to act like one! Verbal aggression is well attested for the Pompe (as it is for other Dionysian processions in Athens) – this is why the word pompeia came to denote aggressive abuse. On Semos’ testimony, verbal abuse formed part of the performance of the phallophoroi and it should probably be inferred from his report that the autokabdaloi were also later called iamboi. But a certain amount of physical aggression was also tolerated and expected. Demosthenes tells us of one Ctesicles who thought it fitting to participate in the Athenian Pompe carrying a leather strap. Unfortunately he happened upon a personal enemy and thrashed him with it. The revealing thing is that Ctesicles pleaded not guilty to violent assault due to ‘the influence of the Pompe and drunkenness’ and would have been excused the assault had it not been for the history of enmity between Ctesicles and his victim, which made the violence look more like premeditation than the
Semos FGrH F (On Paians): ‘then charging forward [the phallophoroi] would mock whomever they chose’. ‘Clearly an aggressive gesture’, notes C. G. Brown : . For the connection between phallic entertainers and ritual abuse: see Brown : –; Bierl : – ( for the interpretation of ); Hedreen : . In addition to the passages on pompeia, below n. , see also 8 Dem. De falsa legatione a (Dilts). Semos FGrH F . For the sexual innuendo, see Csapo : . Dem. .–, , , . For the other youth gangs with phallic names, see Herter : –; Bierl : . On masks at the Pompe: Dem. De fals. leg. with scholion; 8 Dem. Meid. (Dilts); FrontisiDucroux . Cf. the expressions > and 2 - (Pl. Phdr. b; Platon. Diff. Char. . Kost.; Ioh. Chrys. MPG .., .., .., .., .., etc.). Sourvinou-Inwood : is wrong to suppose that the words komos and komazein are technically limited to the night procession of the Eisagoge: Halliwell : –. Men. Perinthia fr. Arnott; 8 Dem. De cor. b (Dilts); Harp. s.v. > ; Phot. Lex. s.v. > ( .); Phot. Lex. s.v. ( ,); Suda s.v. > ( ). The term ‘from the wagons’, usually referred by modern scholars to the Anthesteria and Lenaia because of Phot. Lex. s.v. @ 75@ ( .) and Suda s.v. @ 75@ $ ( ), is likely to be common to all the main Dionysian processions at Athens. See Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. ..; 8 Lucian, Iupp. trag. .a–b (Rabe); 8 Lucian, Eun. . (Rabe); Halliwell : – with further literature. See above, n. ; cf. Sosib. FGrH F . See C. G. Brown : . Rotstein : disagrees. Dem. Meid. .
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sort of random outburst one might expect on this occasion. A scholiast to Demosthenes says that in the Pompe, men wore felt caps underneath masks to muffle the impact of blows to the head acquired when they abused one another. Unruliness was not only licensed but expected. For this reason Aeschines could demonstrate the habitually good behaviour of Epicrates by claiming he showed perfect control even at the Pompe of the Dionysia. Decrees honouring ephebes make specific reference to their orderly conduct at the Dionysia. Decorum and good order from any semi-organized group of young men was so far from being expected that the Athenians created boards of ‘Wardens (epimeletai) of the Pompe’, who appear also to have been called ‘Wardens of Good Conduct in the Theatres’ and ‘Wardens of the Choruses’. Their task was ‘to make sure that choruses did not lose control’ – not likely to refer to the circular, tragic or comic choruses, which could hardly be expected to riot in the middle of their performance, but to the many choruses of men at the Pompe, who paraded about armed with phallos-sticks and very drunk. The Christian polemicists clearly recognized the primarily aggressive and transgressive character of phallos-sticks and phallic processions. The ancient martyrology, Deeds of Saint Timothy, gives the most sensational account. At the Katagogia for Dionysus at Ephesus on January, ad , the participants are said to have ‘tied on indecent adornments, and even hidden their faces with masks so as not to be recognized, and carried sticks and images of idols’. Here the ‘indecent adornments’ can only be phalloi and ‘sticks and images of idols’ seems to refer to phallos-sticks, or phallos-sticks and thyrsoi (only the phallos-sticks could be called ‘images of idols’). Timothy, outraged and disgusted by ‘the indecent ornaments they had put about themselves’, blocked the processional route and demanded that the Ephesians give up their idolatry. Instead they advanced upon him with the weapons at hand and we are told that he achieved a grizzly,
8 Dem. . (Dilts). Felt bands or caps are also seen on the heads of tragic and comic actors. This suggests that the caps are worn for comfort rather than protection. It is the cultural assumptions behind the scholiast’s claim that are of interest. Felt bands or caps: Attic rf pelike, Phiale Painter, c. bc, Boston MFA .–, ARV 2 , ; Attic rf chous, c. bc, Hermitage . (Figure .). Cf. second figure from right on the first-century ad mosaic from the Casa del Poeta Tragico in Pompei, Naples NM . Aeschin. De falsa leg. . The inscriptions are all second–first century bc: IG ii , ll. –; IG ii , ll. , ; IG ii , ll. –; IG ii , ll. –; IG ii , l. ; IG ii , l. . See the discussion in Csapo and Wilson : . Usener . The event may well be historical: see Keil ; Herter b: . On the ‘indecent ornaments’, see Herter a: ; Herter b: ; and Herter : and n. .
Comedy and the Pompe: Dionysian genre-crossing
if poetic martyrdom, beaten to death by the phallos-sticks of the pagan faithful, a martyrdom so delightfully Dionysian, that one would sooner be tempted to shelve Timothy with Orpheus and Pentheus than with Lawrence and Anthony. A second episode of phallic transgression is known from Antioch in ad : a heathen ran into church brandishing phalloi and shouting abuse at the Christian faithful before (as Bishop Athanasius reassures us) the wrath of God struck him blind. These are the last two recorded uses of the Dionysian phallos. It is easy to dismiss any diachronic or even synchronic connection between drama and Dionysian ritual if we think of the Dionysian Pompe as a formal and dignified procession of civic officials, priests and sacrificiants. Our sources suggest that for most Athenians the Pompe, not the dramatic competition, was the climax of the festival. It was a playful, creative and transgressive ritual that involved costume, role-playing, dance, music, obscenity, abuse, mock aggression, laughter and direct, universal participation. Rothwell’s interpretation of the Pompe conforms to a broader trend in scholarship since the s that identifies the aristocratic symposium as the mainspring of (especially archaic) Greek cultural achievement. It is true that much of our ‘lyric’ poetry seems to assume a sympotic setting and also true that imagery related to music and dance is found mainly on vessels designed for the symposium. Many poetic and musical genres grew up in the elite symposium. But most such genres were also only seconded to the elite symposium from popular festival entertainments and others were never absorbed into elite culture, even if they are found on sympotic vessels. Elites were not as isolated from the public religious and festival activities of the
The phallos-sticks used at the Katagogia are uncomprehendingly referred to as rhopala in the Greek version and pali in the Latin. Athanasius, Hist. Arianorum . (Opitz) with Herter : . It is very tempting to connect the Berlin Painter’s phallic nose (Figure .) with the false noses or long-nosed masks used in medieval and modern carnival, as does Hoffmann (: ). The Berlin Painter’s phallic costume is, however, creative costuming beyond the Dionysian norm. Far more tempting is to derive from phallos-sticks the plastic clubs that gangs of young celebrants use to beat each other over the head at carnival processions in Athens today (also , see above, n. ). Despite its transformation, the carnival hardware would show a gratifying continuity in both spirit and function. Symposium and lyric poetry: R¨osler : ; Pellizer : ; Stehle : –. Symposium and komast vases: Fehr ; Isler-Ker´enyi ; Seeberg ; Smith ; Steinhart : – (although Steinhart does not distinguish regularly between public banquet and private symposium); Smith , passim. Symposium and komos vases: Steinhart (above); Rothwell . Without denying the importance of the elite symposium, much of the more recent literature takes a softer stand on its exclusivity or even its primacy in the development of music/poetry: see Budelmann b: –; Carey : –; and on iambos, especially Rotstein : –. See for komast and komos vases, Csapo and Miller b: –, –.
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polis as the lingering adherents of the polarized ‘alterity’ theories spawned during the Cold War would have us believe. This is particularly true of the Dionysian entertainments that developed in Athens and elsewhere: they were certainly colourful, creative and transgressive enough to appeal to the aristocrat in his cups, even if they did derive from the common culture of the masses. what comedy owes to the phallika ‘Discourse of genres’ implies a primarily synchronic relationship. If so, it is nonetheless necessary to outline a theory of the diachronic relationship between Athenian comedy and the choruses that participated in the Dionysian Pompe: first because received wisdom is that Attic comedy began much earlier than reliable evidence allows; secondly because a belief in comedy’s lineal or collateral descent from choruses of the Pompe appears to have influenced the character and performance of many comic choruses in the fifth century bc. In what follows I traverse some heavily trodden ground but aspire to more concision and more strictly evidence-based conclusions than is usual in discussions of comedy’s origins. Attic vase-painting gives a clear indication of the impact that the creation (or revival) of the Athenian Dionysia had upon popular consciousness. Dionysian imagery first appears in Attic black figure from about bc onwards, at first derived from and imitating Corinthian themes. But Dionysian imagery becomes rampant only around bc, when Attic art also introduces many new subjects, and in particular subjects related to Dionysian processions. Hedreen has shown that the treatment of Dionysian myth, especially in depictions of the Return of Hephaestus, is directly informed by the spirit and spectacle of the Dionysian Pompe. Even satyrs after bc begin to show a previously unknown and uncharacteristic discipline in their dance, moving in procession or with orchestrated movements. It is from about bc that we can date the beginning of a series of over twenty Attic vases that show elaborately costumed choruses, depicting animal riders, beasts or transvestites. These are indeed komoi, but hardly the spontaneous aristocratic entertainments hypothesized by Rothwell. They perform a processional dance that is more lavishly
Carpenter ; Shapiro : –; Hedreen ; Csapo and Miller b: –; Smith : . Hedreen . Hedreen . Green : –; Rothwell : –; Csapo and Miller b: –.
Comedy and the Pompe: Dionysian genre-crossing
equipped, better choreographed and more practised than any known performance before them. This new interest in Dionysian processional imagery begins early in the time of Peisistratus’ tyranny and its sudden efflorescence at this date is hard to explain except in relation to Peisistratus’ creation of the Great Dionysia (or its reorganization on a grand scale). Iconography confirms the general view that Peisistratus attempted to eclipse the many local festivals of Dionysus by creating a far more elaborate festival, centred in Athens, and centred ultimately on the person of the tyrant himself. The iconographic evidence (we have little else) thus suggests the following scenario for the early history of the City Dionysia. It was created (or greatly expanded) about bc. The primary event was a parade that included choruses of various types. That some of these choruses were perceived as dithyrambic, or actually performed hymns called dithyrambs, seems probable: the komos (‘animal rider’) vases and some satyr choruses are likely candidates. Other choruses were, from the very beginning, phallic. Both phallic and ‘dithyrambic’ types have several Dionysian features in common: they might have leaders (exarchoi), they wear costumes, and the costumes are by nature bestial or grotesque – indeed the phallic and bestial imagery freely crosses the boundary, if such it can be called (I doubt that the archaic Pompe recognized the boundaries or genres distinguished by later Greeks). Despite the fact that the name ‘dithyramb’ was certainly in use and meaningful at this time, our evidence suggests that both species of Dionysian processional choruses were still thought of, generically, as komoi: that is why the men’s choruses (popularly also called ‘circular chorus’ or ‘dithyramb’) that were later held in the theatre might be referred to by this archaizing term and why also comedy literally means ‘song of the komos’. We should probably think of a generic Dionysian
Csapo and Miller b: . The control and development of Dionysian cult was a conscious policy of archaic tyrants, notably Periander of Corinth, Cleisthenes of Sicyon and Pheidon of Argos: the subject is profoundly treated in the recent work of Seaford, especially: Seaford b; Seaford ; and Seaford . The Peisistratan creation of the City Dionysia was challenged by Connor but reconfirmed by Sourvinou-Inwood ; cf. R. Parker : –. For the ‘dithyrambic’ imagery of the komos vases, see Csapo , esp. –; Rusten b: –; Hedreen : –, –; Seaford : . See above, nn. –. For the iconographic representation of the exarchos, see Csapo – (to which add Athens NM : see Smith : pl. a). Pickard-Cambridge : –; Csapo and Miller b: (citing other literature). The interpretation of komos is disputed both in the Fasti and in the Law of Euegoros. I hope to address the problem elsewhere. Note that Kourebion/Epikrates is said to 1 in the Pompe of the Dionysia (Dem. De fals. leg. ; Aeschin. De fals. leg. ).
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choral form, ‘komos’, of two main varieties, dithyrambic choruses and phallika, each with subvarieties: animal-rider (or beast) choruses and satyrs for the former; phallophoroi and ithyphalloi for the latter. The vase-paintings of animal-rider (or beast) choruses from the Pompe show both processional and circular song and dance. Even in the classical period the Pompe moved slowly, probably from the Dipylon gate, stopping to perform sacrifice and hymns at altars, and especially at the Altar of the Twelve Gods in the Athenian agora. The existence of important stations along the processional route of course explains why our komos vases depict dancing both in a linear (processional) and in a circular formation (circling altars). The part of the agora adjacent to the Altar of the Twelve Gods was known as the ‘orchestra’ or dancing place and later became a book market outside the festival season. But during the festival season (both Dionysia and Panathenaea), wooden stands (ikria) were set up for those who wished to sit and watch the succession of choral performances around the altar. We appear still to have the text of at least one dithyramb performed at the Altar of the Twelve Gods, written by Pindar (fr. M). Things changed when a theatre was built north of the Sanctuary of Dionysus: the archaeological remains suggest a date for the building of the theatre at the very end of the sixth century bc. With the building of the theatre, a much larger audience could gather at the end-point of the procession and this probably encouraged a far greater elaboration of choral set pieces than did the smaller ‘stations’ along the processional route. Possibly prizes previously existed for komoi; we have no way of telling. But with the building of the theatre there was an unprecedented opportunity for
Csapo : –. Xen. Eq. Mag. .. The altar, which dates back to the time of the Pisistratids, was doubtless a station on the processional route even before the classical agora was built. The archaic route probably moved on from the Altar of the Twelve Gods, along the Street of the Tripods, through the archaic agora, to stop again at the large plateia in front of the Old Prytaneon, before finally moving on to the Sanctuary of Dionysus: Schmalz . It is possible, but I think unlikely, that Xenophon is referring to performances connected to the procession of the Eisagoge (or a connected ‘komos’) which took place the night before the Pompe, as Sourvinou-Inwood argued (: –; cf. R. Parker : ): in this case it would have nothing to do with the phallic choruses (which are uniquely attached to the Pompe), but would have something to do with dithyrambs. Wycherley : – nos. , –. Wycherley : nos. –, ; Camp : – fig. ; Camp : and pl. . Zimmermann : –; Wilson : . It is interesting that tradition placed the transfer of entertainment from the agora to the newly built theatre in / bc after the wooden stands (ikria) collapsed: Suda s.v. Pratinas ( ) cf. Phot. Lex. s.v. ikria ( .) (the collection of evidence by Hammond : – conflates two traditions: one that there were performances in the agora before the theatron, meaning ‘theatre’, was built; second that there was a poplar or poplars above the ikria of the Theatre of Dionysus before the theatron, meaning ‘[‘Lycurgan’] auditorium’, was built; see Roselli : –. The logic is presumably that benchwork built onto the natural slope of the acropolis above the theatre would not need to be so elaborate and so a collapse of ikria there would be less catastrophic).
Comedy and the Pompe: Dionysian genre-crossing
establishing a contest that a large audience might witness, and it is probably no coincidence that Athenian civic records of the competition stretched back no earlier than the last decade of the sixth century. It is from c. bc that the Fasti (as usually reconstructed) record winners of tragic and men’s and boys’ choruses. That men’s and boys’ choruses soon came to be known as ‘circular’ suggests that an effective separation was soon made between the processional and the theatrical entertainments. Some such development is indicated by the ancient testimony that Lasos of Hermione ‘introduced the contest for dithyrambs’ as well as Pindar’s testimony that Lasos first converted the dithyramb from a linear to a circular form. In official speech, however, men’s and boys’ choruses are never called dithyrambs, presumably because true dithyrambs were perceived to be processional and cultic. The building of the theatre may have prompted another set of changes in the iconographic record. The most important shows a shift in focus from the procession to the theatre. Within a decade or two of the building, the komos vases with beast choruses, animal riders and transvestites come to an end. At the same time two new subjects, based on the theatrical competitions, appear: we have the first appearance in Attic vase-painting of choregic tripods (and other imagery related to the men’s and boys’ lyric choruses) and the first depictions of tragic choruses. Paradoxically, perhaps, the Pompe continues to be a topic of interest, but with a new subject. It is in about bc that we get the first depictions of the choruses of ithyphalloi that are the subject of this chapter. The ithyphalloi doubtless emerge as a subject because of new interest stimulated by the expansion of the City Dionysia; but unlike the new genres they are not theatrical. (By this date ‘theatrical genres’ could have included comedy, added to the Dionysia around bc.) Depictions of comedy in vase-painting appear only much later, and they focused for the most part on actors. Might it be that early comedy was so close in form and spirit to the phallic choruses that the former sparked the vase-painters’ interest in the latter? (This is a genuine question, not a disguised proposition.) The building of the theatre doubtless had some impact on the performance of the phallic choruses. In late classical and Hellenistic times the theatre could be the site of a prolonged and climactic performance by phallic choruses: Hyperides mentions the ithyphalloi dancing in the orchestra
Suda s.v. Lasos ( ); Pind. fr. b M (with D’Angour ; D’Angour’s theory is criticized and modified, unsuccessfully in my view, by Porter ). Csapo and Miller b: –. Choregic imagery: Csapo b. Tragic choruses and choreuts: Csapo a: –. Csapo a: –.
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and Semos’ account of both ithyphalloi and phallophoroi focuses on the moment that the choruses enter the theatre. But ithyphalloi remained primarily processional and non-theatrical, as is clear from Demochares’ account of the ithyphallic procession to greet Demetrius the Besieger. Not much later we have evidence that the actors’ union, the Artists of Dionysus, who in Hellenistic times assumed much of the responsibility for organizing the Dionysian Pompe, also provided the choruses of ithyphalloi, at least at the Soteria in the time of Ptolemy Philadelphus. It is impossible to say in what sense comedy existed in Athens as a separate genre before around bc, when it was officially adopted as a competitive genre at the City Dionysia. Before this date there is no trace of Attic comedy apart from the rather desperate efforts of later scholars (ancient and modern) to invent a tradition older than the Doric. But comedy did already exist certainly in Sicily and possibly in Megara and elsewhere in the Peloponnese. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that after the building of the theatre the phallic choruses expanded their normal processional repertoire to include a finale in the theatre with more plot and narrative structure and that this gradually grew into a fully theatrical event. Even if this was the case, we would still have to believe that the main models for the creation of Attic comedy were the already evolved narrative and theatrical genres of tragedy, satyr-play, circular chorus and Dorian comedy, not to mention evolved literary genres such as iambic poetry (despite the cultic obscenity and abuse already practised in phallic processions). By the time we can measure its pulse, Attic comedy is sui generis and multigeneric. The one most striking feature that comedy inherits from its carnival matrix is an unrestricted freedom in appropriating the form and contents of other genres, and for this reason it has fairly been called a ‘carnival of genres’.
Hyp. fr. Jensen; Semos FGrH F (PMG a; Bierl : –); cf. the prominence of the theatre in a third-century ad phallic performance in Euboea (SEG no. , no. ; Csapo : ). Democh. FGrH F ; Duris FGrH F . Ath. c (Powell : ); Lightfoot : ; Bierl : n. . See also n. below. The efforts of later scholars to defend the theory of the genre’s Attic origins have left us only the (dubiously formed) name Sousarion, a fragment that is clearly a later forgery, and biographical details of the poet which indicate that, if he existed, he may have been Megarian and composed iambic poetry (rather than real comedy). Rusten b is surely right to cast doubt on both the name and the tradition. For a possible original coalescence of iambos, dithyramb and phallic procession, see Csapo and Miller b: . I refer to the Bakhtinian reading of Aristophanes by Platter . Bakhtin took a particular interest in Greek Old Comedy, ‘a polyglot genre’ (: ), in developing his carnival theory and his approach has had broad resonance in recent work on Old Comedy: see esp. Carri`ere , M¨ollendorff .
Comedy and the Pompe: Dionysian genre-crossing
What ancient Athenians thought, even if questionable or untrue, is, nonetheless, important for understanding later developments in comedy. We cannot be sure if phallic choruses were supposed to be the origin of comedy by anyone earlier than Aristotle, but the connection is an easy one: in addition to sharing a mixture of choral and individual delivery, both genres were scurrilous, obscene, potentially aggressive and abusive; both employed costume which emphasized the phallos, physical distortion of the body and potentially masks. Aristotle does, however, mention a debate, possibly much older than his day, in which pro-Dorians supported their claim to have invented comedy by disputing the derivation of ‘komoidia’ from ‘komos’. There can be no doubt that ‘komoidia’ really did mean the ‘song of the komos’ and it is very likely that all the various genres of processional chorus (including but not limited to the phallic varieties) that appeared in Dionysian parades were closely associated in the popular mind with comedy. A large percentage of the earliest known titles of comedy, not only from Athens, but even from Sicily, appeal to choral types that are either known from the archaic Pompe or part of a broader Dionysian matrix of processional choral forms: titles such as Epicharmus’ Komastai (alternatively called Hephaestus and reportedly about the Return of Hephaestus), Dionysoi, Bacchae and Harpagai (apparently about Kotyto, whose choral forms were assimilated to Dionysian komoi) – this is all the more surprising if, as many believe, Sicilian comedy had no chorus. From the first fifty years of comedy in Athens we have a very high density of beast choruses: Magnes’ Birds, Gall-Flies, Frogs, Crates’ Beasts, Ecphantides’ Satyrs, Callias’ Satyrs (relevant too no doubt are the plays entitled Dionysus by Magnes, Crates and Ecphantides). And, as we will see in a moment, such choruses continue to be popular. The synchronic influence of the komos is most palpable in the second and third generation of Attic comedy. Recent studies of Cratinus make it very clear that he cultivated a public image of himself as a poetic reactionary: Emmanuela Bakola in particular has convincingly shown that Cratinus presented himself as a champion of traditional ‘Dionysiac poetics’ in opposition to the comic poets of his day, who, he felt, had strayed too far from their roots, particularly, it seems, in their emulation of tragedy. It is not just for his revival of the spirit of Archilochus that Aristophanes spoke of ‘the initiates in the Bacchic rites of the bull-eating tongue of
Philomnestos, who seems to presuppose such a connection, is undatable (see above, n. ). Arist. Poet. a–b. Kerkhof : , –; Jameson, Jordan and Kotansky : –. Bakola : – and passim. Bakola picks up from the important studies of Cratinus and iambos of Rosen and Biles , who however speak more narrowly of an ‘Archilochean poetics’.
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Cratinus’ (Ran. ). Cratinus claimed to draw his creative inspiration directly from Dionysus, writing only when drunk and reviving the ‘traditional’ Dionysian spirit of comedy. Cratinus’ choruses frequently have a Dionysian or closely paradionysian persona: he wrote a Boukoloi (not ‘Cowherds’ but a term referring to worshippers who process with Dionysus in the form of a bull), a Euneidae (named after the clan of musicians and priests of Dionysus Melpomene who also organized Dionysian parades), Thracians (probably Thracian women processing for the cult of Bendis, an orgiastic cult with dance and music broadly assimilated to that of Dionysus), one or two choruses of transvestite men (Malthakoi and Drapetides), and at least two satyr choruses (Dionysalexandros and Satyroi), and a beast chorus (Cheirones), not to mention a play called Dionysoi, whose chorus was presumably composed of the god’s worshippers. About some of these plays we know enough to be sure that Cratinus imitated cultic choruses: in Boukoloi (as in Euripides’ Bacchae) the parodos imitates a processional dithyramb; in Dionysalexandros both the parodos and the exodos seem to have imitated cultic processions. Even in Archilochoi the fragments suggest that iambic poetry was conceived to be a performative rather than a literary genre and possibly in a komos setting: the fragments refer to an annual festival and notably to ithyphalloi (frr. and ). In presenting himself as an authentic Dionysian poet, Cratinus draws liberally upon all the choral types associated with either Dionysus’ mythic retinue (satyrs, bacchants) or his festival retinue composed of the typical choral groups that perform in the Pompe: satyrs, beasts, transvestites, iambists and ithyphalloi. But he does this without privileging any single choral type: like the Pompe, Cratinus’ comedy is both generically inclusive and transgressive. Cratinus probably marks the high point of the Pompe’s influence upon comedy, but the influence continues to be felt until well into the fourth century and the era associated with ‘Middle Comedy’. Beast choruses continue to appear in comedy until – bc. Satyr choruses in comedy have their main burst of popularity in the s and s bc and are afterwards only revived by the archaizing Timocles as late as the s bc. At least one classical comedy had a chorus whose persona was drawn directly from the Pompe, Ephippus’ Obeliaphoroi, although we may suspect the respective Komastai of Ameipsias (or Phrynichus) and Timocles’ Dionysiazousai. Other choruses definitely had a mystic or Dionysian character and are likely to have incorporated motifs common to the choruses of
Bakola : –, –. The exodos in which the satyrs escort Dionysus to the Greek ships alludes to a Dionysian Pompe even without the scapegoat overtones argued by Bakola. Storey . See the thorough study by Rothwell : –.
Comedy and the Pompe: Dionysian genre-crossing
the Pompe: Eupolis’ Baptai (with a chorus of transvestite worshippers of the orgiastic goddess Kotyto), Autocrates’ Tympanistai (see fr. ), Phrynichus’ Mystai, Antiphanes’ Carians (a transvestite or effeminate chorus of orgiastic worshippers of Cybele) and of course the respective Bacchae of Antiphanes, Diocles and Lysippus. The beast choruses of Aristophanes are well known; Babylonians may have had a chorus of Asiatics introducing Dionysus; Seasons appears to have been about the rites of Sabazius; the chorus of Lemnian Women introduced the cult of Bendis. It should be remembered that Acharnians (–) directly incorporated a representation of the Pompe. what the phallika owe to comedy: phallic choruses in fourth-century vase-painting Whatever comedy owed to phallic choruses, it is clear from vase-painting that from about bc at the latest comedy dominated the intergeneric exchange. Four Attic vase-paintings from the first half of the fourth century show that the costume and character of phallic dancers underwent some assimilation to those of comic choreuts and actors. The latest surviving wielder of a phallos-stick is indeed embedded in a scene that is otherwise entirely concerned with comedy. Hitherto unnoticed, the phallos-stick appears on a well-known chous in St Petersburg dated to about bc (Figure .). The chous shows five children playing the roles of Dionysian entertainers (a recurrent motif in choes). Each of the children is in costume and each is associated with a comic actor’s mask. All of the figures wear the protective band used by actors to shield the sides and (in some cases) top of the head against the hard edges of the mask (and doubtless also to secure the fit). And yet the figures on the far
Storey a: –. This list of choruses that draw upon komos types familiar from the Pompe would be much longer if it could be shown that choruses of ‘foreigners’ appeared on the series of Attic komos vases, as is frequently claimed (e.g. Seeberg : –; Rothwell : –), but this seems to me the same kind of misreading of general Dionysian costume and imagery as led to the initial identification of our phallic performers as Lydians and Scythians. Play titles such as the Lydians of Magnes or the Cretans of Nicochares are likely to be relevant as choruses of worshippers introducing an orgiastic cult (either that of Dionysus or the various deities that are regularly conflated with Dionysian cult in ancient drama), but not qua foreigners. Norwood : –, –. Attic rf chous, c. bc, Hermitage . . Rusten (forthcoming) demonstrates the importance of this vase to the history of comedy. If Bulle is right that Scopas’ Pothos carried a phallos-stick, then the gem, mentioned in n. above, is later. But see the doubts expressed in the same note. See Csapo a: –. Rusten (forthcoming) shows that the masks are accurate representations of known types. See above, n. .
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Figure . Attic red-figure chous, c. bc
Comedy and the Pompe: Dionysian genre-crossing
Figure . Attic red-figure bell krater, Hare-Hunt Painter, c. – bc
right and left of the scene are certainly not dressed as actors: one wears the costume of a choregos and the other appears to be dressed as a piper. There is therefore a certain blurring of comic actor imagery with other personnel involved in Dionysian entertainment. The three boys in the centre of the visual field all wear the actor’s bodytights and the comic somation (padded body with enlarged stomach, buttocks, breasts and phallos). It is the ‘actor’ on the left who is of particular interest to our investigation. He carries the mask of a comic king (it has a little crown and is the usual mask for Zeus in western Greek comic vase-paintings). Unlike the other two ‘actors’ he also wears a himation, though possibly only as a mark of his superior social status. In place of a sceptre, however, the figure carries a phallos-stick. We do not actually have an image of a phallic entertainer, but rather an image in which the cultic symbol of one Dionysian entertainer is confused with, or appropriated to the use of, another. The readiness with which the attribute of a phallic dancer is transferred to a comic actor is of particular interest as the first sign of a process of assimilation, at least in vase imagery, of the performers in the Pompe to the performers in the theatre. Although phallos-sticks are missing from three fourth-century vasepaintings of choral entertainers, the entertainers have enough points in common with their fifth-century counterparts to make it likely that they too are to be thought of as choruses at the Pompe. One is known only from a drawing made in (Figure .): the Attic red-figured bell krater upon
Rusten (forthcoming).
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which it is based has never been photographed and I infer that it is in poor shape. Nonetheless, we can see ivy-wreathed men wearing spotty bodysuits moving in procession; one appears to carry a cake. These costumes look something more like comic actors’ costumes, since they include the usual form of actor’s phallos and a suggestion of padding. But the figures are not likely to be comic actors or a comic chorus. The padding is slight and the bodysuit worn in comic costume, since it represents stage-nakedness, is never decorated and never belted as this is. Moreover the facial features are differentiated and not distorted: even if the faces are meant to be seen as masked, the masks are not uniform and the beardlessness of the figure on the left shows that the chorus is of mixed age. Comic choruses never show this diversity. One should note too that the toes of the piper are articulated but none of the toes of the choreuts, suggesting that they are wearing boots. Possibly Gerhard could not make out (or did not recognize) the ivy spots that are here rendered as Xs and Os. He also could make nothing of the stick in the hand of the rightmost dancer. It is too long and crooked to be a torch. It may be a walking stick, but a walking stick is an odd prop for a chorus especially of men in their prime. It is likely that Gerhard would have misrecognized a phallos-stick if he saw it. The vase indicates a processional movement: the feet of the four leftmost figures are all directed to the right and their bodies appear to describe a stylized march rather than what we would call a dance. The rightmost figure faces the group and has one arm raised in what might appear to be a speaking gesture (Gerhard apparently took him to be holding something small in his right hand, but this is unlikely). His configuration conforms to a standard schema for showing a lead singer, or exarchos. Even without the detail of a phallos-stick, we would have to conclude from the processional nature of the image, the details of costume (including the ‘comic’ phalloi), the ivy crowns as well as the ‘ivy spots’ on the costume, and of course the presence of the cake, that the vase is meant to depict a chorus from a Dionysiac procession. The phalloi indicate a connection with the Dionysian Pompai, the only processions at Athens for which phallic choruses are attested. An image on a recently published Athenian bell krater of – bc shows a chorus which is certainly meant to be interpreted as a group
Attic rf bell krater, Hare-Hunt Painter, c. – bc, S. Agata de’ Goti, formerly collection Mustilli, ARV 2 , MMC 3 , AV . Gerhard a: pl. and Gerhard b: . Gerhard’s drawing is reproduced in Wieseler : pl. ix, ; Bieber : fig. . Gerhard b: . Even the chorus of old men on the bf skyphos, Thebes BE ., carry torches not sticks: see Green : fig. a. Csapo –.
Comedy and the Pompe: Dionysian genre-crossing
Figure . Attic red-figure bell krater, – bc
of performers from the Pompe of the Dionysia (Figure .). The bell krater shows a group of four men in procession against a background of decorative ivy leaves. The first man on the right is bald, front and top, like the Sabouroff Painter’s group, and prances in what appears to be a mincing effeminate manner (krotalos-players sometimes adopt this stance). The second and third men have several days’ growth of beard on the side of their faces like the Berlin Painter’s choreuts. All the men wear ivy garlands (the berries are emphasized with added white), spotty bodytights and large ‘looped’ phalloi. The phalloi are certainly of the type worn by comic actors (and possibly comic choreuts). So are the bodytights, but only in form: comic tights are never decorated but are designed to represent naked flesh. And there is no suggestion of comic padding. Three of the men wear the familiar kothornoi highlighted in added white paint. There is enough similarity in costume with the early classical phallic choruses of Figures .–. to suggest that the spots on the costume are intended to suggest ivy. We are probably to recognize the men as masked: Ian McPhee tells me that the line of the chin continues up to the ear, contrary to
Attic rf bell krater, Telos Group (Schauenburg) or Telos Painter (McPhee), – bc, Naples, private collection. Schauenburg : pl. .–; Green : . I thank Dick Green for bringing this vase to my attention.
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the normal practice of the Telos Painter and other painters of the fourth century. In any case the faces are different and suggest men of different ages: they are certainly no comic chorus. Threatening, probably, is the way the figure on the left holds his stick or torch. The middle figures are engaged in transporting important contributions to the feast that will follow the sacrifice at the end of the procession. I do not know the identity of the prominent object emphasized by added white paint in the hand of the man second in the procession: Green very plausibly suggests a Mediterranean white radish. Unmistakable, however, is the large object, also emphasized by added white that the man with the radish(?) carries on a pole together with the man behind him. It is not a cake, but something equally suited to the sacrificial procession of an Athenian festival, indeed one uniquely attested for the Pompe of the Dionysia. It is a kind of bread baked on a stick called ‘obel bread’. The exclusively Dionysian quality of obel bread seems to have elicited an aetiological myth that Dionysus invented the bread while on military campaign: no doubt so that it could be carried by his creatures while ‘on the march’. That obel-bread carriers, obeliaphoroi, were no less colourful
I. McPhee per litteras; Schauenburg : ; Green : : Green sees ‘jutting chins’, but adds that ‘it is hard to say if the painter omitted to fill in their beards, or if the intention was simply to make them grotesque’. Green : , but it is not primarily, I suspect, ‘festive food’, as Green suggests (the most common use of the radish in Greek literature, if not in Greek culture, is to provide an emetic). The associations of the radish in this context are at least as likely to be symbolic as alimentary, and to allude to the phallic nature and function of the vegetable: Ar. Nub. (with scholia ad loc. and a, d, a); 8 Ar. Plut. ; Lucian, De mort. Peregr. . (with scholia ad loc.); Hesych. s.v. =- ! ; Suda s.vv. ( ) and =- ( ); Carey . The obel bread said to be found on choes (van Hoorn : figs. –, ; Crosby : ) is in fact streptos cakes: see Hamilton : . Choes are not in any case restricted to themes related to the Anthesteria; they have a broad (and not exclusive) preference for Dionysian themes. Ath. b; Poll. .; Paus. Attic. %ttikän ½nomtwn sunagwg 1; Phot. Lex. s.v. obelias artos ( .). See also Kassel and Austin on Ar. fr. . Schauenburg : – considers but ultimately rejects the notion that the object is meant to represent meat. A Boeotian bf lekanis lid, c. bc (Adolphseck Schloß Fasanerie ; van Straten , V, fig. ; cf. Schauenburg : ) shows meat being stacked over most of the length of a long spit (the one possible Attic equivalent, a cup by Makron, ARV 2 /, Para. , Addend. , is described by van Straten : as ‘man taking dough (?) from lebes on tripod stand’). Schauenburg, however, notes the difference in shape (the object here is in fact ‘stomach shaped’, exactly as Photius describes obel bread). But one should also note that the Boeotian lekanis is careful to articulate the divisions between slices of meat. Moreover, the Telos Painter and the painter of the agora polychrome oinochoe (see below) paint the bread white (it is uncooked or semi-cooked dough which is meant to be baked at the sacrifice in the sanctuary), even though the agora polychrome has seven different colours, including pink, at his disposal. Moreover, one never sees men carrying meat in this way, nor is one likely to (Attic scenes of men carrying meat are very different: see van Straten : ): the meat is butchered and cooked at the place of sacrifice. Only live animals appear in sacrificial processions. If food is carried it is almost invariably cakes or bread (for the radish, see above, n. ). Ath. b drawing on the Epikleseis of Socrates.
Comedy and the Pompe: Dionysian genre-crossing
characters than phallic entertainers, if they were indeed distinguishable, is suggested by the attested use of ‘obeliaphoroi’ as a derogatory term for workers and rustics. Obeliaphoroi were interesting enough to Ephippus for him to give their name to one of his comedies (and evidently therefore to the chorus). Depictions of obel bread appear twice elsewhere: once on an Attic polychrome oinochoe, and once on an Apulian bell krater. Only in the case of the Apulian krater do the obeliaphoroi clearly wear full comic costume. Indeed the comification of the subject is so complete that the figures are drawn on top of a stage. The Attic oinochoe, though it is frequently referred to comedy, is far more likely to belong to our small (but growing) repertoire of images of entertainers from the Dionysian Pompe. Although the details of costume have not survived in any clear form, enough remains to show that both figures share features with our phallic choruses: they have long beards and one is depicted in kothornoi and the same kind of rustic hat we find drawn by the Pistoxenos Painter (Figure .). Yet another chorus of Dionysian performers appear on an Attic redfigured bell krater excavated from an ancient cemetery in C´astulo, near Linares in Southern Spain (Figure .). This is a far more doubtful case. The costumes look comic: lines at the four visible ankles and the three visible wrists indicate the use of the bodytights worn by actors and choreuts. The use of the comic bodysuit (somation) is indicated by the large bellies, buttocks and phalloi. Even the piper (second from left) wears a comic body: the lines on his upper thigh make this especially clear. There are, however, good reasons to think this is not comedy. The one Attic vasepainting and the two Attic reliefs that do certainly show comic choruses show uniform masks, costumes and movements, only the piper excepted (the pipers wear the same formal costume that we find in scenes of tragedy). Here, however, the costumes are distinguished, even if all appear comic
Ephipp. frr. –. Phot. Lex. s.v. obelias artos ( .). Attic polychrome oinochoe, c. bc, Agora P , MMC 3 AV ; Apulian bell krater, Near to the Painter of Copenhagen , – bc, St Petersburg (W. ), PhV 2 . The claim that all of the polychrome oinochoai in the group published by Crosby are somehow related to comedy cannot be sustained. In fact Agora P , identified by Webster in PickardCambridge : fig. as an ‘effeminate reveller’ is very likely to be another phallic entertainer from the Pompe: he wears the cuffed kothornoi and carries a staff that, judging from the photograph of the pot, is intended to be a phallos-stick. Unfortunately the poor quality of the painting and the even more lamentable state of its preservation allow no firm ground for argument. Attic rf bell krater, – bc, C´astulo ; Bl´azquez : – fig. , pls. –; McPhee : ; Dom´ınguez and S´anchez : no. , fig. ; Green : . The published photograph makes clear, as the drawing does not, that there are lines at the wrists of the rightmost figure.
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Figure . Fragments of an Attic red-figure bell krater, – bc
(including the costume of the piper). Only the figure on the right looks masked, or at least has a grotesque face, but not those on either side of the piper. It is possible that the figures that flank the piper are wearing roughly the same costume (the one on the right does not have the himation worn by the one on the left). If this is a scene from comedy it must show an image of two choreuts, a piper and a comic actor. But if this is so, the vase is truly unique: there is virtually no representation in Greek art that shows choreuts and actors together in performance. But the choreuts are not shown making uniform movements or even movements that might strike the viewer as belonging to the same pattern. It is very hard to see how the painter could have expected anyone to recognize that these two figures are meant to represent a comic chorus. Their incoherent, vaguely processional movements (a procession seems indicated by the presence of torches) seem rather to suggest the iconography of entertainers at the Pompe. But if so, they share nothing more with the genre than this vaguely processional and non-uniform movement and the ivy garlands whose traces are visible on the heads of the rightmost figures. The fragment from C´astulo remains problematic no matter what genre we refer it to.
The small figure adjacent a tragic chorus on an Attic rf krater in Basel (BS ) is a notable exception, if this is an actor.
Comedy and the Pompe: Dionysian genre-crossing
conclusion From about bc Athenian art takes a minor interest in the choral groups that performed in the Dionysian Pompe. From about to bc we have several vase-paintings of choral groups who wear costumes typified by sleeved, belted and ankle length (sometimes fringed) garments, ivy spots, kothornoi, ivy garlands and sometimes masks. They move and dance in procession to pipe music and are associated with such Pompe-specific props as phallos-sticks, phallic adornments and obel bread. They are not comic but they have a lot in common with comedy. They may not be precisely the subgenre of phallic chorus that Aristotle was visualizing when he derived comedy from ‘those who led off the phallika’, but they were surely included within his general purview when he linked comedy and phallika. Even if the diachronic relationship between phallika and comedy is wrong (at the very least it is simplistic), the remains of Old Comedy attest to a general belief that a special relationship existed between them. Athenian comic poets frequently model their choruses after choral varieties (including phallic choruses) known from the Pompe, and this is especially true of self-styled Dionysian traditionalists and archaizers, such as Cratinus and (much later) Timocles. By about bc, however, we have strong evidence that the main influence flowed from comedy to phallika: the costume of phallic performers remains clearly distinct from comedy but undergoes a high degree of assimilation nonetheless: one wonders if the ‘voluntary’ performers were already being replaced by professional actors in the fourth century Pompe: this appears to have been standard practice in Hellenistic times. The vase-paintings also show that our phallic performers belong to a broad community of Dionysian choral performers with whom they share many motifs, and with whom they share the same occasion (the Pompe) and purpose (carnival, sacrifice). The patterns that differentiate our phallic performers from other phallic performers and other komoi are variable, relatively vague and easily transgressed. This is a characteristic of Dionysian choruses and of Dionysus himself, who transgresses all norms and barriers. But this transient and permeable quality is something that comedy also
See n. above. For the artists organizing and/or participating in processions generally: Aneziri : , –, –, ; Lightfoot : . Already in the Euboean decree of c. bc (IG xii , , – supplements) it appears that pipers and perhaps other artists who were hired for the theatrical competitions were also required to participate in the Pompe (in IG xii , , ll. –, – all contest performers are required to take part in the procession for the Artemisia). Cf. Aneziri : .
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inherits to a far greater degree than tragedy or even satyr-play. For this reason comedy can fairly be called a ‘genre of genres’ and in this respect too it resembles its cultic Dionysian matrix. Old Comedy draws freely upon all musical and speech genres, but Old Comedy mostly draws its form and contents from the cognate Dionysian genres of tragedy, satyrplay, dithyramb, iambos and the sub-literary choral komoi of the Pompe. In this sense, Aristotle is both deeply insightful and surely wrong, or at least overstating the case, when he derives comedy specifically from the phallika.
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Iambos, comedy and the question of generic affiliation Ralph Rosen
It is a commonplace to note Old Comedy’s many explicit interactions with other literary genres. Indeed, parodic, mocking comedy, in particular – which characterizes much of Aristophanes and probably many of his fragmentary or lost contemporaries – derives much of its appeal, if not its very raison d’ˆetre, from its relationship with other genres. In the case of Old Comedy, parody of tragedy is the most famous instance of its selfconscious dialogue of genres, but there are many others as well – its parody of epic and lyric poetry, for example, and even of contemporary prose genres of history, philosophy, medicine and rhetoric. The relationship that Old Comedy fashions for itself with all such genres is one of alterity, by which I mean that its success depends at the most basic level on the fact that these target genres are other than, different from, comedy, and would under ordinary circumstances be out of place within the comic enterprise. Literary parody within comedy, in short, is a process of ‘allusion’, construed in the most traditional sense of the word as indicating a conscious attempt by the poet to play to an audience’s familiarity with a literary tradition that is not comedy (or at least not Aristophanic comedy), and which would be laughable when incorporated into it.
See Willi : – (and then passim) on linguistic ‘register variation’ in Aristophanes. Not all register variation in Aristophanes is parody, but most parody involves some sort of register variation to mark it as a language that is different from an expected norm. See Willi : – for an attempt to establish a base-line Aristophanic grammar (and stylistics) which can be helpful in detecting parodic deviations. Literary parody (as opposed to parody in other artistic modes, such as music, where the term can be used neutrally to describe thematic borrowing), especially in comic genres, tends to be mocking and ‘negative’, but not necessarily or always so; it does, however, nearly always strive to elicit some form of laughter. See M. A. Rose : –, for the history of terms for parody, and in particular, the relationship between parody and ridicule; for parody in Aristophanes in particular, see Goldhill : –. On the problem of sorting out the different kinds of allusion in Old Comedy – from benign citation to overt parody – see Kugelmeier’s taxonomy of ‘Reflexe’ (: –) that he uses in discussing how poets of Old Comedy interacted with Greek lyric poetry.
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This otherness of a parodied text within comedy makes it fairly easy to spot and to understand in context, and it explains why scholars have often analogized the relationship between a comedy and the texts it parodies to that between parasite and host. But Old Comedy also interacts with other genres in more organic ways, where there is no question of parody and quite often no apparent self-consciousness about allusion or authorial intentionality. Sometimes these are instances where texts interact with each other synchronically as a function of cultural forces that a poet may or may not pay any attention to, such as the ways in which Athenian tragedy and comedy share the same stage and are influenced by common production and performance protocols. Other times comic texts interact with previous authors diachronically, reflecting a generic heritage so old and complex that no single poet could possibly trace a comprehensive history of origins. Aristotle himself put his finger on the problem for Old Comedy when he noted at Poetics a that the early history of Greek comedy could not really be known because no records were kept before its formal state recognition at the City Dionysia ( bc). We still, in fact, share Aristotle’s frustration and crave information about how these
I am thinking here of the many formal devices and structures shared by Athenian tragedy and comedy – e.g. stichic verse, alternation of episodes and lyric passages, and presumably an entire array of stage and costuming practices now largely lost to us. It is likely that in such cases poets were not terribly self-conscious about whether they were ‘interacting’ with one genre or another. Taplin weighs the evidence for and against a meaningful generic relationship between Attic tragedy and comedy, concluding () that ‘on the whole they reject . . . rather than invite overlap’. This is not to say that there were not many self-conscious ‘borrowings’, one from the other, as many scholars have discussed (cf. Taplin : –), but in terms of what each genre actually ‘does’, Taplin finds them worlds apart. Cratin. fr. , which refers to someone as engaging in ‘euripidaristophanizing’ (0* - 1 ), offers a rare moment of self-consciousness about how the two dramatic genres might ‘fuse’. But without real context, it is impossible to know what it all amounts to: it might well imply that Cratinus thought of Aristophanic comedy as deeply informed by Euripidean tragedy; or it may only suggest that Aristophanes is capable of posing as an intellectual like Euripides but was not necessarily derivative of him. See Bakola : –, with bibliography, who argues that Cratinus links Aristophanes to Euripides with the word 0* - 1 in order to highlight his own poetic relationship with Aeschylus. This area includes the many questions about ‘origins’: did Old Comedy evolve, e.g. out of forms inherited from other realms of human activity, such as religious ritual, long lost to the consciousness of any individual poet or his audience? Such a claim is often made for passages such as Dicaeopolis’ lyric phallikon at Ar. Ach. –, even if the passage itself is not felt to replicate such a ritual song exactly (see e.g. Pickard-Cambridge : –; Rothwell : , ; Halliwell : –, with further bibliography, n. ): it re-enacts, or perhaps parodies, an aspect of a specific religious festival that we suspect had a long past even by the fifth century, it seems to have some bearing on what goes on in Attic comedy (viz. aischrologic mockery), but did Aristophanes put it all together in his mind when he composed this scene? Cf. also Rusten , for a similar argument suggesting a link between Old Comedy and the ritual gephyrismos. See Kugelmeier’s third category of lyric ‘reflexes’ in Old Comedy (: ), which includes passages that are best regarded as ‘reminiscences’ (‘Der Reflex klingt an ein lyrisches Vorbild an . . . ’), where it is unclear how conscious the author would have been of what we might call an ‘allusion’.
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diachronic literary relationships might have actually taken shape: where does Old Comedy come from? What accounts for its distinctive generic hybridity? Will isolating its constituent ‘parts’ help us understand how it interacted with other genres and, more important, clarify for us what Old Comedy, as a discrete genre itself, actually is supposed to do? While we cannot here take up the grand (and, it has to be said, intractable) problem of Old Comedy’s ‘ultimate’ origins, I would like to address a specific aspect of Old Comedy’s generic provenance that has a bearing both on the question of its early, pre-fifth-century – and so, pre-historical – forms, and on how it came to be conceptualized in later periods of antiquity when it had become a genre to be read or studied rather than performed. In my book Old Comedy and the Iambographic Tradition (henceforth, OCIT), I tried to make a case for Old Comedy’s close generic dependence on the tradition of iambic poetry, most famously represented by Archilochus in the seventh century bc and Hipponax in the sixth. Since then, there has been considerable scholarly progress on the iambic poets, and some useful engagement with, and criticism of, the approach I took in that work, so this seems a fitting time to revisit the position I argued for in that work. The conception of ‘generic dependence’ that I was working with in OCIT was standard for philological scholarship at the time: look in authors working in genre A for lexical similarities with authors working in genre B, collect overt allusions and pay special attention to passages where one author mentions an earlier one by name. Next, affirm the suspected connection, if possible, by finding ancient testimonia that support the notion of generic affiliation. This method is neither illegitimate nor inconsequential as a first pass at the problem. Certainly, if Aristophanes can be shown to quote Archilochus (as he does), or to mention Hipponax by name (as he does), we have the beginnings of an argument for at least some sort of relationship among these poets. But the real question is what kind of relationship. Are Aristophanes’ quotations of Archilochus categorically different from his far more numerous and full quotations of tragic poets,
Rosen . The methodological problems with arguments for generic affiliation based on lexical similarities were well presented by E. Bowie , on which see discussion below. Although I find his scepticism at times excessive, his challenge affords us an opportunity to articulate what, in the first instance, we are seeking when we ask how literary genres interact. Other critiques of my argument for generic affiliation tended to fixate unduly on my suggestion that historical figures targeted for mockery by comic poets can in some respects be profitably treated as ‘stock characters’ (e.g. Hubbard : – and Kugelmeier : –). I offer some clarification at Rosen : n. . Rosen : –; Kugelmeier : –. Rosen : –; Kugelmeier : –.
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for example? Or to put it another way, when Cratinus wrote a play entitled Archilochoi, almost certainly bringing Archilochus on to the stage in some guise, and peppering the play with Archilochean allusions and quotations, was he constructing a parodic relationship – a relationship of mocking otherness, not affiliation – with Archilochus, akin to Aristophanes’ relationship with Euripides? Or was it an attempt on Cratinus’ part to acknowledge an organic generic relationship between his poetry and Archilochus’ that was more knowing hommage than parody? I argued for this latter position in OCIT, but the case can be made even more forcefully that iambos and Old Comedy were powerfully and uniquely affiliated, I believe, if we move beyond a strictly philological approach and consider them – despite their many differences in literary form, performative structures, or even localized social functioning – as, first and foremost, genres of satire. The key issue in any discussion of generic affiliation is the question of authorial self-consciousness: if we say that various genres are ‘affiliated’ or ‘connected’, or whatever metaphor we choose, does it matter that the poets whom we think were influenced by others were aware of the processes by which they were influenced? Is this kind of self-consciousness an essential criterion for even speaking of ‘influence’ to begin with? And is ‘influence’ even the appropriate word to use in cases where there seems to be no awareness on the author’s part of how his work interacts with anyone else’s, even when we seem to be able to see a clear case of interaction? These are questions that genre theorists in other literary fields have wrestled with for some time, and classicists, too, have not been insensitive to the complexity of the problems, but for a variety of reasons comic genres have presented particular challenges to thinking outside of familiar philological parameters. In the specific case of iambos and Old Comedy, this reluctance to theorize about genre has created some confusion about what we are
Rosen ; Kugelmeier : –; Bakola : –. For my use of the term ‘satire’, see Rosen : –, esp. –. See e.g. Farrell , Rosen : –, and now Rotstein (esp. –), who offers a lucid discussion, with bibliography, of the major theoretical challenges of genre criticism as practised both in antiquity and by theorists of our own time. Among other things, comedy, and in particular satirical strands of comic literature, tend to construct for themselves a historically specific reality that exists primarily in the here and now, cajoling its audiences into thinking that there must be some relation between their lived reality and reality of the comic performance. Matters become even more complicated when authors speak in their own voice in their works, especially when they mock other people who would be known to the audience and make claims for themselves that have the veneer of a veridical truth. One can find even the most sophisticated critics, for example, being drawn into a satirist’s insistence (a conventional trope in itself ) that his work must be taken at face value and as representative of a historical reality. See Rosen : –, –.
Comedy and iambos
looking for when we come to the question of how the two relate to one another. Much of the confusion has arisen because scholars have often conflated what are really four distinct questions: () How, historically, did a particular genre come into being and develop? () How did a given genre represent itself, its origin, its history and its ‘essence’, and why did it do so in that way? () What did the audience think of the genre of Old Comedy? () How have critics (and this can include authors themselves, contemplating the provenance of literary genres) understood a given genre’s origin, history and ‘essence’, and why did they do so in that way, especially if their claims turn out to be historically inaccurate? Sometimes scholars will assume that the one will necessarily follow from the other but, in fact, as I would like to argue here, actual historical dependence between, or affiliation of, genres need hardly imply self-consciousness of such a relationship, nor need we always assume that what an author tells us about generic history is historically ‘accurate’. The argument of OCIT illustrates well the need to clarify which questions we are seeking to answer, and the evidence that can be brought to bear on them. Everyone would agree that Old Comedy and iambos share some literary features: both can employ invective, obscenity, episodic narrative structures, and so forth. I wanted to argue that these shared features suggested that the later genre, Athenian Old Comedy, in some sense descended from the earlier one, and that the comic poets were both aware of the generic affiliation they had with iambographers and self-consciously indebted to those earlier poets for many of the stylistic features for which they were famous in their own time, especially obscenity and political
Rotstein addresses some of these questions as well, passim, and explicitly at –, although in her study of the genre of iambos she is mostly concerned with my question below, i.e. she is less interested in ‘an answer to the question of what iambos is, an answer that would take the form of a definition . . . [but rather] the history of the conceptualization of iambos as a literary genre’ (). She focuses on what she calls the ‘received iambos’, which focuses on authors who were ‘received into’ the tradition by ancient authors and scholars themselves (cf. –, –). Few people today conceptualize genres as natural categories in the way we think of objects in the world (e.g. birds, cups, water), and most would assent to the three descriptions of genres as ‘category concepts’, ‘mental representations of abstract entities’ and ‘cultural products’ suggested by Rotstein . Rotstein’s synthesis of current approaches drawn from cognitive science is illuminating (‘chunking’, ‘embodiment’, ‘scripting’, –), and helpful for explaining why it is often so difficult – for original audiences as well as for us who study them – to pin down the generic identity of a given literary work. I do think, however, that the generic identity of iambos in antiquity (indeed, even the possibility for ancient audiences to define it) was more stable than Rotstein and E. Bowie would allow. Bowie’s () whimsical characterization of iambos as an ‘`a la carte menu’, for example, seems overstated. See further discussion below.
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mockery. Let us say, however, that the philology, and even the testimonia, are not strong enough to sustain the position that Attic comedy ‘descended’ from the iambos or that Athenian comic poets knowingly modelled their plays on iambic poets. What would this actually mean for the question of generic affiliation? How self-aware of their literary forebears must poets be before we can legitimately speak in terms of generic ‘descent’, ‘affiliation’ or ‘influence’? Other criteria have been invoked to downplay or even deny a meaningful affiliation between iambos and comedy: ‘social conditions’, length of work, composition of the audience, modes of performance – each of these categories looks quite different for iambos and Old Comedy. Another way of putting this might be to say that although Archilochus composed a humorous, obscene psogos against Lycambes in the seventh century bc, and Aristophanes composed a humorous, obscene psogos against Cleon in the fifth, the date and conditions of performance, audience composition and reception were so different that any similarities between them were more likely coincidental than indicative of any sort of lineal relationship. The major premise behind this statement is that because both iambos and Old Comedy can be shown to involve many other things besides abuse and political mockery, these elements themselves cannot be regarded as definitional of either genre. As a basic principle, this seems unobjectionable enough; just because we can find similar phenomena in two genres does not necessarily mean that they are related in anything more than a coincidental way. As Farrell has pointed out, Pindar’s Odes may have been commissioned to praise victors, but they could on occasion include blame and criticism as well; the mere appearance of ‘blame’ in his Odes does not, however, suddenly turn Pindar into a ‘blame poet’, and he even famously goes out of his way to distance himself from such an association, at Pythians .–, where he repudiates the iambic poet Archilochus for being psogeros. With Pindar, there is never any question of what his
As E. Bowie , who concludes that we should not think of Attic comedy as ‘descended’ from, or even ‘strongly influenced’ by, iambos. See also Willi : –. The real issue, it seems, is the use of ‘descent’, which again returns us to the question of authorial self-consciousness: is a modern pop love lyric ‘descended from’ ancient examples of similar songs? Is Death of a Salesman ‘descended from’ Greek tragedy? A case could be made for either position in both examples, depending on whether one uses the word ‘descent’ to imply that authors need to be aware of their literary antecedents. Rotstein : – distinguishes between genres that develop ‘out of’ other genres, and those that are ‘similar to but not deriving from’ other genres. This distinction highlights well the problems inherent in the terms we use to discuss influences on, and relationships between, genres, since the actual difference between the two options is not always easy to pinpoint. (See further discussion below, n. ). Farrell : –.
Comedy and iambos
Odes are supposed to ‘do’ – Pindar in this context composed praise poetry, no matter what other literary elements he deployed, some of which, as we have seen with iambos, may even be generically at odds with the goals of epinician. So, in the case of iambos and Old Comedy, the real question is: how important is abuse and comic mockery to each, and what is it actually doing in each one? And if we can determine that the ‘work’ being done by such elements in each genre is functionally similar, would this similarity effectively constitute generic affiliation? This is a far more profitable direction for us to take in considering iambos and comedy, I believe, than mere philology, since literary works by different authors can certainly function in similar ways, as similar ‘speech acts’ with similar claims to efficacy – even if the words and forms they use are dissimilar to each other’s. Horace offers a useful case in point: he did not have philology, or even history, on his mind when he noted at the opening of Satires . that Lucilian satire derived from (pendet) the poets of Old Comedy. This is one of the most famous pronouncements of generic affiliation in all of classical literature, especially since it addresses the bifurcation I have discussed earlier between generic self-consciousness on the one hand (Horace seems to want us to believe that all Roman satirists would have been conscious of a literary, or at least discursive, debt to Old Comedy and could draw on the antecedent genre for allusive play) and, on the other, the notion of an organic generic affiliation (Old Comedy and Roman satire were related to one another simply by virtue of doing similar things, whether or not the poets realized it). What exactly has Horace sensed here in Old Comedy that seemed relevant to Roman satire? He says clearly enough that it was the libertas of Old Comedy, its freedom to attack prominent wrongdoers, that he admires, even if (as he claims) his own speech has to be more constrained. There is an interesting, playful bit of generic gamesmanship at work here; for by denying that he is able to do in his satires what Old Comedy could (notabant . . . ), Horace both distances, apologetically, the nature of his own work from Old Comedy, and at the same time brings it into closer contact by implying that in a perfect world where speech was unconstrained (as he believed it was in fifth-century Athens) his satires would be just like Old
This is the central question that Bowie’s remark (: ) calls to mind: ‘If my arguments [for a multiplicity of “identifying features” of iambos] were to be correct, their relevance . . . would be to diminish the importance within iambos of that element which has most often been seen as linking it closely with comedy, abuse’ (my emphasis). As Freudenburg : succinctly put it: ‘The lines are fraught with misinformation that caricatures not only the poets of Greek Old Comedy, but Lucilius as well.’ See Rosen : – for discussion and further bibliography.
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Comedy. If Horace had never written these lines, or if they were lost to us, how willing would we be to think of Roman satire and Old Comedy as affiliated genres? A strict historicist would probably conclude that any resemblance between Roman satire and Old Comedy was coincidental or arose, one might say, ‘independently’. Certainly no one, ancient or modern, would claim that the relationship between Roman satire and Old Comedy was anything like that between Roman comic drama and Greek New Comedy, where it can be easily shown both that the relationship was historical and that the Roman comic poets were well aware of that fact. Horace’s statement in Satires . about satire’s provenance in Old Comedy is by all measures eccentric, in fact, at least when considered as a piece of literary history. But what might we imagine prompted it? What kind of relationship between the two genres did Horace perceive – despite whatever a historian might think – that could be both ‘valid’ and yet unhistorical at the same time? These are questions that can be applied equally to the problem of how Old Comedy was related to iambos, where the historicity of a generic relationship – which is to say, clear evidence that the former descended organically and formally from the latter – cannot be well established. We are left, instead, with impressions from the poets of Old Comedy, as I discussed in OCIT, that remind us of Horace on satire: they sensed that what they were doing with their comedies was somehow ‘like’ an antecedent genre, even if they would have been unable to make a historically legitimate argument for lineage and descent. Their clear interest in iambos, however, like Horace’s interest in Old Comedy, ought to be sufficient to prompt us, in turn, at the very least to consider what inspired this interest in the first place. To answer this question, it is helpful for us to think in terms of a genre’s ‘dynamics’ rather than any static qualities of form or language. What distinguishes one genre from another, to rephrase my earlier question, becomes more a matter of what they do than of what they are. This approach allows us to reframe our search for a genre’s defining features by asking what it is about a given literary work that no other genre would be able to replicate in quite the same way, and with the same effect. In the case
Scholars of an earlier era seemed more sympathetic to conceptualist approaches such as this, particularly as a by-product of their obsession with finding the ‘origins’ of Old Comedy. If concrete historical (and pre-historical) evidence was lacking, some progress seemed possible with more folkloric, anthropological or structural approaches. See e.g. Zielinski ; S¨uss ; Cornford [] (with J. Henderson’s Introduction to the reprint: xi–xxxiii); more recent discussion in Sifakis , , ; Rusten b; Csapo and Miller a: –, Rothwell ; Halliwell : n. ; Bierl : –.
Comedy and iambos
of iambos, Old Comedy and even Roman satire, I have argued elsewhere that the concept of ‘satire’ is a reasonably good start, for ‘satire’ is a broad term that is not defined by specific literary elements – metres, or structures or performance protocols – but rather by its dynamics, the way it sets out to construct a particular relationship between an author and an audience over against some other person or abstract thing. Satirical authors may draw on a common arsenal of tropes or devices (obscenity, low diction, parody and personal mockery, just to name a few), but none of these itself defines satire, and most of them can be found in any number of other genres. Greek orators, lyric poets and even tragedians mock individuals, use obscenity or engage in parody, and in such moments we may even say that these authors are being ‘satirical’. But to use that adjective is to imply that there is something we consider ‘true satire’, different from the examples that we label ‘satirical’. What distinguishes genres of satire from genres that may merely incorporate satire, is that the work of the former – the ergon or telos of satire, to borrow terms that Aristotle uses for the function and aim of tragedy – is understood by audiences, authors and critics to be laughter. This is laughter of a rather specific kind, of course, but it always lurks behind the mockery and ridicule found in this kind of literary work, and there usually is no further telos, despite an author’s occasional (and equally humorous) claims to the contrary. Aischrology may pepper a forensic or persuasive speech, for example, and elicit laughter from its audience at that moment, but laughter is hardly that work’s telos; it functions more as rhetorical spice – strategically deploying humour in a work that is not otherwise generically characterized as comic. Even the
Rosen : –. See now Worman , on the wide range of classical Greek authors who deploy these many abusive tropes. These tropes allow us to consider many of these authors satirical, but not necessarily ‘satirists’. See Rosen : –. On Aristotle’s use of the terms ergon (‘function’) and telos (‘aim’) for tragedy in Poetics, see Halliwell : – and Woodruff . In the end, Aristotle is not particularly explicit in his use of these terms, and Halliwell’s summary () exposes Aristotle’s thinking here as almost circular: ‘ . . . the end or function of tragedy is not presented by Aristotle as a matter of some single, discrete factor. It involves, rather, the complete, harmonious fulfillment of the “nature” of the genre, and that is something that embraces all the major principles set out in the Poetics – principles of structure and unity, of agency and character, of the arousal of the genre’s defining emotions.’ Does this amount to saying that the nature of tragedy is for it to fulfil its nature? The function of satire is, by contrast, much easier to articulate than that of tragedy, since it involves a rather specific recipe of attack or complaint plus humour, as Aristotle himself seemed to realize. See further discussion below. On the laughter associated with mockery, ridicule, derision, insult – all features of what we call ‘satire’ – in Greek culture, see Halliwell : –. See Worman : –, where she argues that ‘in fourth-century prose, comedy . . . was becoming a resource for the kind of outrageous character assassination that entertains the audience and furthers argument’ ().
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frequent didactic claims one associates with satirical authors, disingenuous or not, are subservient to the work’s goal of humouring an audience. In considering the relationship between iambos and comedy, therefore, we can more easily lay aside the many formal or contextual differences between the two that scholars have legitimately pointed out and instead look at the work each is trying to accomplish. What we find, I think, are strikingly parallel dynamics in play – an author singles out another person for ridicule, usually indignant over that person’s behaviour or some other abstract issue of the day in which that person is implicated; he speaks to, or in front of, any audience of people who are supposed to be sympathetic listeners; and in the course of his attacks, he makes an audience laugh. It is easy to anticipate objections that such a formulation is simplistic and incomplete – surely not every iambic or comic poet at every moment in a given work is engaged in this very enterprise; and there are, of course, many other aspects of their works that seem to have nothing to do with invective or mockery. But if we start with the (almost tautologous) fact that both iambos and Old Comedy are comic genres, and consider what the preponderant nature of that comedy is – namely, what kind of humour these genres most rely on to distinguish themselves from other comedic forms – it is clear that this would be the comedy of personal mockery. It is worth noting, moreover, that iambos and Old Comedy are the only literary genres (certainly the only poetic genres) of Greek antiquity about which this can be said.
Satirists commonly make didactic claims for their ridicule and indignation, but such claims tend to be complicated, if not undermined, by their heavy use of (generically indicated) humour and irony. See Rosen (). This notion is what seems to have persuaded E. Bowie , that iambos has been wrongly conceptualized as, at root, a genre of mockery and blame: ‘Iambos was a form of poetry in which a number of identifying features regularly appeared’ (: ), and mockery was simply one of these features. ‘No one of these features’, he continues, ‘needed to be present for a poem to be recognized as (an) iambos.’ Here we confront again the vexatious question of what we think we are describing – a historical phenomenon that would have been recognizable to contemporary audiences, or a conceptual construct that only crystallized as a genre over time (Rotstein’s much subtler ‘received iambos’, see above n. )? The problem is knowing when to consider that a genre has ‘come into being’ in the first place. If there really were archaic performances of iambos that could be completely devoid of anything we might consider, broadly construed, satirical (which I very much doubt, but here our evidence is too incomplete to judge for sure either way), are we even justified in referring to such performances as ‘iambos’ to begin with, especially in light of the fact that later antiquity almost univocally came to regard blame and mockery as ‘identifying features’ of iambos and would not readily refer to something as ‘iambos’ that did not include mockery? See Rotstein , –, a chapter with the revealing title, ‘Invective as the Dominant Feature of Iambos’. Rotstein : –, in her analysis of Aristotle’s use of the terms psogos and iambos, lays out Aristotle’s varying stances on the matter clearly but, like Bowie, she fixates on the issue of individual iamboi that may not actually contain abuse: the ‘different forms of abuse figure only in part of the works by poets of the “received iambos”, while they are found in other genres of poetry as
Comedy and iambos
As most modern genre theorists are quick to point out, genres are defined not by any kind of reified essence, but phenomenologically: literary works exist within a social and cultural context; people respond to them and classify them according to how they perceive them, how they work, what they look like, and so forth. It is people who label genres, and if they conclude that two genres are affiliated, the issue is not so much whether they are ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ to do so, but what has led them to such a conclusion in the first place. Looked at from this perspective, it comes to matter far less whether we can ‘prove’ that the poets of Old Comedy themselves thought of their work as ‘iambic’ than why someone else, able to compare the two genres, would reach that very conclusion. This is why, of course, the testimony of Aristotle’s Poetics has become so crucial for the debates about how (or whether) iambos and Old Comedy are related, for he is our earliest and most explicit testimony (though never explicit enough, alas) that Athenian comedy in some sense evolved out of the iambos. Aristotle’s discussion of this topic at Poetics does not especially help us with the question of how self-conscious the comic poets might have been about their relationship with iambos, though his acute sense of the literary dynamics at work in each genre certainly makes it likely, prima facie, that he thought they were. The more critical
well’ (). See above, p. , on the difference between satire as a genre and genres that merely incorporate satirical elements but do something else, generically speaking. To put this another way, if we find a poem with no abuse by a poet who otherwise has a predilection for abuse, does that mean that the poet cannot be considered, in terms of generic categorization, a poet of abuse? It seems more profitable to identify an author’s genre as a function of his entire known oeuvre, and of what we can know about what this oeuvre is supposed – by author and audiences alike – to be doing. No one would ever say, for example, that Euripides is not a tragedian because his plays sometimes contain scenes that play like love lyric, pastoral or comedy. Rotstein : is right to say that ‘invective is not a literary genre’, but ‘invective’ is not synonymous with ‘satire’, which, even if we are unwilling to regard it as a bona fide genre as such, is certainly a literary mode that can define certain authors and the genres they work in. This is surely what Pind. Pyth. .–, had in mind in his complaint about Archilochus as psogeros (= a ‘blamer’, but in the context of Archilochus’ comic aims, not so far from our term ‘satirical’), whether or not we should assume that Pindar had Archilochus’ iamboi specifically in mind here (cf. Rotstein : ). Pindar’s insight into Archilochus is not that everything Archilochus composed was blame poetry, but that so much ‘blaming’ could be found in his work that he can legitimately be characterized with an adjective that reflects this (psogeros). See also Nagy : –; Rosen : , . That term, in other words, would still have meaning even in the context of a non-invective, non-satirical poem. Of course, in the end, one has to concede that not enough Archilochean poetry survives to make any very certain judgement about the variations in generic character across his different works; which is why the testimony of a witness relatively close in time to Archilochus, such as Pindar, is all the more revealing. See above, nn. , . Pace E. Bowie : , whose firm denial that Aristotle could have had any notion of ‘descent’ in mind when he noted similarities between iambos and comedy seems overconfident, based as it is on arguments e silentio: ‘that [Aristotle] did not [think Old Comedy was descended from iambos] is further demonstrated by his total silence on Ionian iambos . . . when he alludes to . . . the origins
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question is just how Aristotle conceived of their relationship. The case I would like to make on this point is this: even though Aristotle imagines a more or less conventional diachronic history of tragedy at the beginning of Poetics, he is not really concerned with trajectories of ‘influence’ or authorial self-consciousness. His notions of literary evolution derive rather from a phenomenological analysis and taxonomizing of literary forms and dynamics, and from an attempt to extrapolate from this commonalities among different works. This is why Bowie imagines a false problem when he voices scepticism that Aristotle saw Old Comedy as a ‘direct descendent’ of iambos, since Aristotle does not seem especially concerned to make an argument for direct descent here. The relevant passage from Poetics (b–a) is worth considering here with these issues in mind: ! ' kat t o«ke±a ¢qh &
A ' ( 5 @ > , ' *" @ -> , @ 4 2 ( , F G H 2 $ . @ ' I 6 JK 2 * 6 %# . (9
, .6 ' L > , 6 ' JK 2 5" % ,
; 2 B M (. ; 6 7 6 ./ N! " – 6 ./ ( , " > ./ 1 2 . " @ @ ' & @ ' ./ . F ' 2 , O K N ( *# I
), H 6 # @ " 5 , * 4 6 A B M 9 %# , F )P & )K> 6 , H Q 6 . - ' -’ R" ,
B@ kat tn o«ke©an fÅsin
' @ ./ " , ' @ @ , 6 1 # L ( . Poetry branched into two, according to its creators’ characters: the more serious produced mimesis of noble actions and the actions of noble people, while the more vulgar depicted the actions of the base, in the first place by composing invectives (just as others produced hymns and encomia). Now, we cannot name such an invective by any poet earlier than Homer,
of Attic comedy in phallic choral performances’. ‘Again, it would have been very easy to say that pre-Crates comedy was a direct descendant of iamboi . . . ’ In fact, Aristotle does not have to mention iambos at a, because he had already dealt with it in the preceding section, where he had made it clear that iambic writers were precisely the ones who became writers of comedy (pace Rotstein : ): ' @ ./ " (‘so some became poets of comedy instead of iambic verses’). E. Bowie : . See above, n. .
Comedy and iambos
though probably many poets produced them; but we can do so from Homer onwards, namely the latter’s Margites and the like. In these poets, it was aptness which brought the iambic metre too into use – precisely why it is called the ‘iambic’ now, because it was in this metre that they lampooned one another. Of the older poets some became composers of epic hexameters, others of iambic lampoons. Just as Homer was the supreme poet of elevated subjects (for he was preeminent not only in quality but also in composing dramatic mimesis), so too he was the first to delineate the forms of comedy, by dramatizing not invective but the laughable: thus Margites stands in the same relation to comedies as do the Iliad and the Odyssey to tragedies. And when tragedy and comedy had been glimpsed [i.e. in Homer], those whose own natures gave them an impetus towards either type of poetry abandoned iambic lampoons to become the comic poets, or epic to become tragedians, because these newer forms were grander and more esteemed than the earlier.
In discussing this passage, Bowie concludes that Aristotle ‘writes as if [iambos and comedy] had related features’ rather than that the one was ‘descended from or strongly influenced by the other’ (my emphasis). Even if Aristotle were interested in making this specific point, which is hardly clear from the text, Bowie’s scepticism raises an interesting methodological question – if one acknowledges that two genres have ‘related features’, as Bowie does, what does it take to transform these features into sufficient evidence for generic affiliation? Philosophers might recognize here a variation of the sorites-problem (how many individual grains of wheat does it take to make a ‘heap’?), and the stakes are far from trivial. For establishing affiliation between literary genres brings us back to our original concern for discovering what each genre is actually trying to ‘do’. Put more concretely: if we think we understand what Hipponax is doing when he mocks Bupalus, and we think that, when Aristophanes mocks his targets, we can detect in him similar goals, formal structures, diction, and so on, a case for affiliation, if not descent, seems assured. Some might object, as Willi and Bowie have done, that historical contingencies colour the nature of each poet’s mockery too much to argue for anything but the most casual or coincidental affiliation. Why, for example, should we assume that a poet mocking a target in sixth-century bc Clazomenae should be after the same effect as a poet mocking a target in the fifth, when political structures and social relationships were different? Because, I think we can say, each poet would have the same answer to the following question: ‘what are you really trying to do when you make fun of your targets – not at the localized, specific level, but at the most conceptual, poetic one?’ To this
Here and elsewhere I reproduce the translations of Aristotle’s Poetics by Halliwell (my emphasis). See above, n. . E. Bowie : .
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question, each would doubtless answer that he is ultimately interested in making his audience laugh, and the mode he has decided to adopt is one of satire and mockery; each would claim he has privileged a satirical mode because something about his targets annoys him, and the indignation that results allows him to fulfil his comedic strategy. Exactly how each puts this together in a given poem is highly idiosyncratic, of course, but the same satirical scaffolding can be seen sturdily in place in each case, in examples from antiquity to the present. Aristotle himself also urges us not to fixate on the contingencies of individual authors and works, but rather to think in terms of literary telos, dynamics and a largely unconscious evolutionary process. The opening line of the passage quoted above is a key statement: ! ' kat t o«ke±a ¢qh &
. ‘Poetry’, he says, ‘split apart according to poets’
. S!’, their ‘individual characters’. By suggesting that poets are drawn to certain types of poetry according to their respective temperaments ( . S!), Aristotle attempts to isolate fixed, ‘natural’ categories that can unify a multiplicity of poetic forms, regardless of how these forms might relate to one another diachronically or as a function of authorial intention. Aristotle’s phrasing of this process at a is revealing: - ' -’ R" ,
¾rmäntev kat tn o«ke©an fÅsin ' @ ./ " , ' @ @ , 6 1 # L ( . And when tragedy and comedy had been glimpsed [in Homer], those whose own natures gave them an impetus towards either type of poetry abandoned iambic lampoons to become the comic poets, or epic to become tragedians, because these newer forms were grander and more esteemed than the earlier.
See Rosen : –, for a fuller exposition of the formal, and psychological, structures of satire. See Rosen and Marks , and Rosen and Baines for comparative studies of satirical poetics beyond classical authors. For Aristotle, the scaffolding seems to be what lies behind his use of the word (for the first time in extant Greek literature) ./ 1 at b, now well discussed at Rotstein : –, who sums up the meaning of the verb as ‘to do what is typical of iamboi’ as it was conceived in the fourth century bc, namely, as she enumerates, humorous, sometimes scandalous, content, aischrology, and ad hominem ridicule. Rotstein would say that the idea of iambos as ‘dominantly abusive’ () was a conception that was developing in the fourth century, and then applied ‘backward to a pre-Homeric age’. Why she resists so categorically, along with Bowie, the idea that early iambos might also have been ‘dominantly abusive’ (or at least, to use a phrase with broader connotations, ‘dominantly satirical’) in its own day eludes me, especially given the paucity of actual fragments from the period that would allow us to make definitive judgements either way. There has been some dispute as to whether . S! refers here to poets or poetry, but see Lucas : ad loc.
Comedy and iambos
When poets began to see, through their experience with Homer, what tragedy and comedy were all about, they cathected to one or the other (B@ ) in accordance with their -> . In the lines immediately preceding these Aristotle had already established that comedy, as he conceptualized it, was not identical to iambos, but he still could say that epic and iambic poets of an earlier age ( " @ @ ' & @ ' ./ ) could map on, by analogy, to the tragedy and comedy of his own day. The kind of person whose physis would have drawn him to iambos, in other words, would have had the same character as the person who in classical Athens would have been drawn to comedy. Aristotle is grasping here for that certain something in both iambos and comedy that would appeal to a person with such a physis, their ‘natural bent’, irrespective of any arguments about how these genres might be interrelated from a diachronic perspective. In fact, it is striking that Aristotle makes a point of saying a few sections later (b) that there is no real memory of what came before comedy. The history of comedy’s formal aspects – for example its masks, prologues, number of actors – was unknown because there were no records and no explicit cultural memory, at least none that he had recourse to ( ' " T 2 T ! @ (, U , b). Even so, however, Aristotle has no trouble in positing a clear generic link between iambos and comedy based on his argument that each genre attracted practitioners whose temperaments were themselves linked by their predilection for satiric invective, whether or not they thought very much about how other genres deployed similar literary strategies. In short, for Aristotle, the many types of poetry that exist can be categorized according to the kinds of things that each purports to do or what others (audiences, critics) claim that they do. This is an inevitably imprecise procedure, and it is never quite clear what Aristotle regards as
Aristotle notes that Homer’s Margites, for example, was a form (#) of comedy that dramatized the ‘laughable’ (6 ), which included invective (4 ), but not exclusively so. At b he cites Homer as the first known composer of 4 in his Margites, so it is curious that a few lines later, he says that Margites dramatized the laughable, but not invective ( * 4 ). This seems to show that Aristotle thought of 4 as a prominent component of a larger work of comedy, but that not all the comic aspects of the work had to be invective. See now Rotstein : –: ‘For Aristotle the Margites seems to be an item on the margins of the broad category of psogos that builds 6 into a proto-dramatic story ( )’ (). See above, n. , on Pind. Pyth. .–, which anticipates Aristotle’s correlation between a type of poetry and the poet’s character. For in calling Archilochus psogeron there, he imputes to the personality of the poet a quality that he would identify as lying at the heart of Archilochean poetry, namely its fondness for psogos. People who are naturally drawn to invective in ‘real life’ will just as naturally be drawn to poetry that features invective if they decide to become poets.
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the actual criteria for establishing generic categories. But when he says that certain personality types ‘rush’ (B@ ) to compose in one genre, these poets are rushing towards something, and that something is both real and specific in his mind. Iambos, for example, is for Aristotle a distinct subspecies of comedy, which is itself a subcategory of what he calls the non-serious (*" ). It is, moreover, a form of comic poetry distinguished from others by its predilection for psogos – invective and mockery; it likes to make one set of people laugh by exposing others to mockery. Aristotle is not concerned if individual examples of iambos can be found that might not feature a psogos; it is enough for him to know that this is the type of poem where a psogos could be right at home and, equally important, that its author is the type of person who could be characterized as psogeros. When we arrive at Old Comedy, it is obvious, and often noted, that not every episode of every Aristophanic play is satirical or invective. But if we were to ask Aristotle what sort of person a poet of Old Comedy would be, there can be little doubt that he would say it was someone who loved a good psogos himself – someone who by nature (i.e. in keeping with his physis) revelled in being funny through personal mockery and who deployed the many literary tropes associated with such an enterprise. Such tropes themselves were not necessarily stable and could vary in detail from poet to poet, but on this point too Aristotle would doubtless have found unifying generic categories for them, if only by characterizing them all as low (phaula) and non-serious (cf. Poet. b–, quoted above). Aristotle’s basic position on the relationship between iambos and Old Comedy, therefore, is not, in the end, especially complicated: he did think they were related, in ways that I have discussed, and he did imagine some sort of historical relationship between them, although he had to remain agnostic about the details. He does not himself theorize a concept of
Rotstein’s distinction (: –) between Aristotle’s ‘theoretical’ and ‘empirical’ approaches to the history of poetry makes good sense up to a point, but I suspect the lines between each approach were considerably more blurred for Aristotle: ‘ . . . In the empirical approach dithyramb and phallic songs are “historical” (“out of which”) forerunners of tragedy and comedy . . . In the theoretical approach, iamboi appear as the conceptual (similar to but not deriving from) consequent of psogoi, which I argue is Aristotle’s construct, and the conceptual forerunner of comedy.’ It is not clear to me why the two approaches need be mutually exclusive, either for Aristotle or for ourselves. If Aristotle thought that Attic comedy arose historically and most directly ‘out of’ phallic songs, and phallic songs would have featured the kinds of psogoi associated with iamboi, why would he have had any trouble in thinking that phallic songs themselves had a historical – not only a conceptual – relationship with iambos, that they arose ‘out of’ iambos (on comedy and phallic songs see Csapo in this volume). In Aristotle’s speculative literary history, after all, all comic forms ultimately derived from the split between the poets of ‘the serious’ and ‘the vulgar’ non-serious ( ' ( 5 @ > , ' *" @ -> , b). It is
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generic affiliation, but it is clear that he is willing, unlike many scholars, to lay aside the many contingencies that individual works exhibit within the contexts of their production in favour of thinking in terms of a work’s ergon, and that this kind of thinking encourages a consideration of how different genres interact with one another. Aristotle’s insight about iambos was merely a first step in the generic analysis of iambos, but its significance lay in the way it articulated a literary dynamic – what we would call satire or mockery – that could serve as a meaningful criterion for generic classification without relying on specific authorial practices or self-consciousness. The question of a deliberate, authorially self-conscious, historically verifiable affiliation between iambos and Old Comedy is impossible to answer with much certainty in the current state of our evidence; but denying that there was one or remaining agnostic on the issue does not mean that the two could not be affiliated according to a different set of criteria that have more to do with how humans interact with each other in the world than how aware they always are of what they are actually doing. true that he had no real evidence on which to base this statement, but he seems to have imagined that all those people with ‘psogeric’ -> , driven to compose in comic forms that involved what we would call ‘satire’, were people who had really existed. See Rusten b, for the diversity of comic forms in Greek poetry that seem to have been around in the sixth century bc, as potential antecedents to elements found in fifth-century Attic comedy.
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Paraepic comedy: point(s) and practices Martin Revermann
Epic poetry, notably that of the Iliad and the Odyssey, casts long shadows over Greek cultural and literary history. With a genre of such clout and presence there is no question of whether or not to interact, but only how to interact. Greek literary history can, in fact, plausibly be seen as a long series of responses to epic in the form of the Homeric poems: lyric poetry, tragedy, historiography and the novel (let alone the epic poetry of Apollonius, Tryphiodorus or Nonnus) all cannot but interact with Homeric epic as a critical part of their artistic and ideological self-definition. Comedy too, of course, exists ‘in the shadow of Homer’. The epic legacy (and challenge) contained a set of features which held great appeal for its comic heirs: colourful and complex characters; plots which explored the human condition in extreme, sometimes fantastical, conditions; a distinct linguistic register, Homeric Kunstsprache; a metre, the dactylic hexameter, which was strongly though not exclusively associated with the genre; and an unrivalled panhellenic recognition factor which cut across socio-economic divisions to an exceptional degree: here, if anywhere, it seems legitimate to view comedy’s audiences (Athenian and non-Athenian) as a ‘black box’, united in their knowledge and appreciation of epic poetry and competent to spot how comedy engaged with it. All of these features, then, provided comic playwrights with a rich set of cues, deployable in isolation or as clusters, to signal interaction, trigger off audience responses and position comedy relative to that epic legacy. My account of paraepic comedy is interested both in the ideologies underlying the interaction and in the more technical aspects of dramatic craftsmanship that are involved in it. I will not approach the topic from
I wish to thank the editors and Donald Sells for their helpful comments. Audience competence, in Athens and beyond, was therefore even stronger for epic than for tragedy, see Revermann b on the issue. Swift : – assumes a similarly high level of audience competence with regard to lyric (melic) poetry. But there are problems, especially in Athens where partheneia are not attested (see R. Parker : –) and epinicians may not have been common.
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an Atheno-centric and Aristophanic viewpoint but from somewhat offcentre, starting in the fourth century and proceeding to sixth-century Sicily before, eventually, moving on to fifth-century Athens and to Aristophanes. This itinerary, I believe, is necessary to bring out the complexity and diversity of the phenomenon, and to demonstrate the historical and artistic contingencies that shape comedy’s interaction with epic poetry. a paraepic kitchen A Homeric cook operating in a fourth-century kitchen: this is the scenario in a precious and long comic fragment by Strato from a play entitled Phoenicides, the only fragment, in fact, we have from this late fourthcentury playwright, quoted, needless to say, by Athenaeus. ‘I brought a male Sphinx, not a cook, into the house’, complains the old man who hired the cook, as Athenaeus informs us, implying a free male as the speaker. The old man continues (–): To put it simply: I do not understand a single word of what he is saying, by the gods. He is here equipped with novel words ( =). For the minute he walked in, he boldly looked at me and asked instantly: ‘How many mortals articulate with voice (" ) did you call to dinner? Speak.’ ‘I haven’t called any Meropes to dinner. You are nuts!’
The cook’s pompous Homerisms continue, quickly aggravating the old man’s frustration (): ‘I am a pretty rustic man ( ), so talk simply to me’, and later (–), ‘I implored him now, changing my approach, to speak to me like a human being ( ! ).’ To no avail: this cook can only talk JK @ , even if that means talking about an ordinary dinner using the language of Homeric sacrifice (–). Small wonder that the old man, out of his depth, feels he would need the Miscellaneous Glosses by Philetas of Cos (–) to make any sense of this, and ends up insulting the pompous cooking Homerist as a ‘bastard’ (, 7 ), a slave since childhood ‘of some sort of rhapsode’ (=4 > 2 6 | ( ). The humour of this remarkable fragment operates on a number of levels. There is the failure of the boorish old man to understand any Homeric Greek – the words are invariably novel to him ( ) – even though at least some of them are far from being hapax legomena but used fairly frequently
Ath. b = Strato Com. fr. (= D in Olson , who provides a commentary). The old man, in other words, takes the Homeric adjective " to be a personal name. All translations are mine.
Paraepic comedy: point(s) and practices
(especially when the cook deploys the language of Homeric sacrifice, at or ). It ought to be decipherable to anyone who has had modest exposure to Homeric language. Secondly, humour is derived from the failure of the pompous epic cook himself to use Homeric language appropriately: " 4, for instance, is used in Homer exclusively as an epithet (in conjunction with V ! or /
), and not as a free-standing adjective that has become tantamount to a noun; and a couple of the cook’s coinages seem to be ad hoc inventions (or, put more cautiously, they are not attested in the epic corpus we have), a strategy pursued by the cook, it would seem, for the sole purpose of sounding pompous. This applies to the word =5 #! (‘earth-breaker’) for ox (), or the verb !2 1 (), which is never attested before this fragment, instead of !> . Finally, there is the comic entertainment an audience is to derive from watching these two characters fight their own Homeric battle, if you will, where the conflict revolves about poetic language itself and becomes manifest as the failure (on the part of the old man) to decode linguistic registers properly while the pompous slave cook is funny because of his correct, incorrect or half-correct use of Homeric idiom. At least three bigger features of this fragment need to be mentioned. There is, first, the failure of communication (the old man simply ‘doesn’t get’ the epic mode), a source of humour in its own right, and a comic strategy which can be found in a number of cases of paratragedy as well (notoriously so in parts of Aristophanes’ Women at the Thesmophoria). Secondly, the class aspect: Strato exploits the comic effect of inverting class-based social stereotypes and assumptions in that the owner of a slave cook may be expected to have at least a vague understanding of Homeric language, whereas a slave cook would not exactly be expected to be able to converse in it. This is, in fact, not the only case where exploiting the incongruity between a cook’s perceived social status and his displayed cultural competence is the principal means of generating humour: the cook in the Syntrophoi by Damoxenus (fr. ) waxes philosophical. Moreover, there is an established link between epic and food, and cooking ‘Homerically’ has some tradition. Finally, and most importantly for the purposes of this chapter, we witness the creation of a paraepic character: the cook is not a
Wilkins : – and Dobrov : –. Olson and Sens : xxviii–xliii. The epicizing fragments from the fourth century by Archestratus of Gela and Matro of Pitane are the fullest extant evidence, see Olson and Sens and for the texts and an extensive commentary. But there are also some fifth-century food-related hexameter fragments. Cratin. fr. consists of two hexameters (but no Homeric Kunstsprache) where someone is invited to eat, probably in a symposiastic context. The thirteen hexameters of Pherec. fr. (from his Cheiron, no Kunstsprache) are also associated with the symposium, while Hermipp. fr.
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figure from the Homeric poems entering the world of comedy as, on the Choregoi vase, the tragic Aegisthus enters the world of comedy. Rather, this is a stock character of contemporary comedy, the cook, who is being ‘Homerized’. This poetic strategy is a way of combining disparate and incongruous features that I have previously called ‘layered juxtaposition’. Cumulatively, this kind of juxtaposition constitutes a paraepic comic character who provides the playwright with specific opportunities to solicit laughter and amusement. In this particular case the cook’s Homerization is, for all we can tell, brought about by one single set of distinct cues, the diction of the Homeric Kunstsprache and not, for instance, by metre (i.e. the dactylic hexameter) or by costume. While the Strato fragment is a convenient entry point into the field of paraepic comedy, the bigger claims and concerns of this paper are best spelt out early on. The term ‘paraepic comedy’ is used to denote any instance in which a comic playwright is trying to cue his audience into connecting, for whatever length of time, what they experience right now in the theatre with epic poetry. The range of such cues is very wide indeed, and they can be classified, roughly, into three categories (which may partially overlap): linguistic (metre and diction, equivalent to what Peter Rau considered paratragoidia when examining, in , comedy’s relationship with tragedy); performative (costume, props, gesture and movement, pitch, delivery); and narrative or dramaturgical (choice and development of character as well as plot). These cues can operate for any length of time during a performance, and at any level (the micro-, mesoand macro-level). Within the space constraints of the article format, I wish to make and substantiate the following four points: () In its interactions with Homer and epic poetry, comedy exploits the specific cultural valence of epic poetry, which is higher and of a different order from that of comedy’s performative rivals, tragedy and satyrplay, genres which comedy (certainly as practised by Aristophanes) is even more keen to appropriate. By cultural valence I mean the set of assumptions and evaluative judgements that inform societal discourses on any kind of cultural commodity. As a result of the steady ascendancy of Homer as the authority, and of the Iliad and the Odyssey as the classics, the fifth century attaches an extremely high cultural
(= H in Olson ) has twelve hexameters (again no Homeric Kunstsprache) in praise of wine. In addition, there is the cookbook by some Philoxenus mentioned in Plato Com. fr. (from Phaon, dated to bc) who quotes twelve and a half mock hexameters from it. Revermann a: . Rau . Taplin : –.
Paraepic comedy: point(s) and practices
significance to anything thought to be by ‘Homer’. Comedy, ever the self-interested and self-promoting genre, capitalizes on this specific cultural valence of epic poetry. () By contrast with tragedy, comedy’s interaction with epic, the available evidence suggests, tends to oscillate between two poles. It is either quite ‘Homer-centric’, meaning that there is a focus on the Iliad and, most of all, the Odyssey. Tragic playwrights, on the other hand, show greater and more sustained interest in the poetry of the Epic Cycle (even though there are several and important cases of tragedy appropriating material from the Iliad and the Odyssey as well). Alternatively, comic playwrights like to create what I call epic modality, a somewhat looser and more vague form of generic interaction which utilizes as cues to the audience any combination of metre (i.e. in this case the dactylic hexameter as a signature cue), Homeric Kunstsprache (another signature cue), dramatic character, plot or situation in order to invoke for the recipient an epic atmosphere or tinge which suggests grandeur or mock-grandeur (the Strato fragment just discussed is an excellent example of such epic modality creating mock-grandeur). () While the two general points just made crucially inform comedy’s handling of epic poetry in general, these interactions do not follow one single template but need to be teased out in each individual case. Critical parameters include an individual play’s thematic agenda, the broader socio-cultural context as well as particular features of the local cultural economy. It should, for instance, not be assumed that Sicilian comedy and Attic comedy responded to epic in identical ways, or that the responses remained uniform and did not vary over time. () Of particular interest and relevance is the comparative analysis of Attic paratragic and Attic paraepic comedy. The technical similarities between the two are considerable, on the micro-, macro- as well as the meso-level. Especially the exploitation of incongruities between linguistic registers and the ‘comedification’ of characters, situations and plots taken from the other genre are poetic strategies which are used in quite similar ways in both paratragic and paraepic Attic comedy. Ideologically, however, the two are very different indeed. While paratragedy is an especially aggressive version of comedy’s parasitic way of generic appropriation in general, the paraepic mode, albeit still parasitic in
A concept which changes over the centuries: only by the fourth century ‘Homer’ seemed to have narrowed down to denote the author of the Iliad, the Odyssey and the Margites, see Pfeiffer : , –, , and .
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nature, seeks not to devalue the object of appropriation and, in a zerosum game situation, profit from its alleged failures and deficiencies (as is the case with paratragedy). On the contrary: paraepic comedy aggrandizes even further the already high status of the appropriated genre and strives to feed off the cultural prestige of epic poetry, thereby leaning more towards a scenario which economists and game theorists call ‘Pareto optimal’. Here none of the participants is worse off and at least one of them is in fact better off than before. Since not every reader may be familiar with the concept of Pareto optimality in particular, I add two explanatory charts: Zero-sum Game 10
5
10
0 A
B −10
−5 −10 Gain A = Loss B
Pareto Optimality 20 15 10
20
5 5 0 A
B Gain A ≥ Gain B ≥ 0
a sicilian take on homeric epic Of these four central points it is the third which I would like to illustrate first, continuing my off-centre approach to the topic from the margins of
Paraepic comedy: point(s) and practices
the continuum that is Greek comedy. If the Strato fragment belonged to the end of the fourth century, I would like to shift to the late sixth and early fifth century, and to the Greek West. Epicharmus, we are being told, in some of his plays resorted to parody. This, very interestingly, included parody of Attic tragedy as embodied by Aeschylus (who, of course, spent his last years in Sicily). But it is Epicharmus’ parodic appropriation of epic that we have a much better idea of. This is thanks to two papyri, the combination of which yields fragment , one of the longest extant fragments of Epicharmus. It is part of a play entitled Odysseus the Deserter ()K2W * ) which shows Odysseus in conversation with another unidentified character. Previous scholarly discussions all failed to make sense of the obvious implication of the play’s title, namely that Odysseus deserted from the Greek army and found refuge, of whatever sort, among the Trojans. It was Willi in his important monograph on the socio-linguistics of Sicilian literature who for the first time put together the pieces in a way that fully ties in with those implications of the title Odysseus the Deserter, and I am following his reconstruction here. Odysseus was sent to Troy on a spy mission which went wrong, badly. This much is certain, and uncontested, from the last and best-preserved lines (lines – of fr. ): (Odysseus) If only I had gone where ( !' Q ) they told me to go . . . to prefer evil deeds () to good behaviour . . . to master the danger and acquire divine glory (" ! ) . . . to go to the city ( V2), to find out everything well and clearly, and to report back to the Achaeans and the esteemed son of Atreus the things around here, myself being unharmed (! ).
This passage is preceded by a beating scene, where Odysseus is being maltreated (–): ‘But I see – why are you hurting me, wretch? ( , 1>), ;) – the Achaeans are close. How badly I am off!’ The assault must be conducted by a Trojan, and it is evident that Odysseus is currently in their hands (probably in the Trojan camp outside the city walls rather than within the city itself ). Odysseus, then, abandoned his mission and deserted to the Trojans. In the other major fragment of this play, preserved in Athenaeus (= fr. ), the speaker relates that he has lost the neighbour’s piglet that was reserved for sacrifice at the Eleusinia festival, and that someone accuses him of having sold the piglet secretly to the Achaeans. Therefore, in what would be a hilarious inversion of the Homeric model, Odysseus the deserter may well have been made to do at Troy what Eumaeus of the Odyssey does
Test. (K–A). Willi : misleadingly narrows this down as referring to parody of hexameter poetry only. Willi , . Willi : –.
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on Ithaca: work as a swineherd. Some kind of black-market trading with his fellow Achaeans may have got Odysseus into trouble with his Trojan host(s). Epicharmus’ handling of the epic foil is as intriguing as it is bold. His cues are taken from Odyssey , where Helen reminisces about Odysseus entering Troy in disguise, and most notably Iliad , the Doloneia, which is also established as a significant intertext by a number of linguistic pointers. It is worth mentioning already at this point that it is quite unusual for any comic playwright to use as a model the Iliad instead of the Odyssey, which dominates comic Homer reception, for reasons which will shortly become clearer. That said, those pointers to the Iliadic model only reinforce the daring comic creativity with which Epicharmus goes on to do his own thing – even if this means rewriting the Homeric master narrative by inverting or defying its basics, to the point of making the resulting comedy ‘counterfactual’. Odysseus, the archetypal heroic survivor and epitome of the superior Greek intellect, is being cast in the role of the treacherous deserter, the swineherd with fraudulent inclinations, the object of physical abuse (note the inversion of Odysseus’ verbal and physical abuse of Thersites in Book of the Iliad ): all of this undermines the nobility, the status and the justification of the cause which the epic Odysseus represents. It does so to a degree which seems to hint at a larger aesthetic and ideological agenda if this narrative is situated within the larger discourse of negotiating a specific western Greek cultural identity. Willi takes quite a radical view here when regarding Epicharmus’ invention of a deserting Odysseus and his linguistic integration into the colloquial vernacular of Sicily as an ‘attack on epic poetry’ (‘Angriff auf das Epos’) and everything epic poetry represents to a Sicilian audience around bc. The relationship of comedy with epic would, in this instance then, be head-on antagonistic, almost an act of cultural aggression in the sense that Epicharmus’ ‘writing against’ the Homeric model as well as his ‘writing beyond’ that model both taken together turn into what post-colonial critics like to call ‘writing back’. This ‘writing back’ would delineate along two axes here: the internal axis of class, whereby Epicharmus the comic playwright claims for the colloquial vernacular, hence for popular consumption in large theatres, an art form written in a Kunstsprache with an obvious ideological appeal to the aristocracy; and an external axis of creating and renegotiating cultural identity, whereby Epicharmus the Sicilian
Cassio : and Willi : n. .
The title of section . of Willi : –.
Paraepic comedy: point(s) and practices
claims for the colloquial vernacular, hence his home region, an art form championed by the whole of Greece. It is crucial to note in this context, and for the larger question of the ideologies that underlie paraepic comedy, that there is no evidence for the existence of Sicilian tragedy as a rival genre to Sicilian comedy. The closest performative rival for Sicilian comedy is probably melic poetry, especially when and if it was choral, as many continue to believe much, though perhaps not all, of Stesichorus’ poetry is. In the absence of another fullblown dramatic rival to comedy, this form of ‘writing back’, then, becomes much less an act of generic self-assertion, as Aristophanic paratragedy arguably is, rather than a means of carving out and establishing cultural identity in an environment which may justifiably be called ‘postcolonial’. In the context of Sicily and its complex relationship with the Greek mainland, the cultural valence of Homer and epic poetry appears therefore to have been somewhat ambiguous. It can, to great comic effect, be subjected to bathos and various forms of funny inversion. Irony is one of the comic modes here when, for instance, Epicharmus makes the comic Odysseus recount what he ought to have done and mention that he would have achieved ‘divine glory’ (" ! ). But the very act of ‘writing back’ is, of course, an implicit acknowledgement of the target’s cultural value, and there is no reason at all to believe that Homer and epic poetry were held in lesser esteem in Sicily than anywhere else in the Greek world. On the contrary: recitals of the rhapsode Cynaethus from Chios are attested for Syracuse for the late sixth century, and it has long been plausibly suggested that the Greek colonies and, indeed, the very process of colonization were vital for the dissemination of epic poetry in general and the canonization of the Homeric poems in particular as panhellenic classics. There are further indications in the Epicharmus fragment that the Homeric poems are not the direct targets of ‘writing back’ as part of an ‘attack on epic poetry’ but more of a vehicle for much larger concerns. The dactylic hexameter is not being used: the lines are in anapaests (note that hexameters are attested elsewhere in Epicharmus three times). More compelling, perhaps, is the observation that the epic lexicon and linguistic register are integrated very discriminately and much more subtly than what
Power : – provides a useful and up-to-date synthesis. He, in my view correctly, argues that Stesichorus primarily wrote for choruses but would also compose solo pieces on occasion. There is much interesting research currently being done on trying to contextualize Sicilian literary culture, from both a socio-linguistic and a socio-historical perspective. See Willi , as well as Bosher . Burkert is a particularly important discussion. Burkert and Willi : . In frr. , and ., which quotes Il. . (a line also quoted at Pax –).
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is regularly encountered in that paragon of comic appropriation, Aristophanic paratragedy, which often uses blatant and sustained linguistic and metrical cues to signpost its appropriation of its (stage) rival tragedy. And as the Strato fragment discussed at the beginning of this chapter demonstrates, there are ways of appropriating epic poetry which are much more ‘in-yer-face’, if you will, than what happens in the Epicharmus fragment (brief as it is). Lastly, I believe it is critical to note that in Epicharmus’ Odysseus the Deserter the empowerment (albeit temporary) of the Trojans, the Other on the margins of the Greek world, over a cowardly and treacherous Greek from Ithaca may well have held a specific appeal for its Syracusan audiences. Odysseus, the archetypal Greek survivor who prides himself on a superior intellect and outstanding strategic skills, not only shows what he is really made of (cowardice and opportunism) but also ends up becoming the object of comic Schadenfreude at the hands of the marginal Other. So this comic Odysseus is used to articulate broader socio-cultural anxieties and conflict. But he could not, would not, and was not conceived to undermine the overwhelming authority of epic poetry, that charter narrative of all Greeks. I submit that for Syracusans living around bc epic poetry was, and quite possibly had been for a while, something that was ultimately above and beyond cultural competition, as it provided not just a platform to articulate anxieties and conflict but also, and even more importantly, a unique and distinct way of connecting with a past of heroism and grandeur that was shared among all Greeks.
the athenian context On to fifth-century Athens, at last, where the parameters for comedy’s interaction with epic poetry are notably different from the situation in Sicily, resulting in a reconfigured cultural economy within which comedy
I am thinking, for instance, of the powerful and not altogether rare comic use of dochmiacs, a metre very much associated with tragic anxiety. See L. P. E. Parker : – and my remarks below on Ar. Ach. and . Hermipp. fr. would be another example: twenty-three hexameters (!) of an epic catalogue of goods being imported into Attica by sea, starting in the proper Homeric vein with an invocation of the Muses. The need to re-cast traditional tales in order to appeal to western Greek sensitivities has also been observed for Stesichorus. Thus Burnett argues that in the Lille papyrus (a PMGF) the solution proposed by Iocasta (and endorsed by Teiresias) – Eteocles stays in Thebes while Polyneices accepts his fate and departs in peace and for good – reflects a problem all too familiar to audiences in the western Greek colonies: how to depart from your homeland without subsequent conflict. The myth of the Seven then becomes a negative example: a failed departure and a dysfunctional homecoming – a colonization gone wrong.
Paraepic comedy: point(s) and practices
competes for attention and prestige. This is a century in which the cultural valence of epic poetry in general and Homer in particular is not only strong but also highly differentiated, in a number of ways. As a cultural icon, Homer by this time has certainly emerged as the unmatched authority who determines Greek conceptualizations of their past (see Herodotus passim). As a poet, he is now being disassociated from works such as the Cypria (Hdt. .) which are universally considered to be artistically inferior. As an author, he starts to be conceptualized as a text ready to be searched and scrutinized in full (which Herodotus claims to have done at .). As a thinker, Homer solicits lively, even hostile theological and philosophical debate. And as an instructor, he has thoroughly penetrated the educational system: a fragment from Aristophanes’ Banqueters (fr. ), for example, presents the explanation of obscure Homeric words (JK 2 @ ) as a standard feature of old-style education. But the parameters for comedy are also different as a result of the specific cultural environment in fifth-century Athens. Crucially, in this city, comedy has to grapple with a more than formidable stage rival, Attic tragedy – by contrast, it seems, with the situation in Sicily where no indigenous tragedy is attested. Two areas in particular provide grounds for competition here: by generic convention, it would appear, tragedy inhabits the same narrative space as epic poetry, which in turn has implications for paraepic forms of comedy; and in the form of satyr-play, tragedy’s performative adjunct at the dramatic festivals, tragic playwrights venture into the realm of the grotesque, the bad, the ugly and the exotic which comedy considers to be its home turf. Moreover, and as if that austere sister genre were not rival enough, there are of course the competitive comic playwrights themselves, all trying to come up with that blockbuster by some kind of extravaganza, which regularly entails the challenge of giving a well-known traditional tale that unpredictable, hilarious spin which will sweep the audience off their feet (or so they all hope at least). Cratinus’ Odysseis seems to have done exactly this. Here we meet another Homeric cook, chef Polyphemus himself, whose refined palate sets him apart very firmly from the world of his cruelly omnivorous Homeric ancestor. This Polyphemus threatens (fr. ), in dactylic
There is a steadily growing body of work on Homer reception in antiquity. I find particularly stimulating the articles by Burkert , Ford , Burgess , Hunter , Carey a. Monograph-length discussions of select aspects are Erskine , Graziosi , Nagy a. Recent years have seen a renewed interest in satyr-play. The research by M. Griffith must be singled out for its quality and freshness: Griffith , and . A development that is already underway in Epicharmus’ Cyclops (fr. ) and probably featured in Callias’ Cyclopes (fr. ) but is also detectable in Euripides’ satyr-play Cyclops, see Mastromarco : esp. .
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hexameters and perfect Homeric diction, to make not mincemeat but a gourmet meal of Odysseus and his entourage. And he complains, again in hexameters (fr. ), about the abuse of his generous hospitality by the parasitic intruders from Ithaca who have taken over his cave, an abode which has morphed from the filthy bachelor pad of the Odyssey into something of a rather more accommodating luxury condo with all appliances, including the couches ( ) mentioned in fragment . A civilized and articulate Cyclops confronting an Odysseus who abuses, like the suitors of the Odyssey, the sacred social practice of xenia: this is the kind of inversion of the Homeric master narrative which was evident in Epicharmus’ Odysseus the Deserter, even though in Cratinus’ case such an inversion surely does not tie in with questions of identity formation but, probably, ongoing discussions of cultural relativity as embodied most prominently, for us at least, in the nomos versus physis debate. The Cyclops character is remarkable, for the heavy and sustained, though not ubiquitous, adoption not just of epic diction but of that other hallmark of epic poetry, the dactylic hexameter, and exemplifies a different level in the epicization/Homerization of a comic character by way of an intriguing dichotomy: chef Polyphemus, it would appear, comes (more rather than less) straight out of the Odyssey linguistically while being entirely removed from it with regard to character. In addition, there is the inversion of xenia, a social concept and practice which is at the heart of the Odyssey master narrative but which is now upheld and violated in reverse roles by the Cyclops and Odysseus respectively. Here the parodic strategy of paraepic comedy, in other words, revolves around upgrading the Cyclops from monstrous cannibal to refined gourmand conversing in Homeric Kunstsprache, all for the ulterior purpose of comically downgrading his heroic foil and counterpart, Odysseus, and with him Homer’s Odyssey. Odyssey-related themes enjoy a remarkable prominence in paraepic comedy, although it cannot be emphasized enough that the evidence is sparse. Of the twenty play titles associated with the late fifth-century playwright Theopompus three are Odyssean: Sirens, Penelope and Odysseus (or Odysseus
On the use of the dactylic hexameter in Old Comedy see L. P. E. Parker : (to her survey add Hermipp. fr. and, as a possible case, Call. Com. fr. ) as well as Bakola : n. . Mastromarco : –. As has been observed very perceptively by Mastromarco : –. On this debate see Guthrie : – and Kerferd : ch. . Fr. , spoken by the Cyclops and Odysseus, is not in dactylic hexameters. The metre is either the catalectic trochaic tetrameter (as restored by K–A) or the iambic trimeter (as some earlier editors would have it). Platon. Diff. com. .– Koster remarks that Cratinus’ Odysseis did not contain abuse of any specific individual but was about the ‘ridicule ( 2 ) of Homer’s Odyssey’.
Paraepic comedy: point(s) and practices
and his Companions), in which play a character (probably Penelope) mentions a garment (# $ ) worn by Odysseus which ‘Homer likened to the skin of an onion’ (fr. ), a metatextual reference to Odyssey .–. Theopompus’ contemporary Philyllius wrote a play entitled The Washing Women or Nausicaa (Plyntriai or Nausikaa), perhaps a paratragic treatment of a play with the same title by Sophocles. In addition to Odysseus the Deserter Epicharmus, to look back to Sicily once more, wrote at least three more Odyssey-related plays: Cyclops, Sirens and Odysseus Shipwrecked. My survey of known play titles yields twenty-three plays in total which draw on events narrated in the Homeric poems or the Epic Cycle. Of those plays nineteen are clearly related to the Odyssey, a staggering per cent. The Homer-centrism of comedy’s interaction is then, really, an Odysseycentrism, and this contrasts very sharply with tragedy and its well-known penchant for themes taken from those epic poems which from about the fourth century bc were considered non-Homeric and constitute the Epic Cycle. Yet, the formula ‘comedy appropriates Homer/Odyssey while tragedy appropriates the Epic Cycle’ is, needless to say, not quite so clear-cut. It was mentioned earlier that Epicharmus’ Odysseus the Deserter interacts not only with the Odyssey but also with Book of the Iliad (both linguistically and thematically). Moreover, the best-documented case where a comic playwright resorted not to the Homeric poems but to the Epic Cycle is the play by Cratinus that we can probably claim to know most about: for his complex comic aetiology of the Peloponnesian War in his Dionysalexandros Cratinus, quite naturally, went to the Cypria. Comedies based on the ‘birth of Helen’ motif, one of which inspired a well-known South Italian vessel, may have resorted to the Cypria as well and deployed Homeric language, but here we approach an area where the distinction between a paraepic comedy and a mythological burlesque is likely to have been particularly fluid. Two particularly interesting comic vases, the ‘Rape of Cassandra’ calyx krater by Asteas (Paestan, second half of the fourth century) and the ‘Death of Priam’ bell krater (Apulian, first quarter of the fourth century), refer to the Ilioupersis, with fascinating inversions: in the first Ajax is being raped by a violent Cassandra (with Athena looking on winking) while the second seems to be comically counterfactual by deferring, if not averting
See n. above. In addition to the play titles mentioned in the main text I note Alexis’ Odysseus Being Bathed, Odysseus Weaving; Anaxandrides’ Achilles, Helen, Odysseus; Anaxilas’ Calypso, Circe; Antiphanes’ Aeolus (paratragic), Cyclops; Callias’ Cyclopes; Euboulus’ Nausicaa, Odysseus or Men Who See Everything; Nicophon’s Sirens; Philemo’s Myrmidons and Strattis’ Myrmidons. Walsh : –.
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for good, the death of Priam. It remains, however, disputed whether either vase is inspired by a paratragic comedy or paraiconographic in nature (I must confess a preference for the former scenario). Other comedies too may have appropriated material from the Epic Cycle, but the evidence is very thin indeed. The little that can be inferred from the remains of Cratinus’ Cheirones does not suggest larger paraepic themes touching on Achilles’ youth or the like. This is despite the paraepic tone of fragment , where the chorus calls Aspasia ‘Hera’ and, deploying the Homeric epithet though not the dactylic hexameter, and the ‘dog-eyed whore’ (of Zeus-Pericles, that is). It is, however, worth pointing out that fragment is a line written in the dactylic hexameter. Its content (‘This was worked out by us in just about two years’) suits a parabasis or, more probably, the play’s closure. The paratragic tinge is undeniable, perhaps simply adding a tongue-in-cheek sense of grandeur considering the monumentality of the challenge to finish a good comedy. The Myrmidons by Strattis appears not to have been looking to epic but, possibly, Aeschylean tragedy, although the one surviving fragment (fr. ) does nothing to suggest a paratragic scenario. A play of the same title is attested for Philemon, and it has been speculated (by supplementing a highly lacunose line of an inscription) that Anaxandrides might have written a play entitled Achilleus (fr. ). The notion of a comic Achilles modelled on the Iliad is not particularly far-fetched, especially in view of the Achilles-‘Aeschylus’ figure in Aristophanes’ Frogs (see below). Conversely (and turning to tragedy), the Rhesus, whoever its author, is a Homer-centric tragedy, interestingly enough again drawing on Iliad ’s Book (as did Epicharmus in Sicily sometime earlier), a book which in many ways is quite exceptional and widely considered to be a ‘latecomer’ to what we know to be the Iliad (whatever ‘latecomer’ actually means in this context). The only satyr-play that is completely preserved, the Cyclops, is of course modelled on the Odyssey. The author of the Life of Sophocles, who certainly knew more Sophoclean tragedies than we do, maintains that Sophocles ‘copies ( - ) the Odyssey in many plays’, although in our evidence only Sophocles’ The Washing Women or Nausicaa (Plyntriai or Nausikaa) is obviously Odyssey-inspired. He goes on to say
See the discussions of both vases in Taplin : –; Walsh : –, –; Sells : –, –. The early biography of Achilles was quite certainly part of the epic tradition if not perhaps what became known as the Cycle: see Burgess : –. On Iliad ’s Book and its peculiarities see especially Danek , Taplin and Danek . On the hyperepic dimension of Rhesus, see Fantuzzi and Konstan in this volume. Sophocles was famous for impersonating Nausicaa in this play, especially when playing ball with the maidens. See the testimonia collected in TrGF Tt. –.
Paraepic comedy: point(s) and practices
that Sophocles imitated Homeric grace (# ) and that he alone could be said to be ‘Homer’s disciple’. But the single most significant tragic piece in our context is surely Aeschylus’ famous (and lost) Achilles-trilogy (Myrmidons, Nereids, Phrygians), which confronted the Iliad head-on and transposed key events (from Book through to Book it seems) into the tragic format (a case that will become highly relevant to my discussion of Frogs). To complicate the picture even further, there is, needless to say, always the problem of what ‘Homer’ actually means to a Greek author in the sixth, fifth or fourth century. To use as an example a passage from the ending of Aristophanes’ Peace: the first line of this passage () is the beginning of the Epigonoi, a poem of the Theban Cycle. Antimachus of Teos is considered to be its author in a number of ancient sources. But Homer must also have been thought to have composed it well into the fifth century. For it is Aristophanes’ near-contemporary Herodotus who questions (.) the Homeric authorship of that very poem, evidently taking sides in an ongoing debate. In other words: while the modern scholar will by default categorize this passage as non-Homeric, there is a very good chance indeed that Aristophanes thought he was using Homer, that pinnacle of all Greek poetry. And if it is true that, decades earlier, Aeschylus described his own work as ‘slices from the big meals of Homer’, as Athenaeus would have it, this Homer is almost certainly not fully identical with ours. Why does paraepic comedy, by and large, gravitate so much towards the Odyssey (for this much, at least, seems undeniable)? I submit that this is hardly connected with the intricacies of canon-formation or the like. The reason is more likely to be as simple as it is compelling: it is the enormous, the in fact overwhelming thematic appeal of the Odyssey which was bound to attract comic playwrights. Everything one could want to see in a good soap opera – sex, violence, intrigue, marital problems, the perils of adolescence, romance, deception, separation of lovers and the temptations of the flesh – the Odyssey has it all: superbly told by the Master, and with an unparalleled recognition factor among any imaginable Greek audience anywhere. Gold dust, in other words, for the comic playwrights, who used the creative power of their imaginations for a range of artistic responses which we are unfortunate enough only to see faint glimpses of:
TrGF T .–. See Sommerstein : iii.–, – and – (with extensive references to earlier discussions). Pfeiffer : , –, , , and discusses the various conceptions of ‘Homer’ in antiquity. See also Graziosi and . Olson ad loc. On the intertextual implications of Aristophanes’ reference to Epigonoi in Peace see Tel`o in this volume. Ath. d = TrGF T a.
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from the bold invention of Polyphemus as a gourmet chef (in Cratinus) through the banter of Homeric characters about their own ‘Homericness’ (in Theopompus) to Menander’s subtle use, in the Shield, of the central Odyssean themes of separation through war, the unpleasant and greedy suitor, and the pain that results from failure of recognition. It is time to pause for a brief preliminary summary of what the evidence considered so far (from Athens as well as Sicily) contributes to our understanding of how paraepic comedy functioned. At the narrative and dramaturgical level there is a palpable preference for themes and characters from the Odyssey, even if use of the Iliad and some poems of the Epic Cycle is also attested. In these appropriations the structural and thematic integrity of those epic narratives was not always preserved, especially under the pressure of having to generate humour by comic inversion. Thus Epicharmus’ need for a lowly and disloyal Odysseus results in significant deviations from the basic structure of the Homeric model. Linguistically, paraepic comedy can and does, as one would expect, resort to the dactylic hexameter and/or the use of Homeric Kunstsprache to signal epic modality. Those cues can be as simple as standard Homeric epithets such as ‘dog-eyed’, deployed for personal abuse of Aspasia in Cratinus’ Cheirones (fr. ). Standard epithets may also be comically distorted: in another fragment from the same play (fr. ) Cratinus ingeniously poked fun at Zeus-Pericles without naming either Zeus or Pericles, simply by changing two letters and turning the standard epithet ‘cloud-gatherer’ ( -") into ‘head-gatherer’ (-"). Other markers included paraepic metapoetics. In addition to the explicit referencing of Homer (Od. .–) in Theopompus Comicus fragment there is a fascinating hexameter line from Hermippus’ Europa (the only line we have from that comedy), where a man says that in his anger he will eat all his fingers (D . . . W > 2 ) – clearly a metapoetic pun on the metre (note that the metrical term ‘dactyl’ is used at Ar. Nub. ). Last but not least, paraepic casting and character development appear to have been of central importance. Here comedy could effectively exploit the fact that the Homeric poems, and probably those of the Epic Cycle as well, featured stock characters (divine and mortal) with fixed and predictable attributes who also enjoyed a high recognition factor among any possible Greek audience. Against this backdrop, it is fun and funny to play around with stereotypes: why not invert the standard character of the brute and animalistic Cyclops and turn him into a refined gourmet, complete with
On the Odyssey’s central role in Aristophanes’ generic self-positioning see Tel`o in this volume.
Paraepic comedy: point(s) and practices
dinner jacket and bow tie? Or take Odysseus’ smoothness to an extreme and make him a deserter? And why not compare the promiscuous Aspasia with Hera, that epitome of marital austerity and boredom? Paraepic casting extended to The Bard Himself: he materialized on the Cratinean stage, in the Archilochoi (produced between and ). For one of the few things known for certain about this play (to be inferred from fr. ) is that it featured an agon in which a comic ‘Homer’ was probably up against a comic ‘Archilochus’ – and lost! To situate this outcome within the context of paraepic comedy seems, in fact, more difficult than trying to determine its significance as part of Cratinus’ self-positioning: the ‘iambic mode’, Cratinus seems to have maintained, prevails over the ‘epic mode’, probably qua being more useful for the community as some kind of beneficial political corrective. But does Cratinus’ elevation of the ‘iambic mode’, hence iambic comedy with its collectively beneficial ridicule of individuals (+ ), entail the dismissal, in a zero-sum game situation, of the ‘epic mode’ and paraepic comedy as ineffective and inferior? At least two considerations point against such a view. First, there is reason to believe that in the Archilochoi ‘Homer’ was not alone but, somehow, in the company of ‘Hesiod’, thereby innovatively developing the certamen tradition of a contest between Homer, poet of war, and Hesiod, poet of peace. If for Cratinus the ‘epic mode’ indeed encompassed the whole tradition of hexameter poetry associated with both of these cultural icons and founder figures, a wholesale iconoclastic attack against traditional value systems seems all the more unlikely. More plausibly, the point was that the ‘iambic mode’, and with it Cratinean comedy, was even more useful for political and ethical hygiene than the poetry of those great hexameter poets (a Pareto optimal scenario, in other words). Secondly, in the other cases where we see Cratinus deploy paraepic comedy it can quite plausibly be argued that Homer and epic poetry were not the primary targets but proxies of some sort. The Dionysalexandros, for all its recourse to the Cypria, was a political allegory aimed at Pericles initiating the Peloponnesian War. And while the Odysseis comedy was without doubt, in Platonius’ words, ‘ridicule of the Odyssey’, it was also suggested earlier that the fundamental (and
Bakola : – is an incisive discussion of this play. Cratinus’ competitor Telecleides wrote a play with the title Hesiodoi, strongly suggesting another comic ‘Hesiod’ (and other poets?). Some paratragic element seems certain in view of fr. (in iambic trimeters), which pokes fun at the tragic poet Philocles. For the dramatization of this conflict in Peace see Tel`o in this volume. See above, n. . Graziosi : –; Bakola : .
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hilarious) upgrades to the status of the Polyphemus figure insinuate not ‘Homer bashing’ but a different, more sophisticated agenda within the context of the nomos-versus-physis debate and socio-cultural discourse in general. Reverting to the Archilochoi, Bakola argues that the real target of this comedy was not epic but tragedy, often perceived to be the offspring of epic. Here, the argument goes, the agon takes place on a somewhat displaced battleground: comedy celebrated its victory over tragedy by way of having comedy’s ancestor iambos defeat the stand-in for tragedy, epic poetry. There is, then, a lot to be said for assuming that in the Athenian context – a cultural economy where comedy finds itself constantly competing with a most veritable stage rival, tragedy – epic poetry is not so much target and obstacle as it is vehicle and springboard: for political allegory, metapoetic self-definition, competitive self-positioning vis-`a-vis tragedy as well as other comic playwrights, or just entertaining parody that did not require high theatrical competence but could be appreciated by almost anyone vaguely familiar with the Greek cultural heritage (the ‘sure laugh’, so to speak). In Athens, if anywhere, epic poetry is not comedy’s obnoxious rival: it is its cherished ally. turning to aristophanes It is of course the Aristophanic oeuvre which provides the most substantial body of evidence for any aspect of Greek comedy, including its practices of generic appropriation. Here we have, in principle, the best chance of observing in detail how paraepic operates, especially on the micro- and meso-level. A good introductory example is the paraepic vignette from Philocleon’s escape attempts early in Wasps (–). Deploying neither the dactylic hexameter nor Homeric Kunstsprache, Aristophanes creates an epic modality by way of using different paraepic markers: narrative, a signature phrase, character, props and proxemics. Philocleon, ‘an Odysseus of sorts’ (as Bdelycleon calls him at ), tries to escape underneath a donkey (that particularly lowly animal which the Homeric sheep has morphed
Bakola : . Sells : – interprets the agon of the Aristophanic Frogs as a paracomic response to that of the Cratinean Archilochoi. On that concept see Revermann b. In addition to the linguistic remoteness of the Homeric Kunstsprache, the often-noted thematic ‘nonAthenianness’ of the Homeric poems, and probably of the Epic Cycle, may have helped to increase the value of epic as a vehicle and lessened its appeal as a target for the Athenian comic playwrights. Attic tragedy is different: it too is non-Athenian in its plots and settings (with few though significant exceptions), but regularly projects into its world concerns prevalent in fifth-century Athens.
Paraepic comedy: point(s) and practices
into) pretending, of course, to be ‘Nobody’ (–). This brief paraepic scene looks very much like a ‘sure laugh’ because of its extremely high recognition factor: its epic model must have been most notorious among any possible Greek audience (even most twenty-first-century beginning undergraduates instantly get it!), and the modes of comic distortion used are very transparent (neither of which can be said about most cases of Aristophanic paratragedy). The overall yield, however, of Aristophanic comedy for understanding paraepic comedy is smaller than might, perhaps, initially be expected, since for Aristophanes the opportunities of epic are eclipsed by those tragedy offered. His focus on tragedy is a phenomenon which I (and others) believe to be exceptional by the standards of the genre during Aristophanes’ lifetime, both in its pervasivenesses overall and in its obsession almost with Euripides. The corollary is that Homer, for Aristophanes apparently even more so than for his rivals, is somewhat hors concours. There is no evidence to suggest that Aristophanes ever resorted to sustained parody of the Homeric model (as Cratinus or Epicharmus did), or that the comic incarnation ‘Homer’ – with phallus, ugly mask and all the rest – might have appeared on the Aristophanic stage, as opposed to, again, Cratinus (in the Archilochoi, discussed above). Twice in the preserved Aristophanic evidence Homer is mentioned using evaluative adjectives, both times highly favourably, as wise Homer (Trygaeus at Pax ) and ‘divine Homer’ even (! O K : ‘Aeschylus’ at Ran. – note the hexametric character of this phrase). This kind of positive nomenclature, exceptional in a genre which lives off making (and keeping!) enemies who can be ridiculed and devalued, would seem to confer on Homer the status of an ‘untouchable’, who is spared comedy’s aggression, a privilege very rarely granted by comedy to any mortal or immortal (the goddess Athena may have been another lucky one). All of this said, Aristophanic comedy too does shift into the paraepic mode, and those instances are crucial for a deeper and more differentiated appreciation of how paraepic comedy could function. Character is a good starting point. As a woman with the courage to wage war on war among Greek men, Lysistrata is an anti-epic character of grand (dare I say ‘epic’?)
See M. Griffith on the broad spectrum of social perceptions associated with various equines. Revermann a: –; Silk a passim. Bakola : – devotes an illuminating chapter to exploring possible interfaces between Cratinus and Aeschylean tragedy. While she is surely right to emphasize that paratragedy was a standard feature of both Cratinus and Old Comedy in general she also concludes () that paratragedy was less dominant in Cratinus than in Aristophanes. The elevation of Homer beyond the mortal sphere appears to be older: it is implied at Pind. Isthm. .–.
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proportion, a point strongly reinforced by the gender inversion. The shield oath early in the play most overtly interacts with the epic genre through one of its most notable props, although there is a strong sense of paratragedy as well. The protagonist of the Acharnians is perhaps not so much an anti-epic as, more precisely, an anti-Homeric hero, not least because he is given Lamachus as his Homer-inspired counterpart. Ridiculously linear, dull, backward-thinking and solely focused on things martial, Lamachus takes to comic extremes character traits shown by the Iliadic Diomedes or Ajax. The irreverent and obnoxious Dicaeopolis, by contrast, is reminiscent of Thersites in Book of the Iliad. What makes Thersites a despicable and ultimately ineffective nuisance to the elite circles of Homeric leaders is, of course, what renders the comic Dicaeopolis successful in his radical fantastic project and sympathetic to the democratically minded notional audience in Athens. Their first encounter (Ach. –) contrasts Lamachus’ ridiculous bombast in appearance and attitude with Dicaeopolis’ irreverent and subversive behaviour towards that ‘hero’ (Dicaeopolis’ cynical address X Y#’ Z () is emphatically repeated at ). Lamachus’ shield – that martial, and epic, prop par excellence which is also central to the scene from the Lysistrata discussed above – is inverted, literally speaking, for Dicaeopolis to vomit into. Homeric Kunstsprache is not being adopted, let alone the hexameter, but Dicaeopolis’ ranting at – can be considered a paraepic vignette invoking the catalogue style of epic which features so prominently later on in the known fourth-century epic parodies by Archestratus of Gela and Matro of Pitane. In Acharnians the juxtaposition, embodied by the pair of contrasting central characters, between the doomed grandeur of epic and comedy’s celebration of survival and the good life culminates in the play’s showdown, the arming scene and its aftermath (–). Staged as a tableau of parallel actions (and parallel ways of living) the scene’s conceptual core, the lavish description of the hero getting ready for battle, is profoundly Homeric. The epic standard scene comes with the kind of comic modifications one would expect from the genre: the warrior’s armour, rather than being described in painstaking detail, is presented to the audience in a busy sequence of quick, parallel and contrasting carrier entries; there is much emphasis on food and physicality; and the epic hero fails visibly, returning as a battered victim, while the comic hero is free to leave for his aristeia – between the sheets, and not with one but two women. Lamachus’ agonizing exclamation ‘I’m having a
Excellent remarks on this can be found in Hunter : . Revermann a: –. Olson and Sens and .
Paraepic comedy: point(s) and practices
black-out’ (, @) – uttered in dochmiacs, that most tragic and expressive of metres, and echoed by Dicaeopolis’ metrically corresponding dochmiacs ‘I want to fuck in the dark’ (, / @) – is but the culmination of the scene’s pervasive paratragic modality, which started with the introduction of the parallel messengers at the very beginning of the sequence (–) and continued throughout, casting Lamachus as a paratragic victim wailing in the mode of a tragic kommos while the comic hero triumphs. Paraepic and paratragic modes, in other words, are combined and merge into each other to create a smashing comic finish. The metapoetic dimension – does comedy triumph over epic and tragedy in the first fully preserved comedy we have? – may, perhaps, not be pushed too far. It is, rather, the additive strategy of blending the paraepic with the paratragic mode in order to reinforce cumulatively the desired comic effect, which is impossible to deny here. Whether this additive strategy of generic interaction, which results in a hybrid modality (of tragedy and epic, in this case), is typical of fifth-century paraepic comedy in general or a speciality of Aristophanes is difficult to make out on the basis of the preserved evidence. I, for one, believe that the latter view is far more plausible, in part because of what happens in Frogs, my next case study. That the ‘Aeschylus’ of Frogs is somehow modelled on Achilles will not have been lost on the alert and more competent members of the play’s audiences. Not only is ‘Aeschylus’ addressed as ‘Achilles’ by the chorus (). More strikingly, it is the prolonged silence of ‘Aeschylus’ at the beginning of the agon () which cues the audience as early as possible into making the connection with Achilles – more precisely, a specific Achilles: that of Aeschylus’ Achilles trilogy in Myrmidons and the Phrygians, the first and (probably) third play of the trilogy, both of which were famous for their protagonist’s long periods of silence (as Aeschylus was notorious for long-silent characters in general). This feature is critical for the use of epic in this particular comedy: not only are paraepic and paratragic features combined, but the epic component in fact comes heavily mediated already, by way of (Aeschylean) tragedy. We are dealing, then, with a version of the additive strategy of generic interaction that is heavily tilted towards tragedy and its representation of the other genre (epic, in this case) that is used to generate the hybrid modality. This preponderance of the paratragic modality will persist throughout the agon, which culminates with Achilles‘Aeschylus’ throwing his words into the scales to weigh against those of
The shape of these particular two dochmiacs ( Parker : –. Ran. – and Taplin .
@ * * @ * )@ is common only in Aeschylus, see L. P. E.
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‘Euripides’, a comic coup de th´eaˆ tre inspired by Aeschylus’ Pyschostasia (where Zeus weighed the souls of Achilles and Memnon) and, again, the Achilles trilogy (where, in the Phrygians, Priam’s ransom appears to have been weighed in scales against the body of Hector). Only the very last lines of the play (–) invert, intriguingly, the relative preponderance of tragedy and epic within the hybrid modality: the chorus clearly allude to the ending of Aeschylus’ Oresteia – but the passage is in dactylic hexameters! This is exceptional, perhaps unique, in our evidence, and clearly a strategic move. A comic chorus with an epic voice, leaving the stage not singing ditties but reciting or quite possibly even singing dactylic hexameters to the accompaniment of the aulos, is noticeably different in performative terms for anyone in the audience. It is an unusual stratagem meant to add gravitas to the closure and elevate it to a higher level, that of Homer, whom ‘Aeschylus’ has just called ‘divine’ (). In addition, there is the important aspect of community. The voice of the epic hexameter, be it sung or recited, is a solo voice. Its transposition by Aristophanes into the mouth of a collective, the comic chorus, creates a new sense of communal rather than individual ownership and self-expression. Peace, finally, needs discussion in this context. The play’s generic interactions, striking in complexity and sheer number, are not confined to the stage rivals of comedy, although those do have a prominent place: tragedy, especially in the clearly flagged paratragic use of Euripides’ Bellerophon at the start; and satyr-play which is more subtly woven into the play’s fabric in, for instance, the central theme of hauling out a deity or the scattered and disorderly choral movements which appear to be modelled on those of satyr choruses. The epic mode, however, grows in scale and intensity during the course of the play. The fact that, as Hermes informs Trygaeus
Sommerstein : iii. and . The processional movement from darkness to light and the use of () are, rightly in my view, commonly considered to echo the final moments of the Oresteia. For a different modality of comic engagement with the Oresteia see Bakola in this volume. On Cratin. fr. (from Cheirones) see above, p. . The possibility that the closing hexameters of Frogs were sung must be seriously entertained. Dactylic hexameters were obviously being sung by the Homeric ‘singer’ ( ), to the accompaniment of his phorminx, until the advent of the rhapsodes who would start reciting them (M. L. West and : –). There is also inscriptional evidence with musical notation from Epidauros suggesting sung dactylic hexameters, see M. L. West and : , –, who dates the inscription to a period not later than the third century bc. By the late fifth century sung dactylic hexameters – to the accompaniment not of a lyre-type instrument but that of the aulos – may have been perceived as particularly unusual and solemn. Hall and Sells : – are two wide-ranging discussions of this complexity. Sells : –. On the parody of Euripides’ Bellerophon see Dobrov : – and Tel`o : –; on the interaction with satyr drama cf. in particular Dobrov .
Paraepic comedy: point(s) and practices
(–), the gods have angrily retreated from watching Greeks wage wars against each other inverts the Homeric notion of the divine audience who will take interest – benign or malicious – in human suffering. In Trygaeus’ interaction with the priest Hierocles (–), the metre quickly (– ) shifts from the colloquial iambic trimeter into the solemn dactylic hexameter tinged with Homeric Kunstsprache. During this battle of hexameters, quotations explicitly attributed to Homer, real and made-up, and the authority they convey are turned into heavy weaponry capable of deflating and undermining the hexameters used by Hierocles for his impromptu verse oracles. Once things get physical (), the comic trimeter instantly returns: no dactyls for fist fights! In the play’s final sequence (–), Trygaeus completes and counters the bellicose traditional hexameters recited by the son of Lamachus with hexameters of his own making before shifting back into the comic trimeter mode at , where the topic is food and having more than plenty to eat. The whole passage is a prime example of how metre and meaning can be linked and made to re-enforce each other (note, for instance, that – are emphatically spondaic). The formal use of Homeric metre and diction only highlights all the more strongly the ideological shift and transference which redirect the power, the universally acknowledged authority and the beauty of Homeric poetry towards peaceful and universally desirable goals. It would be hard to think of a more appropriate way to conclude a play which advocates panhellenic peace and unity than by shifting formally into the mode of ‘wise’ and ‘divine’ Homer while inverting, transferring and redirecting his epic tale of war and suffering into the praise of peace, food and the good life, just before the final wedding song that accompanies the union, physical and symbolic, of Trygaeus with Harvest. What emerges from integrating the Aristophanic evidence into the discussion is a considerably richer typology of paraepic comedy than the one that could be sketched earlier on. Characterization and choice of plot and subplot again turn out to be critical dramaturgical strategies. Paraepic comic protagonists and plots revolve around deflating the grand, pacifying and domesticating the martial, and turning the confrontational into something convivial and celebratory. Standard devices of epic (arming scene or catalogue, for instance) are subjected to comic inversion, which also includes epic props (shields and armour in general). Specific epic intertexts can be invoked (Philocleon’s failed paraepic escape attempt specifically
Lines – are a Homeric pastiche, lines – are Il. .– (= Epicharm. fr. .). See Tel`o’s analysis of this scene in this volume.
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echoes Odysseus’ successful one), but often paraepic markers are used to create, more broadly, an epic atmosphere or modality: whole scenes or brief moments of the comic performance simply ‘smack’ of epic and convey a distinct sense of grandeur which can be played with and distorted. The dactylic hexameter and/or Homeric Kunstsprache, including direct quotations from the Homeric epics, can be used for those effects, but often are not. All of these techniques just mentioned, it must be noted, are used in paratragedy as well, and the similarities between the paraepic and the paratragic at the level of craftsmanship are considerable. The two modes blend into each other to the point of being almost indistinguishable. There appears to be a particular fondness of epic aggrandizing towards the closure of a comic performance, as is the case in several Aristophanic comedies (Acharnians, Peace, Frogs) and possibly Cratinus’ Cheirones (fr. ). Of special interest are additive strategies where several parodic modes are combined into hybrids: both Acharnians and Frogs create long sequences which combine epic and tragic modalities. Such additive strategies of generic interaction were probably quite common: Cratinus’ Dionysalexandros combines the paraepic with the parasatyric, and other plays (for example Cratinus’ Archilochoi) would, if more of them were preserved, almost certainly yield something about combining the paraepic with the paramelic or para-iambic, not to mention the paracomic (i.e. comedy’s intra-generic interactions). In fact, I suspect that, at least in Attic fifth-century comedy since Cratinus, hybrid generic interactions were so widespread that the sustained ‘pure’ interaction with only one genre, as seen in Aristophanes’ Women at the Thesmophoria (tragedy) and possibly Cratinus’ Odysseis (epic), may have been the exception rather than the rule. Aristophanes’ Frogs, finally, shows an interesting variation of hybrid interaction where epic and tragic modes are combined in such a way that much of the epic material used comes heavily mediated by way of tragedy, in this case Aeschylean tragedy. Using tragedy as a catalyst may be a function of Aristophanes’ unusually strong interest in tragedy (especially Euripides) in general, or of this play’s topic in particular, or both. But Aeschylus may well have had a particular appeal for other comic playwrights wishing to interact with epic; for he not only constantly appropriated epic material (Seven Against Thebes, for instance, is a full-scale tragic transformation of an epic arming scene), more importantly, he did so with characteristic grandeur (the 3 that Aeschylus was famous for in antiquity). The bigger the better, if only because then comedy can deflate epic grandeur
Bakola , Sells : –.
Easterling .
Paraepic comedy: point(s) and practices
even more spectacularly – and a tragedian who went as far as to materialize on stage the scales with which the epic Zeus weighs the souls of mortals was surely asking for comedy to step in! Whether such a tragedy-heavy hybrid interaction is typical of paraepic comedy in the late fifth century or whether this is an Aristophanic speciality is perhaps impossible to say on the basis of the evidence currently available. But there are considerations which make me, for one, believe that such a strategy is more specifically Aristophanic. One is, of course, my conviction in general that Aristophanes’ interest in tragedy is unusual in its intensity as well as its almost obsessive engagement with Euripides. An emphasis on tragedy wherever possible would therefore seem an almost logical step for Aristophanes. But there is also a critical formal feature, the use of dactylic hexameters in Aristophanes compared with that in other fifthcentury poets, which seems relevant here. The dactylic hexameter is actually quite frequently used by Aristophanes, but for mock oracles. Its use in a paraepic environment, however, is rare, confined as it is to the instances just discussed and at most three fragments. And it is interesting to note that in the case of Eupolis there exist no more than two hexameter fragments, only one of which appears to be paraepic (and that one only partially). ‘The fragments of some other comedians suggest a much greater fondness for parody of epic’, Parker observes before concluding that ‘it may be that Aristophanes and Eupolis were at one in regarding epic parody as in danger of being overworked’. If this is indeed so, giving his paraepic interactions a heavy tragic component may well have been Aristophanes’ special way of trying to refresh and invigorate a comic feature which he felt was in danger of becoming stale and flat. slicing the big meals of homer Epic poetry is a genre like no other for comedy, both Attic and Sicilian, to interact with. Comedy adapted its innate and compulsive parasitic drives accordingly. Unlike tragedy (at least in Athens though not in Sicily), epic is not comedy’s stage rival. It may, instead, best be described as comedy’s older,
Eq. – and –, Av. –, Lys. –. The ending of Frogs and Pax –, a sequence which also contains parody of oracles. The fragments are frr. , and (but the metre is uncertain in all). Fr. seems to be the parody of an oracle: see Storey a: –. Only fr. , one line which parodies a proverb, has a paraepic tinge in its use of the adjective * , a concept associated with the craft of Hephaestus in the Iliad (.) and the Odyssey (implied for the chains made by Hephaestus at .–). L. P. E. Parker : .
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experienced and authoritative companion, ever-present through education and ongoing rhapsodic performance. And a special companion it is. Epic is in common perception represented seriously by only one artist, Homer ‘the divine’, as Aristophanes calls him, while the others tend to be neglected and passed over (contrast the various well-known poets not just of tragedy but also of lyric poetry). And the Bard has exceptional standing from at least the sixth century onwards, conveying to epic a cultural valence second to none in the panhellenic cultural economy. All of this made epic not impossible but unwise to denigrate: putting down Homer to extol your own product in a zero-sum game situation is a strategy that backfires all too easily (while it might work just fine when dealing with tragedy). Riding on Homer and the prestige associated with epic, on the other hand, makes perfect sense and leaves everyone, comedy and Homer, even better off (Pareto-optimal scenario). And there is reason to believe that tragic poets approached Homer on similar terms. The rhetoric of ‘slices from the big meals of Homer’ attributed to Aeschylus, for what it is worth, certainly suggests not an aggressive but a grateful parasite who considers himself lucky to be around. All of this is despite the fact that ideologically comedy’s stance versus epic is often bound to be one of conceptual opposition, where the comic world of survival and the good life meets the epic one of war, suffering and doom. Using Homer as a vehicle rather than a target did not, however, follow a simple template but manifested itself differently. Sicilian comedy of the sixth and early fifth centuries appears to have approached Homer and epic poetry in ways that differed quite substantially from the appropriations in Athens later in the fifth century. For Sicilian artists like Epicharmus (or Stesichorus, for that matter) who worked from a fairly recently established periphery of the Greek continuum Homer is a means less of generic and artistic than cultural and regional self-definition. Here, even the very little evidence we have shows that comedy’s parasitic self-interest could go as far as to disrespect, in the Odysseus the Deserter, the structural integrity of the Homeric master narrative by rewriting it ‘counterfactually’, in the comic mode. Such ‘counterfactual’ rewriting of the epic paradigm, though probably not unique within the comic tradition, has particular connotations in Epicharmus’ post-colonial context not as an attack on Homer but, more broadly, as an expression of confidence vis-`a-vis the Greek mainland and an act of cultural emancipation, reassertion and autonomy. This latter conceptual triad is crucial for fifth-century Attic comedy too, but within
Burkert , Burgess , Nagy a.
Paraepic comedy: point(s) and practices
entirely different parameters: in Athens it is comedy’s place within the cultural and socio-political discourses of the Athenian polis which was, to no small extent, also defined by its interactions with other genres. Here Homer and epic poetry, however, were only one of several readily available options for interaction, and tragedy, comedy’s illustrious stage rival, emerged as the most rewarding host for comedy’s aggressive parasitism. This process seems to have culminated in the last quarter of the fifth century and with Aristophanes. After that, in the fourth century and later, the balance shifts yet again. Comic playwrights, who now for the most part hailed from non-Athenian backgrounds and produced for audiences all over the Greek world, resorted extensively to myth as passed on authoritatively by its two major disseminators, tragedy – and epic poetry. In this equilibrium of generic interactions the point and mode of appropriation is likely to have been less aggressive and more benign, less parasitic and more utilitarian. Strato’s Homeric cook, to be sure, is not an attack on epic but a funny and highly idiosyncratic creation of comic character. And Archestratus of Gela or Matro of Pitane seem primarily interested in formal rather than ideological features of epic. Lastly, the prominence of mythological burlesque in the fourth century may often have made it very hard, and quite possibly even pointless, for audiences to try to identify a particular play, sequence or even line as parodying epic poetry specifically rather than traditional tale at large. If, however, the generic boundaries become so fluid and fuzzy, the paraepic mode loses much of its appeal to a comic playwright as an instrument to engage his audience. This may help to account for the fact that much of the paraepic poetry of the fourth century that we know of is so overtly paraepic: at this point in time the nature of generic interaction needed to be emphasized in the stongest possible terms to be understood properly and as a distinct poetic mode. What does the story of paraepic comedy tell us about Homer? A better understanding, perhaps, of what the term ‘Homer the Classic’ ultimately meant to creative minds in the ancient Greek world. Not the ‘sun’ which Homer was compared to in German Romanticism, as the brilliant, warm and friendly source of all life which is also glaring, monstrous and potentially overbearing. May the term ‘lighthouse’ be a more appropriate
Taplin . ‘Und die Sonne Homers, siehe! sie l¨achelt auch uns’ writes Schiller in the final line of the elegy Der Spaziergang (), exploring in this context the ambiguity between the sun as a physical entity of cosmic durability (shining on himself as it did on Homer) and its metaphorical use to denote Homer’s incessant and life-sustaining vitality. On Homer’s reception in German Romanticism more generally see Rutschke and Wohlleben .
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metaphor for what Homer was to Epicharmus and his successors? A treasured guide by night, an imposing monument by day, an infallible token of (self-) recognition and an indispensable point of reference for those seeking to come home, whatever ‘home’ may have meant for each and every one of them.
c h a p te r 5
Epic, nostos and generic genealogy in Aristophanes’ Peace Mario Tel`o
poetic contrasts and gene(ric)alogical trees It is beyond doubt that words like ‘genealogy’, ‘filiation’ and ‘affiliation’ play a pivotal role in the metaphorical vocabulary that modern (and postmodern) critics employ to describe and interpret intertextual phenomena. But since antiquity writers themselves have built on the notion of paternity to define the relationship with their forebears and stake out their position within an established literary tradition. In classical literature certain texts are more prone than others to represent the complex dynamics of generic inheritance as father–son conflicts. For example, recent studies on Latin epic have investigated how the thematic concern with generational and dynastic continuity exhibited by Virgil and the post-Virgilian epicists selfreflexively encodes their anxiety about measuring up to or even surpassing their predecessors. A similar connection between thematics and poetics is at work, albeit on different grounds, in other genres as well. No reader of Old Comedy can fail to notice that in several of his plays Aristophanes takes a peculiar interest in staging intergenerational friction. In this chapter I intend to explore how this thematic preoccupation intersects with Aristophanes’ definition of his comic self. In particular, I set out to show that Aristophanes’ representation of intergenerational conflict in the finale of Peace is inextricably bound up with the tracing of his own generic genealogy. The concluding scene of
Many thanks to Elton Barker, Jim Porter, Lucia Prauscello, Alex Press, Alex Purves and the Cambridge University Press anonymous referees for comments on earlier versions of this chapter. As observed by Kerkhecker : , in Brut. Cicero seems to conceptualize the intertextual exchange between Ennius and Naevius in terms of anxiety of influence (cf. Bloom ). In Dion. . Nonnus refers to Homer as a father (see Hopkinson : –). On the application of Bloom’s Oedipal model to classical literature and on the idea of literary filiation in antiquity, see Thalmann : –; Finkelpearl : –; Hubbard ; Whitmarsh : ; Gildenhard : . Cf. esp. Hardie : –; Farrell ; Casali ; Gildenhard ; Oliensis : –. Elmer has recently shown that in Heliodorus’ Aethiopica paternity is assigned a primary narrative force and informs the ways in which this novel self-reflexively represents its complex intertextuality.
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Peace presents us with a rhapsodic contest between the old comic hero Trygaeus, relishing the joys of future peace, and a boy revelling in nostalgic fantasies of martial turmoil. This peace–war opposition operates as the ideological clothing of an interpoetic match casting Trygaeus and the waraddicted boy in the roles of Hesiod and Homer respectively. My main contention is that Aristophanes intertextually mobilizes a scene of intergenerational confrontation embedded in Book of the Iliad and transfers this episode into the metapoetic dimension of a literary-critical comparison. As Philip Hardie has recently remarked, ancient authors tend to inscribe their literary and cultural histories within self-constructed contrastive pairings of poetic personalities. What shapes the chapter of ‘doit-yourself literary history’ that Aristophanes forges out of his reading of Book of the Iliad is a far-reaching search for the roots of his comic self. The result is an intricately crafted dramaturgy of generic affiliations revolving around the figures of Archilochus, Hesiod and Homer. Recovering the governing principles of this dramaturgy will enable us to gain a sense of the intensity of self-awareness and inventiveness that Aristophanes brings to his exchanges with different generic traditions. But it will also help us to pin down the distinctive traits that Aristophanes places at the core of his authorial self-presentation. I begin by setting the terms of Trygaeus’ impersonation of Hesiod and examining how it combines with his endorsement of Archilochus’ iambic persona. In the second section I examine the overarching intertextual procedures that position the rhapsodic agon between Trygaeus and his young contender against the so-called epipolesis in Book of the Iliad, where Agamemnon chastises a group of heroic sons for their alleged cowardice. In the following section I consider the process of creative engagement with the epic tradition and its own modes of generic self-representation by which Aristophanes construes this scene as an instance of the opposition between Homeric martial poetry and Hesiodic didactic. As I contend, the displacement of this epic scene into the finale of Peace causes Aristophanes to identify Trygaeus’ Hesiodic persona with Diomedes and Odysseus, two filial figures who pose as defenders of paternal authority. In the fourth section I build on this kinship between the Hesiodic Trygaeus and Odysseus to bring to the surface the extensive layering of Odyssean motifs in the finale of the play. I argue that in the genealogical tree of the comic self emerging from Trygaeus’ impersonations of comedy’s generic predecessors,
Hardie . On the concept see Hinds : –, . On Aristophanes as a literary critic see Wright in this volume.
Epic and generic genealogy
the Odyssey figures as a vital branch that connects Hesiodic didactic with Archilochean iambos. comedy and its ancestors: hesiod and archilochus In the closing scene of Peace Trygaeus’ versatile theatrical talent causes comedy to infiltrate the territory of other performative genres. Before attending the party that will celebrate his nostos from Olympus and the return of Eirene (‘Peace’) the comic hero runs into two boys coming from backstage, where his much longed for wedding banquet is getting under way. The first boy immediately displays his hopeless warfare addiction and ventures into an impromptu rhapsodic performance of martial epic. The comic hero is thus impelled to take on a similar role of virtuosic improviser of dactylic hexameters. He attempts to beat out his young adversary by concocting a peace-oriented selection of hexametric morsels, originally Homeric or made up on the spot (–). At the second boy intervenes. He is introduced as the son of Cleonymus, well known to the Aristophanic audience for his almost proverbial cowardice. At – this second boy performs the Archilochean elegiac quatrain about the loss of the shield (fr. W ), twisting this recitational duel into a flagrantly anti-Iliadic conclusion. ([\P]PK^ \´) ‘ ( I!’ B " @ #$! – ’ (_.) ( B " 2 , (’, X , . ` A !" ’ L . ([. ´) ‘ ’ , #6 N ’ . , > =’ %/ = > +- " ’. (_.) ; * > " & ; ([. ´) ‘% ! ’ D’ . *# , " @ ’. (_.) @ . ; > , , 6 ] 2 ,
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On this essential aspect of Trygaeus’ characterization see Hall : . Aristophanes’ numerous allusions to Cleonymus’ cowardice are discussed in Storey .
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(First Boy) ‘But now let us begin on the younger men –’ (Trygaeus) Stop singing about ‘younger men’ and that, you triply miserable creature, when we are in peacetime! You are stupid and cursed. (First Boy) ‘Now as these in their advance had come close together, they dashed their bucklers together and their shields massive in the middle.’ (Trygaeus) Shields? Will you stop reminding us of shields? (First Boy) ‘There the screaming and shouts of triumph rose up together of men.’ (Trygaeus) Screaming of men? You will be the one to cry, by Dionysus, singing ‘screams’ – and ‘massive in the middle’ at that. (First Boy) Well, what should I sing about? Tell me whatever it is you like. (Trygaeus) ‘So they feasted on beef’, and that sort of thing; ‘they had breakfast laid out before them and whatever is best to eat’. (First Boy) ‘So they feasted on beef, and they released from the chariot-yoke the necks of the sweating horses, having had their fill of fighting’. (Trygaeus) Good. They had their fill of fighting, and then they ate. Sing about these things, yes, about how they ate after being sated. (First Boy) ‘They armed themselves after they finished –’ (Trygaeus) Gladly, I think. (First Boy) ‘and poured forth from the walls, and the ceaseless clamor arose’. (Trygaeus) To hell with you, boy, and your battles too! You don’t sing about anything else but wars. Whose son are you, by the way? (First Boy) Me? (Trygaeus) Yes, by Zeus, you. (First Boy) I’m the son of Lamachus. ... (Trygaeus) Oh, where has Cleonymus’ child gone? (To the Second Boy) Sing something before you go in. I’m sure that you won’t sing about troubles,
Epic and generic genealogy
for you are the son of a prudent father. (Second Boy) ‘One of the Saeans now boasts of my shield, a faultless weapon that I unwillingly left by a bush –’ (Trygaeus) Tell me, mon petit fr`ere, are you singing about your father? (Second Boy) ‘but I saved my life –’ (Trygaeus) And you disgraced your parents. But let’s go inside, for I know well and clearly that, being the son of that father, you’ll never forget these things that you have just sung about the shield.
Many recent studies have directed attention to the metapoetic quality of this complex scene and read into the animated exchange between the first boy and Trygaeus the dramatization of a well-rooted tension within the epic genre between Homeric and Hesiodic poetry. In particular, critics have noted that the contrast between a pro-war and an anti-war epic underpinning this rhapsodic match is fashioned in terms strikingly reminiscent of the rhetorical tactics deployed in the Certamen Homeri et Hesiodi to dichotomize the literary personas of the two outstanding representatives of early Greek hexametric poetry. At – the first boy shrewdly shifts Trygaeus’ previous praise of feasting (a ' 2 / @ ", ) back into the sphere of martial diction (a ' 2 / @ ", *#" b | %2 $ , " 2 ! ), but he triggers this 5 2 effect by reviving Homer’s reply to Hesiod in the first couplet of the so-called epic part of the Certamen, where the two poets are made to duel with mock-epic hexameters (Certamen ): % !’ b / @ " *#" b – %2 $ , " "! . Then they dined on beef and the horses’ necks – They released from the chariot-yoke the necks of the sweating horses, having had their fill of fighting.
In the first line Hesiod appropriates Homeric language, eliding the expected martial verb, even at the cost of creating an absurd image of horse-eating.
The translation is my own except for the quoted Homeric language. Here and elsewhere I reproduce with some modifications the translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey by Lattimore and . See esp. Richardson : –; Compton-Engle ; Hall : ; Revermann, in this volume. On the opposition between Homeric and Hesiodic poetry in archaic and classical Greek literature, see N. O’Sullivan : –; Rosen a; Morris : –; Graziosi , : –; Tsagalis : –; D. Steiner : –; Rosati : –. See also below n. . There is a wide agreement among scholars that the Certamen, a second-century ad composition derived ultimately from Alcidamas’ Mouseion, is deeply ingrained in a literary tradition of synkrisis between Homer and Hesiod that probably predates the fifth century bc: see most recently Graziosi ; M. L. West b: ; Rosen : –; Nagy b: –. The formal structure of this poetic agon accords well with the practice of rhapsodic competitions in the classical age: see M. Griffith ; Collins , : –, –; Graziosi : –. Text and translation of M. L. West b.
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In the second line, Homer reinstates the martial verb – the horses are to be washed, not eaten – and shifts the emphasis back from feasting to war. It is thus quite straightforward to draw the conclusion that, in this Aristophanic scene, Trygaeus ‘plays the role of Hesiod’ and is assigned ‘the advocacy of peace and symbolic representation of peasantry associated with the author of Works and Days’. The comic hero intertwines this Hesiodic self-fashioning with an implicit endorsement, at –, of the Archilochean shield-dropping posture of the second boy, whose lyric performance elicits a jeering response from Trygaeus but, significantly, neither provokes a fierce reaction of disapproval on his part nor stirs up a new contest. In fifth-century Athens the elegiac poem in which Archilochus forges the much-imitated image of the = 4 was regarded as emblematic of the stances of comic abjection and self-abasement typical of the satirist’s self-portrait, as we can infer from Critias’ censorious judgement on the iambic poet (Critias b D–K). Therefore, there is no doubt that, in spite of its elegiac facet, the successful Archilochean performance of the second boy serves the function of affirming the generic kinship between the iambic mode and comedy as incarnated by Trygaeus. As his name (connected with 2 ) transparently indicates, the protagonist of Peace acts, in fact, as a spokesman or even a personification of the comic genre. As a result of this metaliterary identity, Trygaeus’ impersonation of Hesiod and his alignment with Archilochus’ anti-martial attitude transform this scene into a parade of comedy’s poetic predecessors that
Cf. Graziosi : –. On the ideological opposition between war and food see Revermann in this volume. Thus Compton-Engle : and Hall : . Platter : – analyses the scene as a Bakhtinian opposition between epic tout court and comedy without considering Aristophanes’ alignment with Hesiod. For the significance of the expression #2 ' () see below, n. .
` #6 N , Sh V , . , ’ * ( ! , ` / , 6 % > j# , , "/ (‘we should not have known either that he was an adulterer, unless by learning it from him, or that he was lecherous and wanton and – what is even more disgraceful than these things – that he threw away his shield’). On this passage, where Critias turns Archilochus’ generic self-characterization as a blame poet into biography, see esp. Kurke : – and Rosen : –. Modern critics have recognized the genuinely iambic quality of Archil. fr. W : cf. esp. Seidensticker a; Miller : –; R. D. Griffith and Marks : –; on the numerous references to = 4 in Old Comedy see Halliwell a: –. Rotstein : n. points out that ‘the fact that this poem was composed in elegiacs stands against an assumption that Critias speaks of Archilochus’ blame poetry as represented in his iambic poems’ but, as observed by Dover : , there are ‘no grounds for believing that Archilochus regarded iambos and elegy as different genres’. On this much-discussed topic cf., in particular, Rosen ; Degani ; Kugelmeier : –; Zanetto ; Bakola : –. For a critique of the sceptical positions of E. Bowie and Rotstein , see Rosen in this volume. On Trygaeus as a self-reflexive agent of 2 see esp. Hubbard : –; Dobrov : – (according to whom Trygaeus acts as ‘Mr Comedy’); Hall : –.
Epic and generic genealogy
encapsulates a double statement of generic genealogy: Aristophanes reveals not only the iambic ‘fathers’ but also the Hesiodic ‘grandfathers’ of his comic self. But what connection, if any, does Aristophanes posit between the apparently unrelated traditions of Hesiodic didactic and Archilochean iambos? And what idea of comedy does the self-conscious disclosure of this generic pedigree encode? The literary persona that Hesiod projects in the Works and Days prefigures some of the central themes and postures of satiric literature. Hesiod’s relationship with his brother Perses and the corrupt judges that sets up the overarching situational frame of the Works and Days re-creates the distinctive contours of one of the (real or fictional) feuds in which satirists self-indulgently depict themselves as innocent targets of injustice or abuse. This constantly evoked autobiographical background endows the poetic voice of Hesiod with a ‘pose of moral rectitude’ that alternates between irony and invective, recalling the self-righteous stance characteristic of iambic and comic poets. Recently, Elizabeth Irwin has added an important element to our appreciation of the points of contact between Hesiod’s didactic mode and Archilochus’ satiric posture by illuminating their shared use of the ainos as a narrative form that, despite its seemingly ‘low’ and ‘weak’ status, enables both authors to trumpet ‘the strength of their poetry and the power of their role as poet, particularly in the assessment of what is dikaion’. To determine what kind of kinship Aristophanes establishes between his declared ancestors and how he assimilates the Works and Days into satiric discourse, in the next two sections I will tease out the defining features of the Aristophanic alter egos of Homer and Hesiod by looking at the scene’s intertextual construction from a hitherto unattempted angle. I will illustrate the comic scene’s recasting of the epipolesis in Book of the Iliad,
Other plays of Old Comedy are metapoetically engaged with Hesiod. In Cratinus’ Archilochoi the couple of Homer and Hesiod was probably treated as an epic unity pitted against Archilochus: cf. Bakola : – and Revermann in this volume. Telecleides’ Hesiodoi (frr. –) testifies to ‘the canonization of Hesiod in comedy’ (Cingano : ), but it is not clear whether and to what extent this play presented Hesiod as an ancestor of the comic genre. On ‘fathers’ and ‘grandfathers’ in the critical discourse on genre see Silk in this volume. Cf. Nagy : – and, in particular, Hunt . Martin : has remarked that the structure of the Works and Days has to be understood ‘within the demands of a genre that may have had more in common with Roman satire than Greek epic’. On the Works and Days as an angry speech, cf. Lardinois . Worman : draws attention to the association between wisdom poetry and archaic abuse. On this situational frame as a distinctive feature of satiric discourse in all of its manifestations see most recently Rosen ; Hawkins : –; D. Steiner . So Hunt : . Rosen : n. draws attention to Hesiod’s ‘interest in establishing his own self-righteousness through the narration of a neikos’. Irwin : . See also D. Steiner b: .
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aiming to show that the poetic contrast between the first boy as Homer and Trygaeus as Hesiod pivots on a table of ideological opposites which comprises not only war versus peace and heroic versus anti-heroic but also young versus old and son versus father. First of all, I will examine the complex of epic quotations that overlay the Iliadic epipolesis onto the contest between Trygaeus and the young warmonger; my analysis will suggest that in this literary match Homeric epic figures as an embodiment of filial defiance. re-enacting the epipolesis in peace The opening of the first boy’s performance ( ( I!’ B " @ #$! – ) quotes verbatim the incipit of the Cyclic poem Epigonoi, relating to the expedition against Thebes led by the sons of the Seven (fr. Bernab´e): ( I!’ B " @ #$! M ( But now, Muses, let us begin on the younger men.
The key word B , which ‘defines youth by its ability to bear arms’, bestows an intergenerational dimension upon the contest between poetry of war and poetry of peace that is dramatized in this scene. It is not by chance that the first boy unveils his fixation on pro-war epic by evoking the Theban cycle. At the end of his heated exchange with Trygaeus (), he introduces himself as the son of Lamachus. In this way he turns out to be not only ‘the worthy offspring of a valiant, even bellicose father’, but also a real Tydeus, for Tydeus was the name of Lamachus’ son, a general himself in / bc. The epic quotations of Trygaeus’ competitor seem thus to be a priori conditioned by his onomastic affiliation with the boldest
Aristophanes is not the only author who represents the opposition between Homeric and Hesiodic poetics as an intergenerational strife. In the second oration On Royalty of Dio Chrysostom the Homer–Hesiod contrast takes the form of a confrontation between Alexander and his father, Philip, in which the former endorses the heroic poetry of Homer as suited to kings and generals and the latter defends Hesiodic poetry as dispensing gems of practical wisdom: see Rosati : –. The same line is also quoted in Certamen as a classic piece of the Homeric performative repertoire. On this quotation from Epigonoi see Revermann in this volume. Translation of M. L. West a. Vernant : . On the paretymological connection between B and see Burkert . In Homer B frequently appears in contexts of intergenerational confrontation: Il. . (comparison between Priam and his sons); . (Nestor contrasts himself with the younger generation of warriors), on which see below; Od. . (Telemachus sets himself against the old swineherd Eumaeus). Mattingly : . Cf. Compton-Engle : n. and Platter : –.
Epic and generic genealogy
of the Seven. But how can a historical Tydeus like Lamachus’ son identify himself with the B , the second generation of fighters at Thebes rather than the first one (to which his namesake belonged)? Let us consider the central moment of the first boy’s rhapsodic performance. Lines – and have usually been reckoned as ‘a free Aristophanic composition, roughly based on Homeric models such as Iliad .– or .–’. These two passages from Book and Book present us with an identical sequence of lines that is evidently echoed by Trygaeus’ adversary: ’ =’ #@ G 52 b , ’ , W ’ %# " ’ @ # ! A ! " # % ’ , W ’ +26 +$ . % ! ’ D’$%& ' ()$ !* +> +2" , =" ’ b .
Now as these advancing came to one place and encountered, they dashed their shields together and their spears, and the strength of armoured men in bronze, and the shields massive in the middle clashed against each other, and the sound grew huge of the fighting. There the screaming and the shouts of triumph rose up together of men killing and men killed, and the ground ran with blood.
But are we certain that what the first boy is borrowing from the Iliadic encyclopaedia of martial poetry is only a cluster of contextually interchangeable Homeric formulae stitched together to picture the loud tumult of battle? Can we reach beyond the reading of these lines as merely a pastiche of epic clich´es? If we restore them to the larger situational compass of Book , it becomes evident that Trygaeus’ interlocutor is patterning his comic =4 upon a distinctive narrative syntax and conjuring a rich network of thematic associations structurally anchored to a specific context. In Book the vibrant description of the battlefield to which lines – belong is preceded by two speeches delivered by Sthenelus and Diomedes at the end of an animated debate on how to live up to one’s father’s military accomplishments. This debate takes place within the context of the epipolesis, a self-contained episode of almost two hundred lines in which Agamemnon, after finding and praising Nestor, confronts and scolds four ‘heroic sons’: Menestheus, Odysseus, Diomedes, Sthenelus.
Olson : . On the epipolesis and its role in the Iliad ’s narrative and ideological economy see Nagy : –; Kirk : –; Martin : –; Alden : –; Cairns b; Beck : –; Lentini a: –; Barker and Christensen .
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At – the leader of the Achaeans harshly accuses Diomedes of cowardice and reproachfully holds up to him the example of his father Tydeus, well known, by contrast, for fighting tirelessly in the forefront of the battle. Diomedes’ falling short of his father’s reputation as a valorous warrior induces Agamemnon to draw the conclusion (–) that Tydeus’ son is much better as an adviser than as a fighter: k , _2" 2' e-
$ , ’ + > " -> ;
* ' _2"l ’ m - 1" N , W 6 - R e #! , : - b j > A * % S ’ *' j A ’ V - "! . ... % _2W \.$ A 6 26 ; #" #, " ’ .
Ah me, son of Tydeus, that daring breaker of horses, why are you skulking and spying out the outworks of battle? Such was never Tydeus’ way, to lurk in the background, but to fight the enemy far ahead of his own companions. So they say who had seen him at work, since I never saw nor encountered him ever; but they say he surpassed all others . . . This was Tydeus, the Aitolian; yet he was father to a son worse than himself at fighting, better in conclave.
Respectfully, Diomedes does not respond to Agamemnon’s rebukes; it is instead Sthenelus, Capaneus’ son, who takes over the burdensome task of retorting to his charges from a filial point of view (–): a - , 6 ’ ` "- 6 ] , .! / , .
A 6 ’ 26 c 4 2 . So he spoke, and strong Diomedes gave no answer in awe before the majesty of the king’s rebuking; but the son of Capaneus the glorious answered him.
Significantly, Sthenelus endeavours to defend Diomedes by recalling their common commitment to the second expedition against Thebes and explicitly summoning up the contents of the poem Epigonoi. He claims that not only can the sons of the Seven like Diomedes live up to the expectations imposed upon them by their fathers’ exploits, but they prove to be even "’ than their fathers (–):
See Burkert : . Barker and Christensen discuss the ways in which, in this scene, the Iliad activates and manipulates a rival epic tradition centred on the Theban saga.
Epic and generic genealogy
& " "’ *#!’ L A & n/ G b R > , 2 6 !’ 6 # V , ! !@ o 6 A ' -" ! 3 A @ " !’ B
% ! .
We two claim we are better men by far than our fathers. We did storm the seven-gated foundation of Thebes though we led fewer people beneath a wall that was stronger. We obeyed the signs of the gods and the help Zeus gave us, while those others died of their own headlong stupidity. Therefore, never liken our fathers to us in honour.
As recent studies have shown in detail, Homeric epic builds its notion of the paternal-filial bond around two mutually exclusive paradigms, a conflictual and a congenial one. The latter characteristically realizes itself on the battlefield, wherein the son’s success is not meant to activate any form of rivalry with the father but, on the contrary, to strengthen familial solidarity, ‘affirming reciprocal identification across two generations’. In Iliad .– Glaucus recalls the instructions he received from his father before leaving for Troy and thus provides one of the most eloquent formulations of the congenial paradigm: .' > # % V | ' " " .#2 " , p "’ V | % ’ )0-> " Y2 * (‘to be always among the bravest, and hold my head above others, not shaming the generation of my fathers, who were the greatest men in Ephyre and again in wide Lykia’). According to Agamemnon, Diomedes’ cowardly conduct has betrayed this paradigm (epitomized by the directive ' " " .#2 " ), failing to reinforce intergenerational continuity through martial excellence. Conversely, Sthenelus’ defence of Diomedes seeks to move the relationship between Diomedes and Tydeus from scanty intergenerational co-operation into the realm of the conflictual paradigm by defiantly depicting the second expedition against Thebes as a proof of the sons’ martial superiority to the fathers. As I have already noted, in the final scene of Peace the first boy’s quotation of the incipit of Epigonoi programmatically aligns him with the descendants of the Seven (the B ). His first lines combine an explicit reference to the second expedition against Thebes with a description of the
See esp. Strauss : –; Crotty : –; Thalmann : –; Felson , . Felson : . On this passage see esp. Cairns a: –; Felson : –; Alden : –; Bakker : ; Lentini a: –.
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battle’s tumult markedly reminiscent of Iliad .–. This conjunction of elements causes the rhapsodic opening of Trygaeus’ adversary to re-create a crucial segment of the narrative set-up of Book . Thus, the first boy adopts the role of Sthenelus and the overboldness of the epic Tydeus to whom he is onomastically related merges with this heroic son’s unruliness. But how can the congenial paradigm, which Agamemnon suggests Diomedes should follow for the sake of Tydeus, coexist with the conflictual one, embodied by Sthenelus? Trygaeus’ encounter with the second boy may be illuminating in this regard. The comic hero contrasts the Archilochean loss of the shield boasted about by Cleonymus’ son with the Homeric ethic of intrafamilial cooperation through martial prowess that I have just discussed (): [. /´ ‘42#, ’ 5 –’ _. #2 ' .
Trygaeus is undoubtedly ridiculing Cleonymus’ son, who in losing his shield has not, in fact, ‘dishonoured’ his faint-hearted father at all. But, as has been rightly remarked, ‘it is significant that this boy, in contrast to Lamachus’ son, is not asked to change his tune’. This detail suggests that Trygaeus is conjuring the Homeric paradigm of paternal-filial solidarity with the purpose only of rejecting it in the name of Archilochean poetics. From the peace-oriented comic point of view, there is no substantial difference between the congenial paradigm and the conflictual one: they are interchangeable expressions of the Iliad ’s martial code. As we have seen, in the literary match staged at the end of Peace Lamachus’ son acts as a stand-in for Homer. By onomastically linking this character with the notorious overboldness of Tydeus, Aristophanes identifies Homeric epic with the most extreme manifestations of the martial spirit; at the same time, the mapping of this Athenian Tydeus onto Sthenelus assimilates this reckless martial spirit, presented as constitutive
In this line, #2 ' echoes Homeric formulations such as Il. .–, on which see above. Bonanno – detects in this half-line an allusion to Alc. fr. .– Voigt , #> [| % ` . [ " . It is beyond doubt that in this poem, which develops martial themes, the expression #> is self-consciously employed as a marker of Homeric intertextuality: cf. Hall : – and Lentini b: –. So Compton-Engle : , who adds: ‘the antiheroic ethic expressed in the poem matches the mood of Peace’. See also Platter : –. In lines – Storey : – recognizes ‘the friendliest tone in which Aristophanes mentions Cleonymus (in the context of war and peace a = 4 , after all, is on the right side)’. Therefore, the idea that, in this scene, ‘Archilochean escapism is condemned’ (Harriott : ) seems quite unlikely. Cf. Thalmann : : ‘Sthenelus’ speech . . . although its rhetoric is sharp in response to Agamemnon’s perceived insult, is within the norm defined by the heroic ideal.’
Epic and generic genealogy
of Homeric poetry, to an outburst of filial defiance. The apparent contradiction, which we have noted at the beginning, of a character’s positioning himself within the generation of the B in spite of his onomastic association with the previous one foregrounds this notion of Homeric martial poetry as inevitably resulting in a stance of intergenerational competitiveness. But what part does Trygaeus play in this comic reconfiguration of the Iliadic scene’s intergenerational frame? This is the question that I take up in the following section. We will see how the epipolesis sets the terms of Trygaeus’ Hesiodic identity, one which is defined first and foremost by the defence of paternal authority. trygaeus, hesiod and the iliadic sons We have thus far seen how the intergenerational tension between the Seven and their descendants that comes to the fore during the epipolesis is intertextually manipulated in the agon of Trygaeus and the first boy. Upon closer scrutiny, the same episode spins out other narratives of father–son conflict. Exploring the ideological underpinnings of these narratives will help us to clarify the interpretative paths that prompt Aristophanes to use this Iliadic episode to style Trygaeus as a Hesiodic figure. The description of Diomedes’ silent reaction to Agamemnon’s neikos speech lays emphasis on the key concept of .$ (.! / , .
, ) and accords well with the excellence in the art of advising ( " ’ ) that, though juxtaposed with supposedly defective military ability (#" #), the leader of the Achaeans ascribes to the young hero at the end of his reproach (–). The proximity between lines ( " ’ ) and (.! / , .
) seems to configure a thematic cluster – resting on the combination of faultless speaking capacity and .$ – that, in Homer and Hesiod, is deployed to identify authority figures weaving together royal sovereignty and the practice of wisdom. It is precisely by assuming an authoritative stance and self-reflexively signposting it through the marked
On the agonistic valence of Diomedes’ silence see Martin : –. Cf. Od. .– (B ’ -" > , | . # , ' " " , | #9 ’ V2 !6 a . ) and Hes. Theog. –, – (B ’ -" > | L4 " " " 2 . . . # ’ ’ @ !6 a 9 | . # , ' " " ), which characterize the condition of the ideal king in strikingly similar terms. For a discussion of the paraenetic elements of these two passages see Martin .
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term (! that, at lines –, Diomedes addresses Sthenelus and urges him to comply with Agamemnon’s orders: " q , ’ ! >!.
* g @ r" " @ +> #! s r# > . Friend, stay quiet rather and do as I tell you; I will find no fault with Agamemnon, shepherd of the people, for stirring thus into battle the stronggreaved Achaians.
In so doing, Diomedes casts himself in a part not dissimilar to the one assigned to Nestor, who in the Iliad is not just an adviser, but represents the paternal figure par excellence and acts as a self-conscious practitioner of paraenetic discourse. During the epipolesis, Nestor reminds his charioteers not to get overconfident on the battlefield in their desire to achieve their personal glory and, with such a warning, he attempts to pre-empt the same kind of defiant attitude that Diomedes reproaches in Sthenelus. As Nestor confesses with remarkable narrative self-awareness, his task is precisely to restrain the B (!) by practising / 2 and (! (–): m ( " U' > / 2 >! A 6 " . .# ’ .# 2 $ , b
B "
! / - .
Yet even so I shall be among the riders, and command them with word and counsel; such is the privilege of the old men. The young spearmen shall do the spear-fighting, those who are born of a generation later than mine, who trust in their own strength.
In the Iliad Diomedes figures as ‘the model of the young Greek male initiated into forceful speaking’. In appropriating the paraenetic stance of Nestor to warn Sthenelus, Diomedes foreshadows the didactic posture
On the semantic and ideological distinction between % and (! in the Iliad, see Martin : –, –; for its developments in the Odyssey see Clark . Cf. Martin : : ‘Nestor and Phoenix . . . become conduits for the genre of paraenetic poetry.’ On Nestor as a symbol of */ 2 and paternal authority see Schofield : –; Martin : –, ; Dickson ; Christensen : –; Barker : –, –; on his resemblances to the figure of the Hesiodic good king see Martin ; Christensen : –; Hunter b: –. In .– Nestor approves Diomedes’ attitude, but remarks that it has not achieved the " >! : cf. Schofield : –; Martin : –; Barker : –; Christensen . JK and its cognates represent Lieblingsworte of Nestor’s vocabulary: see Il. ., where the superlative B is used. On the thematic relevance of this adjective in the opening of the performance of Trygaeus’ adversary, see above. Martin : . See also Barker : – and Christensen : .
Epic and generic genealogy
of the Hesiodic narrator in the Works and Days, who, despite his fraternal status, casts the relationship with his nepios addressee Perses in a father–son framework. In particular, the opening address of Diomedes to Sthenelus (" q , ’ ! >!, ) resonates with the vocative expressions that the authorial voice of Hesiod repeatedly uses to signpost the essential moments of Perses’ education. If Sthenelus’ filial defiance is taken as a generic icon of Homeric epic, it is quite a small step to (mis)read into Diomedes’ paternal exercise in authoritative speech a manifestation of proto-Hesiodic didactic. This being the case, one can suggest that in the final scene of Peace the altercation between the first boy as Homer and Trygaeus as Hesiod mimics the exchange between Sthenelus and Diomedes. Aristophanes has more than one reason to identify a ‘proto-Hesiodic moment’ in Diomedes’ (! and plot it into the agon that brings Peace to an end. Not only does the young hero adopt a fatherly persona that anticipates Hesiod’s purported commitment to redeeming his nepios brother; in the context of the debate, the ideological contrast resulting from Sthenelus’ combative assertion of military bravery and Diomedes’ protreptic stance also amounts to a mise-en-sc`ene of the dichotomy between # and that Agamemnon laid out at the end of his speech (). The Iliad ’s heroic code feeds upon ‘the idea that a hero will ideally be distinguished in both wisdom and valour’ and ‘debating in the assembly is part of what one has to do to prove oneself a man’, but the last lines of Agamemnon’s taunt seem to envision the possibility that excellence in speaking may be divorced from or even opposed to prowess in fighting. If understood within a Hesiodic frame of reference, this #– tension can be easily connected with the binary oppositions through which,
On Hesiod’s appropriation and manipulation of the father–son didactic model, cf. Pellizer and Martin : n. ; M. Griffith b: –, interprets the fraternal setting of the Works and Days as a deliberate innovation of the classic father–son paradigm (see also Tsagalis : –). Pucci a: notes that in the Works and Days Hesiod’s authorial voice ‘agit constamment comme le substitut du p`ere absent’. Cf. e.g. Op. : X [", W ' ( ! !2; : X [", W ’ V 2 . For a thorough analysis of all the addresses to Perses in the Works and Days, see Clay : – and Lardinois : –. The idea that intertextuality works through ‘a plurality of moments in which the tradition is locally called into being and then turned and troped’ (Bryson : ) lies at the root of the concept of ‘do-it-yourself literary history’: cf. Hinds : –, and , to which I owe the formulation ‘proto-Hesiodic moment’. The quotations are taken respectively from Schofield : and Barker : . In .– Nestor seems to correct, at least partially, Agamemnon’s judgement on Diomedes: _2e, " ' " % , | / 2 B % 2 V . Cf. Christensen .
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in the Works and Days, Hesiod figures the generic contrast between his own poetic endeavour and martial epic. As many studies have recognized, the agriculture–sailing opposition that is foregrounded at lines – (the so-called Nautilia) metaphorically sets the aesthetic worldview of Hesiodic didactic against the poetic values of the Iliad. Even the avian dispute at the centre of the ainos of the hawk and the nightingale is loaded, as Deborah Steiner has most recently shown, with a similar metapoetic significance. In both cases the pole of Iliadic poetry is explicitly paired with the ethical world of Perses: the unstable and unpredictable nature of seafaring captivates his knack for gambling and risky deals, while the predatory morality of the j5 nicely epitomizes the insatiable greed and nefarious scheming that the Hesiodic narrator imputes to his addressee. In Aristophanes’ tendentious reading, the animated debate that engages the Iliadic sons Sthenelus and Diomedes in Book not only generates the governing principles of Hesiodic didactic but also dramatizes and tropes the distinctive strategies by which this generic tradition articulates its identity against the background of martial epic. Trygaeus plays the role of Diomedes, but Diomedes is not the only actor of Iliad’s Book to exert impact upon the Hesiodic self-characterization of the Aristophanic comic hero. At – (‘a ' 2 / @ "’, 2 A | ‘V ! D!’ Z ! ’) a recognizably Odyssean tessera introduces the theme of feasting into the duel between the comic mouthpieces of Homer and Hesiod. Line opens, in fact, with the initial segment of Odyssey . a ' 2
!’ 4-' " @, which also shows up amid the patchwork of Homeric quotations deployed by the character of Hesiod in the Certamen. Feasting is a constant presence in the thematic baggage of Homeric
On the poetological meaning of the Nautilia, cf. Nagy : –; Rosen b; Graziosi : –; Murnaghan : –; Tsagalis : –, : . As D. Steiner : observes, ‘the hawk and its mode of delivering its harangue carry an Iliadic character and one that corresponds to the (pejorative) characterization assigned to heroic epic in several other programmatic passages’, while the nightingale – ‘a bird that remains close to the ground’ – captures well the scope and the quality of Hesiodic poetry. On the depiction of seafaring as ‘a dangerous temptation to Perses’, cf. Clay : –. Building upon the possible connection of Perses’ name with )P 2 [" , Martin has suggested that the addressee of the Works and Days stands not only for ‘a brother and a general audience in need of instruction’ but also for ‘the entire genre of epic about Troy’s fall’. On the Iliadic character of Perses see also Rousseau . Cf. Certamen : a p ' 2 , *' %# . Od. . alludes to the banquet that Menelaus arranges in Sparta to celebrate the weddings of his son and his daughter. As lines – indicate, Menelaus had promised to marry off his children when he was still in Troy but this promise was enacted only after the end of the war. By placing emphasis upon the post-Iliadic dimension of this wedding celebration, the Homeric narrator seems to present feasting as a typically Odyssean theme.
Epic and generic genealogy
epic. It pervades the world of the Iliad ‘but it is especially in the peacetime epic of the Odyssey that we see young men gathering in the halls of the great to feast’. In the Odyssey feasting is the single most frequent activity and is charged with a broad network of symbolic associations pertaining to the concepts of social orderliness, civic harmony and political stability. Therefore, it certainly comes as no surprise that the Homer–Hesiod contrast staged by Trygaeus and his adversary is also constructed out of the antagonistic opposition between a war-centred Iliad and a feasting-oriented Odyssey. What is surprising is to find this opposition thematized within the same Iliadic episode that, as we have seen, serves as the pivotal intertextual background of the intra-epic contest staged at the end of Peace. Before addressing Diomedes, Agamemnon reviles Menestheus and, especially, Odysseus for their defective commitment to fighting in the vanguard (–): >, " - , $ -", ’ V 2 ; -@l " ’ " $ R &' # 2 / A $ 6 21! , B " 2 - 1 r#
. % ! - ’ + " " % U' >
j 2 " " , 3-’ !" A ( ' - #’ B . " > r# @ ! #
"l #.
[Son of Peteos, a king supported by Zeus] and you, too, you with your mind forever on profit and your ways of treachery, why do you stand here skulking aside, and wait for the others? For you two it is becoming to stand among the foremost fighters, and endure your share of the blaze of battle; since indeed you two are first to hear of the feasting whenever we Achaians make ready a feast of the princes. There it is your pleasure to eat the roast flesh, to drink as much as you please the cups of the wine that is as sweet as honey. Now, though, you would be pleased to look on though ten battalions of Achaians were to fight with pitiless bronze before you.
This rebuke and that subsequently directed against Diomedes share a set of structural and linguistic similarities – primarily in their openings ( $ -", ’ V 2 ; ∼ $ , ’ + > " -> ; ) – pointing to the symbolic kinship between Odysseus and Diomedes that is repeatedly posited
Ford : . See also Sherratt : . On the metaphorical meanings attached to Odyssean feasting see esp. Sa¨ıd : –; W. J. Slater ; Pucci : –; Ford ; Bakker .
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throughout the poem. In both of his blame speeches Agamemnon defines the normative world of # against an alternative (and allegedly inferior) ethico-social microcosm ( or ) into which he contemptuously relegates his interlocutors. It is evident, in other words, that the #– dichotomy emblematized by Sthenelus and Diomedes reformulates, in different terms, the dialectic between # and that Agamemnon devises to chastise Odysseus. If the practice of exemplified by Diomedes’ admonitory address to Sthenelus can be taken to adumbrate the didactic setting of the Works and Days, conjures an ideological concern with fair sharing and equal distribution that is central to Hesiod’s paraenetic enterprise. In fact, the Works and Days’ just speech urges its Iliadic addressee Perses to overcome greed, detach himself from the group of the - kings and embrace . It seems thus possible to conclude that Agamemnon’s tendentious presentation of Odyssean as an alternative to and a diversion from # provides Aristophanes with another ‘proto-Hesiodic moment’, which brings out a concept resonating with the Works and Days’ moral universe and places it against the backdrop of martial poetry. In this perspective, and can function as interchangeable tags of the generic territory of Hesiodic didactic. The merging of the proto-Hesiodic worldviews ( and ) with which Agamemnon associates Odysseus and Diomedes enables Trygaeus to confront his Sthenelus-like opponent by deploying an Odyssean stance. Trygaeus is impelled to re-enact Diomedes’ role, but instead of positioning himself within the discursive domain of he intrudes into the cognate realm of Odyssean . How shall we explain this choice? In the Iliadic scene consider Odysseus’ response to Agamemnon’s attack (–): 34 , T !"! j " , _# - " # " _$ A W ' (’ $ /1 .
Cf. Martin : . On the ‘association of a clever speechifier with food’ that lies behind Odysseus’ concern with in the Iliad, cf. Worman a: –, b, : –. See, among others, Griffith b; Clay : –, : –; Lardinois ; Edwards : – . D. Steiner : n. has pointed out that the epithet - , similar to / , which is attached to Agamemnon in Il. ., underscores the association of the corrupt kings of the Works and Days with the world of the Iliad. The vocative expression that Agamemnon uses to address Odysseus (l.) creates ‘a less than heroic persona for Odysseus, which . . . is put to good use by the Odyssey as it realizes its hero’s ’ (Bakker : ). Cf. Pucci : – and Clay : . Significantly, this address is alluded to in Eq. – ( 2 | 1 " ).
Epic and generic genealogy
Only watch, if you care to and if it concerns you, the very father of Telemachos locked with the champion Trojans, breakers of horses. Your talk is wind, and no meaning.
What is most striking in Odysseus’ self-defence is the strong emphasis laid on his paternal condition. At line Agamemnon addresses him as Y , and in so doing he betrays his attempt to equate Odysseus with the other addressees of his taunts, namely Menestheus, Diomedes and Sthenelus, whose status as heroic sons is continually underscored through an insistent usage of patronymics (X 2' [@ -" / , ; k , _2" 2' e- , ; 6 ’ 26 c 4 2 , ). By presenting himself as father of Telemachus, Odysseus clearly aims to shake off the filial identity that Agamemnon is imposing upon him or, to put it another way, he is trying to displace the paternal authority embodied by the leader of the Achaeans onto himself and, by extension, into the domain of . If in Book the exchange between Agamemnon and Diomedes configures itself as the clash between a war-centred political father and an -oriented son, Odysseus’ self-presentation as ‘the father of Telemachus’ seems to have paved the way for Trygaeus to flip the terms of this exchange and turn it into its opposite: a match between a Sthenelus-like son and an Odysseus-inspired father. One could even say that Trygaeus picks up on Odysseus’ retort to Agamemnon and retrospectively downgrades the head of the Achaeans to filial status by coupling him with a transgressive symbol of hypermartial attitude such as Sthenelus. Trygaeus is, in other words, reading this scene according to the same intertextual strategy that informs the agon between Odysseus disguised as a beggar and the suitor Eurymachus in Book of the Odyssey. In the course of this agon Eurymachus mockingly addresses Odysseus and suggests that he should work for him gathering stones for the walls and planting trees, but he immediately withdraws his offer
See Lentini a: –. On the ‘easy passage uniting the three figures of the king, the god, the father’ (Derrida : ) in classical literature see D. P. Fowler : –. That Agamemnon is made to play a paternal role is guaranteed by the resonance of Odysseus’ response with Od. .– (34 , j ’ !"!, - , ’ !2 | ` #> 6 " , : > ). In both scenes a filial figure (Odysseus / Telemachus) rebels against or challenges a paternal one (Agamemnon / Odysseus): cf. Murnaghan : –. Nagy : reads the contest between Odysseus and Eurymachus as a Homeric counterpart to the relationship between Hesiod and Perses. See also Murnaghan : – and D. Steiner a: . In Hymn .– Callimachus significantly turns the episode into a metapoetic conflict between Homer and Hesiod: cf. Bing .
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claiming that the beggar could never accept it because of his insatiable belly (–): ’ I , % ’ %! , * ! %
#! , $ / > , 3-’ t %# / , "’ V . But since all the work you have learned is bad, you will not be willing to go off and work hard; no, you would rather beg where the people are, and so be able to feed that ravenous belly.
Such an insulting remark echoes the reproach that Agamemnon targets at Odysseus in Book of the Iliad. In both the Iliadic and the Odyssean context what exposes Odysseus to the blame heaped upon him by his interlocutors is his supposed habit of lagging ( $ , ; cf. Il. ., $ ) and slackly indulging in the pleasures of the belly (/ , "’ V , ; cf. Il. .–, $ 6 21! , | B " 2 - 1 )\#
). In the Odyssey the suitors are persistently qualified as " (or ( ) and display many features of the ‘recklessly individualistic warriors of the Iliadic battlefield’; significantly enough, the formulaic line m " j " is always and exclusively referred to them. The effects of retrojected intertextuality that Eurymachus’ selfpatterning upon Agamemnon determines are, thus, quite easy to gauge. Agamemnon is retrospectively paired with a figure of arrogant youth and accorded the filial identity that, in Book of the Iliad, Odysseus intended to impose polemically upon him. The head of the Achaeans is likened not only to the suitors, but also to Sthenelus, another example of " " whom, as we have seen, Trygaeus’ adversary deliberately imitates. It is thus clear that what prompts Aristophanes to understand the characters of Diomedes and Odysseus as parallel embodiments of a
On these lines, anticipated almost verbatim at .–, cf. D. Steiner a: –. On the thematic centrality of in Book of the Odyssey, see most recently Worman : – and D. Steiner . On these verbal echoes cf. Lentini a: –; as Pucci : has shown, Odysseus’ response to Eurymachus, too, resonates with the exchange between Odysseus and Agamemnon in Book of the Iliad. Graziosi and Haubold : . Cf. Scheid-Tissinier ; Falkner : ; Felson : –; Graziosi and Haubold : . One should also observe that the epithet / , which Achilles applies to Agamemnon in Il. ., recalls the depiction of the suitors’ hubristic behaviour in the Odyssey (see e.g. Od. ., .).
Epic and generic genealogy
proto-Hesiodic poetic personality is their adoption of a fatherly role. Aristophanes’ idea of Hesiod seems, in other terms, to coincide with the paradox of a filial figure conferring upon itself and exerting paternal authority through which the narrator of the Works and Days programmatically constructs his persona. Within the parade of the heroic sons taunted by Agamemnon, Diomedes and Odysseus are aligned with two father-oriented ethico-social domains ( and ) that Aristophanes construes as anti-Iliadic generic forces causing the didactic impetus of Hesiodic poetry to intrude into and compete with the rival world of epic #. As a result of this literary-critical manoeuvre, the intergenerational debate of Book is turned into an intergeneric arena wherein didactic and martial epic confront each other in terms reminiscent of the contrasts between Hesiodic and Homeric poetry that the Works and Days often dramatizes. If this reconstruction of Aristophanic ‘do-it-yourself literary history’ hits the mark, the contest between the first boy and Trygaeus encodes the Homer–Hesiod contrast by retrieving in the intergenerational thematics of the Iliadic epipolesis different strands of epic tradition and their modes of generic self-representation. As I have concluded, among these modes of self-representation the Hesiodic voice’s alignment with paternal authority is essential to Trygaeus’ identity and, consequently, to Aristophanes’ comic persona. However, the question posed at the beginning of this chapter still awaits an answer: why is Hesiod coupled with Archilochus in Aristophanes’ genealogical tree of the comic self? In the next and last section I will contend that the Aristophanic idea of Hesiod that we have so far recovered can help us to make sense of the connection between these two comic ancestors. comedy and the odyssean hesiod Scholars have long recognized that the Archilochean poem on the loss of the shield (fr. W ), which the second boy recites with Trygaeus’ implicit approval (–), triggers a subversion of the heroic code that sounds not only anti-Iliadic, but markedly Odyssean in register. The iambic persona of Archilochus is self-consciously re-enacting the gesture that, according to what Odysseus himself boastingly recounts in one of his Trugreden, the epic character performed to save his life in a dangerous moment of a raid on the Egyptians (Od. .–):
Cf. J. Russo ; Seidensticker a; Miller : –; Newton : –. Barker and Christensen have retrieved traces of the same Odyssean stance in the new Archilochus elegiac fragment.
mario tel o` * ’ 6 6 2 " `2 %! k l , 2 ’ %/ % # A * g / S2! b > > !’ R$ A B ’ > ’ " . At once I put the well-wrought helm from my head, the great shield off my shoulders, and from my hand I let the spear drop, and went out into the way of the king and up to his chariot, and kissed his knees and clasped them; he rescued me and took pity.
Archilochus’ account of his = 4 offers an eloquent example of the major role that the character of Odysseus plays in the iambic poets’ strategies of literary self-fashioning. As we have seen in the previous section, Aristophanes constructs the Hesiodic identity of Trygaeus by assimilating the comic hero to the figures of both Diomedes and Odysseus, whom, in the epipolesis, Agamemnon depicts as adversaries of the Iliadic devotion to #. It is beyond doubt, however, that in wielding the language of Trygaeus accords special prominence to the Odyssean component of his Hesiodic self. If we glance at the context of the finale of Peace, we can easily notice its shaping through the appropriation of several Odyssean plot motifs. The resourceful ( - | - , –) and much-suffering ( ’ , ) comic hero comes back from his successful trip to another world and looks forward to celebrating his nostos with his (new) wife. Just like Odysseus, he also confronts and defeats a young Sthenelus- or suitor-like supporter of martial epic. But there is more. Odysseus’ nostos ultimately amounts to a restoration of fatherly authority resulting from his defeat of the suitors and his assuming responsibilities as Laertes’ caretaker. When Odysseus visits Laertes in the orchard (Od. .–), he recollects the names and the order of the trees through which as a child he had walked together with his father. By so doing, Odysseus not only re-acquires ‘the long-lost parental embrace’ and re-enters the symbolic space of the oikos but also commits himself to curing his old father, disparaged by the suitors and relegated to solitude. Thus, the poem’s narrative telos resolves itself in a forceful assertion of the principle of generational continuity and in the
On this topic cf. Rosen a, : –, –; on the Odyssey’s foreshadowing of iambic motifs and situations see Worman : – and D. Steiner . On the marriage feast of Trygaeus see Calame : – and Hall : –. The quotation comes from John Henderson : . On the relationship between paternity, memory and nature that is thematized in this scene see Pucci b; John Henderson ; Murnaghan : –; Purves : –. On Odysseus as Laertes’ caretaker cf. esp. Falkner : –.
Epic and generic genealogy
triumph of an agricultural poetics evocative of the Works and Days over the heroic past of the Iliad. In exactly parallel terms, the final nostos of the rustic hero Trygaeus reunites him with his fervently longed-for trees and, through the intertextual mediation of Diomedes and Odysseus, casts him in the role of a paternal son, that is, a son painstakingly dedicated to defending and embodying fatherly authority. The plot of Wasps, centred on the fathersaving mission of Bdelycleon, dramatizes this role and its intersections with the comic poet’s self-presentation. As I have argued elsewhere, the stance of the paternal son is central to Aristophanes’ articulation of his comic persona in Wasps, Clouds and Peace. In these three plays Aristophanes fashions himself as a filial figure attempting, with alternating successes and failures, to rescue his fatherly audience from the tricks of his adversaries. In the final scene of Peace Aristophanes engages in a programmatic search for the generic precedents of the posture of the paternal son. He foregrounds its affinities with the authorial voice of the Works and Days, and by applying Hesiod’s own strategies of generic self-definition, he detects the emergence of such a voice in the oppositional attitude towards the Iliadic heroic code that Agamemnon imputes to Diomedes and Odysseus during the epipolesis. The ultimate outcome of this staged archaeology of the Hesiodic persona is the assimilation of the Works and Days’ didacticism to Odysseus’ anti-Iliadic stance, the same one that Archilochus appropriates as a key constituent of his satiric self-presentation in the account of his = 4 . In virtue of this Odyssean lineage, Aristophanes can position the Works and Days among comedy’s generic ancestors alongside archaic iambos and incorporate Hesiodic didactic into satiric discourse.
Pucci b: remarks that in this scene ‘the Odyssey enacts a sort of pillaging of the splendors of Iliadic | heroic diction’. On the connection between Laertes’ orchard and the agricultural poetics of the Works and Days see Murnaghan : –; other points of resemblance between Odysseus and the poetic persona of Hesiod are discussed by Kelly . As D. P. Fowler b: has observed, Odysseus’ nostos represents the quintessential didactic plot in that it metaphorically captures the endeavour to ‘return home after being alienated from the way things are by false beliefs’. Trygaeus’ homecoming is often viewed as a familial reunion with his trees: see, in particular, ll. – ( / > " 2 , | 2 , ? g ’->2 i $ , | ! !26 & # ) and –. Cf. Tel`o : n. . Cf. Hubbard : : ‘by projecting his own experience onto his main character, Aristophanes clarifies both the potential and the limitations of his comic art’. See also, among others, Reckford : –, –; Olson : ; Dobrov : . Tel`o .
mario tel o`
Thus, through Archilochus, Hesiod and the Iliadic practitioners of proto-Hesiodic poetics Aristophanes retrieves and parades the Odyssean roots of his comic self. It is this elaborate exercise in self-styled generic genealogy that lies at the core of Trygaeus’ nostos and his reunion with all of his literary fathers.
On the central role of the Odyssey in Old Comedy’s interactions with epic see Revermann in this volume.
c ha p te r 6
Comedy and the civic chorus Chris Carey
Choral song has a unique position in the cultic and cultural life of the ancient Greek city. It is arguably the voice of the Greek polis at worship and remains so in all regions of Greece throughout the archaic and classical periods and into the Hellenistic period. No solo form (sung, chanted or spoken) achieved either the contextual range or the public standing of choral song and dance. Despite the major differences of scale, mode of performance and fictionality that separate Athenian drama from the various non-dramatic choral genres in Athens and elsewhere, the chorus remains central to the collective perception both of tragedy and of comedy. Permission to compete is always described in terms of the giving/ withholding/receiving of a chorus from the archon (Ar. Eq. , Pax and , Ran. ; Cratin. frr. and ; Arist. Poet. b). And even when the chorus dwindles in the fourth century to (often) an interlude, it is inconceivable in civic performances at least that a play could be staged without one. All literary genres are located at a point of convergence between contexts and tendencies, diachronic and synchronic, generic and individual. But the status of drama as a choral form underlines in particular both the performative dimension of this intersection and the relationship of the singing voice with the collective voice of the city. Drama is acutely aware that it exists within a network of choral performances both within its own festivals and within the Greek (not just Athenian) festival calendar. It is also self-consciously aware of its own capacity to achieve new effects with these traditional forms. It is this overt sense of belonging to a larger picture of choral activity that I wish to explore. I shall have less to say about parody of and citations from known authors of lyric works than about the way in which the comic choral voice locates itself in relation to those of
For the continuing centrality of the chorus see Rothwell b. See on this, the Introduction and Silk in this volume.
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other choral forms. My approach is unhistorical, in the sense that I am more interested in phenomena and perceptions than in putative origins and development. This sense of belonging to a larger picture takes very different forms in tragedy and comedy. In tragedy every known kind of non-dramatic choral performance is in one way or another drawn into the fiction. It is not just that individual odes use generic markers to identify themselves and create or reflect narrative moments. The tragic chorus frequently shifts register between non-dramatic genres within the ode to create changes in mood. A single song can begin as one kind of composition and shift or mix register up to several times within a score of lyric verses. This kind of complex code switching within the ode is more rare in comedy. Momentary effects such as bathos and para prosdokian more generally are common. But, unlike the tragic chorus, the chorus in comedy retains a more sustained focus on the individual dramatic moment; it generalizes less, narrates less, predicts less. This has implications for the range of moods and modes available within any one ode and consequently for the potential for interaction with other choral forms. The comic chorus is also regularly more firmly partisan than all but a small number of tragic choruses. This reduces the ability of the comic chorus to switch genre codes to anything like the extent of the tragic chorus. Code switching is therefore more often to be seen in the larger architecture of the play and the corpus than within the individual choral song. In some obvious respects the comic chorus comes closer to the nondramatic choral tradition. It shares with archaic lyric a pronounced sense of occasionality. Comedy is more explicitly aware of its place within a performative framework than is tragedy, which because it resolutely stays within its own mythos can only indirectly acknowledge its status as performance. The sort of choral self-consciousness discussed by Henrichs as an intermittent effect in tragic songs is both normal for comedy and more overt. Unlike tragedy, comedy acknowledges and intermittently addresses its audience. This quasi-dialogic relationship with the audience distinguishes it from its generic sister tragedy and brings it closer to effects achieved in non-dramatic lyric, most notably the way in which the chorus in Alcman draws its own performance into its song:
See Henrichs . See Swift and (for the victory ode exclusively) Carey . On the rhetoric of the comic audience as the comedian’s ‘own friends’, see also Prauscello in this volume. For this aspect of Alcmanic deixis, see Peponi .
Comedy and the civic chorus
N *# B u B ' " )0 A 7 ' # 4 v # ! #26 [:] A ) > , - " u Do you not see? The courser is Enetic. And the hair of my cousin Hagesichora blooms like unalloyed gold; and her face of silver, why do I speak it to you outright? (Alcman .– PMGF)
The sense of comedy as recurrent ritual is enhanced by the tendency of the comic chorus on occasion to adopt a seamless identity with other comic choruses past and future. The chorus can refer back to previous performances. Thus at Acharnians – the chorus recalls how at the Lenaia in a previous year it was sent to bed hungry by a previous choregos, who ignored his obligation to feast his chorus: )\ # 6 w † 6 52- † 6 " , : ' 7 @ 5 " B o> A ) ' 6 Y # @ "2 ) V . Antimachus the son of Spray, † the chronicler †, the lyric poet, let Zeus obliterate horribly – in short; who when he was producer at the Lenaia sent me off with no dinner.
It can anticipate future productions as at Acharnians –, where the chorus expresses a hostility to Cleon which is difficult to square with the identity of the speaker and puzzling in its immediate context: o* # A ' " W A : c" % , x @ ( >. I won’t take it! Don’t you even talk to me! For I hate you even more than Cleon, whom I’ll cut up into bootsoles for the cavalrymen.
The textual-dramaturgic effects here are very complex. Unmistakable in retrospect is a specific anticipation of Aristophanes’ next production, Knights.
Differently from Wilson, I tentatively follow here Bothe’s reading.
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At the moment of performance the joke is probably felt as no more than a threat to savage Cleon. But this war-hungry chorus should not be opposed to Cleon in a play which associates the ascendant politicians collectively with the war. The threat is an example of the parabatic glide which Bakola has established as part of the Aristophanic, and more generally comic, manner, in which the authorial voice can surface momentarily and often elusively in the mouth of almost any character in the play. Audible through the threat is an Aristophanes unbowed (despite the anxiety of Dicaeopolis at –) by the attack on him from Cleon after Babylonians, hinting slyly at plans to reopen hostilities. But a side effect is to draw the chorus imaginatively into a future dramatic production. Less obvious perhaps is Peace , where the chorus’s self-description as a grim juror looks like a backward glance at Wasps: *") V ) H , W *' > . You won’t find me any more a grim and ill-natured juror.
The comic chorus thus has a sense of its place within a continuous series of performances, past and future, as though despite the shifts in dramatic identity the composition of the chorus were the same throughout time. This aspect of the Aristophanic chorus is at its strongest in the parabasis of Knights (–): . " , @ # & U 1 "5 % 6 6 !" / ,
* t -> %2# > 2A If any man of the older generation as producer had tried to press us to approach the audience and speak, he would not have had an easy time.
It is as though the specific chorus, assembled and drilled together for this one performance, has always been there, performing. This explicit sense of chronological continuity, though formally different from surviving civic choral performances, which usually leave the element of iteration unexpressed, nonetheless reinforces the sense of comedy as, like paean, maiden song or dithyramb, a cyclical civic ritual.
Bakola : –. For the polyphonic voice of fifth-century comedy (in contrast to New Comedy) see also Dobrov b, especially , . For the chorus of Peace, and its affinities with that of Wasps, see McGlew . The practice finds an interesting parallel in the continuity (within democratic Athens) in other bodies with a civic role; speakers addressing the assembly and the jury courts regularly refer to the immediate audience as though it were coterminous with all other assembly or court meetings.
Comedy and the civic chorus
But comedy is a slippery medium and on closer inspection it turns out to have an ambiguous relationship with the choral tradition, as it does with every other cultural discourse. I return to the role of the chorus in civic celebration. Our evidence suggests that the choral voice in non-dramatic state performances is generally the undivided voice of the polis. This is explicitly the case in Pindar’s second and fourth Paeans. The voice in the paean for Abdera identifies itself as a typical inhabitant, or as the collective voice of the inhabitants (Pind. fr. b.– M = D Rutherford): ..] [ ] n[]l [ ] [] ` A " G 5 # % . . A 6 ' ") % % 2 . . . . I dwell in this Thracian land rich in vines and harvests – may great time as it advances not tire in its steadfastness in future. I inhabit a new city; but still I gave birth to my mother’s mother struck down by war’s fire.
The paean for Ceos is more ambiguous, in that the voice seems to hover between that of the community and that of the island (Pind. fr. d.– M = D Rutherford): ]#> " #! ] d/2@ 4 ]"# ] A !@ ] ]A ] .#!> S g [ ] $ ' "! J0 , $[ ][ ] ' "# D A []. ] [ >] 2 V [2] -" / # V , V . / 2 " A
See Rutherford : ; Lefkowitz : –.
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. . . narrow-necked breast of land . . . will not change it for Babylon . . . plains ... Indeed I too, though I live on a crag, am renowned for athletic achievement in Greece, and am known too for providing Muse enough. Though it’s true my land bears Dionysus’ life-enriching release from perplexity, I am horseless and am not skilled in cattle rearing.
This sense of the choral speaker as representative of the whole community is articulated most sharply in Pindar’s Paean . (= fr. k M = A Rutherford), where having rehearsed the possible ill-omened aspects of the solar eclipse the chorus says: + ->" , " . I lament nothing which I suffer together with everyone.
Common to all civic song is the tendency for the poet’s voice to remain hidden, even where the song identifies its author. There are two significant divergences from this pattern in the choral song tradition. One is the maiden song, where grammatical gender inevitably identifies the choral voice as a subset of the polis rather than the community as a whole. The genre plays up the age/gender identity of its performers, slipping constantly between the subgroup and the city as a whole. Thus Pindar’s virgins can move easily from expressions of maidenly modesty (fr. b. M) to narrative of the past, athletic and political (fr. b.– M). This flexibility allows it to become at will a communal voice representing the whole of society. Another divergent form is the victory ode, where the choral voice, unlike the cult songs discussed earlier, rarely identifies itself. Consequently, though the epinician chorus may use the language of communal values and communal response, the speaking voice is less explicitly the community. This reflects the unusual place of the epinician within the choral repertoire, whose status as civic song is unstable. In most cases the chorus is privately commissioned. So if this is a communal voice, it is by aspiration rather than by delegation. It seeks to align the
The same shift can be seen in Alcm. .– PMGF (esp. –, –) and –. For the lability of the choral voice in the partheneion cf. D’Alessio : –. The role of the maiden chorus as civic voice is neatly captured in the form taken by the choral projection in Bacchylides , where the male epinician chorus assimilates its role to that of a maiden chorus as part of a (tacit) claim to a civic role; see Power . See Carey b.
Comedy and the civic chorus
listeners with its own position rather than taking that alignment (as cult song can) as a starting point. This ambiguous relationship with the communal voice is enhanced by a tendency (though with striking variations between authors, regularly ignored by modern scholars) for the choral voice to merge into the authorial voice. The same applies on occasion to choral songs composed by panhellenic masters for performance at the great Greek sanctuaries. Comedy straddles this divide within the choral tradition, slipping in and out of civic voice at will. The comic chorus frequently defines itself implicitly as distinct from the polis. This is embedded in the text at the level of title and choral identity, a point worth stressing, obvious as it may be. Whereas the tragic chorus most commonly has an ethnikon, the comic chorus (where it has a geographical, regional or ethnic identity) vacillates between ethnikon (where it is set outside Athens) and demotikon (when it is set inside Athens). They are people of Acharnai or Prospalta first and foremost. And unlike the chorus in tragedy and other public choral forms (except, interestingly, the partheneion) they occasionally dissolve into a group of named individuals, as in Wasps –: #$ , / ) " . X c , /> . 6 ] ) * " 6 ( ), ) N!) > A 2 ' 2 !) - ) @ , # . We old codgers have a complaint against the city. For we’re not looked after in old age worthily of those glorious sea battles we fought, but are treated terribly.
The advice which they go on to offer to the city acknowledges a civic duty and is offered as a policy for the future, not just a personal complaint. But at the level of text they do not represent the polis. They remain a collective voice; but it is their (dramatic) age group, not the city, that they represent and they explicitly present the polis as the cause of their unhappiness. It is the audience who represent the polis, since in spelling out their grievance they substitute ‘you’ (@ ) for ‘the polis’ ( ). Again in the parabasis of Knights the epirrhema by implication identifies the audience, not the speaker, with the polis (Eq. –): & ) 5 ( > ! # . 6 * . ( *' , 2 A S ) . " 2$!, , -! ! ) & @ ) " . We think it right to defend the city and our local gods nobly for free. And in addition we ask for nothing but just this: if ever peace comes and we cease from struggles, do not resent us for our long hair and our well-groomed skin.
The knights see themselves (realistically) as an unpopular subgroup within the polis and regard themselves as its unappreciated benefactors; their plea is that the audience as representatives of the polis should show their appreciation when the time comes. In Women at the Thesmophoria this becomes a grumble of the women against the men (–): ) t 2 & 4 ! ) t , z ) -2" . # , &@ . " V #6 . . .
Differently from Wilson, OCT I follow the MS reading " against van Leeuwen’s " .
Comedy and the civic chorus
There are many complaints we women could justly bring against the men rightly, but one most enormous. For it would be fair, if any of us were to bear a man who serves the city well . . .
This begins as a straight opposition by gender but by a fluent (and readily intelligible) process the men become the city ( . , X . . . ). The gap is less marked in the parabasis of the Frogs (–): 6 6 # 6 # 52 . It is right that the sacred chorus should give the city good advice and teaching
Here the chorus claims that it has a duty to advise on political matters; the language of duty and the emphatic link to the sacral role of the chorus aligns the advice with civic and not sectional interests, as does the slippage between second-person plural and first-person plural in the narrative and advice. But even here the disjunction between chorus and polis remains. The chorus speaks to, not for, the polis. The Aristophanic chorus in these instances acts like a concerned citizen in the assembly, not like the conduit for the collective identity which we find elsewhere in choral performance commissioned by the state. But despite the divergence of these choral utterances from the norm as we encounter it elsewhere, and irrespective of the date and manner in which the parabasis entered the comic festival tradition, what we have makes sense as a naturalization of the choral voice within the context of the democratic polis. The disjunction we have seen appears to be part of a larger tendency in ‘loidoric’ choruses. So one would conclude from the account in Herodotus .. of the choral performances in the worship of Damia and Auxesia on Aigina and in Epidaurus: 2 ' > #$ !2 " - # 2 , # @ 2" R" @ " @ A @ ' U2 # V '
*" , ' # 2 . N ' )0 2 * 2 . . . Having set them up in this place they sought their favor with sacrifices and female choruses in the satirical and abusive mode. Ten men were appointed providers of a chorus for each of the deities, and the choruses aimed their raillery not at any men but at the women of the country. The Epidaurians too had the same rites . . . (trans. Godley).
For discussion e.g. Sifakis : ch. ; Hubbard : –.
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These choruses share the sectional identity of the Aristophanic chorus. What they lack is the political dimension, that is, the element of (what claims to be) practical advice from the part to the whole. Moses Finley famously observed that dispute and conflict are central to democracy: Substantial inequalities, serious conflicts of interest, and legitimate divergences of opinion were real and intense. Under such conditions, conflict is not only inevitable, it is a virtue in democratic politics, for it is conflict combined with consent, and not consent alone, which preserves democracy from eroding into oligarchy.
Irrespective of how we choose to read the advice offered to the polis in these parabases, the statements of dissent are fundamentally serious in this respect; by this I mean that such utterances simply by virtue of being uttered make an important statement about the nature of public discourse in a democratic state, that dissent is an important part of the political process and that the right to speak out is open to all. They enact (or exemplify) democracy. In terms of literary genre they form a complex hybrid. The chorus as subset of the city in some respects resembles the chorus in at least some ‘comic’ contexts outside Athens; it also resembles the female chorus in the partheneion, though it differs in that the virgin chorus never lectures its audience. As individualizing adviser to the city, the comic chorus is closer to monody, elegy and iambos. Formally it also shows affinities with effects found in the epinician (especially in the hands of Pindar) in the slippage in the choral voice in the anapaests between group and poet and the pronounced interest in poetics. This studied and overt positioning by the comic chorus is also reinforced by some less explicit choral uses. One choral form favoured by Aristophanes is the wedding song. Two of his surviving plays end with this form. The wedding chorus is different from other choruses in a number of respects. For reasons we can only guess at, as a vehicle used by named authors the wedding song is confined to the early period of Greek lyric. Sappho certainly composed wedding songs; so too according to tradition did Alcman. Though the wedding song persisted in Greek culture, and its status as
Finley : . To forestall misunderstanding I should make clear that I do not suggest that the parabasis emerged as part of a conscious and concerted effort to enshrine democratic values in choral utterance, merely that this is part of the function of the comic chorus as it evolved within its interactive performative environment. See on this subject Goldhill : – and for this aspect of comedy see Carey . See Bakola : –; Calame : . For comedy and iambic tradition see Rosen in this volume. Both endings have been studied recently by Calame . Anth. Pal. ..–; see further Campbell, vol ii.; Haslam : .
Comedy and the civic chorus
public marker of formal marriage gave it enormous civic significance, this was a choral genre which never made it into the songbooks of the great panhellenic lyric poets. We do not get specially commissioned works, unlike the obvious parallel, the threnos, which was prominent among the lyric products of the late archaic and early classical period. The difference from other forms of lyric is all the more marked if one accepts the argument for mixed-gender composition of the chorus in at least some contexts, since it erases one of the key features of the public chorus, which is its organization by age, status and gender. It lacks the crisp sense of social order which other choral forms generate and as such it is the most inclusive of forms. The wedding song hovers between formal and informal. It is impromptu and presumably (like spring songs, work songs and the like) consists of repeated popular forms. But unlike other popular forms it conveys community approval on the marriage. Whatever the historical reasons for its recurrence in comedy (and the persistence of marriage as an ending in Menander may be suggestive in this respect), the wedding song sharply captures the combined communal and individualistic interests of Old Comedy. It gives collective recognition of the achievements of the Aristophanic hero through the unprompted voice of the community; but because this is a spontaneous social gesture rather than a centrally controlled celebration it leaves the hero comfortingly (in terms of the values of the comic world) unassimilated into the formal structures of the state. This sense of the people as distinct from the formal structures of the state is caught neatly by the reuse of a celebrated opening of Stesichorus in Peace (–): M (, W ' " 2 " ’ ( ( - 2 #2 , 2 !@ 2 @ ! A Muse, do you thrust aside wars and with me your friend dance, proclaiming marriages of gods and feasts of men and celebrations of the blessed ones.
Swift . The ending of Acharnians offers a parallel for this complex effect. The most recent discussion by Wilson b: stresses the absence of a communal element in Dicaeopolis’ victory. This is an achievement which he both secures and enjoys alone. Yet though the victory is solitary, its celebration is communal. It is significant that the excluded chorus voices no resentment of the lone success of the comic hero; this is self-assertion sanctioned by the popular voice, the ultimate comic fantasy. For Stesichorus in Peace see Hall : –.
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The original comes from Stesichorus’ Oresteia ( PMGF ). In its original context it may have been performed at a festival. Certainly it speaks the language of public performance. In Aristophanes the text is exquisitely relocated to a context which celebrates the achievement of peace. Even the season is right, since Stesichorus’ original proclaims itself a spring song, while Aristophanes’ text was performed at the Dionysia. This is a remarkably clever transplant. But in its new context the Stesichorean poem comes with a typical Aristophanic twist. We are promised marriages of gods and feasts of men and instead we get jibes at individuals of a sort common in Aristophanes’ lyrics. This is not the voice of collective formal ritual but rather the voice of popular scorn at individuals who earn it. As well as providing the aesthetic pleasure of recognition and the humorous effect of incongruity the text also tacitly makes a claim to be the voice of the people. But comedy is never simple and this is only one aspect of a more complex picture. The disjunction between the comic choral voice and the formal voice of the polis is not maintained with anything like consistency. I start with Frogs, which contains one of Aristophanes’ most sustained ritual performances. For much of the play the mystic dimension of the chorus is not prominent. But the parodos gives them an unusually dense association with public ritual. This is probably the most complex choral moment in Aristophanes. What we are given is not an imitation of an actual ritual but a composite blended from different ritual moments. This is not real ritual but fiction. Part of this synkrisis is to superimpose the forms of civic choral celebration on to aspects of the cult which were not choral (the gephyrismos) but which work in context partly because this resembles certain skoptic songs in Aristophanes. Another part is to combine different chronological moments of Eleusinian cult. At one moment we are in the agora (– ), at another somewhere (in terms of time) on the road to Eleusis (–). A further effect is to combine mystic religion with public civic formula; the anapaestic tetrameters at – are derived only in part from the mysteries. They begin and end with the exclusion of the uninitiated. But the exclusions in – come from the curse uttered at the beginning of the assembly meetings. The chorus of initiates thus presents itself as the formal representative of the polis, and the sovereign demos. The civic chorus which is created by this process is both imaginatively appealing and also (like comedy itself ) a blend of the silly and the serious. Both the emphasis on unity in the anapaestic interlude and the religious authority
This depends on the reading ) in .
Comedy and the civic chorus
created in the parodos allow the chorus to resume its solemn function and describe itself at the beginning of the parabasis () as the ‘sacred chorus’ in preparation for a political intervention which offers what looks like both practical and (unlike what we get in other parabases) contentious advice. The description of the chorus there fuses the intra- and extra-fictive character of the comic chorus (sacred as mystics within the fiction, sacred in the festival context as part of the worship of Dionysus). But the ambiguity begins in the parodos. The other play which makes prominent use of the extra-fictive role of the chorus is Women at the Thesmophoria. At the heart of the play are two sustained hymns (–, – – the first of these probably a hyporchema) which are firmly in dramatic character, in that they are explicitly connected to the cult activities of the women in their dramatic role as participants in the Thesmophoria. There are no jokes and no bathos. Anton Bierl has rightly stressed here the convergence between the dramatic and the festival role of the chorus, in that what the chorus says is fitting in context but can also be taken seriously as an act of worship. The convergence between civic cult and dramatic fiction is enhanced by the expansion of the hymnal focus to include other gods of the polis, which makes the narrow intra-dramatic ritual moment representative of the larger cult activity of the polis as a whole, not just the enactment of a single cult, while the inclusion of Dionysus creates a convergence between the intrafictive worship and the actual cult moment of the festival in which the play is performed. A similar dynamic can be seen at work in the two prayers sung at the beginning of the women’s assembly (Thesm. – and – ), one of which includes elements of the curse uttered at the beginning of the Athenian democratic assembly (which appears in the parodos of Frogs). The tone is consistently solemn (though juxtaposed with humour from the herald). The two sets of songs are linked by the surprising prominence given at – to the patron goddess of the city as enemy of tyrants, which gives a political twist to the later choral context: - !), X 2 2 2 (’, F . . Appear, you who hate tyrants, as you should.
One feature shared by the two plays is their location in a fraught political context: at the time of Women at the Thesmophoria the democracy had been
Bierl : –, –, –, –. See on these hymns also Bremer . Silk a: ; Bierl : –.
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undermined and was soon to be (temporarily) removed; at the time of Frogs there were reasonable concerns that the city’s situation was precarious and that defeat was a possibility. And Women at the Thesmophoria, like Frogs, returns to its political concerns in later choral utterances. A curse on all who worked against the collective good was equally at home in both. But as the most recent commentators note, it was probably safer to express such thoughts obliquely in bc, when men were being murdered for their political views. Hence the more oblique approach of the earlier play. Even with this oblique approach, it is significant that its politics is voiced by a female chorus, whose distance from real politics adds sufficient ambiguity to the message to afford some protection. But despite the distinctiveness of their context, these two plays also reflect a broader trend in the treatment of ritual moments. For the gap between the chorus as a character in a comic fiction and the chorus as participants in a civic festival is regularly elided in one of the most common nondramatic lyric forms used in comedy, the hymn, cletic or other. Hymns are the most frequent of all the non-dramatic lyric forms in Aristophanes. Perhaps the most striking feature of Aristophanes’ hymns taken as a whole is the relative solemnity of tone. Solemnity of tone is in itself common in Aristophanes; it is also commonly subverted by bathos. So solemn utterance cannot be examined separately from its immediate context. But choral hymns and prayers are rarely parodic (rarely is anything said which could be seen as distortion or mockery, either affectionate or hostile) and bathos is generally avoided, irrespective of the place in the play, though these religious moments may be juxtaposed with comic elements. There is no hint of undercutting at Clouds –, –, hymns which summon a number of gods. The same is true of the two hymns at Knights –, – . Both of these can be explained away as special cases because the hymns in Clouds include Athena, the patron goddess of Athens, and her mythical rival for control of Attica, Poseidon, while the hymns in Knights are devoted to these two gods. But this does not fully explain the phenomena, since there was no obligation to include these gods in these hymns. We can, if
Austin and Olson : xliii–xliv. The word hymnos is not used as a specific term for a song of praise to a god before Plato. But with or without the terminology the speech act of praise to a god (what Plato would later call a ‘hymn’) was firmly established across a range of metrical forms, including lyric song both solo and choral, and with it a number of formal features; on the formal features of hymns and prayers in Aristophanes see recently Willi : –. Silk a: with n. rightly notes that praise of Athens, ‘invariably religious praise’, is not undercut; but the phenomenon seems to extend beyond reverence for Athens.
Comedy and the civic chorus
we wish, argue for the parabasis as a special case because, in systematically (unlike the intermittent slippage which is the bedrock of Athenian comic fiction) eliding the gap between the fictive world of the drama and its festival context, it has a very distinctive role in Athenian comedy. But the same tendency is also observable in the choral songs which flank the prayer of Bdelycleon at Wasps –: (< .) X /) { [>! ), ) ! ># 6 ), x # % ! Q @ !2@ , D & 7 2" . . [ . (d.) X " ) V 5 )\2 (, ( ) ( !> 2 > , "5 , , X ) 5, f ( . ( ) * ( ( 6 2- 6 N! , 2 " 6 !2 5 . S ) L !$ S * , W -> ) @ 4" , > / > , 2 2 6 + , - -"! . (< .) 52 2#! " # b @ " . I 5 Q 6 Uh!! 2 - ( : * , @ " . < . [ > (Cho.) Phoebus Apollo, god of Pytho, harness to good fortune for us all the scheme which this man devises before the doors and end our wandering. Oh, Paean! (Bd.) My lord and neighbour Apollo of the street, who stand before my door, accept this new ritual, my lord, which we instigate for my father. End his too sour and rigid temper adding in a little honey in his heart. May he be right now gentle to mankind and pity the defendents more than the indicters
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and weep as they entreat and ceasing from his ill-temper take the nettle from his anger. (Cho.) We join our prayers and chants to yours for the new regime because of what you’ve said. For we favour you ever since we saw you love the people like no one among the young. < Oh, Paean!>
The chorus here remains resolutely in character, as does Bdelycleon. There is none of the ambiguity about role which we find in Women at the Thesmophoria and Frogs or the explicit (partial) suspension of plot and fiction which we find in the parabatic songs. But again there is no element of parody or coarseness or anything else to undermine the relatively serious tone. This is true also of the (non-choral) Phales-hymn which Aristophanes gives to Dicaeopolis at Acharnians –, where humour is certainly present, together with a (by Aristophanes’ standard) mild sexuality, but all in keeping with the nature of the procession. At this point some caution is needed. The reasons may not in these cases be purely religious. It is very rare for a comedy of any sort to survive solely on a run of jokes, as the ubiquitous presence of the ‘straight man’ from Aristophanes to music hall and modern television comedy amply demonstrates. Humour desperately needs solemnity in its proximity, if it is to work. And in drama the (largely aesthetic) desire for variety of tone may also be influential. In both Wasps and Acharnians there are good dramatic reasons for absence of bathos. In Acharnians the idyllic peace of Dicaeopolis’ festival is about to be shattered by the irruption of the chorus and in Wasps Bdelycleon’s hopes for the conversion of his father will in the long run founder on his irrepressible nature, even though the home trial achieves initial success. So interpretation of the phenomena remains subjective. But the seeming seriousness of tone in such ritual moments not just in the parabasis but elsewhere in the play is very striking in a genre which regards the gods as a legitimate comic target. There is no blanket reluctance to mock the divine in comedy. But there does (on the evidence available) appear to be a disinclination to parody choral hymns and prayers. It may be a shared sense (between writer and audience) that the chorus’s role reflects a larger duty to the collective, and that the chorus is the cornerstone of the drama itself as an offering to a god, that keeps these hymns from descending into comic bathos. If so, there appears to be a consistent tendency to blur the intra- and extra-textual dimensions of
Comedy and the civic chorus
the choral utterance. This would merely be another example of comedy’s consciousness of its festival context and another way in which comedy’s relationship with its audience generates implicit limits to what is perceived as right. One’s suspicion that there is a reluctance to undercut ritual utterances from the chorus is reinforced by the celebration of Peisetaerus’ achievement in Birds. The hero has brought the gods to their knees and forced Zeus to give up Basileia, personification of Zeus’s power. Though Peisetaerus has ousted Zeus, he receives not a hymn but a wedding song (Av. –). Within the fiction he is the supreme being but this is not reflected in the formal honour he receives. Choral prayers are especially common in Aristophanes’ parabases. So the picture of the parabasis I gave earlier needs to be adjusted, since the largely individualizing epirrhematic sections are juxtaposed with choral hymns which have the air of formal choral performance. The parabasis is a complex fluctuation between fusion with and distinction from the civic voice. This is the closest comedy comes to the complex shifts achieved by the tragic chorus, in that two modes are juxtaposed without either of them destabilizing or ousting the other. There is one last example of engagement with civic choral forms which I would like to mention briefly. Lysistrata closes with not one but two civic choral performances. The first of these is sung by the Athenians; it is a syncretistic song which presents us again with a generic hybrid, part paean, part hymn (as Plato would later understand the term). The second is a hymn sung by the Spartans. This second song is a very elegant illusion, in that it looks like a maiden song but it is sung by males. The song is assimilated to a Spartan culture of partheneia by the strongly feminine focus of its third-person narrative. The evidence of comedy suggests at least some familiarity with Alcman in fifth-century bc Athens. Probably the Alcmanic partheneion was what an Athenian would recognize as Laconian cult song. This link provides the Spartan song with a cultural and religious authority, making it the civic voice of Sparta as it was heard in cultural contexts in Greece. The juxtaposition of the two choruses acting as the voice of the two cities gives us (in the imaginary world of the play) a new era of harmony between the warring states. Unlike the Frogs, where the choral engagement with contemporary politics is inescapable, it is more difficult
A useful (if imprecise parallel) would be the way in which comedy sets up rules of propriety in dealing with respectable living women, for which see Sommerstein b; a closer parallel still would be the reluctance to bring Athena on stage in the comic theatre, for which see Bakola : . Despite its ostentatious subversiveness comedy has its tacit boundaries.
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to argue that this play is offering a straightforward message. But the play is at the very least expressing a yearning, even if the desire is unrealizable. And the sustained dialogue between the civic voices at the close of the play articulates this aspiration for peace in presenting dual collective celebration of the key combatants. The ambiguity we have observed in the relationship between the comic choral voice and civic choral forms extends to comedy’s comments on choral lyric. I have discussed elsewhere the self-positioning of comedy in relation to the victory ode. Here I would like to expand the focus. Against the song which celebrates the hero’s success at the end of Birds, with its roots in the popular tradition, can be set the more contrived products of the professional lyric tradition we meet earlier in the play. Comedy is ambiguous in its treatment of this branch of lyric poetry. Both Aristophanes and Eupolis represent a knowledge of lyric poetry, including late archaic choral lyric, as a mark of culture. As such it becomes part of a contrast between a better past and a degenerate present. Simonides’ choral lyric in Clouds becomes a test case for the right choice of song at a symposium, when Strepsiades invites his son to sing a victory ode of Simonides and his son rejects this as old-fashioned. Eupolis echoes this divide between generations and Weltanschauungen in lumping together three choral lyric poets, Stesichorus, Simonides and Alcman, as figures now considered oldfashioned at symposia, in contrast to Gnesippus; possibly in the same context he observed that the work of Pindar had fallen into disuse (it was ‘silenced’) by the general insensitivity of the age. It may or may not be coincidence that it is choral lyric rather than the simpler and more versatile monody which is cited as losing appeal. But at the same time as comedy underlines the cultural importance of the lyric corpora, the products of that tradition can be viewed with suspicion. Comedy, as often, is able to have it both ways. The hero has founded a new city. In the world outside the comic theatre the founder would acquire honours, and the inauguration would be a matter for celebration. Unsurprisingly therefore the setting up of the new city attracts (among other unsavoury hangovers from the corrupt Athens which Peisetaerus is trying to escape) a choral lyric poet. He offers a mishmash of choral lyric songs to Peisetaerus. All are rejected, as is the poet himself. What is rejected is not the idea of personal celebration, since (as
Nub. –. See Carey . For this fragment (especially in relation to the work of Gnesippus) see most recently Prauscello . Eup. fr. ; cf. also fr. .
Comedy and the civic chorus
the ending shows) the play has no reservations about self-aggrandizement on a very large scale. It is the kind of celebration, which is presented as yet another example of the charlatanism and self-seeking which frequently occurs in Aristophanic comedy as various people enter and try to share the benefits of the hero’s achievement according to a common Aristophanic pattern. These works are pompous and bombastic; they are also mercenary and parasitic. There is a near repeat of the scene later when Cinesias (that rare creature, an Athenian lyric poet) enters. This time the focus is not on choral modes in general but on the dithyramb in particular. If comedy finds – or can choose to find – bought choral lyric unpalatable, it finds the work of poets like Cinesias still more so, for these are exponents of the New Music. Here what we have is not so much bought song as vacuous song, over-embellishment of the commonplace, a triumph of form over content. The choice of forms tacitly articulates comedy’s sense of its place within the lyric repertoire. Not the flashy and expensive products of elite self-congratulation but the living tradition of the community. Comic choral utterance (in Aristophanes at least) engages with civic choral song in a flexible, generally opportunistic way. Comedy can use its lyric modes to lay claim (tacitly or explicitly) to a particular relationship with the formal structures of the state and can even separate itself from the city and present itself as a voice of protest. No other choral form can do this. It is unique to comedy. But the comic choral voice can also approximate to the more conventional choral civic voice. It can become serious in the simple and obvious sense that it does not invite laughter. The further effects sought here can be complex. It can be context-specific and express anxiety, hope or wish which reaches into the extra-textual context. Or it may simply fulfil the larger role of the chorus as the voice of the city at worship. The same flexibility can be seen in the comic treatment of nondramatic choral poetry. High lyric can be a mark of culture but can also be used to mock pretensions and position both the work and the corpus in contrast to higher forms. This flexibility of choral voice reflects the nature of comedy itself as genre, which the chorus as the non-negotiable core of the performance is best suited to express: it is an organ of the polis yet it claims independence; it is fundamentally humorous yet it demands to be taken seriously; it is at times subversive of the norms of society yet it is intolerant of deviant behaviour. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the
On the wandering poet in this scene see Martin , especially (for the critique of commissioned work) –. Though not exclusively; see Ach. .
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comic choices is the frequency with which the effects achieved have their antecedents in the songs of young virgins. This too may be no accident; the maiden chorus is marginal in terms of power yet it can play a central role in the polis and can articulate collective values; this is the way comedy sees itself.
c h a p te r 7
Aristophanes’ Simonides Lyric models for praise and blame Richard Rawles
This chapter is a discussion of some places where Simonides is the target of allusion in Aristophanes. It is not a complete survey; a number of passages are not discussed here. I shall focus on three examples, from Peace, Clouds and Knights, which show Aristophanes’ Simonides in particularly interesting ways, before attempting to draw some broader conclusions both about Simonides and about Aristophanes’ use of the earlier poet. If it is a truism that most of our knowledge of ancient texts is shaped by subsequent traditions and receptions, this is something of which one needs to be particularly aware when dealing with quotations from and allusions to otherwise lost texts. Aristophanes’ quotations from and allusions to Simonides serve Aristophanes’ own purposes and interests (in a context conditioned by the knowledge and expectations of Aristophanes’ audiences), and these interests do not include helping out the future scholar who wants to try to work out what may be said about Simonides after the loss of almost all of his work. Even if this is potentially an obstacle for a study directed solely towards the understanding of Simonides (which is true only to a limited extent: it can help rather than hinder our approach to the earlier poet to see what people in later times might think of him, especially where they could read or hear what we have not), it is also an opportunity to enhance our understanding of Aristophanes. One underlying contention in what follows, therefore, is that this exercise cuts both ways. Looking at Aristophanes’ Simonides helps us to understand both
Thanks are due to the editors for criticism and encouragement (and for the organization of such a stimulating conference), and to Elizabeth Irwin for advice on Aeginetan matters, and for a great many other suggestions and observations besides. Errors and omissions remain my own. Note Ar. Av. – (Simonides T Campbell, T Poltera), Pax – (T Campbell, T Poltera), Vesp. – (T Poltera); also Eup. fr. . Some of our hopes concerning these – that they can serve interests firmly directed away from the quoting author and towards the ‘target text’ – are revealed when we refer to ‘quotation fragments’. Sometimes the laudable care of editors of fragmentary texts to separate ipsissima verba from their contexts in quoting authors can be unhelpful, if the result is to present isolated snippets in the main text with only a very few words of quoting authors given in tiny print below.
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the earlier poet and the later one; indeed, these two tasks are not readily separable from one another. In the present instance, this is not the only mediation involved: this work is only possible because it has in some respects been done before. The Aristophanic allusions to Simonides discussed here would not all have been recognizable from the text of Aristophanes alone but are known to us because of the observations of ancient scholars preserved in the scholia; even in the case of Simonides PMG (= Poltera), where Aristophanes has Strepsiades identify the song as 8 2 " (Nub. ), the scholia are still informative. For the passages considered here, it is a result of the ancient scholars’ interest in Aristophanes’ interactions with earlier poetry that we can follow the same interest. The observations presented are of value (I hope) in their own right, both as a reading of selected fragments and passages with an exploration of aspects of the two poets concerned, and as a contribution to a broader understanding of comedy’s relations to other texts of different generic kinds. To the extent that this is a contribution to a larger view of comedy’s relationship with the sung verse of the archaic and early classical periods (considered as a genre, ‘lyric’), it points to the need for such a generic account to be tempered by careful awareness of differences between the individual poets and their receptions. This account emphasizes differences between Simonides and other poets whose work would seem generically close to his (Bacchylides and Pindar), and also differences between Aristophanes’ interest in Pindar and his interest in Simonides. Aristophanes’ Pindar is not particularly similar to his Simonides. Thus the present focus on one lyric poet seems justified and to some extent even necessary. I start, then, with Aristophanes’ Pindar: a passage from Acharnians, where an allusion to Pindar is identified in the scholia (Ach. –): - ) L @ !@ V5 B , > 5 , 5 ! , ! ) Z! ! 2 " 2 , ) L #2 . ) 6 @ "/ 5 @ @ ' +, 2 A , ( j , *!W W - 2 ) V @ 2 !!. . " ! > ! " r! , H t !+, -> , 4 .
For the complex process of mutual dialogue between the ‘comic voice’ and the ‘other’ tradition thus ventriloquized, see also Tel`o in this volume. Here and below I have used the Loeb translations of Aristophanes (Henderson), Pindar (Race), Simonides, Bacchylides and Timocreon (Campbell).
Aristophanes’ Simonides
V5 codd.: j Bentley Our poet says that he deserves rich rewards from you, since he has stopped you from being deceived overmuch by foreigners’ speeches, from being cajoled by flattery, from being citizens of Simpletonia. Before he did that, the ambassadors from the allied states who meant to deceive you would start by calling you ‘violet-crowned’; and when anyone said that, those ‘crowns’ would promptly have you sitting on the tips of your little buttocks. And if anyone fawned on you by calling Athens ‘gleaming,’ that ‘gleaming’ would get him everything, just for tagging you with an honour fit only for sardines. 8 R0 ad . - 2 A @ [ 2 !2/ . "- r!
The dithyramb in question, for which we have also other sources, is represented for us by Pindar fr. M: X . "-
, J0 % , r! , ! O shining and violet-crowned and celebrated in song, bulwark of Hellas, famous Athens, divine citadel.
Probably (see Plut. De glor. Ath. a) this comes from the same song as fr. M, which referred to Artemisium: ! r! /
) 2! Where the sons of the Athenians cast the foundation of freedom.
The dithyramb of Pindar known to us from fr. and probably fr. was a big hit in Athens. It is the object of allusion by Aristophanes at least twice. This song is an Athenian dithyramb, but looking at both Simonides and Pindar there is no special tendency towards interaction of comedy with dithyramb rather than with other lyric genres. Allusion to ‘classic’ lyric in Aristophanes thus differs from interaction with tragedy: with the exception of this one dithyramb, there is no focus on songs from the same Athenian Dionysiac performance programme as comedy. Interaction with
Isoc. .. On Pind. frr. – M see the commentary provided in Lavecchia , and note his vast collection of testimonia (indicating the fame of the song in antiquity). In addition to the passage from Acharnians quoted above, see also Eq. (with 8) and (according to 8 ad loc.) Nub. –: but in the latter place, the scholiasts’ belief in an allusion to the Pindaric dithyramb need not be found particularly convincing. Cf. of Athens also at Ar. fr. , in an extremely ‘high-register’ context: cf. K–A ad loc. By the use of ‘classic’ here I mean to indicate that I am leaving ‘new dithyramb’ out of consideration – that would be another paper.
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tragedy is a kind of ‘cross-reference’ within official Athenian state-sponsored performance culture, but this is not generally so with lyric. The words of the Theban Pindar are presented as those of an outsider trying to curry favour with the demos (this does not happen with Simonides). In the play made in Acharnians with the words . "- and , Aristophanes goes to Pindar for a very high-register lyric style, which is here made the object of comic parody, and juxtaposed with the mundane and low register (bumlets, sardines). This applies to Aristophanes’ Pindar in general: he goes to Pindar for lyric of a high linguistic register which contrasts with the much lower-register ‘base level’, so to speak, of comedy. Given the analogy with paratragedy, this is no surprise. But even though similar linguistic features are clearly visible to us in the fragments of Simonides (as it happens both . "- and are attested Simonidean words), this characteristic of Aristophanes’ Pindar is not a feature of Aristophanes’ Simonides. Finally, the allusions to Pindar in Aristophanes are to instances of ‘civic poetry’: an Athenian dithyramb, a prosodion (for Delos?) and a hyporchema celebrating Hieron’s foundation of Aetna. Only the last could also be categorized as praise of an individual (but the poet in Birds speaks of songs . ^- 2 ). I find no sure allusion to Pindaric epinician in Aristophanes: Aristophanes’ Pindar is not a poet of praise of individuals. His Simonides is different. My first Simonidean example, however, does look like praise for the city, and emphatically so: I shall argue that this looks like an explicitly democratic kind of praise for Athens. In the parabasis of Peace we find the following (–): # ' > W =/ ># 2 , j , 6 6 6 !" / . . ) I . , !> ] , V !$ " , V5 L -) * B &@ . @ ' W 2 !$ " 2 . = $ -! ( .
The use of Simonides’ name at Av. is perhaps analogous to a limited extent. See the observations of Silk a: , concerning Aristophanes’ own lyric style. . "- : . PMG = . Poltera; : fr. . PMG = a Poltera (on which fr. see further below). A Pindaric prosodion is the object of allusion at Eq. – ∼ fr. a M; the poet scene in Av. (–) involves parody of Pindar’s hyporchema commemorating Hieron’s foundation of Aetna. Kugelmeier’s candidates for possible Aristophanic allusions to Pindaric epinician are Av. ∼ Nem. . and ∼ Pyth. .: neither seems to me especially strong (Kugelmeier : ).
Aristophanes’ Simonides
The ushers should beat any comic poet who praises himself before the audience in the anapaests of a parabasis, but if after all it is fitting, daughter of Zeus, to honour one who has been and still is the world’s best and most renowned comic producer, then our producer says that he’s worthy of high praise. In the first place, he was the only man on earth to stop his rivals from making jokes about rags and waging war on lice . . .
The scholia identify a Simonidean allusion (8 V ad ) from his (on the probable meaning of this term see below): . ) I . A 8 2 @ . ) V , !2" ] , V r! 5" .
This is Simonides W (= G–P). The fragment as the scholia give it is clearly corrupt (‘corruptum vel lacunosum u.v.’ West). I would print the following text: . ) V , !> ] , V , r! 5" . !>, 5" Schneidewin: 5" Hartung and if [sc. it is right], daughter of Zeus, to honour whoever is best, the demos of the Athenians alone accomplished this.
It may help us, putting aside the caution which should be provoked by its fragmentary state, to try to work out what kind of a poem this might be. Although both West and Gentili–Prato call this ‘incertum an ex epigrammatis’, I believe that it comes from an extended elegy, and not inscribed epigram, for the following reasons: () The scholia cite the couplet @ : this should probably mean ‘from the book of elegies’ (the singular might have
!> seems safe. 5" is unmetrical, so the minimum correction is to 5" (Schneidewin): ‘If . . . to honour, daughter of Zeus, whoever is best, I, the demos of the Athenians, accomplished this alone.’ (We must understand a verb equivalent to . from the missing previous line; alternatively Gentili–Prato suggest . and . # could also be considered; on . ) y here see Denniston : –.) Can we accept ‘I, the demos, accomplished this’ in either elegy or epigram (this generic question is considered below)? The collective dead in early epitaphic epigrams can speak in the first person (‘we lie here’). But this seems very difficult: we need 5" (Hartung). The change of person to 5" in the MS may reflect that the scholiast or a scribe has in mind Aristophanes’ presence as an authorial voice, i.e. he is mentally paraphrasing ‘Our poet did this and that’ as ‘I did this and that.’ Unless we have to suppose another object for 5" in the next couplet. For parallels to the general sense, cf. from epigram Anth. Pal. . (= ‘Simonides’ FGE), but also Pind. Isthm. .–. With the latter, cf. V5 . . . * at Pax : from Simonides? But cf. also e.g. Eq. , Nub. . Note also at Pax .
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referred to either an elegy or an epigram). Of course this might be the result of imprecision or error. () I do not think that the couplet we have could fit into an epigram of fewer than three distichs, and this is unusually long for an epigram commemorating the Persian Wars. Of the surviving elegiac Persian Wars epigrams only two are longer than two elegiac distichs (these are ‘Simonides’ FGE and ). Of one of these, our sources enable us to say with confidence that it has been expanded in transmission after its original composition (FGE : we have long and short versions), and I agree with those who have argued that the same is true of the other (FGE , the Megarian epigram; however, even if we believe that part of this epigram is a later addition, the original may still have been atypically long). Is our fragment part of a four-line epigram? I think we need a preceding couplet, where we find the missing verb ‘If it is right something-or-another . . . ’ Then follows the surviving couplet. But then we may feel that we want another with some kind of clause or equivalent explaining what they did (‘for they defended all Hellas by fighting the Mede and now lie here’ or the like); we might also want an expressed object for 5". So in my view it is hard to make this a two-couplet composition. If so, this makes epigram less likely, though not impossible. () If !> ] is, as has been generally thought, an address to a Muse, this would be unremarkable in elegy but surprising in epigram. () I am not aware of any other place where Aristophanes appears to be engaging with inscribed poems (the language of Athenian decrees etc. might count as [prose] inscriptional; Vesp. – and Ach. , references to graffiti, are a different matter). Various sources and fragments show that Simonides wrote elegies commemorating a number of battles of the Persian Wars, and we should think of one of these. Bergk attributed our fragment (fr. Bergk) to a
Wilamowitz-Moellendorf : ; Barigazzi : ; M. L. West : –. The epigrams are collected as an appendix in Kowerski : – (numbered up to , but this includes a few which are either not verse or not elegiac, and some numbers include more than one epigram). On FGE , see Petrovic a: – with bibliography: for Petrovic, only the last couplet is later, so that the original text was eight lines long. The epigram is treated as belonging to the early fifth century bc in its entirety by Kowerski : – and Faraone : –. On inscribed poems in other pre-Hellenistic literary sources, see Petrovic b. Simonides’ elegies concerning battles of the Persian Wars: Marathon (?) Vita Aeschyli (could be epigram?); Artemisium Suda, frr. – W ; Salamis (?) Suda ‘ @ ’ perhaps frr. – W (but cf. M. L. West : –); Plataea frr. – W . Kowerski questions the usual assumption that different battles were each commemorated in separate elegies. On Simonides’ ‘battle poems’, see
Aristophanes’ Simonides
Marathon elegy, and was followed by Barigazzi. Podlecki preferred to think of Salamis. My analysis of the rhetoric of the fragment suggests we might prefer one of the sea-battle poems. The question ‘who was V ?’ was current at the time of the Persian Wars, and prominent in the discourses about them. This is visible in Herodotus, as where he tells us how the Aeginetans were considered best in the Battle of Salamis and how this judgement was validated by Delphi (Hdt. .., .). With reference to this battle he also tells us how the Greeks gathered at the Isthmus to decide who was the best individual (but failed to agree). We can see already a similar concern in Simonides’ elegy concerning Plataea: in the longest fragment (fr. W ) the poet talks about Achilles and his commemoration by Homer, addresses a (singular) Muse and turns to those who fought at Plataea, before identifying Pausanias of Sparta in a badly preserved couplet which defines him as V (fr. .– W ). As Achilles was V r# @ then, and commemorated by Homer, so Pausanias is V now, and his " is ensured by Simonides’ elegy. In Homer V is regular in this position in the formula r# @ V | (this occurs several times in the Odyssey, but in the Iliad only once (Il. .): Helenus advises Hector to challenge ‘whoever is best of the Achaeans’ to a duel), and in Iliad we see the Muse asked ‘who was best?’ (Il. .). Our fragment represents another take on the same general idea – but in a completely different way. Although the grammar and the intertextual resonances lead the audience to expect a personal name, the V here is neither Pausanias nor Miltiades nor Themistocles but the r! – the contrast between singular and collective is sharpened up by the almost paradoxical . The use of r! rather than another expression meaning ‘the Athenians’ is striking (Athenian Persian Wars epigrams do not refer to the Athenian ). This looks like a democratization of " poetry: the elegy commemorates neither an individual nor Hellas in general, but the community of Athenian citizens. Some might have understood in a less inclusive sense as a class word: the aristeia belongs not to the aristoi, but to the demos. An obvious
especially Parsons , M. L. West , essays in Boedeker and Sider , Kowerski , and now also Grethlein : –. Epigrams on the Persian Wars are generally ascribed to Simonides, correctly or otherwise, in subsequent tradition: for the latest treatment of the vexed question of the authorship and transmission of ‘Simonidean’ epigrams, see Petrovic a: –, with bibliography; cf. Sider . Barigazzi : –; Podlecki : –. For a sense of the surprising and politically forceful impression which this expression might have made, cf. the discussion of " for the demos (Solon fr. . W ) at Irwin : –: this is
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comparandum is Aeschylus’ Persians, where no individual Athenian or Greek is named. This democratization of poetry seems to me much more likely to go, here as in Aeschylus, with a naval battle rather than with Marathon, a victory of the thetes rather than of the hoplites. If the elegy was commissioned by an individual or on the proposal of an individual politician, we should think of Themistocles (associated with Simonides in later anecdote) rather than, as it might be, the aristocratic Miltiades or Aristides. So I think we are dealing with either Salamis or Artemisium. This might be in part a response to the awkward position that the Aeginetans could claim to be V in what Athenians saw as an Athenian triumph: a circumstance especially odious to Themistocles and to supporters of Themistoclean hostility to Aegina. What does this mean for the parabasis of Aristophanes’ Peace? The chorus tells us that any comic poet who uses the anapaests of the parabasis to praise himself should be beaten by ‘the ushers’ (=/ (# ). But ‘if after all it is fitting, Daughter of Zeus, to honour one who has been and still is the world’s best and most renowned comic producer, then our producer says that he is worthy of great praise’. Why does Aristophanes deserve praise? He has replaced the tired old rubbish that comedy used to be with something better: this includes replacing clich´ed elements, and diverting comic satire away from the poor and ordinary towards the great, and specifically Cleon. The Simonides fragment is thematically relevant to the concerns of the parabasis. As the fragment suggests a kind of democratic or at least ‘demophilic’ poetics, so we see a refusal to engage in ‘ridiculing the
another place where the language characteristic of singling out elite individuals for special honour is re-targeted in the direction of the demos. A survey of views on the politics of Aeschylus’ Persians is now conveniently provided at Garvie : xvi–xxii. Plut. Them. .– (T, T Campbell = T, T Poltera); Cic. De fin. .. (T Campbell = Tb Poltera); Suda s.v. Simonides ( Adler); cf. the traditions concerning Timocreon, Simonides and Themistocles discussed below. On the extensive anecdotal tradition concerning Simonides, see Bell . On rivalries between Athens and Aegina expressed in terms of competitive claims to panhellenic arete and visible for us especially through Herodotus, see Kowalzig : –, esp. – with n. (but at with n. I find Kowalzig’s point with reference to Crius, Simonides PMG and Timocreon PMG rather unclear). On the highly contested status of the Aeginetan past in the later fifth century bc as reflected in the works of Herodotus and Thucydides, see now Irwin a and b; on Salamis, especially a: –. Figueira : – argues that the Athenians may have conceived of – or at least represented – their colonization of Aegina in the later fifth century as the restoration of the island to ‘democratic’ Aeginetans who had previously taken refuge in Athens (perhaps including the family of Aristophanes). In this light (and if I am right that the fragment comes from a Salamis elegy), then Aristophanes’ use of this Simonidean tag, combining democratic ideology with rivalry towards Aegina, resonates strongly with Figueira’s observation that the Athenians’ colonization of the island might have seemed legitimated ‘in terms of a populist ideology that prioritized the existence of a sovereign and activist demos’ (Figueira : ).
Aristophanes’ Simonides
ordinary little man, or women’, or in ‘mocking rags and making war on lice’: Olson (ad loc.) comments that Aristophanes characterizes the comedy of his predecessors as ‘vaguely anti-democratic.’ The question ‘who is the right object of praise?’ is handled in both the fragment and the parabasis. First we have the disingenuous suggestion that public officials should beat the one who makes the parabasis into praise of the poet – this suppression by the state of individualistic self-assertion sits well with the sentiment of the Simonides fragment. Then the idea is introduced that it might (‘If . . . ’) be appropriate to praise the best poet, and the poet’s reported assertion that he is V5 * . Finally, in the account of the poet’s adversary (Cleon) at –, we see the praise of the wrong kind, directed at the wrong target: the snaky hair of the monster is not made of snakes but of flatterers, (). But there is a striking reversal: if Simonides’ elegy replaces the praise of named individuals with the praise of the demos, the Aristophanic revision precisely reverses this process. Praise of the demos is changed into praise of the poet, who is not named but whose name is perhaps punningly suggested by the very word V . ‘Le demos, c’est moi’: Aristophanes deletes the demos as laudandus and puts himself in its place. The regular egotism and poetic self-praise of the parabasis is powerfully emphasized by contrast with the source-text. Aristophanes’ self-advertisement as a heroic, one-man warrior against Cleon seems to contradict the collective values suggested by the elegy’s praise of the whole demos together. The parabasis not only sets up the poet as an individual hero deserving of praise (V5 * ) but also shows awareness that this self-promotion might seem dangerous and problematic in contrast with the collectivist ideology seen in the Simonides fragment. It also gives us a striking glimpse of Simonides as an exponent not only of commemoration of the Persian Wars, but also of democratic sentiment which may have carried an identifiably Themistoclean flavour. However, in his presentation of Simonides as in his presentation of himself, Aristophanes allows a degree of paradox and denies the satisfaction of a straightforward or schematic meaning. He knows of other constructions of ‘Simonides’. Just as Aristophanes’ own commitment to a democratic poetics might seem at odds with his individualistic selfassertion, so this ‘democratic’ Simonidean voice is already undermined: the parabasis starts a mere thirty lines after the passage at Peace –, where Sophocles’ supposed avarice is compared to Simonides’: for profit’s sake, he’d go to sea in a sieve . . . In other places where we find allusion to Simonidean poems in Aristophanes we find poems in praise not of the city but of individuals. In Clouds,
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Strepsiades explains how it happened that he and Pheidippides came to blows (–): (8.) , ! @ U5! ! g - . ) , $!), F j, @ ' *6 , > / ’ g )"2 8 2 " , 6 c , : "#!. B ) *!" # L ) %- 6 ! 1
! ), : #2 2 ) ( . (.) * ) *!W # ) ! ! ,
> !), : " R @ ; (Strepsiades) I will indeed tell you how our name-calling started. You’ll recall that we were having a feast. First of all I asked him to pick up his lyre and sing a song by Simonides, the one about how Ram got shorn, and he right away said it was old-fashioned to play the lyre and sing at a drinking party, like a woman hulling barley. (Pheidippides) Why, right then and there you should have been pounded and stomped – asking me to sing, as if you were throwing a feast for cicadas!
At least after his time in the phrontisterion, Pheidippides’ tastes are defined by a generational conflict between those who like the old-style habits of Athenian song-culture, and the young who prefer the trendy Euripides and recite spoken verse rather than singing to the lyre, which in the world of professionalized music seems banausic and old-fashioned. But for this idea any song by a poet of the ‘old school’ might have done: we ought to ask why this one might have particular force. Good independent information is preserved by the scholia, including a fragment of the song, which is corrupt only to a relatively minor extent; here I give the texts of both Page and Poltera ( PMG = Poltera): 8 E a and b (other MSS slightly different) 8 2 5 2 "5! ) B c 6 * " . N ' , \. . - ' * - , L . 6 6 1@ "5 2 " 5 † † B , " "5! ) B c 6 * " !g . " 6 ] 6 " . cf. 8 RVE a/A #, " 2 . c 6 6 \.
Here I give the manuscripts’ " rather than Blaydes’ " ’ (accepted by Wilson). The scholia of Tzetzes seem to me not to add anything which is not guesswork or the result of drawing false inferences from corrupt text.
Aristophanes’ Simonides
Page’s text ( PMG) and Campbell’s translation: "5! ) B c 6 * " !g ` 6 ] 6 " . ` Dobree Crius not surprisingly got himself shorn when he came to the glorious sanctuary of Zeus with its fine trees.
Poltera’s text (his fr. ): "5! ) B c 6 * " !g ] 6 " . Valckenauer, !g Hermann
I shall start by looking at this puzzling fragment in isolation and then return to its context in Clouds. The problem which I shall address – was Crius the victor, or a defeated athlete? – is an old one. The view that Crius was a loser (as I argue here) was expounded in particular by Page in . The key point is that Crius, which as a regular noun means ‘ram,’ is here a personal name. The first question is the sense of "5 . Although this verb " can refer to persons combing their hair, it can also mean ‘shear (sheep)’. That Aristophanes paraphrases "5 with "#! probably signifies that the middle here is close in sense to a passive. We
Important earlier contributions include Schneidewin : –; Wilamowitz-Moellendorf : ii. n. ; : n. ; : n. (Wilamowitz’s opinion changed over time). Page : –. For a recent exposition of the opposite view, see Mann : –. The view expounded here is close to that expressed at Figueira : n. (much less fully in the earlier publication of this essay at Figueira : with n. ): note particularly Figueira’s comment that the interpretation ‘is just the sort of thing that would fit the taste of the unabashedly non-aristocratic and patriotic Strepsiades’, an idea which I develop below. However, I am doubtful whether we should call this song (identified by our sources as 5 2) ‘a parody of an epinician’ commemorating a non-athletic event which Simonides merely ‘compared to an athletic defeat’: the qualities of this song, though surprising, need not prevent our calling it epinician (see further below). On the linguistic questions at stake (can the sigmatic aorist middle form ever be said to represent the passive? to what extent may a middle be said to have a quasi-passive sense?), see Wackernagel : –; Bers : –; Koniaris : –. For possible analogous cases, see Pind. Ol. . - $ (Wackernagel : ; Koniaris : ) and Verdenius ad Ol. . - . G. B. D’Alessio kindly suggested to me the possible relevance of Pind. Pae. . M (= D. Rutherford). Here the papyrus reads R $ , but a scholion appears to correct to R $ and another scholion in a different hand gives the gloss ( ![. Here the scholiast (surely correctly) understands that Pindar is using a metaphor by which ‘marriage gift’ represents ‘song’ (D’Alessio : , coll. Callim. fr. . Pfeiffer). It made sense to a scholiast to gloss a middle form with a passive. To my mind, the sense of "5 is middle – it means ‘got himself shorn’ – but it is a middle which can legitimately be paraphrased (as it is by Strepsiades) using a passive ‘was shorn’.
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are dealing at most with the difference between ‘got himself pekoed’ and ‘was pekoed’. And at least in conjunction with the name Crius, the sense ‘the ram got himself shorn’ seems unavoidable. Since, despite his name, Crius was not a sheep, we must wonder what this figurative expression might signify. Two possibilities arise: it means ‘Crius got his hair cut’, or it means ‘Crius suffered some disadvantage, that is, was defeated in the games’ (the latter might involve an analogy between a human’s haircut and suffering disadvantage, an analogy between the shearing of an animal and suffering disadvantage, or a combination of both of these). If we think that we are to understand ‘Crius was defeated,’ we will translate * " ‘and no wonder’, whereas if we think that he merely had his hair cut and is praised for a victory we will put ‘and in no unseemly fashion’. Mockery of named losers is not found in Pindar and Bacchylides: the only mentions of losers (both from songs for Aeginetan wrestlers: is this just coincidence?) are Olympian .– and Pythian .–: Ol. .– x ># ' , " ) * $ " ! 2 %#! " @ 2- L . . . [Alcimedon, the victor,] who, with divine favour, but also by not failing his manhood, put away from himself on to four boys’ bodies a most hateful homecoming, words less respectful, and a hidden path . . .
Cf. Wilamowitz-Moellendorf : n. . There are further interpretative possibilities with regard to the paraphrase of "5 with "#!. Koniaris : – suggests that Simonides used the middle aorist "5 para prosdokian for the middle aorist , moving towards the treatment of Crius as the animal, but Aristophanes’ Strepsiades takes the equivalence of ram and athlete further by using the passive, which shows that Strepsiades is treating the athlete as if he really were a ram. This line of approach (humour is derived from a difference in sense between "5 and "#!) is as old as Schneidewin (: –: his fr. ) and seems in some ways attractive, but is vulnerable to two objections: () the joke relies on (some of ) the audience’s remembering Simonides so accurately that they could spot the substitution of "5 with "#! even in a context where the word "5 never occurs, which might be doubted (cf. Molyneux : ); () we can explain "#! much more easily by observing that the sigmatic aorist middle usages with sense close to passive, as discussed by the authorities named in n. above, seem to be uncommon and high-register verse usages, so that it is natural for Strepsiades to paraphrase using the passive, which would be more usual in ordinary speech. Emmanuela Bakola suggests to me the possibility that Simonides may have meant ‘got his hair cut’ while Aristophanes’ Strepsiades changed this to ‘was fleeced’, perhaps with the implication ‘lost his money’ (sc. paid to the proverbially greedy Simonides, it being understood that Crius commissioned the song): this seems to me to share in the attractive ingenuity of Koniaris’ reading, but also in its vulnerabilities. A parallel for the idea ‘fleece’ ∼ ‘cause disadvantage to’ might be provided by Cratin. fr. ; for other, later parallels see Molyneux : n. . At Hdt. . the Argives resolve to wear their hair short as a response to defeat.
Aristophanes’ Simonides
Pyth. .– " ) % 4! - " , ` B@ % [2! !,
*' ") - " 2> X # A > ) #!@ $ , 2- " . And upon four bodies you fell from above with hostile intent, for whom no homecoming as happy as yours was decided at the Pythian festival, nor upon returning to their mothers did sweet laughter arouse joy all around; but staying clear of their enemies they shrink down alleyways, bitten by failure.
Where losers are mentioned they are neither named nor individualized; they are basically foil to the account of a victor. In Pindaric (and Bacchylidean) epinician, naming confers praise: they do not name to blame. But this is a dubious reason for denying that Crius is a defeated wrestler in Simonides. While Pindar and Bacchylides may pun on the names of victors (e.g. Bacchyl. init.), they do not start their songs by making facetious comments about victors’ haircuts either. By any interpretation of this fragment, it suggests something surprising and different from what we would expect to find in Pindar and Bacchylides. Crius of Aegina is known to us from elsewhere. Herodotus tells us how he was a prominent Aeginetan when the island gave earth and water to Darius (c. bc). He was confronted by the Spartan Cleomenes on Aegina and subsequently captured and held in Athens. The historian records another pun on Crius’ name made by Cleomenes (Hdt. .): c " ' 2 \. j 6 c 6 j 6 ` A B " 6 6 %-. B ' c " 6 *6 %-A ‘S ( # (, X ", ", : 2 .’ When Cleomenes was being driven out of Aegina, he asked Crius what his name was, and Crius told him. Cleomenes said to him ‘Get your horns tipped with bronze, Mr Ram: you’re about to meet with a big misfortune.’
Molyneux suggested that in these circumstances, combined with the regular Athenian hostility to Aegina, it was unlikely that a song praising Crius
Cf. Poltera : –; Bagordo . Cf., with a different take on the Pindaric passages, Molyneux : ; Poltera : cites Bacchyl. init. and Bagordo to argue that a joke of this kind could be made about the laudandus of a short epinician for performance at the site of the games.
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would be popular in Athens, and that this should encourage us to suppose that Crius featured as a defeated loser. This need not be so. Aristophanes can allude to a song praising Hieron for the foundation of Aetna, and the Sicilians were fans of Euripides because he was a great poet, not because of their attitudes towards Athens in general: we need not believe that the fact of dissemination in Athens is in itself evidence of a song’s political content (in any case the song might have circulated among Athenians who did not share in the hostility towards Aegina). But this approach suggests another. We ought to try to understand this song in terms of its Aristophanic context. Strepsiades asks Pheidippides for this song, and not another, by a favourite poet. What does this mean in the world of the play? Strepsiades’ wife is from a family background composed of identifiable members of the international aristocracy (Nub. –): % ) % M" 2 ( M" 2 - V i 5 V , , 2-@ , 2 " . (Strepsiades) Then I married the niece of Megacles son of Megacles, I a rustic, she from town, haughty, spoiled, thoroughly Coesyrized.
Through her, Pheidippides has not only the poshest but also the most epinician pedigree possible, including Megacles the laudandus of Pindar’s Pythian and probably also the Olympic victor in the chariot race of . Given his ancestry and his earlier horse mania, one might almost have expected that Pheidippides rather than Strepsiades would be a fan of epinician. Strepsiades is characterized (and characterizes himself ) in contrast to the family of his wife, identifying himself as V . Perhaps the sheep-shearing imagery corresponds to this. Strepsiades’ attitude to the world at large is laid out for us in the scene where the student of the phrontisterion shows him a map. His interest in the world outside Athens is about cleruchies for people like himself,
Plut. Nic. .–. Molyneux : . Megacles senior: LGPN II Megacles , ostracized /, laudandus of Pind. Pyth. . Megacles junior: LGPN II Megacles , Olympic victor (chariot race) . Koisyra: no. in M. J. Osborne and Byrne , wife or mother of Megacles senior, from Eretria. The mention of Koisyra indicates that we should think of the two men named Megacles as historical individuals, even though the name is also redolent of aristocratic ideology in a more general way by virtue of its etymology. (The scepticism in Dover’s notes ad and reflects the position before Koisyra’s historicity and identity were clarified through the discovery of ostraka cast against Megacles senior and bearing her name: these may now be found in Siewert and Brenne .) See in particular Nub. –, –. For Simonides’ role in Theocritus’ construction of ‘bucolic epinician’, cf. Theocritus with Rawles .
Aristophanes’ Simonides
and chauvinist pride in Athens’ imperial conquests under Pericles (another Alcmaeonid, but of a rather different kind from the picture of Strepsiades’ in-laws) (Nub. –): (8.) 6 @ !@ , ) ; . " . (M.) ' . (8.) 2 ' ; (M.) . (8.) () I # ; (M.) ! . (8.) , 2# ; (M.) `, , > . (8.) " A 6 - 6 # . (M.) H " . B ; b ' r! . (8.) W " ; * ! , *# B@ !" 2 . (M.) : () !@ r 6 6 # . (8.) ( c 2 . , ; (M.) (! ) % . & " ) 0`/ ), : B , & " 2. (8.) L)A 6 &@ ! [ " 2 . ) & Y ( ) ; (M.) 2 ) ; .
(Strepsiades) What in god’s name are these, then? Tell me. (Pupil) This one here is for astronomy. (S) And this one? (P) Geometry. (S) So what’s that good for? (P) For measuring land. (S) You mean land for settlers? (P) No, land in general. (S) Talk about sophisticated. That device is democratic, and useful too. (P) And look, this is a map of the entire world. See? That’s Athens right there. (S) What do you mean? I don’t believe it; I don’t see any juries in session. (P) Anyway, this really is the territory of Attica. (S) Then where are the Cicynnians, my fellow demesmen? (P) They’re over here. And Euboea, as you can see, is laid out here, over a very long stretch. (S) I know; we laid it out ourselves, with Pericles. But where’s Sparta? (P) Let me see; right here.
Strepsiades refers to the Euboean campaign again later on: Periclean victories come naturally to his mind. In this light, a song which mocks the discomfiture of an Aeginetan aristocrat seems right up Strepsiades’ street, while a song praising Crius seems out of place. Praising aristocratic foreigners for their victories in athletic pursuits in no way conforms to
Nub. with Dover ad loc.
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Strepsiades’ characterization, while a chauvinistic taste for the discomfiture of a foreigner from a country with a long history of enmity with Athens and subsequently conquered by Pericles is precisely to his taste. When Clouds was first performed ( bc) and subsequently revised, it was not long since the Periclean invasion and ethnic cleansing of Aegina in bc, and only a year since the Athenians attacked the Aeginetan exiles at Thyrea in bc: Aegina (and the defeat of Aeginetans) is an especially contemporary matter. Two years before the first Clouds, Aegina had been mentioned in the parabasis of Acharnians because of the Spartans’ demand that the island be given back. It taps into a rich seam for Aristophanes to characterize Strepsiades by means of his taste for a song mocking an Aeginetan who was remembered in Athens as a Medizer and a captive of the Athenians, and, being more consistent with the trend of the play than the alternative, supports this reading of the fragment. Consideration of Aristophanes and Simonides together helps us to judge what is likely to be a better account of the Simonides fragment, and also to perceive more clearly its function and meaning within the play. In Aristophanes’ Knights it is the chorus who recall Simonidean epinician (–): : ' 6 > * ! ( #$ ( . j , @,
c 2
M 2 . X ) ) V ! b1 , j! -> , F Q , / , % ! .
) t A ‘ ’ 2- .’
Cf. Figueira : n. . Thuc. .–; Plut. Nic. .. Elizabeth Irwin has rightly stressed to me the significance of the dating of the first version of Clouds in relation to the conflict at Thyrea. Aelian (VH .) refers to an Athenian decree that the Aeginetans have their right thumbs removed, which should belong at this date, but Thucydides records that the captives were all killed. In any case the sources report that the captives were brought to Athens, where the decision what to do with them was taken by the assembly: the question has therefore been a recent matter for debate in Athens itself (not merely news). I wonder whether it is relevant that, according to Hdt. ., Thyrea was the site of a battle between Sparta and Argos, in which the Argives were defeated, and as a consequence of the defeat resolved to wear their hair short until they might recapture Thyrea; the Spartans resolved always to wear their hair long. It is this same passage which seems to presuppose that Aristophanes had a personal connection with the island (Ach. –): this might indicate that his family had arrived in Athens as pro-democratic refugees from Aegina in the early fifth century (Figueira : –). Here I give the manuscripts’ ! , which has been emended to ! (van Herwerden, accepted by Wilson) and !" (Hirschig).
Aristophanes’ Simonides
6 K* ) t j , " 2 , &!" ) . /#"/# . See how he keeps up his boundless brazenness without even changing his usual colour! If I don’t hate you, may I turn into a blanket in Cratinus’ house and be coached by Morsimus to sing in a tragedy! Oh, you’re everywhere, in everyone’s business, lighting on bribery’s blossoms; I hope you throw up your mouthful as easily as you found it. For only then will I sing ‘Drink, drink on a happy occasion!’ (Chorus leader) And I imagine Ulius, the old grain ogler, would whoop a paean of joy and sing the Bacchebacchus.
The scholia are again informative: 8 VEGnM a:
A , - , 6 8 2 " ) 2- . @ 8 2 ' ( _! . 6 ' 2- ) ! A @ " & 2- . That is, it says, I would sing to you the song of Simonides ‘Drink, drink for the results!’ This is from Simonides’ epinicians for winners in the four-horse chariot. ‘Results’ refers to ‘good things’: the word 2- is a vox media. Cf. Suda (s.v. 2- )
From the use of the line quoted as a kind of title (6 8 2 " ) 2- ) we can infer that this is another incipit. The potential ambiguity of 2- , of interest to the scholia, is thought-provoking. In later Greek (including Aristophanes) 2- without further qualifier often carries the negative sense ‘disaster, bad outcome’. Bacchylides illustrates the ambiguous quality of the noun which the scholia point out, but in a gnomically generalized way (Bacchyl. .–): ]2- ’ ! > /]>[]. ( ]6 . [6 ] 4 - >[# ] ! ! A
. . . if Fortune comes with a load of suffering, she ruins a fine man, while if set on a prosperous course she makes even a base man shine on high.
Bravi : –.
Cf. Bravi : .
richard rawles
In Pindar the word is used only in the negative sense: Olympian . 2- . , and (suggestively) Pythian . 2- " , of the losers in the wrestling, as quoted above. The scholia show that it seemed to somebody, with information unavailable to us, that 2- in the Simonidean song carried a positive sense. But the way in which this is argued suggests that there was at least a little room for ambiguity: the poem did not include, for example, an adjective like ! qualifying 2- , otherwise it would have been unnecessary to explain that 2- was vox media. In a way, problematic dictionary definitions are not the point. An athletic victory is a 2- ! for the winner – and a 2- for the rest. This aspect of athletics is not generally acknowledged in Pindar and Bacchylides, who rarely mention losers. The ‘inclusivity’ of Pindaric epinician creates a world in which the celebration of the victory is an underlying fact or premise of everything that follows, while opposing viewpoints are ignored or acknowledged only with general references to -!
. Pindar’s epinicians are generally reluctant to acknowledge that there are those who would prefer that the laudandus had not won. By my account of the Crius fragment, Simonides took a very different line there: a celebration of the defeat of another, named competitor. Perhaps ) 2- points in the same direction: it is suggestive of faction and enmity also in its echoing of the celebratory and stasiotic drinking of Alcaeus ( Voigt): ( # !>! ' / $ , , ! M> . Now must men get drunk and drink with all their strength, since Myrsilus has died.
Considering factionalism and the ambiguous reference of 2- , we should look at the fragment within Knights. If Paphlagon were to come to a
In my view the comment in the Suda (s.v. 2- , Adler), ' " 2 ) ) ! , probably reflects the same idea (i.e. ‘some say [that it means] “drink to the good things!” ’); but cf. Trombetta : for a different view. Contra, Bravi : (‘lo scoliasta risolve l’ambiguit`a in maniera inequivocabile’). References to wine and conviviality are common in both Pindaric and Bacchylidean epinician, but this kind of straightforwardly colloquial exhortation to drink is not characteristic. One may wonder about the pragmatic implications of the second-person singular imperative . It might invite the addressee to form a part of a group (‘drink with me/us’), as commonly in Alcaeus (frr. a, , a Voigt, and cf. the popular song PMG). Did the singular have the effect of singling out the laudandus, as perhaps with # at Pind. Pyth. ., Nem. .? This is speculation: the singular might have conveyed the idea ‘drink, each of you severally!’ (cf. in Alc. fr. Voigt, quoted here).
Aristophanes’ Simonides
nasty end and to have to hand over all his corrupt gains, the chorus would sing: ) 2- , ‘drink, drink for the 2- : good for us, and bad for you!’ It hardly makes sense to decide whether 2- here ‘means’ good outcome or bad: the Knights’ delight in their victory is inseparable from their Schadenfreude at Cleon’s downfall. This use of Simonides for the expression of jubilation in the defeat of an enemy is of broader interest in Knights more generally. In this most partisan of plays, the chorus is unambiguously on one side, that is, opposed to Paphlagon-Cleon, and as such is especially easily aligned with an ‘authorial’ presence. It is easy for a choral voice to start to shift towards a ‘poet’s voice’ even outside explicitly parabatic passages. In our passage at – we can hear the poet behind the chorus, a poet’s voice being suggested by the mockery of the poets Cratinus and Morsimus (while the identity of the chorus is perhaps closer to the foreground in the choice of a song for a victor in the chariot race, corresponding to the equestrian interests of the knights). The Simonidean allusion represents an adoption of a Simonidean voice by both poet and chorus. A little later the chorus make their most shocking statement of partisanship (Eq. –): X (# [ , X 7 @ " 2 !) - > " 2 #$ , () - ( / ( , # &" 52 6 ^ , f # @ R ) #! ! ) &@ 1 . ( I ( - ! A "# j ' ( .
Pallas, City Guardian, mistress of the land that is the holiest of all and the most successful in war, poets and power, come join us, and bring
I retain the manuscript reading # @ against Wilamowitz’s emendation V , x _ " 5 2 / ! * ) )P26 j, /g ' ) 2 2 ) %/ " . 3! , W ' , W ) $ , W ' A 2 ) )P!
2 42# # A
) S! `# , k n " "! .
Well now, if you praise Pausanias and you, sir, Xanthippus, and you Leotychidas, I commend Aristeides as the very best man to have come from holy Athens; for Themistocles incurred the hatred of Leto, Themistocles the liar, the criminal, the traitor, who was bribed with mischievous silver and would not take Timocreon home to his native Ialysus, although he was his guest-friend. Instead he accepted three talents of silver and sailed off to the devil, restoring some to their homes unjustly, chasing others out, killing others. Gorged with silver, he made a ridiculous innkeeper at the Isthmus, serving cold meat: the guests would eat up and pray that no attention be given to Themistocles.
This may be a complete song. Although abuse of Themistocles is the principal point, we should not discard the initial praise as mere foil: this is praise as, like athletics, a zero-sum game, where naming a winner involves rejecting losers. There can only be G in Athens; praising Aristeides
Gentili : . On this song, see Robertson , Scodel , Stehle ; for possible historical contextualization of Timocreon’s siding with Aristeides against Themistocles, Kowalzig : – (where is misidentified as elegiac: surely part of the rhetoric of the song was that, however its initial performance was intended, it shared in the formal features of collective, public choral performances).
Aristophanes’ Simonides
and denigrating Themistocles go together. Praise and blame are integrated in the work of one poet. We know even less about Timocreon than we do about Simonides. What we do know, however, is suggestive for our purposes. Timocreon is known to Aristophanes. Aristotle (fr. Rose, from the lost work On Poets) tells us that Timocreon was quarrelsome ( - ) towards Simonides. The Suda asserts that he argued with both Simonides and Themistocles and that he composed a comedy against them. This refers to aggressive mockery rather than comedy proper. This tradition, visible in the Aristotle fragment, is also our best testimonium to suggest that a close relationship between Simonides and Themistocles, assumed in later anecdotes, reflects earlier Athenian tradition: if it was visible in lost poems of Timocreon, it dates from Simonides’ own time. The Simonidean attribution of an amusing mock-epitaph for Timocreon (Anth. Pal. . = ‘Simonides’ FGE) cannot be leant on heavily. Our sources explicitly attest only to the expression of aggression by Timocreon aimed at Themistocles and Simonides, and not the other way around. There is no reason to believe that Simonidean poems looked ‘just like’ Timocreon’s poem against Themistocles – but the latter is a valuable source for a nonPindaric poetics of praise and blame, and close to the world of Simonides in Athens. What, then, does Aristophanes’ Simonides look like? This is in part Simonides through Athenian spectacles, a practitioner of praise of a naval demos Athenaion with what I interpreted as a Themistoclean inflection. It is Simonides the praise poet, but simultaneously engaged with the poetry of aggression, partisanship, mockery and abusive ridicule. We might see him as part of the world suggested by the figure of Timocreon: street-fighting
I am uncomfortable where Gentili (: ) calls this a ‘parody’ of praise and a ‘transgression of generic propriety’, since I think that combination of praise with blame may have been more common than this formulation might imply (which is not to deny that the conceptual dichotomy praise vs. blame doubtless long predated Timocreon). Aristophanic allusions to Timocreon: Timocreon ∼ Ach. with 8; ∼ Vesp. – with 8. Suda s.v. _ " . See n. above. For discussion of the presentation of Simonides in Plutarch’s Themistocles, see Zadorojnyi , for whom Simonides’ significance in the Life is especially to be interpreted in terms of his regular association in the anecdotal tradition with excessive concern for money. On the Timocreon fragments concerning Themistocles (for which our source is Plut. Them. .–), see Zadorojnyi : –. The attribution cannot be traced further back than the hand of a corrector in the manuscript of Anth. Pal. (who may have known the tradition reported in the Suda), and the epigram, which might itself be early, was cited by Athenaeus without the name of an author. See Page FGE ad loc. On attribution of Simonidean epigrams in general, see Petrovic a, Sider (both with bibliography).
richard rawles
poets in the world of political conflict and rivalry, like jackdaws squabbling close to ground level while the Theban eagle soars serenely above. In the context of a different kind of investigation from this, Michael Silk drew a useful distinction between a high-register line of lyric tradition, including Simonides, and an alternative strand of ‘low lyric’, retaining links with ‘popular elements’: Aristophanes the lyric poet does not belong to the well-known line that runs from Alcman to Simonides, from Pindar to the authors of those magnificent choral odes of tragedy. His lyrics may be more or less affected by that line, but he does not belong to it. His affinities are rather with the tradition of low lyric that descends from folk song and Archilochus – or, presumably, from folk song to Archilochus – and is drawn on variously by Hipponax and, under the aristocratic accent, by Anacreon: a tradition that, by comparison with the ‘serious’ line, keeps recognisable links with popular elements.
This set of distinctions seems to me valid and helpful. But my analysis of Aristophanes’ Simonides suggests to me that Simonides’ place in the traditions of lyric could sometimes be seen differently. Aristophanes’ Simonides is characterized by skoptic and comedic elements and aggressive partisanship – the relationship with Aristophanic comedy is as much one of analogy as of contrast, as if Aristophanes went to Simonides as a precursor. This applies to language as well. The Simonidean passages we have considered are not marked by the high register which is frequently characteristic of the choral lyric tradition. On the contrary, this Simonides is a poet of low-register lyric language, quite different from Aristophanes’ highfalutin’ Pindar. With boozy, yo-ho-ho drinking song, obvious punning on the name Crius and mockery of the defeated aristocrat, they may seem closer to a demotic, popular tradition. This Simonides could as easily belong with Archilochus and Anacreon as with Pindar. If this is Aristophanes’ Simonides, should it then be ours? To put it another way, does this account enable us to get behind the encrustations of later ages for a better look at the ‘real’ Simonides? Yes and no. This kind of reception-through-allusion is not working on nothing: the picture of Simonides which has been developed is partly based on real fragments, preserved for us through Aristophanes and his scholia. It cannot be dismissed as mere fabrication. Further, Aristophanes may well be close to some elements in the repertoire of contemporary Athenian responses to lyric poetry. I think that Simonides really was close to Themistocles (or at least that the
Silk a: . For Simonides and ‘popular’ traditions, see e.g. Vetta , Trombetta ; cf. Rawles .
Aristophanes’ Simonides
ancient assumption to this effect was not baseless, but reflected real contact between them); that Timocreon did engage in polemic against them; and that Simonides did engage in mockery of the defeated Crius. But this picture is highly selective. Even within Athenian tradition, it does not describe Simonides at the court of Hipparchus, or the proto-philosopher of Plato, and it leaves open whether we should integrate this picture with Aristophanes’ depictions of Simonides as greedy for profit. This Simonides does not look much like the poet of the Danae fragment ( PMG = Poltera), or the encomiast of the panhellenic ambitions of the Spartan regent Pausanias (fr. W ). As far as praise is concerned, we can make a couple of observations. First, both the Crius fragment and ) 2- are incipits – the same is true of # ) !> b ( PMG = Poltera), known to us from Aristotle. Perhaps Simonides liked to begin praise songs in a startling way in order to grab the audience’s attention, and the rest of these songs would surprise us less. Secondly, Simonidean epinician from papyrus does not necessarily share the striking features of the quotation tradition. Here is an incipit preserved on papyrus ( fr. a PMG = Poltera = POxy. fr. a): c0Y}_P _. KP8 \P\_PK~ [. \P8P.^. K* ] c 2[ ] \. 2 ]. #2 -[] [5 r R/ [ . [2!. [$ ] !’ [ ( . . . .]..[.]2. [ . . . . . . ]..[ omnia suppl. ed. pr. (Lobel) The glorious son of Kronos, child of Uranus, (protects?) the race of Aeatius, and the far-shooting Apollo of the golden lyre and shining Pytho mark them out and (the glory of ) the horse racing . . .
The fragments of a song addressed to Scopas of Thessaly quoted in Plato’s Protagoras ( PMG = Poltera) seem to show ‘tempered praise’ in a rather different, albeit analogous (and perhaps analogously surprising) way. As stressed at the beginning, the present chapter is a selective treatment and does not purport to describe all aspects of the Aristophanic Simonides. For Simonides’ greed in Aristophanes, see Pax – (T Campbell, T Poltera); the same perception arguably underlies the naming of Simonides at Av. (Simonides T Campbell, T Poltera).
richard rawles
Here I see no hint of ‘tempered praise’: this is epinician praise as we know it, straight out of the tin. The language is firmly in the high-register lyric tradition: 2 , #2 - 5, even : ‘greasy Pytho’. Though the number of epinician papyrus fragments which are both recognizable and substantial is pretty small, this may suggest that the quotation tradition, including Aristophanes, emphasizes aspects which looked surprising in a post-Pindaric world. However, there is one surprising element here: the title, ‘For the sons of Aiatios in the single-horse race’. Doubtless racehorses, then as now, could be owned by syndicates such as ‘the sons of so-and-so’. But the ancient scholars who were responsible for the titles found before Pindaric and Bacchylidean epinicians never name more than one person but always isolate a single victory and a single laudandus, even where a song seems to commemorate multiple victories by one family. Can we see here a reflex of a phenomenon visible also in the Crius song? That the ancient scholars either could not extract a single name here, or felt it was unnecessary or inappropriate to do so, might reflect that the poetics of naming in Simonides followed a different pattern from what we see in Bacchylides and Pindar, just as it did in the Crius song, where (by my argument) we find the similarly unparalleled naming of a defeated loser. In any case, this fragment does not show us the features that we remarked upon in Aristophanes, and reminds us that Aristophanes’ reception of Simonides is selective: it reflects Aristophanes’ poetic choices. He could have gone to Simonides for the features which he found in Pindar, but he chose Pindar for the likes of . "- and and went to
# 2 %# 2 1 " # -2 #,
; ( ( . By Zeus, they’re certainly up and about late to-day: they always call for him after midnight, carrying torches and warbling those old-sweet-SidonPhrynichus-pretty songs that they use to summon him out.
Rau : , followed by F. D. Harvey : , considers the desiderative verb () to be paratragic (cf. Pax ); Sommerstein , ad loc. compares the lines to Aesch. Cho. and remarks on the ‘absurd’ tragic style of acting. These lines contain yet more Euripidean parody (of Theseus frr. –, Bellerophon fr. , and perhaps others) as well as parody of the tragic motif of desperate escape fantasies (e.g. Eur. Hipp. ; Soph. Aj. ; cf. Padel ). See Rau : and MacDowell ad locc. The tragic model here is unknown, but cf. Thesm. –. On all these passages see Rau : –. Cf. Rau : –, where there seems to be a certain degree of indecisiveness. The inverted commas are (as always) important: what counts as ‘serious’ comedy? See Silk a: –. Cf. Platter on tragedy’s .
matthew wright
Eventually the chorus start singing (–), and it is likely that their song is based on a real Phrynichean original. This, presumably, would have been a lyric from his tragedy Phoenician Women (which is alluded to by - - in the middle of that monstrous adjective at ). Just beforehand, the chorus leader has enquired where Philocleon is, saying that he habitually leads them to the court singing something from Phrynichus (). So it appears that both the chorus and the hero of this comedy are obsessed by tragedy – and not just any tragedy, but specifically the tragedy of Phrynichus. The most significant point about Phrynichus here (given particular emphasis by # -) is that he represents a much older generation of tragedian that by the late s was seen as being rather old hat (Phoenician Women was produced over fifty years earlier). Thus Phrynichus and his works are made to participate not just in the contest of comedy versus tragedy but also in one of the other major contests in the play – old versus new. The aged Philocleon and the decrepit jurors, predictably, prefer the archaic tragedy of Phrynichus to that of the more up-to-date younger tragedians (a contrast that is developed prominently in the last scene of the play). The younger Bdelycleon’s use of that ludicrously ponderous adjective # -2 # seems to convey a hint of condescension towards the older tragedian; and perhaps there is also a suspicion that Phrynichus is being mocked for his sesquipedalian diction (rather as Aeschylus is parodied for his prolixity and penchant for compound words at Ran. –). Since Aristophanes often adopts a posture of mocking what is old-fashioned and praising what is modern in literature and drama, it is likely that he is sending up these old codgers and their preference for the out-of-date Phrynichus. One can well imagine that the obsolescent lyrics would have been accompanied on stage by an exaggeratedly senile, moribund style of choreography.
See Sommerstein ad loc., noting a similarity between the metre of this passage and several fragments of Phrynichus; cf. Av. – for similar Phrynichean parody. 8v Vesp. , quoting 8 $ V2 . (= Phryn. fr. TrGF; cf. fr. ). Nevertheless, Aristophanes’ treatment is one-sided, since obsolescence is not Phrynichus’ only characteristic. In his time he was seen as an original or even controversial poet: the Suda (- ) reports that he was responsible for metrical innovations and that he was the first playwright to put female characters on stage; cf. Herodotus’ account (..) of his tragedy The Sack of Miletus, which proved too hot for the Athenians to handle. E.g. Nub. – (Simonides vs. Euripides); Frogs passim (Aeschylus vs. Euripides). See Handley on the ‘generation gap’ theme in general. But Aristophanes’ view of novelty is more complex than it seems: see Wright . See MacDowell : (who notes the exaggerated predominance of long syllables, which may be indicative of slow and painful movement); cf. L. P. E. Parker : –, who links the ‘old vs. young’ contest to the metre and music. For comic dance as a medium of mockery, cf. Ar. Eq. –, Nub. .
Comedy versus tragedy in Wasps
Phrynichus may seem to come off fairly lightly from this treatment: Aristophanes does concede that his poetry has a sort of ‘sweetness’ and ‘prettiness’ about it, which may be read as a form of critical approval (though Bdelycleon’s overall attitude makes it more likely that he is actually damning with faint praise). Other tragedians fare much worse. For instance, Philocles, the nephew of Aeschylus, is referred to disparagingly for his famously unpalatable lyrics; and a somewhat obscure reference to Acestor, which is apparently making fun of his social standing or behaviour, could be seen as an implicitly critical reflection on his work. These parenthetic put-downs are effective in spite of, or perhaps even because of, their casual brevity. It is obvious that, for the audience, the mere mention of these tragedians’ names carried immediate associations of bad drama. Another brief dismissal is dealt out to Sthenelus, who is mentioned in passing as a term of comparison within a simile: someone is said to be as useless as a locust without wings, or Sthenelus shorn of his props (8! " . . . 2 " , ). Evidently Sthenelus was renowned for his over-reliance on spectacular stage action or special effects at the expense of plot or style: other references to him are similarly withering. All these parodic jibes and put-downs, like many others of the same sort scattered throughout Aristophanes’ works, are significant in that they imply an inherently hierarchical relationship between the comedian and the poets whose work is being criticized. In a sense, all literary critics are required to adopt an authoritative, de haut en bas stance for the purposes of their work. Such a stance may be articulated in many different (stronger or weaker) ways, using a wide variety of rhetorical techniques. But inevitably the act of passing positive or negative judgement on another writer’s work is an
Vesp. (above); cf. Av. –. Note that ‘Euripides’ at Ran. – says that Phrynichus turned his audience into a bunch of morons – not even faint praise here. Vesp. –; all other comic references to Philocles seem to be pejorative, drawing attention to his stylistic ‘bitterness’ (Thesm. , Av. (with 8); Cratin. fr. ; Telecl. fr. ), and indeed his nickname was ‘Gall’ (Suda ). See Taillardat : –, – on metaphors of eating or drinking to describe poetic ‘taste’. Vesp. : the reference is obscure partly on account of a textual uncertainty. Acestor’s non-Athenian origins are mocked elsewhere, as is his parasitic character (e.g. Av. –; Cratin. fr. ; Eup. fr. ). Sommerstein : thinks that he is mentioned here qua parasite: cf. Storey and Vaio for discussion of the delicate social nuances conveyed by the symposium scene in Wasps. However, tragedians’ (and others’) social standing is often used as the basis for an oblique form of comment on their work: e.g. the numerous jokes about Euripides’ mother’s profession (Ach. , Thesm. , etc.; cf. the ancient Lives of Euripides: Kovacs : , , , , ). Cf. Kaimio and Nykopp . Ar. fr. mocks Sthenelus’ writing for its lack of flavour (cf. Vesp. – on Philocles); Arist. Poet. a– finds Sthenelus’ style clear but undignified. Cf. TrGF .–.
matthew wright
assertion of the essential superiority of the critic. When Aristophanes lays into Sthenelus, Philocles and the others, he is saying in effect that he is better than they are – at least, better qualified to recognize what counts as good or bad writing. For a comedian to criticize a tragedian (in particular) implies an inversion of the normal hierarchy of the genres, whereby the ‘inferior’ writer becomes the superior. This move may be interpreted, perhaps, as a ‘carnivalesque’ reversal of status, of a type which is characteristic of comedy in general. Aristophanes’ superior stance is not based exclusively on the passing of implicit or explicit critical judgements. Another way in which he uses tragedy to assert his own authority is simply by demonstrating wide knowledge of it. His numerous quotations, references, allusions and adaptations all add up to a virtuoso display of learning as well as a profound appreciation of the tragic genre. To refer to Aristophanes’ quotation of specific texts as ‘parody’ reflects only one aspect of his activity: ‘intertextuality’ may be a more appropriate all-round term. Tragic texts are quoted, in Wasps and elsewhere, far more often than any other sort of literature. In part this is because tragedy represents high culture, the ‘great tradition’ of Greek poetry. Aristophanes is using tragedy to demonstrate his literary and cultural credentials – to show us, in yet another sense, that he is a writer to be taken seriously. The question of audience reception arises again in this respect. How many of the audience would have spotted the tragic allusions? Some of these intertextual references would have been easier to detect than others. For example, the parody of Phrynichus’ Phoenician Women (–) no doubt relied on a fairly obvious pastiche of musical style (and there is some evidence to suggest that Aristophanes’ audience were in the habit of memorizing songs more than spoken passages from tragedy). One of the quotations from Euripides’ Stheneboea (, discussed below) was clearly in circulation as a piece of quasi-proverbial wisdom, independent of its life
Cf. Too’s view of ancient criticism as a series of bids for power. M¨ollendorff effectively applies Bakhtin’s concept of the ‘carnivalesque’ to comedy. Cf. Platter on ‘the carnival of genres’ in Aristophanes. This is broadly the position arrived at by D. P. Fowler . Lyric excerpts would have been commonly circulated and memorized via performance at symposia (etc.): Plut. Nic. is a valuable piece of evidence. The skolia quoted at Vesp. – and the lyric poems at Nub. – fall into this category. Some comic passages allude to the memorization of iambic speeches (not dialogue): Ran. – apparently concerns the recitation of excerpts from speeches or agones. Vesp. – mentions a defendant, Oeagrus, who recites speeches from a tragedy Niobe in order to entertain the jurors: but Oeagrus is an actor, not an average member of the theatre-going public. On all these matters see Ford : – and Rosen b.
Comedy versus tragedy in Wasps
as a ‘tragic quotation’ as such: this is shown by the large number of times that it is cited by other (contemporary and later) authors. But many of the allusions are more obscure: they do not stand out from their context as being obviously quotations; they are not particularly pointed or funny in themselves; they are brief and not especially catchy or memorable. A couple of quotations from Euripides’ Theseus are incorporated into the paratragic lament at –. Here a young child cries to his parent, who has been bewailing the lack of money to buy food: ‘Why then, wretched mother, didst thou bear me?’ ( ), X " , % ;). In Euripides’ play the words were uttered by a child who was about to be eaten by the Minotaur, whereas in the comedy this child’s situation is rather more trivial. Perhaps even the bookworms in the audience would have found this joke relatively obscure; at any rate, this unremarkable line is probably not the sort of quotation that would be recognized by the average spectator, even if Theseus had been produced relatively recently. Still, the parody works on a more basic level as well: even those spectators who had not read Euripides would have been able to tell that the line is ‘tragic’ in style and language, and they would have been able to appreciate the disparity between high style and absurd context (as well as the incongruity of a child calling his father ‘mother’!). This disparity is emphasized by the chorus leader’s silly, deflating answer to the child’s pathetic question (), and the insertion of a further parodic quotation from Theseus (–). Once again, even if not everyone caught the specific allusion to Euripides, they would still have been able to derive humour from the insertion of the down-to-earth word !2 (‘lunch-box’) in the middle of this highflown, recognizably ‘tragic’ passage. The brief, mangled quotations at – are comparable in type: were either (), X 42# (‘Hasten, my soul!’) or , X (‘Give way, thou shadowy . . . ’) really striking enough phrases to prompt the
Cf. Vesp. – for another quotation which is effectively a proverb: see MacDowell ad loc. Of course proverbs (gnomai) represent another way in which tragedy was seen as embodying authority, and comedy undermines this authority by means of parody: cf. Eriph. Aeolus fr. . Eur. Stheneboea fr. ( , ) V | 0 , t V 2 Nh 6 ): quoted by Pl. Symp. e; Plut. Amat. (Mor. b), De Pyth. or. (Mor. e), Quaest. conv. . (Mor. c); Aristid. Or. ., .; Long. Subl. .; Chor. Op. : Kannicht ad loc. supplies other references. E.g. Vesp. (loosely adapted from Eur. Cressai fr. ; see Rau : , ); – (a four-word phrase apparently quoted from Achaeus’ Momus = fr. TrGF; cf. Pax ); – (an apparent allusion to the supplication scene from Euripides, Ino). Vesp. = Eur. Theseus fr. : the context is provided by the scholiast ad loc. Vesp. : V ) X !2 , ) L# V, adapting Eur. Theseus fr. ( V ) , j $ ). Cf. Eur. Beller. fr. .
matthew wright
recognition of the average audience member? Probably not – in fact, the source of the first of these quotations has never been identified – but it is still possible to see the humour as operating on several different levels simultaneously. Clever spectators (or a reading audience) will have taken pleasure in identifying the precise quotation and noting the absurd dissimilarity between the tragic and comic contexts. However, the most basic level of humour, open to many more people, derives from the over-literal treatment of an obviously poetic phrase: Philocleon, having addressed his soul, suddenly breaks off to ask, bathetically, ‘Where is my soul?’ ( ( 42#;). A further level would have been added for those who were able to recognize apostrophe of one’s own soul, heart or body parts as being a familiar tragic device in general, even if they missed the exact source of the quotation. I have already mentioned the difficulty of judging the precise effect on the audience of all these tragic allusions and intertextual jokes: how high does the humour aim? On balance, it seems unlikely that the full extent of Aristophanes’ intertextuality would have been appreciated by an ordinary spectator of Wasps who happened to have watched – perhaps many years earlier – a single performance of the plays quoted. The complete effect seems to have been aimed at a more sophisticated, text-reading audience. Despite his mock-humble claims not to be confusing the audience by giving them anything too clever, Aristophanes is essentially a sophisticated connoisseur of literature writing for other sophisticated connoisseurs. Nevertheless, at the same time there is enough material to cater for the less sophisticated spectators as well. Even though he downplays his intertextuality in order to seem less highbrow, Aristophanes does not disguise the importance of tragedy. Indeed, it is important that everyone should notice its presence (even if they missed the fine details), because it is central to his distinctive ‘brand’ of comedy. In his ‘comeback’ play Aristophanes is trying to have it both ways, providing something for everyone – and tragedy is at the very heart of his negotiation of the complex relationship with his audience(s). Even the least culturally clued-up spectator could scarcely have failed to appreciate the importance of tragedy in the final scene of Wasps. All
A similar parody of the same motif is seen at Ach. , , ; for the tragic version cf. Eur. Med. , , , IT , Or. , Ion ; Neophr. fr. TrGF, etc. Rau : – provides further discussion. See Rosen : –; N. W. Slater ; and Ford for further discussion of literacy and comic readership (as such).
Comedy versus tragedy in Wasps
pretence at restraint has now been abandoned, and we are presented with an elaborate display of music and dancing. This final section of the play used to be seen as a relatively insignificant coda, unconnected to the main action. Actually it is thematically linked to the plot in various ways, as a number of studies have shown. But the main significance of the scene is that it represents the culmination of Aristophanes’ preoccupation with tragedy: it is the moment at which his implicitly competitive relationship with tragedy is made fully explicit. In this last scene, as in the prologue, there are various signs that Aristophanes is ‘doing’ tragedy: thus generic interplay is used to provide a neat framing device. This time tragedy is evoked specifically through the use of closural effects. The scene starts when Xanthias emerges from within and exclaims that a god has come to their house, ‘wheeling in’ baffling events ( , 6 ] 2 , V ) & | .> . , . , –). This seems to be an oblique allusion to the pattern, familiar from the end of numerous tragedies, in which a deus ex machina arrives unexpectedly at an impasse and alters the course of events in astonishing ways. Sommerstein also detects in the verb .> an allusion to the clunky stage machinery which Aristophanes elsewhere parodies as being characteristic of Euripidean dramaturgy. A few lines later, Philocleon cries out, as he is emerging from the house, ‘Let the doors be unbarred!’ (! #! , ) – an utterance which is clearly paratragic in diction and content. The doors are already open, which makes his instruction nonsensical, but the point is that he is playing out his own version of a tragic d´enouement, in which the doors are flung open to reveal dreadful things within the doomed house.
E.g. Wilamowitz-Moellendorf : –, ; Schmid and St¨ahlin : . E.g. Beta b: connects the dancing to the theme of madness, which is central to his reading of the play; A. M. Bowie : – focuses on Philocleon’s transformation, which he makes central to a ritualized reading of the plot; C. F. Russo : – sees Philocleon’s sensuality as a major theme of the play which is brought out in the last scene; Silk a: – sees the scene as an affirmation of the ‘exuberance’ of comedy and Philocleon’s ‘antinomian’ habits; Vaio emphasizes the importance of the sympotic theme (cf. Roos : –, who sees the style of dancing as more like that of komasts or courtesans than of tragic dancers). The device is seen very widely, especially in Euripides (at the end of (e.g.) Andr., Bacch., El., Hipp., Suppl., IT, Hel., Ion, Or., [Rh.]). See Dunn . Sommerstein : . Thesm. may provide a parallel; Ach. almost certainly does. MacDowell : ad loc. rejects this interpretation on the grounds that Philocleon did not enter the house by means of the ekkyklema, but this objection is surely over-literal. See Rau : –, comparing Eur. Med. , Hipp. , IT , Hel. , Soph. Ant. –, etc.
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But our main focus is on the extraordinary dancing contest which finishes everything off. Now that Philocleon has (apparently) been cured of jury mania, the slave Xanthias announces (–): B " , : % ( # 2 S 2" ) * (, #, +# > 26 *' > # ) ) ; n" U 1 A W > - 5 c 2 W ( # + H . The old man is overjoyed, seeing as it’s such a long time since he had a drink or listened to music – and all night long he’s not stopped dancing those old-fashioned dances which Thespis used to enter in the competitions. He also says that in a little while he’s going to hold a dancing contest and demonstrate that it is today’s tragic performers who are really old fogies.
What Philocleon is proposing, in other words, is literally a contest of comedy versus tragedy. It is also a contest of old versus new, in which the usual status of the contestants is paradoxically reversed. Philocleon, performing material from the has-been Phrynichus and the antediluvian Thespis, is the ‘young’ one, and it is contemporary tragedians such as the sons of Carcinus who are now seen as ‘old’. The scene which follows is a hilarious comic pastiche of tragic-style dancing, which probably contains specific and detailed parody of the style of choreography and music employed by Phrynichus and others. To begin with, Philocleon seems to be aping the style of Phrynichus, first crouching like a cock () and later performing high leg-kicks (– ). This description may refer to particular dance moves associated with Phrynichus. Whether or not this is so, and whether or not the audience members detected the reference after all these years, it seems likely that for many people the name Phrynichus would have had associations of a
The point of the joke would be lost if the Phrynichus mentioned at were not the tragedian (previously parodied at –): this is demonstrated by MacDowell : – and Borthwick , who consider and reject other identifications (with (e.g.) Phrynichus the comedian or Phrynichus the politician). The earliest tragedian of all, according to tradition (TrGF ; cf. Suda ! ). See Borthwick . Dale : – is more cautious about the extent to which one can reconstruct the dancing; cf. L. P. E. Parker : –, who nevertheless notes that the prevailing metre of the exodos (Archilochean) seems to be paralleled in a fragment of Phrynichus (fr. TrGF). Lawler’s attempt to detect satyric elements in this dance is unconvincing. Usually it is taken to be a parody of a specific Phrynichean line (fr. TrGF), but there is some doubt about the attribution: see Snell, TrGF ad loc.
Comedy versus tragedy in Wasps
different sort. The tragedian was famous for, among other things, having been defeated and driven out of the theatre for his disastrous play The Sack of Miletus. Phrynichus may be an old fogy, he may be a purveyor of flowery lyrics and easily parodied dance moves – but he is also a loser: this fact above all explains why he is an ideal figure for Philocleon to include in the contest. Eventually Philocleon tires of dancing on his own and issues a challenge to anyone who wants to compete against him (–): j - +# ! @ , # !) . . If there’s any tragic performer who claims to be a good dancer, let him come on up here and have a dance-off with me!
Comedy’s challenge to tragedy could hardly be more explicit. Philocleon’s words here could almost be read as embodying Aristophanes’ attitude to tragedy in general (it will not have escaped anyone’s notice that can mean ‘a tragedian’ as well as ‘a performer in a tragedy’). The final comedy-versus-tragedy ‘dance-off’ which follows (–) provides lots of fun for its own sake, including hilarious choreography and parodic caricature of the ‘crab-like’ sons of Carcinus, as well as further parody of Phrynichean dance steps (–). However, it also embodies a relationship between the genres which is absolutely central to Aristophanes’ whole project as a comedian. Tragedy, then, occupies a prominent position at the very end of this comedy. In a sense, it has the last word. As the dancers representing Carcinus and his sons prepare to leave the orchestra, Aristophanes – through the voice of the chorus leader – makes a final, emphatic statement of his originality as a comic poet. No one, it is claimed, has ever before done what Aristophanes is now doing: ( * " , | +# >
Hdt. ... 8 Vesp. mentions this episode as an explanation for Phrynichus’ ‘crouching’ (i.e. in humiliation). See Borthwick : – for discussion. The precise details of the dancing have been widely discussed, with little overall consensus being reached, but it is clear that the dancing is extremely exuberant. The parody seems to recall specific features of the choreography and style of tragedy embodied by Carcinus and his sons: see Borthwick : –; Roos : –; Rossi ; Sommerstein ; and MacDowell ad loc. for details and differing interpretations. It would be very strange if, as MacDowell : suggests, Carcinus and his sons appeared in person here. Granted, the parody is not overtly hostile, but the predominant tone is strongly anti-tragic in general, and Aristophanes’ treatment of Carcinus and Xenocles elsewhere is insulting (Nub. –; Thesm. ; Ran. ; cf. Pax –). Rau : ; Vaio : –; and others are probably right to interpret the attitude here as ironical or mocking.
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5 # 6 2@ (–). But what precisely is it that no one has ever done before? Nobody has ever been able to understand this claim properly. On the face of it, it means that ‘no one has ever sent a comic chorus off dancing’. Surely this cannot be literally true. Dancing was so central to comic drama (from its very origins onwards), and surviving comedies (and tragedies) so often end with the chorus singing and dancing off stage, that it seems unlikely that such an ending would have seemed innovative as late as . Alternatively, it has been suggested that the originality lay in the fact that extra dancers were introduced especially for the final scene; or that the actor playing Philocleon joined in. Like the literal meaning, these explanations are hard to disprove, but they do not really seem to justify the rhetorical boast of novelty. Surely the way in which Aristophanes has phrased his claim, and its emphatic position as the very last sentence of the play, suggests that he is doing something far more striking. I suggest that the real point of this claim is that no comedian had previously ended his play with a tragic style of dancing (as opposed to a festive komos or similar). Even though comedians had ‘done’ tragedy before, and even though Aristophanes had previously established himself as a comedian who was unusually preoccupied with tragedy, Wasps was the first comedy which had ended in a conspicuously ‘tragic’ (that is, paratragic) fashion. The stress lies not on +# > at the beginning of the line but on 2@ at the end. As we have already seen, ‘trugedy’ stands for comedy precisely when comedy is being compared and contrasted with tragedy. A trugic chorus, which is what we have here, is not just a comic chorus but specifically a comic chorus ‘doing’ tragedy – and that is Aristophanes’ innovation at the end of Wasps. His originality, as he has been trying to make clear all along, lies precisely in his handling of the contest of comedy versus tragedy, and so it is fitting that the last word of the play should remind us of this defining aspect of his comic art.
MacDowell and Sommerstein ad loc. consider this claim seriously: they point out that only two complete comedies predate Wasps (not counting Clouds, which is a later revision), making it impossible to falsify the claim. Sommerstein ad loc. N. W. Slater : – (comparing the end of Wealth). What is the last word? The text as printed by Wilson (and other recent editors) gives 2@ , but the reading of several manuscripts and the earliest printed edition is @ . If one were to adopt this alternative reading (as Rogers ad loc. tentatively suggests), Aristophanes’ claim would appear slightly differently – but perhaps even more emphatically – as an ironic declaration that his chorus was literally a tragic one rather than a trugic (paratragic) one. Note that the closely
Comedy versus tragedy in Wasps
As for the outcome of the contest, Aristophanes does not need to tell us whether comedy or tragedy is the winner. Anyone with any sense will know immediately which genre is better, and (more importantly) who is its most talented representative. similar - and 2- are often mixed up, though more frequently - is emended to 2-: see Ghiron-Bistagne .
c ha p te r 9
Crime and punishment Cratinus, Aeschylus’ Oresteia, and the metaphysics and politics of wealth Emmanuela Bakola It is a common notion in archaic and early classical thought that unjust wealth brings punishment upon its owner and, moreover, that while the punishment may come late, it is nevertheless inescapable. This is a dominant theme in two archaic authors whose concept of dike is fundamentally economic, namely Solon (esp. frr. and W ) and Hesiod (Works and Days). In surviving drama this theme is explored mainly by Aeschylus throughout the Oresteia, which has strong echoes of the Hesiodic and Solonian precedents. The argument of this chapter concerns the reception of the Oresteia in a comedy of bc, namely Cratinus’ Plutoi. This play, which featured a chorus of divinities of wealth, dramatized the latecoming but inescapable justice brought upon individuals accused of having amassed their riches unfairly. Cratinus’ Plutoi is arguably the earliest surviving response to the Oresteia, and actually – and most importantly – to a crucially important aspect of the trilogy which generally receives much less scholarly attention than others, namely its reflection on man’s relation to wealth as a fundamental dimension of dike. Even more importantly, Plutoi
The argument of this chapter, first presented at the Classical Association annual meeting, develops some brief thoughts published in Bakola : –. I would like to thank Pat Easterling, Chris Carey, Oliver Taplin, Richard Seaford and Manuela Dal Borgo for their invaluable advice and insights, from which this chapter benefited greatly. For the economic perception of dike in archaic and early classical authors, and the Hesiodic influence on this, see Gagarin and . However, contra Gagarin, dike is not primarily a legal term; ‘natural order’ (i.e. ‘balance’ as natural principle) is an indisputable part of the semantic spectrum of the term in the same period: cf. Lloyd-Jones ; Burian : –. Crucially, the ‘natural order’ is often conceived of as disturbed or upheld by human economic behaviour and the way in which human beings position themselves with regard to the Earth’s productive powers and resources (as especially in Hesiod, where, again, man’s punishment or reward concerns the natural processes which bring him wealth: the land’s and the livestock’s fertility, favourable conditions for productivity and prosperity, and their opposites: cf. Hes. Op. –). See also Perysinakis : –, –, and ch. passim. More recent and nuanced discussions of the economic dimension of archaic and early classical dike are found in Nelson : –; Balot : –. The principal reference work here remains Solmsen . However, the rich Aeschylean debt to Hesiod (esp. Works and Days) and Solon deserves much further exploration.
Crime and punishment
reflects an understanding that in the Oresteia man’s relationship to wealth is conceived of as part of an even larger concern which governs the trilogy: the relationship of man to the Earth and its resources. The aim of this chapter is to show that our study of Cratinus’ engagement with the Aeschylean trilogy may have a profound effect on our understanding not only of Cratinus, but also of Aeschylus. The discourse with tragedy, therefore, works in two directions, since comedy elucidates and defines both itself, but even more so, its tragic model. To begin with, the comic text is multifariously shaped by the Aeschylean subtext and by the Hesiodic and Solonian discourses that both Aeschylus and Cratinus appropriate. The shaping of the comic text is not restricted to its themes, motifs, characterization of its chorus and its overall structure; for, as the Plutoi recontextualizes the socio-political commentary of the Oresteia, in particular, the discourse of comedy about itself in relation to its political function and role is also conditioned by that of its model and by cultural change. This has a profound effect on the poetic voice: on a first level, Plutoi constitutes further invaluable evidence for the self-positioning of the comic author in relation to the tragic master. Even more interestingly, it also suggests Cratinus’ construction of an ‘Aeschylean’ anti-hegemonic political stance, which coheres with the Hesiodic and Solonian stances which he also evokes. However, it is the opposite direction of the discourse which is even more intriguing and revealing: for, as it emerges, Cratinus’ use of the Oresteia reflects an early (and today largely ignored) understanding of the Aeschylean trilogy, one which privileges the notion of the Earth and the human relationship to it. This is an understanding which relates the trilogy much more firmly to other Aeschylean works, especially Persians and Seven Against Thebes, than most modern readings do, and one which coheres with – and elucidates – unappreciated evidence from Aristophanes’ Frogs as reception of Aeschylean tragedy. The argument of this chapter develops in four stages: in the first stage, it revisits two widely recognized intertexts of Plutoi, namely the opening
The few scholarly works which engage with the discourse of wealth in the Oresteia (Jones : –; Di Benedetto : –, –; P. W. Rose : –, –; Seaford e.g. : – and : –), do so predominantly in relation to the Agamemnon; Crane ; Collard : xxxviii–xxxix; and Bakewell engage with the theme somewhat more narrowly. However, none of these scholars discusses the role of the Erinyes and especially the Earth, which is indispensable for our understanding of the discourse of wealth in the Oresteia. See Bakola : – (on his ‘Aeschylean’ self-presentation); – on Cratinus’ Drapetides and Aeschylus’ Hiketides; – and on Dionysalexandros and Aeschylus’ Theoroi or Isthmiastai; – on Eumenides and other Aeschylean references.
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scene of Prometheus Lyomenos and Hesiod’s account of the Golden Age in Works and Days. By exploring in more depth the argument that the Plutoi are modelled on the tragic Titans of Prometheus Lyomenos as well as the daimones ploutodotai of Hesiod, and by discussing salient elements of the nature of the chthonic deities and the Earth, it highlights the importance of the chthonic nature of both literary models – and as a result, its significance, and that of the Earth, in Cratinus’ construction of his Wealth-gods. It also points out another important dimension of the Plutoi, namely their enactment of the Solonian-Hesiodic concept of delayed punishment for unjust wealth. The second section of the argument turns to the Oresteia and demonstrates the importance of the notion of ‘wealth’. It focuses especially on the fact that ‘wealth’ is conceived, more specifically, as ‘wealth of the Earth’ across the Aeschylean trilogy and that it is consistently correlated with the chthonic Erinyes. The third, synthesizing, section shows that the chorus of Plutoi has been fashioned on the model of the Aeschylean Erinyes more closely than on any other model, thereby establishing strong thematic and structural links between Plutoi and the Oresteia. It is finally shown that by engaging so closely with the Aeschylean trilogy and its salient theme of wealth, Cratinus recontextualizes its socio-political stance; he thus enhances the ‘Aeschylean’ dimension of his own poetics, in particular, by appropriating a largely ‘Aeschylean’ anti-hegemonic political posture. cratinus’ plutoi and its intertexts: chthonic deities, wealth and delayed punishment For a fragmentary play, Plutoi is attested relatively well, with substantial papyrus fragments surviving from its opening scene, from an episodic scene and from an agonal scene. In addition to those, eight more fragments have been preserved through indirect tradition. Among those, most revealing are the fragments from the opening and the agonal scenes, especially because they tell us the most about the role and characterization of Cratinus’ chorus. The fragment of the opening scene (PSI fr. a – = fr. .– ) preserves part of the anapaestic parodos of a chorus of Titans, who present themselves by the name of Plutoi (multiplications of the chthonic deity Plutos/Pluton, king of the Underworld), and who arrive having just
PSI xi and PBrux. e ‘P. Cumont’ = fr. . For a full discussion of the play and for earlier scholarship, see Bakola : –; Farioli : –; Ruffell : –. All translations are Jeffrey Henderson’s, in Rusten (), adapted. Cf. Farioli : –; Mazon : .
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been set free from the tyrannical power of Zeus and intending to visit their ancient brother (ll. – and –): . . . . ' [ (< .) ’ 5 [ - [
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[ ( ) ( ' .[ * ( ( ![ (< .) m ’ H ’ - [Z >!’ S. _ ' [ [ ( ’ >!’ ’ [N# c . ’ N - !’ [ " ’ 6 W . 6 [ . ( ) L ' " 6 ] [ . . . . [ [ c] /[ [ ] _ [ [ ] . [
. . . bad[ (Cho.) Well, even though revealing [ deserving to win, [ to accept whatever comes; [ that these judges, weighed down by events, [will not be?] patient. ( ) For me too this is[ of my previous[ (Cho.) But why we said [we have come you shall now hear. We are by birth Titans and used to be called Wealth-gods when [Cronus reigned. That was the time when he swallowed his children alive with whetstones with a mighty gulping sound/ swallowing up your hooting and you were happy with that. ( ) Then secretly from Zeus you . . . (or Then you steal Zeus . . . ) ](?) depose . . . Cronus[ ]and the Titans[ ]bond(?s)[
[c. lines missing] 6 5. [ (< .) : ' 2 #, . ["2 ' , (’ >! 6 . [ * 6 1 ( [ ] . . !6 S. ]4 $ I] #’ >.
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(Cho.) Since the tyrannical rule [is over and the people are in power, we rushed here to our [(?) kinsman and ancient brother seeking him, though he’s now decrepit. ](our) first excuse on the other hand] you will soon hear.
In the fragment from the agonal scene, the Plutoi take on the role of prosecutors in the trial of Hagnon, on the charge that he amassed riches unjustly (esp. l. ):
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(< .) ...[ [ : . . . . [ ’ [ " 2 [ ( 2 "[ % , !2", @[ *" +! 2" . . ( ) 2 W " [2 @ #A ( 8 @ * . 2. [ x (’ ( . [ (< .) Q * 2 !’ F. [> . ( ) , # 2 . ’ 5 #[ %# !’ ’ ’ *, ' [][] , [ (< .) 5 $ - . [ ]-" [ ^ - 6 N [ ] [ [ ! 2 ! 6 [ ] [ ( ) Q "42 [] . [ ( ) ) $ , ] [
for giving [ as one of the old generation[ to me then . . . [ turn to speak[ this . . . to combine [ My spirit, bestir your tongue well-balanced roused for delivery of speech. ( ) The summoned witnesses [ must [stand] here; it’s desirable [? to investigate] the man from Steiria, whom they call Hagnon now, and his deme [ (Cho.) This man here is unjustly wealthy; let him [pay for it! ( ) But he’s inherited his wealth, and [had] everything he owns from the start (/ from office) some [from . . . or from . . . ] (Cho.) I’ll improve by explaining [] more clearly Nicias was a porter [ hired by Peithias [ ( ) He has told lies about this[ ( ) Well I, by Zeus, won’t
As noted earlier, the identifiable engagement of this comedy with earlier literature does not concern only the Oresteia. In the characteristically
Crime and punishment
‘omnivorous’ manner of comedy, in the opening scene Plutoi alludes to at least two more intertexts in a strikingly close fashion: Prometheus Lyomenos and Hesiod’s account of the Golden Age in Works and Days. These, as will be demonstrated, are closely interwoven with the Aeschylean intertext and form an inextricable part of the effect of Cratinus’ engagement with Aeschylus. A re-analysis of the details of these intertextual allusions is beyond the scope of this chapter; however, a number of points should be made as they are important for the present argument, especially in respect of the characterization and function of Cratinus’ chorus. (i) Prometheus Lyomenos. The first point concerns the degree of closeness in which the opening scene of Plutoi refashions the corresponding scene of Prometheus Lyomenos. In the latter the tragic Titans had explained upon arrival that their reason for coming was to visit their enfeebled brother Prometheus. They had just been freed from their long imprisonment in Tartarus to which they had been condemned by Zeus. In Cratinus’ highly allusive parodos, composed in the same metre as its tragic model, the Titans say that they have also just become free from their bonds in the Underworld, and have come to visit their brother, also described as enfeebled (fr. .– ). This striking similarity in dramatic situation is strengthened by the fact that the register, style and, as far as we can see, staging of the Plutoi opening scene allude copiously to that of its model. The comedy’s debt to the Prometheus Lyomenos is a heavy one. (ii) Hesiod’s account of the Golden Age and the daimones ploutodotai. The Titans of Prometheus Lyomenos are not the only literary figures who have been identified as lying beneath the characterization of Cratinus’ chorus of Plutoi. The Plutoi, as they say in line of the papyrus fragment, are Wealth-gods who had once lived at the time of Cronus. As such, as many scholars have pointed out, the Plutoi clearly draw on one more literary identity, that of the Hesiodic Golden Race of the age of Cronus as described at Works and Days –. Fragment gives us an idea about
For the debt of Plutoi to the Prometheus Lyomenos and the Hesiodic Golden Age see (most recently) Bakola : – and –; Farioli : , ; Ruffell : –. My own analysis of the Hesiodic intertext is revised and significantly expanded here, below. TrGF fr. , quoted by Arr. Peripl. M. Eux. : At least the Titans say there to Prometheus: ‘We have come . . . to view your labours, Prometheus, and these chains which you endure’. Although in [Aesch.] PV – we learnt that Zeus had imprisoned the Titans in Tartarus along with Cronus (cf. Hes. Theog. ff., ), in this tragedy the Titans were free. As PV – foreshadowed, in the meantime Zeus may have relented. For Prometheus’ enfeeblement, see Aesch. TrGF F .–. See above, n. . First suggested by Mazon : – and adopted by most scholars. See most recently Ruffell : . Contra Farioli : –.
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how Cratinus may have reworked this theme in Plutoi, which is generally understood to have had a prominent utopian dimension:
; , / W c N 6 , V U 1 , 1 ’ \. /"/ 2 /$ @ Those who in days past had Cronus as king, when they played dice with loaves, and in the exercise yards dough from Aegina was deposited, ripe and flowing with lumps.
However, there is one part of Plutoi whose debt to the Hesiodic account of the Golden Race of men has not been properly appreciated, namely the partly surviving agonal scene where the Plutoi are shown to prosecute Hagnon as 2 ( (fr. .–). In order to appreciate this connection, it is important to understand a crucial element concerning the nature of the Golden Race of men after their death as described at Works and Days –, namely the fact that they are described as chthonic divinities: * , ( " 24 ' " . ] 6 2 / 2 !
, #! , -> ! @ !$ ,
b = -2 2 #" % U" R - @ ’ L , 2 A ( " / %#
But since the earth covered up this race, by the plans of great Zeus they are fine spirits haunting the earth, guardian-watchers of mortal human beings: they watch over judgements and cruel deeds, clad in invisibility, walking everywhere upon the earth, givers of wealth; and this kingly honour they received (trans. Most , adapted).
After they perished and went to the Underworld, the Golden Race of men are said to have become daimones ploutodotai. Thus they are described as spirits of the dead and as divinities of wealth at the same time. On account of their association with these two elements, the Underworld and wealth, it is clear that the Hesiodic daimones are seen as chthonic divinities. This
See Ruffell for discussions of other utopian comedies with Hesiodic echoes. Cratin. fr. is cited by Athenaeus alongside Crates’ Beasts (fr. ), Teleclides’ Amphictyons (fr. ), and Pherecrates’ Mine-workers (fr. ), under the general idea of ‘descriptions of a life without work in comedy’. " ’ in fr. . is another Hesiodic echo, recalling Cronus’ devouring of his children in Hes. Theog. and . For the fundamental dual association of the chthonic divinities with the dark realms of the dead and with wealth and growth, see Burkert : ; for the dead, more specifically, as sources of wealth, see Ar. fr. . and Hippoc. Vict. . ‘all growth comes from the dead’; cf. R. Parker : –. The connecting concept behind the two ostensibly contrasting notions is, of course, the
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is also why – something which still remains unnoticed in scholarship – in Works and Days they are described as having both a benevolent, or rewarding (ll. and ), and an avertive, that is potentially punitive function (ll. – and –). To be more precise, the ambivalence of the Hesiodic daimones correlates with human beings’ just or unjust relation to wealth, as they not only grant them riches and protection in their activities but also keep watch on them, their accumulation of wealth and the judgements which pertain to economic matters. If we realize the ambivalent nature of these chthonic beings in relation to wealth, we can clearly see the full extent of Cratinus’ debt to the Hesiodic account of the Golden Race: for, while in the parodos (and probably at the end, as I will suggest) the Plutoi evoke the positive aspects of their model, in the agon, as watchers and punishers of the unjustly wealthy of Athens, they also embody the negative functions of the Hesiodic chthonic . Our knowledge of these two intertextual relationships enriches our understanding of the chorus of Cratinus’ Plutoi in a number of significant ways. First and foremost, it makes clear that the Plutuses’ chthonic nature and origin in the Underworld is a salient aspect of their identity, not only because of the chthonic nature of the king of the Underworld Plutos/Pluton (whom they represent as his multiplications), but also because
Earth, which is not only the place of the dead, but also the primary source of all growth and wealth. Scullion , and provide the most balanced analysis of the validity and applicability of the concept of the ‘chthonic’, as opposed to modern scholarly attempts at questioning the distinction between ‘Olympian’ and ‘chthonic’ (although a more precise definition of what Scullion means by ‘Earth’ is necessary). The ambivalent nature of the chthonians has long been recognized, although no scholarly authority makes any reference to these Hesiodic passages: see, above all, Henrichs , with n. for earlier bibliography; see also Lloyd-Jones a. The element of ambivalence is crucial for understanding that Hes. Op. – and – refer to the same divine beings (as argued by Paley : , Wilamowitz-Moellendorf : and ; Bona Quaglia : ; Clay : –, and others on different grounds). M. L. West and most scholars before and after him believe that -> ! @ !$ means ‘guardians’ of men, whereas -> ! @ !$ at Op. – (which echoes the previous passage almost verbatim: Op. –∼–), means ‘watchers of mortal men’. Thus, the two groups of -> have been distinguished because of the perceived discrepancy between the ‘benevolent’ and ‘policing’ functions in the first and second passage respectively (and as a result Op. – have been deleted in most editions as interpolation; see M. L. West ad loc.). Nevertheless, not only can ->5 mean both ‘guardian’ and ‘watcher’ (see LSJ s.v.), but the chthonic nature of these beings explains perfectly their ambivalent nature as both ‘guardians’ and ‘watchers’ and supports their identification. It should be noted that these deities’ activity upon the Earth (Op. , , ) does not tell against their chthonic nature, as chthonic deities, like the god Plutos in Hes. Theog. –, are thought to review human activity on the Earth. #! , therefore, means that the daimones ‘haunt the earth’, cf. LSJ s.v. Cf. the context in which the three thousand -> are described, which is about perversion of justice for profit (Hes. Op. –). The second phylakes’ preoccupation with the just or unjust accumulation of wealth coheres with the first phylakes’ preoccupation with dike (as natural order) once we take into account Hesiod’s economic perception of dike (see n. ). See also n. .
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it is central in both intertexts which inform their characterization. Their chthonic dimension is, as has begun to emerge and will be further explained below, paramount when it comes to our assessment of their function in Plutoi. Ultimately, only if we realize the strong connection of the concept of wealth with the chthonic deities and the Earth, can we appreciate Cratinus’ debt to the Aeschylean Oresteia. Furthermore, the intertextual relationship of this play to the Prometheus Lyomenos provides one more important dimension of the function of Plutoi, this time concerning the timing of their intervention: their long imprisonment in Tartarus, which was related in the opening scene (at fr. .–) and of which much was made in the Prometheus trilogy, and their concern for explaining the reasons of their long absence upon arrival suggest that the avengers of unjust wealth appear from the depths of the Earth after a very long time to execute their role. (iii) The relationship of the Plutoi to the Aeschylean Erinyes as working hypothesis. The main elements which emerged from the exploration of the intertexts of Plutoi (chthonic nature, connection with wealth, delayed punishment of unjust wealth) are significant and merit further exploration, as they open up a range of possibilities. In addition to them, another element emerges as a possible hint that there is yet another dimension in the characterization of Plutoi: the way in which they present themselves as a chorus early on in the comedy: (< .) m ) H ’ - [Z >!’ S. _ ' [ [ ( ’ >!’ ’ [N# c .
(Cho.) But why we said [we have come you shall now hear. We are by birth Titans and used to be called Wealth-gods when [Cronus reigned.
Beyond alluding to the Hesiodic daimones, as Titans, and hence children of Earth and situated in the Underworld, the Plutoi would also be recognized as chthonic powers: Hes. Theog. ; [Aesch.] PV ; Aesch. Eum. . The perversion of justice for profit in Hes. Op. – is punished in ways which strongly evoke the reaction of chthonic deities and the Earth herself: infertility, terseness, poverty and disease. Conversely, justice is rewarded with fertility, agricultural growth and wealth. Cf. Ar. fr. , where the chorus of Heroes express the chthonic concern against unjust acquisition of wealth: & | @ @ @ !@ , | ! ( W 2 | " > | > ' 2 . The dramatic time of the Titans’ release from the Underworld is at least thirteen generations after Prometheus’ chaining: cf. PV –, and Prometheus Lyomenos TrGF F , with M. Griffith a ad loc.
Crime and punishment
As has been observed by numerous scholars, this resembles in structure and diction the self-presentation of the chorus of Erinyes in Aeschylus’ Eumenides (–): > 2 , ] 6 A & ^26 . " , r ’ j ! . . . You shall learn the whole of it concisely, daughter of Zeus. We are Night’s eternal children, and in our home beneath the Earth we are called the Curses.
We have strong lexical and contextual links between the two passages: a second-person address using the future of 2 ! , a self-identification through genealogy, a naming that uses the first-person plural middle/passive of " . This, together with the element of the chorus of divinities, itself relatively infrequent, makes the possibility that there is an intertextual connection between the two passages quite strong. These are not formulae of choral self-identification, since no parallels in extant tragedy can be found. Besides, it should be pointed out that Cratinus certainly had an interest in the Eumenides of Aeschylus. He himself had written a play of the same name which presumably featured a chorus connected to the Erinyes. However, the ascertaining of a link between these two passages will have to wait until we take a more global look at the relationship between Plutoi and the Oresteia. As will emerge, the intertextual relationship of the Plutoi and the Oresteia runs much deeper, and in terms of its impact in shaping the comedy, it supersedes even the engagement with the Hesiodic and pseudoAeschylean models. The relationship becomes clear on consideration of a central theme of Plutoi, that of unjust wealth and its punishment.
Since Schmid and St¨ahlin : n. and Pieters : –. See most recently Bakola : –; Farioli : . All translations of the Oresteia are from Collard , unless otherwise indicated. For Cratinus’ Eumenides and its relationship to Aeschylus’ play on the basis of the title see Bakola : –. The relationship of Plutoi to the Oresteia demonstrated here depends only on Cratinus’ familiarity with the trilogy, not on the case that Eumenides was the original title of the final play. There is also a probable allusion to Eumenides at Drapetides fr. ; see Bakola : . For the authenticity of the Prometheus plays, see M. Griffith passim; M. Griffith a: –; M. L. West : –. Recent discussions which defend the authenticity of PV are Pattoni and Podlecki : –. Yet as M. L. West : notes, although no single feature of the play can in isolation prove the play spurious, what counts essentially against its authenticity is the accumulation of a large number of such features diverging from Aeschylean practice, many of them, in fact, in the direction of Sophoclean or Euripidean practice. Prometheus Pyrphoros and Prometheus Lyomenos constituted a trilogy together with PV: cf. M. L. West : –; M. Griffith a: with n. and –. The trilogy was probably composed and produced between and : see M. Griffith : –, –; M. L. West : –; Bees passim. Moreover, the audience knew the name of the author (which may or may not be in our records) or they at least thought they
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In the other fragments of PSI and in PBrux. e there are no clear signs for the development of paratragic play with the Prometheus trilogy. Yet even if the specific parody of the Prometheus trilogy was abandoned or (more probably) relaxed after the opening scene, engagement with tragedy altogether was not. It has already been noted that in fragment .–, which preserves part of the ‘trial’ of Hagnon and in all probability comes from the agon, the chorus still uses a consistently elevated register (cf. ll. –). As will be shown, this is part of an even larger paratragic scheme. unjust wealth, the ‘wealth of the earth’ and the erinyes in the oresteia As already mentioned, in drama the notions that wealth acquired and used unjustly brings punishment upon its owner and that, although punishment may come late, it is nevertheless inescapable are explored by Aeschylus and, tellingly for the paratragic dimension of our play, throughout the Oresteia. Something which is very often disregarded is that the discourse of dike in the Aeschylean trilogy is inextricably bound with the discourse of economics, as most often in archaic Greek thought, including, above all, Hesiod and Solon, on which the Oresteia draws heavily. This is vital. On a close reading of the Oresteia, one realizes that the discourse of dike focuses persistently on man’s unjust relation to wealth, as regards both acquisition and use. This, as was suggested earlier, is a fundamental strand of an even more salient and overarching idea which the Oresteia explores, the problematic relation of man to the Earth and its resources. Two clarifications are necessary at this point: the first one concerns the notion of ‘wealth’ in the Oresteia, especially the fact that it is not restricted to the material kind of wealth alone, nor to its acquisition alone. Indeed, in line with the technique of the Aeschylean ‘unfolding’, ‘wealth’ emerges as a dynamic concept, and owing to the predominance of the notion of the Earth in the trilogy, it progressively expands beyond material wealth and ultimately includes everything that the Earth begets for man. Having first been introduced through the notion of kerdos, the desire for material gain (which motivates crimes of hybris) in the all-important sacrilege image at Agamemnon –, the notion of ‘wealth’ progressively
knew it: according to West’s bold but attractive hypothesis (M. L. West : –) the trilogy could have been produced by Aeschylus’ son Euphorion in the name of his father. Cf. Sommerstein : –. A technique at the heart of Aeschylean poetry, best demonstrated in the analysis of the Oresteia by Lebeck , esp. –.
Crime and punishment
amplifies and acquires ever-more significant and poignant connotations. It becomes, especially during and immediately after the ‘carpet scene’, one of the most dominant themes of the trilogy which drives it until the very end: the ‘wealth of the Earth’, a highly significant conceptual compound which combines material wealth, natural resources and the ultimate wealth, human life and lifeblood. The complexity of the notion of the ‘wealth of the Earth’ and its dependence on multiple strands of dramatic meaning (above all those of religion/ritual, economics, imagery, dramaturgy and gender) suggest that its analysis demands a full-length discussion elsewhere. Here, the intertextual relationship with Plutoi requires one to focus mostly on the discourse of ‘material’ and, especially, ‘unjust material wealth’ in the trilogy. Indeed, despite the notion’s progressively amplified semantics, ‘wealth’ as ‘material wealth’ is central in nearly all the choral odes and a large part of the dramatic action of the first play, always connected with the disruption of dike. It is through this consistent discourse that by Agamemnon and throughout the first play ‘unjust wealth’ emerges as the perennial cycle of satiety, greed and, finally, abuse, destruction and waste of wealth, and the accusation is persistently directed at the elite oikoi. Eumenides returns to these problematics in order to give a final solution to the fundamental problem of man’s relationship to wealth and to the Earth itself. In other words, the discourse of ‘wealth’ returns, with striking echoes of Agamemnon, as the trilogy draws to a close, namely in the choral odes in the second part of the final play and in its final scene. The second clarification concerns one of the most significant features of this complex discourse of wealth, which has also remained unnoticed: that punishment of unjust wealth throughout the trilogy is associated explicitly with
Human blood and human life are conceived of as wealth in Aeschylus, and more precisely, as the ultimate wealth that the Earth begets. In the Oresteia, having been symbolically enacted in the ‘carpet scene’ (and suggested by implication in the parodos and the first stasimon), this idea is explicitly articulated in the choral ode which closes it (esp. Ag. –). Hence, during the ‘carpet scene’ and thereafter material wealth (by which one should also understand ‘natural resources’, namely the Earth’s resources, as clearly demonstrated at Ag. – – as we will see below) and human life together constitute the idea of the ‘wealth of the Earth’. Across the Oresteia the ‘wealth of the Earth’ is abused and destroyed by man on two interconnected levels: through greed and waste of wealth on one hand, and commodification and destruction of human life on the other. As the concept of wealth develops and the notion of the Earth takes centre stage, in Choephori and the first part of the Eumenides human life and lifeblood dominate the semantics of ‘wealth’ more than material wealth per se – although material wealth retains an important role: see below. However, both aspects of the Oresteian ‘wealth’ return with equal force in the choral ode of Eum. ff. Man’s gendered problematic relationship with the Earth and its wealth is finally ‘resolved’ (albeit not without ambiguity) at the end of the Eumenides. See the penultimate section of this chapter. For the role of the Choephori in the discourse of wealth see n. above.
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the Erinyes. The Erinyes, as we will see, have a central role in the entirety of the trilogy’s problematics, making an entry as early as Agamemnon – , maintaining a pervasive presence and, ultimately, determining the meaning of the final scene. Having both these points in mind, we can now observe how the discourse of wealth unfolds in the Oresteia, and how it is consistently correlated with the Erinyes as enforcers of dike. In the first stasimon of Agamemnon (–) it is suggested that Paris’, Agamemnon’s and Menelaus’ acts of hybris are inextricably bound with their pathology of koros, the complex condition which includes not only satiety but also greed, as in Solon, on whose poetry this ode draws heavily. The reflections of this ode, which implicate all three individuals in crimes associated with wealth (violation of the sacred in the name of profit, commodification and waste of human life with an eye to wealth, satiety
Easterling , esp. , stresses the continuity of the role of the Erinyes across the trilogy. See also Macleod : –. For the free alternation between singular and plural of the Eriny(e)s, see Easterling : . See esp. Ag. –. As Lebeck : has acutely observed, in this ode’s complex array of images and reflections, Paris and Agamemnon mirror one another in terms of guilt, and Menelaus is also entangled in the same nexus of blame. Most commentators, including Lebeck, do not attribute to koros the importance that it deserves in terms of the three individuals’ motivation and responsibility. The reason seems to be that koros is usually perceived as a passive condition, i.e. ‘satiety’, ‘excess’. However, a major aspect of the Aeschylean koros is insatiability, acquisitiveness, greed (hence : > 2 6 means ‘from his insatiable desire for wealth’; see below nn. –), and it can be shown that, along with other motives, it stands behind Agamemnon’s and Menelaus’ responsibility for the Trojan War and Paris’ theft of Helen. Beyond the Solonian echo (see n. ), the reasoning includes (but is not restricted to) the following points: (i) the altar image in –, where koros is first introduced, maps onto Clytemnestra’s strikingly similar image in –; koros is thus illuminated by the earlier kerdos (desire for profit). This is confirmed later on by Eumenides –, where the altar image is used again with the same connotations, and in a context bristling with echoes of Agamemnon: there the term kerdos has replaced its synonym koros (see below); (ii) the altar-image of Ag. – is immediately preceded by an explicit disavowal of insatiable acquisitiveness: ‘May I have wealth without the taint of trouble, enough to satisfy a man of sense’ (Ag. –; trans. Sommerstein ) which refers to the ability to control insatiability; (iii) in Ag. – Agamemnon and Paris are targeted together by the accusation of acquisitiveness in connection with the war. Paris, in particular, whom the play brands repeatedly as a member of a house teeming with excess, is targeted with language of theft and robbery (Ag. , cf. , –). The perceived economic value of Helen, important already in the Iliad (Wohl : ch. ), is an important dimension of this. (iv) Helen is a precious commodity not only for Paris but also for Menelaus, whose erotic desire for her is merged with his desire for other, more transgressive things (–). That greed is part of Menelaus’ transgressive motivation becomes gradually clear by the consequences of his desire, portrayed immediately afterwards through the suggestive image of the exchange of the ashes and urns of the soldiers for gold (–). Koros means insatiability in Aeschylus’ Persians (cf. Rosenbloom : –; ), a play which develops the discourse on wealth, dike and the Earth in a way strikingly similar to the Oresteia. See Anhalt : –; Balot : –; and Helm , none of whom, however, discusses this passage in Agamemnon. Nevertheless, it is widely accepted that there is a rich Solonian subtext in the first stasimon of this play. Theognis uses koros in the same sense in frr. – and – W ; (cf. Nagy : –; Helm : –).
Crime and punishment
and yet insatiable greed), climax with the suggestion that the Erinyes may delay punishing, but eventually do punish such acts (Ag. –): @ 2 * V !
, ’ )0 > # 2#6 3 ’ V 2 2# / / 2 ! ’ 2 . . . ........................... ’ V-! 3/ A ’ j ! ’ I *6 7 W ’ V / .
For the gods do not fail to take aim against those who have killed many, and in time the black Furies enfeeble him who succeeds against justice, reversing his fortune and corroding his life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. I approve unresented prosperity; I wish I may neither sack cities nor as captive myself see my life under others. (trans. Sommerstein , adapted)
The idea of unjust wealth and its punishment is examined further in the second stasimon of Agamemnon. The Solonian overtones are here as strong as in the first stasimon, since at the ode’s heart lies the contemplation of the adverse effects of unjust wealth on the wider oikos and the community, an idea predominant in Solon (and appropriated from Hesiod, see Op. ). Lines –, which explicitly reflect on the unjust wealth of elite oikoi, point, at their climax, to the revenge of the daimon of the house. This female divinity (Ag. –), as Collard has rightly pointed out, is meant to be understood as the Erinys, who once again is said to exact late but inescapable punishment (cf. Ag. , "1 " # ).
In the earlier stanzas of the ode (–) the chorus reflects on Helen as destruction and contemplates the terrible consequences of Paris’ abduction of her on the entire Trojan community, including his own oikos. The ode closes with three stanzas on insolent prosperity (–). What is the connection between the two parts of the ode? The first stasimon made it explicit that it was Paris’ koros which motivated his abduction of Helen and the abuse of Menelaus’ xenia. In this choral lyric his oikos and the entire Trojan community are emphatically shown to have endorsed and legitimized his crime through the rituals of marriage (–). By doing so and by delighting in her as an agalma ploutou (–), they have been implicated in Paris’ koros-guilt. Unjust wealth, its effect on communities and its punishment seem to be the connecting idea behind the two parts of the stasimon. See Collard : . There is a series of identifications which construct the image of the Erinys and her avenging action in this ode: Erinys ∼ Wrath in –; Helen ∼ lion cub (as a primary reference) ∼ priest of Ate ∼ Erinys in –; black daimon of Ate ∼ Erinys in –. It is not only Paris and the Trojan oikos in our text who are punished by the power represented by the Eriny(e)s. In the case of Menelaus, the horrific storm which eliminates the entire fleet of the Atreid brothers and, as we are meant to understand, takes Menelaus’ life also is, in fact, a victory-hymn of the Erinyes (). After Paris and the Trojan oikos, it is plainly suggested, the Erinyes have started punishing the Atreids for their koros and the crimes it bred.
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- ) / " "2 , " !" - 6 3/ (! ’ V ! , ) ! ># " / .1> . # ) V - . . 6 2/' % ' , -" ) . " .
j *!2 . . - ' H/ ' 1 2 / @ H/ ) T !), 6 > - 2, V# , ! ! { , . " ( . ] ' ' 2 $ , ) . #2 ) %! W #@ 3 ([] . . .
Long spoken among men, there exists an old saying that a man’s property grown fully great has offspring, not dying childless; his life’s good fortune bears shoots of insatiable woe. I differ from others, alone in my thinking: it is the impious deed which later on begets more deeds that resemble their own parentage; for to houses upright and just fine children are destined forever. Ancient insolence is wont to breed youthful insolence in evil men sooner or later, when the appointed day comes for birth, rancour rising afresh, and a daimon unfightable invincible unholy in boldness, a daimon in black Ruin for a house, resembling its parents. Justice gleams in houses foul with smoke, doing honour to the righteous man; but gold-bespangled mansions where hands are unclean she leaves with her eyes turned away . . .
The second stasimon climaxes with the contemplation of this idea and powerfully prepares the way for the ‘carpet scene’, Agamemnon’s trampling on the red tapestries, where the notions of unjust wealth and its punishment are physically enacted. Several questions and possible objections may arise at this point: whilst Agamemnon can be conceived of symbolically to enact ‘unjust wealth’ by way of his highly significant action of trampling on the dark red tapestries, are we meant to understand that there is a connection between this enactment and his murder? And, more importantly, can the Erinyes be shown to have anything to do with his murder – as punishment? We shall shortly see so, as well as that the multiple levels of determination of the heavily debated ‘responsibility/guilt of Agamemnon’ can be read in
I.e. abuse and destruction of both wealth and life, see above.
Crime and punishment
the light of ‘unjust wealth’ as enacted symbolically in this scene. However, we should first seek the answer to another important question which has in the meantime arisen, namely why the Erinyes would be associated with wealth in the first place. Modern scholarship suggests that in the mid fifth century the Erinyes are perceived as agents of retribution after violation of justice (especially in familial crimes). However, despite being correct on a general level, this explanation of their role in the Oresteia seems insufficient, because it does not explain their intervention in relation to crimes associated with wealth, which, as will be further shown below, pervades the entire trilogy. There is something even more important involved here, namely the Erinyes’ nature as chthonic deities. As chthonic deities, like the king of the Underworld (Hades or Plutos/Plouton), Persephone and Hecate, and like the Hesiodic daimones plutodotai analysed earlier, the Erinyes are associated with wealth, an association which we find not only, as argued here, in the Oresteia, but also in Aristophanes’ Wealth, and elsewhere. Wealth in the Oresteia is, as suggested earlier, conceived of explicitly not only as ‘material wealth’, but also and above all, as wealth of the Earth, the primary source of wealth. As chthonic deities, and as such, guardians of the Earth and, consequently, guardians of the ‘proper’ use of its natural resources, and of the natural order, or dike – in the Oresteia they are punishers of unjust wealth, in the form of excess, greed, abuse and waste. Having this dimension of the Erinyes in mind, it is fitting to return to the text and remind ourselves of Clytemnestra’s words of extraordinary danger and transgression in the carpet scene, as Agamemnon is hybristically encouraged to trample on the red tapestries (Ag. –):
For example, Sommerstein : –, who also points out their deterring role. Sewell-Rutter : ch. is the most recent treatment of the subject and focuses on the issue of inherited guilt. While the Erinyes are said to be originally guardians of the natural order, this is not considered in relation to their chthonic nature. Explicitly in Cho. –; cf. Garvie ad loc. In Plut. –, Penia is likened to an Erinys when she tries to stop Blepsidemus and Chremylus from giving Wealth back his sight, and hence his ability to grant riches to the poor and just. The connection of wealth with injustice, argued by Penia-Erinys herself (Plut. ff.), permeates the entire play. The Erinys is connected with wealth and the Earth in Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes, where the image of the Erinys/Curse develops in a manner very similar to that of the Erinys/daimon of the oikos in the Oresteia. The second stasimon and especially Sept. – (cf. –, –) are particularly suggestive of this. It is also intriguing that in the cyclic Thebaid fr. Oedipus’ curse on his sons to divide the family wealth with iron attracts the attention of the Erinys. For the role of the chthonic deities as guardians of the Earth’s resources, see Burkert : . I am grateful to Pat Easterling for helping me sharpen these thoughts.
emmanuela bakola % ! – " /" ; – "- 2 -> .2 , /- . y ’ # @ W ! , V 5, %# A " ! ’ * . (Clytemnestra) The sea is there – and who shall quench it? – nurturing the juices which yield much purple worth its weight in silver, wholly renewable, the dye of vestments; there is a remedy for these here with the gods’ help, my lord; the house does not know how to be poor . . . (trans. Collard , adapted).
These words construct a very strong image of human wealth production by exploitation of natural resources. The idea of the natural productive powers’ perennial ability to renew themselves dominates the passage. It is suggested that the oikos has subjugated these powers to its own use and, above all, to its own waste. As Clytemnestra’s words enact a breathtaking degree of transgression, so Agamemnon enacts the destruction of the resources by treading on the precious textiles. So the oikos does not only waste – by harming – itself and its wealth, although this is an extremely important idea of the play and explicitly stated as such in the text (Ag. –, -! | -! ( . . . ). It is ultimately the natural productive powers of the Earth which the oikos of the Atreids wastes and treats hybristically. Crucially, the natural productive powers refer not only to material wealth and the natural resources, but, as the powerful symbol of the dark red textiles which Agamemnon and Clytemnestra are together ‘destroying’ in this scene suggests, also the ultimate wealth, human life, conceptualized across the Oresteia as the image of human blood which is endlessly shed on the Earth. As wealth is treated hybristically and with contempt, and wasted, so too is human life which, as the first stasimon in particular suggests, the Atreid oikos had commodified and wasted in the name of wealth.
This idea is amplified by the image of the sea as unquenchable; the sea, like the rest of the natural world, is part of the Aeschylean notion of ‘Earth’. For the concept see Jones : –. It is important to keep in mind that when it comes to production of natural resources and to the natural powers’ ability to generate, the concept of the Earth used by the Greeks includes our concept of the natural world and the depths of the Earth. For the more global semantics of the ‘Earth’, see Eum. –. The trilogy constructs a close parallelism between the oikos and the Earth, both as wealth-producing entities; see Bakola (forthcoming). See above, n. . This is an idea which the ode closing the carpet scene makes once again especially explicit (Ag. –), and which dominates the Cassandra scene and thereafter (see especially Lebeck : –). As nearly all commentators point out, here are symbolically recalled the blood of Iphigeneia and that of the soldiers of the Achaean army with a poignant emphasis on the loss of young life
Crime and punishment
It is the hybris towards the ‘wealth of the Earth’ (which includes the whole cycle of unjust wealth as constructed earlier: acquisition, abuse – including commodification – and waste) that most definitely imbues the scene and the house with the threatening presence of the Erinys, towards whom – as the punisher of this crime – Agamemnon walks. Crucially, it was in the second stasimon, the choral ode immediately preceding the ‘carpet scene’, and not as late as the Cassandra scene, as it is usually claimed, that the Erinys was explicitly associated with the oikos and beset it. The role of the Erinyes as punishers of unjust wealth in the case of Agamemnon is explicitly ascertained a little later: Clytemnestra suggests that it was the Erinys who armed her hand to kill Agamemnon () before she goes even further to identify herself with the Erinys, the daimon of the house (–). The role of the Erinyes as agents of punishment of the crime of unjust wealth is confirmed once again later on, when Agamemnon’s dead body is revealed wrapped in the ominous red cloth; this cloth is revealingly called ‘an evil wealth of clothing’ and ‘the woven robes of the Erinyes’: V - / . . . ( b A (Ag. –) (Clytemnestra) . . . a net with no way through . . . an evil wealth of clothing . . . .g - " )0 > 6 V -
(Ag. ) (Aegisthus) . . . when I see this man lying here in the woven robes of the Furies in a manner pleasing to me . . .
The red cloth, symbol of hybristic wealth and shed lifeblood, and – to be consistent with the analysis above – of ‘unjust wealth’ is also the instrument of punishment of the Erinyes.
(cf. the wrath of chthonic Artemis for the loss of young life in the omen of the hare at Ag. –; and the emphasis on lost hebe in Aesch. Pers. esp. –. That youth is wasted and children killed aggravates the offence against the Earth, which is not only a nurturer of crops (source of wealth), but also of children: for Earth kourotrophos see Solon fr. W and Aesch. Sept. –; cf. R. Parker : –). This is through the complex imagery of the lion cub bred in the house and Helen-Erinys as destruction of the oikos (see also above, n. ). To associate the oikos unambiguously with the Erinyes is one of the functions of the second stasimon. This was foreshadowed already at Ag. – ( . . . . M ). Here it is suggested that the wrath of the Erinys about the blood of Iphigeneia merges with Clytemnestra’s own wrath about her as her daughter. As revenge seeking the restoration of the natural order, the action of the Erinys coheres with dike in this passage (). It goes without saying that Clytemnestra’s responsibility is also determined on multiple levels.
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Furthermore, it is not only Agamemnon’s, and as we saw earlier, Paris’ and Menelaus’ punishment, with which the Erinyes are associated. Every member of the two oikoi who has been implicated in ‘unjust wealth’ sooner or later encounters the revenge of the chthonic force represented by the Erinyes. In the Atreid oikos, after Agamemnon it is the turn of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra to be punished. Clytemnestra’s crime of ‘unjust wealth’ is enacted not only in the carpet scene, but much earlier. She herself revealed her desire for the wealth of the house and the power that comes with it when she first appeared on stage (Ag. with Collard’s translation), something which she also enacted dramatically with the ‘control of the threshold’. Aegisthus’ words about the wealth of the oikos and its power in Agamemnon – confirm that this is a justified assumption, not only about her, but about the murderous pair: @ ' ( # V# @ A 6 ' , ! 1>5 / . . . (Aegisthus) From this man’s wealth I shall try to rule the citizens; any man who does not obey me I shall put under a heavy yoke.
Clytemnestra and Aegisthus are killed by Orestes inside the house in the Choephori, which has by now become associated with the ‘Erinys of the house’, and the Erinys herself is said to ‘drink the third draught of unmixed blood’ (Cho. –); when their bodies appear, in the scene which mirrors that with the dead bodies of Agamemnon, Cassandra and the red cloth (Cho. ff.), Orestes points at the same sinister device of the red cloth of the Erinyes over them, recalls the entrapment of his father by his killers and suggestively calls them robbers (Cho. –): ( t - , 5" 2 / 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . - 2 ' 5W # 52/ /- -! 2 ( . ( *6 . @, ( $1 g , !’ H- - @ A (Orestes) This is the sort of thing that a footpad might get for himself, a man who led the life of beguiling travellers and robbing them of their
See note above. Cf. Taplin : –. It is also suggested that Clytemnestra is guilty for the commodification of human life: Cho. – (treating her children like chattel); Ag. – and – (treating Cassandra like chattel).
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money . . . the ooze of blood contributes over time to spoiling the many dyes in the embroidery. I praise my father now, I lament him now, while I am here and addressing this woven thing that killed him.
The place of this cloth, the ‘evil wealth of clothing of the Erinyes’, on the bodies is highly suggestive: this powerful symbol has proven murderous not only for Agamemnon, but also for the ‘robbers’ and abusers of wealth (including human life) Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. That the pattern ‘unjust wealth-punishment by the Erinyes’ is seamlessly followed until the end and includes Orestes as its last victim can be seen from the very same scene, where the heir of the Atreid oikos reveals himself as also entangled in the cycle of abuse and destruction of the ‘wealth of the Earth’. The striking image of the destroyed expensive red dyes on the red cloth illustrates how the notions of waste of wealth and waste of lifeblood have been conflated into one another, and have become one. With a dramatic gesture pregnant with symbolic meaning, Orestes shows himself trapped inside the circle which the chorus forms around him by holding the red cloth (Cho. –): ’ *6 > 6 . . . 5’ . . . stretch it out, and standing round me in a circle, show the thing . . . (trans. Collard , adapted).
This scene demonstrates with full force how Orestes is, like the two previous generations of the oikos, guilty of the same crime against the ‘wealth of the Earth’, because he has abused and destroyed it by shedding human blood. A poignant reminder of the vicious circle in which his father and mother had been entangled is that Orestes’ motives for killing were partly economic, namely the recovery of his father’s property (Cho. ; cf. Cho. –, , Eum. –). As is to be expected, his punishment will be sought by the
The oracle Orestes receives from Apollo (Cho. –) is suggestive of the driving force of the Erinyes behind the killing. There is no need to suppose, as some commentators suggest, that the chorus (or Orestes’ attendants) are only asked to form a circle or a semi-circle around the cloth. The cloth has to be stretched out so that Orestes is fully encircled by it. The dramatic meaning of this action is enormous, supporting his portrayal as guilty, since Orestes, by being caught in the same vicious circle of blood and unjust wealth, mirrors the other two generations. See Sider : ; cf. Tarkow : . Orestes’ acquittal does, however, suggest that he is not simply to be bracketed with previous generations. At the civic level he puts an end to the tyranny and at the familial level he releases his sister. Unlike others he also acts not to increase his possessions but to restore what would normally be his. This is not to underrate the horror of matricide. However, although in certain key respects Orestes is unlike the previous generations, the unfolding of a pattern in relation to wealth across generations is clear.
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Erinyes. And indeed, at this very point Orestes sees the Erinyes coming after him (Cho. –). After a long wait and an elaborate build-up across the first and second plays, the Erinyes are finally appearing in bodily form. Crucially, they appear again in the same role as they assumed throughout Agamemnon and Choephori. They will retain this role in the third play and until the very end, as we will now see. Indeed, the concept of ‘unjust wealth’ and its punishment by the Erinyes returns forcefully in Eumenides. The echoes of Agamemnon are strong (Eum. ff.), and so is the emphasis on material wealth (which had been overriden by life and lifeblood as ‘wealth’ in the second play). In Eumenides – the Erinyes allude to the highly significant altar image of Agamemnon’s first stasimon, to reassert that there is no escape for the man who disregards justice for kerdos, for profit, and they remind their listeners of their punitive action against this crime: 6 " A / 6 j ] , " " .g !" 5 A " A In all things I say to you: respect the altar of Justice; and do not, with an eye to profit, insult and kick it down with godless feet, for retribution results.
The Erinyes’ punitive action is evoked even in the final scene, where they have been accepted by the Athenians as benevolent Eumenides/Semnai Theai, thus embodying a resolution to man’s problematic relationship with the Earth and her wealth, both material and human life. The scene is one of hope that from now on only the benevolent aspect of the Erinyes’ chthonic nature will manifest itself, and the chthonic goddesses will provide natural abundance, fertility and riches to reward human dike in a city that is ideologically constructed to embody it. However, in two unexpectedly poignant verses the goddesses are shown to retain the avertive function of their ambivalent chthonic nature, since their message of rejoicing still carries an implicit warning to the Athenians to observe moderation in their accumulation of wealth (Eum. –):
On the whole, the positive and negative aspects inherent in the Erinyes’ ambivalent chthonic nature make it more likely that their association with ‘Semnai Theai’ (cf. Eum. ) and ‘Eumenides’ was a traditional religious concept before Aeschylus and certainly before Euripides; see Lloyd-Jones a passim and Henrichs : –; cf. also Macleod : –; contra Brown and Sommerstein : –.
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# ’ . > 2 # ’, 6 g Greetings and may you rejoice in moderate measure of wealth. Greetings, people of Athens! (trans. Collard , adapted)
The above analysis shows that there is a remarkable continuity in the image and role of the Erinyes across the Oresteia and a consistent correlation with the theme of wealth. The ubiquitous role of chthonic forces and the theme of wealth across the trilogy are bound together by the enormous emphasis on the idea of the Earth as the ‘power below’, which is dominant in so many aspects: dramatic, dramaturgical, imagistic, religious, cultic, philosophical. The persistent reflection on man’s relation to wealth across the trilogy is inextricably bound with man’s physical and metaphysical relation to the Earth. It is on that basis that wealth is presented as the ultimate measure for the natural order, or dike. This is because wealth is conceived of not only as material wealth but also and above all as the ‘wealth of the Earth’, the Earth’s natural resources and productive powers, the primary source of wealth. There is a final aspect of the Erinyes’ role in the trilogy in relation to wealth which should be pointed out, as it is crucial for the characterization of Cratinus’ chorus in Plutoi, namely the dramatic technique of the anticipation of their arrival: from a mere image of an imminent avenger in the lyric songs of the Agamemnon chorus and a personified wrath of the oikos, the Erinyes gradually become a presence which we can only sense, the daimon of the house of the Atreids, then a real vision for Cassandra, then an even more vivid vision for Orestes, until they actually appear as a live chorus. This build-up, together with the trilogy’s deeply Solonian, persistent focus on the idea of delayed punishment (see the concept of
Cf. e.g. ’ j , Od. .; Seaford a: xxiii provides a translation which is consistent with the interpretation offered here. Beyond the intervention of the Erinyes and the other chthonic deities, a wide range of elements (both on the level of imagery and on the level of plot) associated with the Earth construct her dramatic ‘presence’ in the Oresteia. For example, the earth under the feet of the characters is the focus of the ‘carpet scene’ and of the entire first half of the Choephori (–). Furthermore, the trilogy’s natural imagery, reflecting the disturbance and the distortion of nature which mirrors or even results from human crimes, is a pervasive element and keeps the problematic relationship of man to the Earth in permanent focus. Moreover, the winds, perceived by the Greeks as chthonic powers (cf. Gagn´e ) have an instrumental role across the trilogy (e.g. Ag. –, –, –, –, Cho. –, –, Eum. , , –, , etc.), as do dreams, which in myth, popular belief and everywhere in Aeschylus are understood as coming from the Earth (Cho. –, –, Eum. –; cf. Supp. –, Pers. –).
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(Ag. ) and synonymous expressions (e.g. Ag. –; Ag. )), dramatically portrays their function as avengers who come late but do not fail to come. This is a crucial idea for Cratinus’ play, too, as we will see. cratinus’ chorus of plutoi and the erinyes of the oresteia In Cratinus’ Plutoi, a play reflecting on both justice and wealth, the Aeschylean intertext is evoked very closely. Not only is the Oresteia’s general theme of unjust wealth and its punishment turned into the main theme of the comedy, but there are also striking affinities between the Plutoi of Cratinus’ play and the Erinyes of the Oresteia. What is meant by ‘Erinyes’ – it should be clear by now – is not only the chorus of the Eumenides, but the entire image of the divinities across the trilogy, as they are conceived of as avengers on behalf of the Earth and the natural order from Agamemnon and throughout the trilogy, and as their presence gradually increases in intensity until they appear in reality. In relation to the Plutoi and the Erinyes’ characterization and function we can thus say: () Both the Erinyes and the Plutoi – who, crucially, combine the identities of the king of the Underworld Plutos/Pluton, the tragic Titans who emerge from the Underworld and the Hesiodic daimones ploutodotai – are chthonic divinities who come from the depths of the Earth and avenge the crime of unjust wealth. The surviving fragments of Plutoi allow us to understand ‘unjust wealth’ only as unjust acquisitiveness of material wealth, which, as we saw, is a salient notion in the Oresteia – albeit not the entirety of what is meant by ‘wealth’. Nevertheless, frr. (* !6 !: ‘a god sends up for them self-generated blessings’) and (see above) and possibly frr. and suggest that wealth in Plutoi was explicitly viewed as associated with the Earth. As a result, it is likely that ‘unjust wealth’ was portrayed as an act provoking the chthonic wrath of the Plutoi, and hence as an abuse of the natural processes and the Earth as a whole, as in the Oresteia and elsewhere in the Aeschylean corpus, notably the Persians. () Both the Plutoi and the Erinyes arrive late to execute their punitive role: through the Prometheus Lyomenos intertext the Plutoi evoke the centuries-long interval from their imprisonment in the Underworld until their release. This seems to be a reworking of the portrayal of the Erinyes, who are repeatedly characterized in terms of
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and synonymous expressions, and who appear on stage only after a long and elaborate build-up throughout the trilogy. Ultimately, both choruses enact the Solonian idea of late but unfailing punishment of unjust wealth. () In the Eumenides a new system of justice replaces the old one and it is suggested that all crimes which in the past drew upon themselves the retribution of the Erinyes will now be pursued and punished under a new judicial system. The first prosecutors in this new system are still the Erinyes, who are thus shown to retain their role as avengers of the ‘wealth of the Earth’. Nowhere else in drama apart from Cratinus’ Plutoi do we have a trial scene with the chorus as prosecutors, and in the light of the previous correlations, this seems to be another strong point of contact between Aeschylus and Cratinus: therefore, the trial setting of the Oresteia is evoked in the agon (or one of the agonal scenes) of the comedy, where the Plutoi strive for the punishment of unjust wealth in Hagnon’s acquisition of wealth during his office. () The Oresteia closes with a scene of an Athenian utopia, with the natural order restored, dike redefined into the justice of law (which, under the auspices of the Erinyes, coheres with the natural order), and the Erinyes accepted in Athens as benevolent divinities and promising to grant prosperity and riches to its people. We cannot be certain of the ending of Plutoi, but it is interesting that no matter how much commentators differ in other respects of its reconstruction, owing to the generic tendency of comedy towards endings of a particular style, there is a consensus that the final scene would have been one featuring a utopia. The surviving fragments , and (and possibly ) strongly enhance this likelihood, since their context may have been or may have anticipated this final scene. Therefore, if the widely accepted reconstruction of the ending of the Plutoi is correct, one can see that Cratinus’ engagement with the Oresteia was probably sustained until the end, since the comedy seems to allude even to the trilogy’s final scene: the chthonic Plutoi, manifesting the benevolent side of their nature and having ensured dike, grant, like the Aeschylean Erinyes (and
In this trial this is primarily the human blood shed by Orestes (Eum. ). That here they defend the mother’s blood is also paramount, because the notion of the ‘mother’ has meanwhile been merged with the image of the ultimate female who generates and nurtures, the Earth (cf. Cho. , ; , #! 6 - (; , * , f | !"4 ’ I! @ ( / ; , ' "- , etc.). See, most recently, Farioli : –, who discusses all previous studies. See also Ruffell : –.
emmanuela bakola like the Hesiodic ploutodotai daimones), a wealth of natural abundance and create a utopia.
cratinus and aeschylus i: the earth and elite wealth in the oresteia and in plutoi By exploring and explaining the consistent correlation of the chthonic Erinyes with the concept of wealth, the reading outlined in this paper suggests that the notion of the Earth has a far higher prominence in the Aeschylean trilogy than has so far been allowed. A reconsideration of earlier Aeschylean works such as the Persians and the Seven Against Thebes, where the notions of the Earth, the chthonic powers and wealth are also central (albeit in different forms and degrees), suggests that the Oresteia may even have been the ultimate reworking of a concept which repeatedly preoccupied the tragic poet. Cratinus’ response reveals an understanding of the centrality of the chthonic element and its connection with wealth in the Aeschylean trilogy – although the fragments do not allow us to say with confidence how these notions may have been exploited further. However, the likelihood that the element of the Earth was understood as central in Aeschylean tragedy by fifth-century audiences more widely is corroborated by another comedy, namely Aristophanes’ Frogs: in Frogs ‘Aeschylus’ is revealingly presented as a chthonic power manifesting his wrath (a central concept in the religious understanding of the chthonic world, and ubiquitous in the Oresteia) as a reaction of the natural forces, but as also able to bestow blessings on human beings from the Underworld. He thus embodies the very concept which was arguably central in many Aeschylean works. Further research into other literature of the period will probably confirm that the Oresteia did indeed trigger wider responses for its engagement with a concern timely and poignant at all times. Furthermore, Cratinus’ use of the discourse on wealth in the Oresteia – and through the Oresteia, of its Hesiodic and Solonian precedents – reveals
For the dramatic exploitation of wrath in Aeschylus, see e.g. Ag. –, –, , Cho. –, –, –, –, –, –, –, , –, Eum. –, –, –, –, –, –, –, –, –. Aeschylus’ striking portrayal in Frogs as a chthonic force (especially as the Typhon, cf. Ran. –, –) and as a divinity of the Underworld who can bestow blessings to humanity (Ran. ) are extremely important and should not be missed. They are arguably a vivid manifestation of the perception of Aeschylean tragedy as preoccupied with the Earth and its wealth. As argued in my forthcoming paper, in a deeply symbolic way, which in the Oresteia is mostly expressed through the role of the Erinyes, man’s greed, abuse and destruction of wealth provokes the reaction of the environment towards his actions and entangles him and the environment itself in an increasingly destructive cycle for both sides.
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the fascinating response of a comedy to another perennial concern which pervaded Greek societies and constituted a source of major cultural, social and political developments: the balance between the elite’s striving for increasing their wealth and power, on the one hand, and the voices of resistance in the name of just order, on the other. This response corroborates the reading of the Oresteia as an ideological attack on the aristocratic elite, which has been argued by many scholars, most recently and with admirable sharpness by P. W. Rose in Sons of the Gods, Children of Earth. In the Oresteia Aeschylus adopted the perception of dike as expressed by archaic sources, especially Solon and Hesiod, that is, as natural order but with a strong economic dimension, and reshaped it in the light of the particular political and socio-economic conditions of his own time: in the still relatively young democracy of the Oresteia reflected a continuing anxiety over the role of the elite and their perennial competitive struggle for wealth, prestige and of course power. The weight of the anxiety concerned the traditional establishment of the old propertied families, the # 9 2 , something most poignantly suggested by the trilogy’s pervasive emphasis on the powerful aristocratic emblem of the oikos, on the role of inheritance (albeit as ‘inherited evil’ rather than ‘inherited excellence’) and on the transmission of great wealth from generation to generation (e.g. Ag. –; –). When allowed to disregard the order of dike – the Oresteia suggested – the aristocracy tends to manifest its socially constructed and traditionally reinforced ethos, above all its insatiable desire for more, thereby breeding destructive injustices and plights for the community, and for humanity as a whole. The ideological opposition of ‘ancestral’ to ‘newly acquired’ wealth, which seems to have been a major concern in the aristocratic discourse of archaic and classical times and is explicitly evoked in Agamemnon –, was therefore ironized, because it was the traditional
See, above all, P. W. Rose’s compelling analysis of the Oresteia (: –, –) as an ideological attack on the aristocracy and the inherited and socially reinforced ethos of the oikoi. For a similar approach see Winnigton-Ingram : . Contra M. Griffith . Cf. Thgn. –, –, –, –; cf. –, –, –, –, –, – W ; Alc. Voigt; Simon. Tg. The economic developments and the social mobility generated by the expansion of trade, the overseas settlement, the developments in agriculture and the violent intra-elite rivalry during the archaic period made the nouveaux riches a considerable threat for the old elite, as the former increasingly sought a share in power. Cf. O. Murray : –, –; de Ste Croix : –. In Athens this social phenomenon is reflected, above all, in Solon’s reforms of the class structure and hence the eligibility for office-holding on the basis of income: cf. Foxhall . Even if the newly wealthy did not constitute a significant percentage of the elite during the archaic period, what matters is that (as the literary sources suggest) the hereditary elite’s perception of them was that of a real threat. For a different account of the intra-elite struggles in archaic Greece, see Van Wees .
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aristocratic classes – the ‘children of Earth’ – who were effectively cast in a negative light. In the context of the decisive changes which the Ephialtean reforms had only recently brought for the role of the aristocratic clans, the Oresteia seemed to pass a historical judgement. The anxiety over the role of aristocratic wealth and its concomitant psyche was in the trilogy brilliantly interwoven with ecological reflections, philosophy, Greek cult and the Erinyes. In Plutoi Cratinus responds to the concerns of his own times by evoking and recontextualizing salient aspects of the Oresteia, namely the voices of criticism against the elite, the old discourse about hereditary wealth, as well as the cultural, social and political context of the tragic trilogy. In particular, he brings to the fore the conflict between the elite’s perceived greed and the polis’s aspiration to just order. However, the basis of the anxiety that Plutoi reflects and plays on is a different one from that of the Oresteia: as has been shown elsewhere, Plutoi presupposes the events surrounding the decree of Dracontides (Plut. Per. .–) and the deposition of Pericles from strategia in the late summer or autumn of . More precisely, it draws on the climate – before and immediately after the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War – of public disquiet, accusations and trials against individuals from the circle of Pericles, especially those who were perceived to have enriched themselves with public resources: Pericles himself, Phidias and Hagnon. The ultimate target of those orchestrated attacks against Pericles and his circle was clearly the statesman’s policy concerning the war. If what has survived from Plutoi is representative of the comedy’s overall political tone, the discourse on # 2 (Plutoi fr. .–) which dominates the surviving part of Hagnon’s trial, and the opposition of ‘ancestral’ to ‘new’ wealth (Plutoi fr. .–; cf. Ag. –) are suggestive. As we will see, like the Oresteia, Plutoi ironizes the opposition of ancestral and new wealth; by extending the argument of the Oresteia, however, and by abiding by the generic prejudices of the comic genre, it charges both types of wealth with violation of dike, criminalizes and condemns them. Both are seen as
For the concept of autochthony as connected with aristocratic nobility, and later appropriated by the democratic civic ideology, see Loraux : –; Thomas : –. The concept of ‘land’, more narrowly, was central to the aristocratic ideal and rhetoric which disparaged ‘new’ wealth, as the principal landowners were the hereditary ruling aristocrats. Both ideas arguably underlie the concept of the Oresteia. On Ag. –, P. W. Rose : aptly comments that ‘the relation of vast wealth and disaster evokes metaphorically, on the one hand, the natural process of a cycle of growth, reproduction, aging, and death, and on the other the social institution of the aristocratic family that perverts that natural process’ but does not take this comment any further. However, this concept can be shown to have a pervasive significance in the entire trilogy. See Bakola : –.
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ultimately parasitic on the polis in that the elite collectively are guilty of exploiting the city for their own personal ends. The concept of ‘inherited excellence’, with its credentials of ‘noble birth’ and ‘hereditary wealth’, died hard even in the circumstances of radical democracy of the last decades of the fifth century. Old comedy makes interesting uses of this perception in order to serve and maximize its popular appeal. The topical background of Plutoi outlined above suggests that Cratinus was disparaging the superiority attached to the concept of ‘ancestral wealth’. Our sources, including comedy, suggest that Pericles’ aristocratic lineage and vast hereditary wealth were ubiquitous in his public profile and its disparagement. Given the circumstances of Pericles’ deposition from office and the overall theme of the play, it is very likely that Plutoi exploited the fact that the # 2 Pericles was understood to have been charged with and punished. Furthermore, Hagnon’s claimed identity as # 2 (whether he was one or not) and the line of defence attached to this claim (fr. .–) are disparaged just as much, since the mere characterization # 2 puts Hagnon on a par with Pericles: Hagnon, it is claimed, is an # 2 only as a 2@ who enriched himself 5 # , an ambiguous expression which in this context is understood most fittingly as ‘from his office’, or – as is also suitable in Hagnon’s case – ‘from the empire’, thus undercutting the intended meaning ‘from the beginning’. However, comedy does not stop at the disparagement of ancestral wealth: for comedy all wealth is criminal, especially when it is in the hands of public officials. By evoking Theognis’
See Ober : –. Arist. Rh. a and Eth. Nic. b are our principal sources for the lasting appeal of the aristocratic credentials over new wealth. Thus comedy most often disparages the newly rich politicians (e.g. Ar. Knights; Cratin. frr. , ) by playing on the popular anxiety about their lack of the credentials of the class which traditionally provided the city with its leaders. A direct reflection of the popular appeal of the aristocratic ideal ‘wealth-cum-birth’ is found in Eup. fr. , but one should be aware that comedy never praises wealthy politicians if they are in office, and indeed if they are alive (regardless of the origin of their wealth). In Aristophanes’ Wealth it is alleged that it is inconceivable to be wealthy without being a criminal. Pericles’ aristocratic ancestry and wealth in public perception: Plut. Per. ., esp. , ( -> Z , I (cf. .–); Pericles as choregos: IG ii .; hypothesis to Aesch. Pers.; estates: Thuc. ... His lineage figured prominently in comic satire: for example, the frequent jokes about his cranial deformity (Cratin. fr. , , ; Telecl. fr. ; Eup. fr. ; cf. Plut. Per. .–) certainly aimed at the ‘kalos’ element of the kalos kagathos aristocratic ideal. It is not clear whether Hagnon came from an aristocratic oikos or not, as we do not know anything about his father, Nicias. See Pesely ; Davies, APF and (on Theramenes). This interpretation of the word was suggested to me by R. Rawles. A central argument, for example, in Aristophanes’ Wealth: see Sommerstein : . See also Knights, etc.
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disdainful characterization - and the contempt attached to ‘new money’ from the point of view of ‘inherited wealth’, the Plutoi suggest that Hagnon’s wealth is in fact acquired – which in the comedy of the s (and thereafter) automatically equals dubious financial practices. Whether inherited or new, it is therefore implied that wealth is equally corrupt and criminal. That Athens needs to rid itself of the individuals who abuse public money to serve their own interests is the ‘message’ of Plutoi – which at the time would have played well on the Athenian populace mostly affected by the misfortunes of the war. The Erinyes come from the depths of the Earth once again, in the guise of Plutoi, as a salient strand of the Oresteia once again reminds people of the dangers of unjust wealth. cratinus and aeschylus ii: cratinean poetics, and plutoi between comedy and aeschylean tragedy Plutoi, as we saw, engages with and ‘attacks’ the idea of elite wealth by appropriating and recontextualizing the very important discourse on class of the tragic trilogy. Once again, therefore, comedy takes a distinctly populist stance and flags its self-fashioning as a defender of the interests of the demos and as a genre that appeals to the masses by opposing the hegemonic order. What is very interesting in the case of Plutoi is that it does so by alluding to the voice of the Oresteia, a work whose anti-hegemonic stance is wrought, as suggested above, on multiple levels: dramaturgy, imagery, thematic motifs, characterization and ideas – beyond the (much debated) political statement of the end of Eumenides. Cratinus both alludes to and subtly adjusts the Aeschylean presentation, in that his elite (in reflection both of the shifting dynamics of power in the evolving democracy and also the comic stance toward politicians as a class) are a more fluid group than those of Aeschylus. Cratinus’ reception of the Oresteia, therefore, is an active one, since it reworks salient aspects of the Aeschylean positioning. Crucially, his stance is enhanced by the allusions to Solon’s elegies and Hesiod’s Works and Days, works which, notwithstanding the complexity of the discourse which they advance – especially in relation to their socio-political context – have also been felt to express anti-hegemonic voices. Cratinus’ engagement with Aeschylus’ Oresteia, therefore, significantly enhances our knowledge of his poetic programme and self-presentation. In the context of comic competition, and even before he entered the rivalry
Thgn. fr. W - ’ V# 2 , ’ !@ !> ! : cf. Cerri : n. . Contra Farioli : –, who argues that Plutoi reveals Cratinus’ aristocratic bias. For a different view on the class discourse in the Oresteia, see M. Griffith .
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with Aristophanes, Cratinus presented himself as the ‘old and inspired’ master of comedy by appropriating the perception of ‘Aeschylus’ in the fifth century. He also engaged repeatedly with Aeschylean works, such as Hiketides, Eumenides, the satyr drama Theoroi or Isthmiastai and probably others. Finally, depending on whether the Prometheus trilogy was perceived as genuinely Aeschylean by its original audiences, Cratinus’ return to it in two of his plays (Seriphioi and Plutoi) may also suggest that his preoccupation with the master of tragedy was remarkably extensive. With his persistent focus on poetics, one of the prevalent elements of Cratinus’ Aeschylean preoccupation seems to have been the appropriation of the status of a classic, as Aeschylean tragedy was perceived in the time of Cratinus. In Plutoi, however, Cratinus’ interests seem to have gone even further and drawn on the political facets of Aeschylean tragedy for his self-presentation: thus, by presenting his comedy as making a bold statement against the elite order of wealth and privilege and, conversely, as creating an imaginary utopia of justice and wealth for the benefit of the wider community, Cratinus may have striven to give an explicitly political-ideological position to his comedy which complicates his overall self-potrayal. As opposed to the elitist inclinations which the presentation of his poetics may have implied, but in line with his Archilochean persona and its concern for the community, Cratinus seems to have fashioned himself alongside Aeschylus to form a pair of politically engaged dramatists and especially champions of the demos and the community.
See above, n. . No ancient source doubts the Aeschylean authorship of the Prometheus trilogy. For West’s attractive hypothesis that it was produced as a genuine work of Aeschylus posthumously by someone else, such as his son Euphorion, see above, n. . For the [Aesch.] PV and Cratin. Seriphioi see Bakola : –. For such utopias of supernatural abundance as expressions of radical popular idealism, see Ruffell : –. See Bakola : –.
c h a p te r 10
From Achilles’ horses to a cheese-seller’s shop On the history of the guessing game in Greek drama Marco Fantuzzi and David Konstan
Pseudo-Euripides’ Rhesus – would seem to be the longest and formally most clear example of what we are calling a guessing game known to us from archaic and classical poetry – the guessing game consisting in a bantering exchange between two people in dialogue whose aim is to disclose some kind of information by a progressive series of guesses. Instead of a simple sequence of question and direct answer, one of the interlocutors who knows the answer, or at all events imposes his answer as the truth in the end, guides the other in formulating guesses, or else criticizes false guesses, until the uninformed interlocutor finally catches on or the information is revealed to him. The Rhesus passage consists of a long stichomythia, framed by an introductory distich (–), in which Hector agrees to Dolon’s request to obtain a reward for the spy mission he has agreed to undertake in the camp of the Greeks, and asks him to choose this reward, and a concluding distich (–), in which Dolon finally states that he wants Achilles’ horses. The frame provides all the information which is necessary to the context (the distichs – and –, read one after another, make complete sense for the scenic action to continue), and the stichomythia itself, which, as a consequence of the ‘autonomy’ of the frame is highlighted as a stylistic device, is a sort of priamel, in which Hector suggests several alternative prizes, and Dolon rejects them one after another until Hector runs out of ideas. Only at this point does Hector give up guessing and poses a direct question (), and this occasions Dolon’s final answer, which brings the stichomythia to an end: (0.) , ( * V " . 5 ' ! , , 2 . (] .) * @ # 2 2 . (0.) W ) [ @ /6 (. This paper profited from the advice of R. Hunter, S. D. Olson and A. Petrides, whom we thank.
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(Hector) Yes, that is quite right, I cannot deny it. Name your reward – anything except my kingship. (Dolon) I have no desire to be the city’s protector and king like you. (He.) Well then, marry and become brother-inlaw of Priam)s sons. (Do.) I do not want a marriage tie with my betters. (He.) Perhaps you will ask for gold: we have plenty of that. (Do.) I have money at home and do not lack livelihood. (He.) Well what of Ilium)s treasures do you desire? (Do.) Promise me a gift once we destroy the Greeks. (He.) I will give you anything you ask except the admirals. (Do.) Kill away! I won’t beg you to spare Menelaus! (He.) Surely you are not asking to receive the son of Oileus? (Do.) The hands of those nobly nurtured are bad at farming. (He.) Which of the Achaeans do you want to hold to ransom? (Do.) I have said already that I have gold in my house. (He.) You can come yourself and take some of the booty. (Do.) Nail it to the temples in honor of the gods! (He.) Well what greater gift than these will you ask me for? (Do.) The horses of Achilles: it is right for me to work and risk my life in the dice game of fate for a prize that is worthy (trans. Kovacs ).
In this chapter we propose to reconsider the unstudied history of the guessing game in comedy and what seems to be its pre-history in tragedy. We will also exhibit similarities between the Rhesus passage and lines – of Menander’s Perikeiromene, with a view to achieving a better understanding not only of the complex generic status of the Rhesus (an epic tragedy with a smattering of comic innuendos), but also of Menander’s conception
The evidence for the massive presence of comic hints in the Rhesus is well discussed by Burnett – though we do not agree with her conclusion that the Rhesus would therefore be a sort of farcical satyr drama, and we prefer to think that this tragedy reflects an overlap between tragedy and comedy along the lines of Menandrean comedy (see below).
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of comedy’s relation to its neighbouring genre, with particular reference to Old Comedy and to the epic-tragic features specific to the Rhesus. This intertextual relationship will turn out also to be part of a larger pattern in the history of the guessing-game topos, which achieves its fullest expression in Aristophanes but seems to have been a recognizable Euripidean device – as Aristophanes himself appears to acknowledge. The guessing game in the Rhesus has no direct antecedent in the brief dialogue between Hector and Dolon in Iliad .–. It is first attested in some short series of false guesses or assumptions which occur fairly often in Euripides’ tragedies, especially in his early and mature productions (see in particular Alc. –, –, Med. –, Hipp. –, Hec. –). Almost all of these examples pertain to dialogues between two characters, one more in the know and the other less so, and typically involve exceptionally bad news that is broken by the better-informed character to the other; they are thus evidently designed to rouse pity in the audience. The function of this device has recently been well described: the strategy was as follows: through their initial false guesses the uninformed characters reveal, also to the audience, the bad things they can off-handedly think of, once they have grasped that something bad has happened. However, what really occurred is always worse than what they were able to imagine. This way it is conveyed to the audience just how terrible, how devastating the news is for the unknowing character (often the victim). What has happened – this is the impression that is created – was literally ‘unthinkable’.
Thus, for instance, in the first Alcestis passage Heracles inquires who has died in the household; the surprise comes at line , when Admetus informs his guest that Alcestis is both alive and not alive – an unimaginable combination (more below on this passage, and its possible parody in Aristophanes’ Acharnians). In the second passage Heracles learns that Admetus entertained him despite the death of his own wife – this is an unimaginable climax for Heracles (not for the audience, of course), since he had supposed, reasonably enough on the basis of what Admetus had told him, that the death involved a foreigner and not an intimate of Admetus’ household. And in the Medea () Jason learns that it is his own children whom Medea has slain – the one thing he had failed to guess. The guessing game takes the form, however, of a more fully rounded riddling repartee and thus becomes a clearly recognizable motif, only in comedy and in the Rhesus ascribed to Euripides. The expansion of the guessing debate seems to be a function of the comic possibilities of this
All discussed by Dubischar (i).
Dubischar (i): .
The guessing game in Greek drama
form of dialogue; the more or less extended reiteration of false guesses and assumptions, combined with a persistent misunderstanding and a certain pretension to being able to divine the truth, are especially conducive to humour and belong to the common strategy of refusal of the ‘ordered communication’ which is typical of comic poetics, and more specifically of its taste for riddles, derived from sympotic practice. More particularly, the shift from the self-consciously tentative guesses of Euripidean characters to bolder assumptions, which seem reasonable but unexpectedly turn out to be false, takes place first and foremost in Aristophanes: the most prominent instances of the guessing game are in his comedies Acharnians –, Wasps – and Frogs –. As for the Rhesus, this development was, we argue, probably influenced by its particular intersection with comedy, an effect already noticeable in late fifth-century tragedy and which plausibly increased in the course of the fourth century. In fact, despite the thesis that the Rhesus belongs to the youth of Euripides, we consider it more probable that it was the work of an imitator in the fourth century, when the popular fortune of Euripides and the frequency of revivals gave rise not only to a vast number of minor interpolations in his text, but also to the ample additions to the anapaestic dialogue at the beginning of the Iphigenia in Aulis. In any case it is odd to suppose, we believe, that a young Euripides knew and adopted in the Rhesus the expanded form of the guessing game, for which we have evidence only from Aristophanes’ Acharnians onwards, but in the other tragedies of his maturity never resorted again to this fully developed device and only exploited the shorter series of false assumptions which we have discussed above – unless we are prepared to accept the idea that the Rhesus was conceived by the young Euripides as a kind of semi-comical farce, and hence especially open to comic techniques; but this view has never met with substantial favour. From the way in which Aristophanes manipulates two of his instances of the guessing game, he seems to have considered it a paratragic motif with a specifically Euripidean flavour. Acharnians – and Frogs –
See most recently Kloss : ch. . See below, p. and n. . Cf. Lada-Richards : –; Konstantakos . This was the main thesis of Ritchie , promptly and authoritatively refuted by Fraenkel . Cf. most recently Olson : –. For instance, developing a suggestion recently re-proposed by Kovacs : –, our Rhesus may have been mistaken for the by then lost Rhesus of Euripides and could thus fill the slot of this title in the pre-Hellenistic collection of the works of the fifth-century tragedian (after all from the hypothesis ii we have fragments from two different prologues, whereas the text which has reached us through the manuscripts lacks the prologue). This prompt inclusion would be especially plausible if our Rhesus was by a fourth-century interpolator, who paid special attention to indulging the tastes of the theatre audience – a ‘professional’ attention which Euripides’ interpolators observed as a rule: see Page .
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are manifestly paratragic passages, and both allude explicitly to Euripides. In Acharnians – Dicaeopolis has decided to speak in defence of the Spartans in front of the chorus of old Acharnians, and hence he wishes to dress in the most miserable rags so as to elicit their pity ( 2! )
; ! $ , ). Accordingly, he asks Euripides to lend him = ( ( – it is clear that he has some specific tragedy in mind, and Euripides starts guessing who the most wretched character in his tragedies might be: (] .) ), / @ 6 @ ), 0* , = ( ( . "5 # = A H ' ! , T @ "5 , E" . (02.) >#; @ ; K. W B B > 6 U 1 ; (] .) * K. " N , ) %) ! " 2. (02.) ( 2E (
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!) 7 , . " , ) N 2 ( # ( " ; (] .) `, > 2 W W # " 2. (02.) ) N 2 !" $, ? d E L#’ B # 6 ; (] .) * d E A ' N # , @ , > , 6 " . (02.) L) V , M26 _E . (] .) , _E A > 2 , / @ ", . (Dicaeopolis) I entreat you by your knees, Euripides, give me a bit of rag from that old play of yours. I have got to make a long speech to the chorus, and if my speech fails it means death. (Euripides) Which ragged raiment?
A brief series of guesses, in which, however, there is no precise piece of information to be revealed, also occurs in the dialogue between Euripides and his in-law in Thesm. –: (c )
Q r! ; (0* ) % r! – (c.) @ B " , B ; (02.) `, ) G . *# R $ . (c.) @ B 2 $ ; (02.) *# R $ ; (c.) 6 ] ) ` ) F " ) ." . (02.) , // > ), ’ * L!’ j (‘(In-law) What Agathon is that? (Euripides) There is one Agathon. (In.) You don’t mean the bronzed, muscular one? (Eu.) No, a different one; haven’t you ever seen him? (In.) Not the one with the bushy beard? (Eu.) You haven’t ever seen him! (In.) I certainly haven’t – at least not that I know of. (Eu.) And yet you have fucked him – but perhaps you are not aware of the fact!’). If this set of wrong assumptions by the In-law in fact intimates the structure of the guessing game, then this quasi-guessing game of Aristophanes too would feature Euripides as a character. The difference here is that the guesses yield no conclusion, since it is impossible to state which is the real appearance of the tragic poet Agathon.
The guessing game in Greek drama
Not that wherein this ill-fated ancient, Oeneus, performed? (Di.) It wasn’t from Oeneus, it was from someone even more wretched. (Eu.) That of blind Phoenix? (Di.) Not of Phoenix, no: there was someone else more wretched than Phoenix. (Eu.) Whatever shreds of robing doth the fellow seek? – Then meanest thou that of beggar Philoctetes? (Di.) No, someone much, much more beggarly than him. (Eu.) Desirest thou then the squalid garb this lame Bellerophon bore? (Di.) Not Bellerophon; but my man was lame, importunable, glib, a formidable speaker. (Eu.) I know the man; ’tis Mysian Telephus. (Di.) Yes, Telephus. Give me his wrappings, I beg you (trans. Sommerstein a).
His first four guesses fail to identify the all-time winner in Dicaeopolis’ hierarchy of wretched attire, but in the end he hits the target and realizes that Dicaeopolis wants the rags of Telephus (Aristophanes will return in several later comedies to making fun of this drama: in the Acharnians, Telephus not only is a ‘double’ of Dicaeopolis, but becomes a foil for Aristophanes as well and for the poetics of comedy). This round-up of Euripidean tragic characters, delivered by Euripides himself but directed by the comic character Dicaeopolis, is a clear case of paratragedy, among other reasons because it is tailored to the specific dialogue structure of the guessing game, which was perceived, we are arguing, as a Euripidean stylistic device. Indeed, if enough members of Aristophanes’ audience were conscious of Euripides’ penchant for this motif, which is already manifest in tragedies produced prior to the Acharnians, the comic effect of this scene would have been considerably enhanced. As Euripides fails in his first self-confident assumptions concerning which of his dramatic characters is the most wretched of them all, the guessing game ‘not only mocks the tragic poet’s propensity for these pathetic figures but wants his audience to consider the range of tragic models available to him and to pay special attention to the apt choice of Telephus’. At the same time, Aristophanes appears to hint at the Euripidean copyright of the guessing game, with a precise parodic purpose. Not only does he feature Euripides as the unfortunate conjecturer, but he also introduces the scene of his guessing game by having Euripides’ slave answer Dicaeopolis’ very simple question % %) 0* ; (‘Is Euripides at home?’, Ach. ) with a paradoxical
* % % (‘He is at home and not at home’, Ach. ). This is doubtless a paratragic allusion to the paradoxical statements in oxymoronic
Cf. Foley (useful specifications in Heath b: – and A. M. Bowie : –); Goldhill : –; N. W. Slater : –; Beta a; Brockmann : –; Voelke : –. Foley : ; see also N. W. Slater : and Olson : .
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form which are typical of Euripides, and in particular of his Alcestis, a play which is fond of playing with the identity of opposites. In fact one of these paradoxical statements in Euripides is Admetus’ reply – % *") % (‘She is and is no more’) – to Heracles’ question ! > L T 1$ % ; (‘Do you mean that she has died or is still alive?’, Alc. –), precisely at the conclusion of one of the false guesses in an early tragedy of Euripides (as discussed briefly above). By exposing the Euripidean lineage, the guessing game of the Acharnians turns out to mock a device of Euripides’ style by making it (and its author) a butt of Dicaeopolis’ (and Aristophanes’) wit. The comic poet who, in the Frogs, could make Aeschylus wait in silence as a way of caricaturing his dramatic practice with his protagonists (on which Euripides will then comment explicitly) was perfectly capable, even at the beginning of his career, of making Euripides participate in the role of hapless diviner in the game that he himself had invented, but which is now being controlled by the comic actor who is in many respects a stand-in for Aristophanes himself. In Frogs – Dionysus confesses to Heracles that his heart has been struck by a sudden longing ( ! ), and Heracles tries to conjecture what it may be for: (] .) ) g $ , r " 6 26 5 E ! , 5 @ j E. (}.) ! ; ; (] .) , & M .
Cf. L. P. E. Parker : , who comments: ‘Aristophanes was prompt in spotting Euripides’ fondness for this type of paradox.’ Cf. Gianotti . Another evident reference to Euripides encapsulates the guessing game in ring composition. In fact Ach. –, 5 #6 L , | L ' . , E ! ' (‘for I this day must seem to be a beggar, be who I am and yet appear not so’) quotes, according to Triclinius, a passage of the Telephus where the protagonist commented on his attire to the audience (TrGF .) – ‘a quotation which involves an obvious metaliterary element, as “who I am” is not merely the disguised Telephus, not only the disguised Dicaeopolis, but the dramatically disguised comic poet as well’ (Hubbard : ). The density of the references in the Acharnians of bc to the Telephus, a tragedy which was performed thirteen years before, leads us to wonder how many members of the audience could have recognized all these allusions. It is possible that the Athenians had the memory of the Telephus refreshed in some re-performance of this piece between and bc and could perceive the details of Aristophanes’ paratragedy, but in any case most members of the audience will have laughed at least when perceiving high-flown language of tragedy taken down to the low everyday level of comedy: cf. Foley : ; Collard, Cropp and Lee : –; MacDowell : ; Olson : liv–lxi; in general on the recognizability of allusions in comedy and tragedy see Stinton = and (with different emphases on the orality/writtenness of the tragic texts presupposed by Aristophanes’ reuse) Mastromarco , ; Nieddu : ch. ; Konstan : –.
The guessing game in Greek drama
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2 ! 0* 2, . (Dionysus) And, anyway, on the ship I was reading Andromeda to myself, and suddenly my heart was struck with a longing, you can’t imagine how hard. (Heracles) A longing? how big a longing? (Di.) Only a little one – the size of Molon. (He.) For a woman? (Di.) No, it wasn’t. (He.) Then for a boy? (Di.) No, by no means. (He.) You mean it was for a man? (Di.) Aaaah! (He.) So you had it off with Cleisthenes, did you? (Di.) Don’t make fun of me, brother; I really am in a bad way, such is the passion that’s ravaging me. (He.) What kind of passion, brother dear? (Di.) I can’t describe it; but none the less I’ll explain it to you by analogy. Have you, before now, ever felt a sudden desire for a lentil soup? (He.) Lentil soup? Whew: thousands of times in my life! (Di.) ‘Do I make my sense clear’, or shall I explain it some other way? (He.) Not about lentil soup, you needn’t. I understand perfectly. (Di.) Well, that is the kind of yearning that is devouring me for – Euripides.
After excluding Heracles’ suppositions that the object of his desire is a woman, a boy, a man, or – a lentil soup! – Dionysus finally reveals that his craving is for the dead Euripides: once more, not the kind of thing the audience, or Heracles, would naturally have divined. Again, the humour of this passage would be more pregnant if Euripides’ copyright on such dialogues based on false assumptions and the progressive revelation of the true answer was widely recognized by at least some of the more astute members of the audience. The unveiling of the object of Dionysus’
The first or (less probably) the second hemistich of the line is a quotation from Euripides’ Hypsipyle: TrGF ..
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longing, Euripides, thus takes place over the course of a dialogue shaped as guessing game, in a sort of homage to its ‘inventor’ Euripides, which would be parallel to the homage paid to him by Dionysus’ love – and Aristophanes’ own – at verse through the quotation from Euripides’ Hypsipyle. We may, moreover, add one further detail to the pattern, as Aristophanes manipulates it. Heracles has already himself offered a kind of bathetic version of the surprise or inconceivable answer, when he tops off the sequence of passion for a boy and a woman with the suggestion that it may be for a man. Dionysus’ reaction ( , ) is in part one of distress, because his desire, though not sexual, is in fact for a grown man, and Heracles’ guess, ) , ‘touches him on the raw’; but Dionysus’ is also a cry of repudiation para prosdokian of the idea of a homosexual passion, since one did not normally, in Athenian society, acknowledge an erotic desire for an adult male, an . Dionysus then adduces the desire for lentil soup, though only by way of comparison: such a passion Heracles understands at once and supposes that this is what Dionysus longs for, only to be informed, finally, that Euripides is the object of his desire (). Therefore, after the crescendo represented by woman, boy, and man – all plausibly objects of erotic desire, even if the last is not entirely respectable, and almost paradoxical – there is the sudden drop in level to lentil soup, topped off at last with the big shocker, the tragedian Euripides. This shift in direction depends on the idea that there are, after all, at least some ‘low’ physical pleasures of everyday life – in this case the value of food – which are commonly shared, always thinkable and always and unarguably desired (even when they are not the primary concern, everyone is interested in them). Therefore it may serve also as a sort of sign of the poetics of comedy, which is marked, as Bakhtin already observed, by a preoccupation with bodily functions – a deft touch by which Aristophanes innovates on the intimation of the unthinkable, patented by Euripides. Though not manifestly pointing to its Euripidean ‘pre-history’ (Euripides is not involved in the scene as a character), Wasps – appears to be at least in tune with the Euripidean technique of false guesses. Having indicated that his master is suffering from a strange malady, Xanthias, in dialogue with Sosias, pretends that members of the audience are conjecturing the nature of the disease (passion for dicing, passion for drinking, passion for sacrificing, passion for entertaining): Xanthias acts as though
Though a hint of comic humour surfaces in Aristophanes’ text, thanks to the discrepancy between high tragic register and ordinary life content. On this coexistence of homage and comic humour, see already Van Leeuwen : . See now Wilkins . Dover : .
The guessing game in Greek drama
he hears their remarks and replies to them, while Sosias comments on them. Alternatively, Xanthias imagines a series of incorrect guesses by members of the audience before he reveals the actual sickness that afflicts Bdelycleon’s father – that is, a passion for the courts: whatever else one might have imagined, a mania for trials exceeds all expectation. Now, at lines – Xanthias introduces the guessing game with a brief description of what the procedure will be and describes the news about to be imparted in a way that seems to reflect a metaliterary awareness of its unthinkability, precisely the feature which Euripides’ series of false guesses often appear to convey: B , * ( , f *’ t ;
’ *' 52/ , . , >! !’ &@ A 1. His father, you see, suffers from a bizarre sickness, which no one here will be able to recognize or diagnose unless we tell you. Go ahead, take a guess.
Among the many types of possible comic effect which might be triggered by a series of wrong assumptions (e.g. emphasizing the stupidity of the conjecturer), both in this metaliterary preface and in the course of the guessing game proper, Aristophanes seems to focus specifically on the exceptional strangeness or unpredictability of the news to be delivered, thus in tune with Euripides’ practice. After Aristophanes, a much briefer instance of the guessing game occurs in Menander’s Perikeiromene –, which again would most probably be a case of paratragodia, as it seems to allude to the Rhesus, and thus point once more in the direction of Euripides, or at least to a text that at a certain point was acknowledged as Euripidean. At the beginning of the second act Moschion enters the stage with his slave Daos. Even though Daos has had nothing to do with the decision of Glycera (with whom Moschion is infatuated) to leave Polemon’s house and move into the house of Myrrhine, where Moschion also lives (he is Myrrhine’s foster son), the slave boasts and takes credit for organizing the move of Glycera, who – he pretends – made this move just to be near Moschion. He thus starts a discussion about the reward he should receive for his initiative (–):
The MSS are not coherent at this point in defining the changes of speaker, and a few commentators, following the ancient scholia, have assigned the whole passage to a single character, Xanthias. The Rhesus has reached us as part of the corpus Euripideum and was listed ‘as a genuine work’ in the Peripatetic Didascaliai, as reported in the hypothesis ii prefaced to the tragedy in some manuscripts – though the same hypothesis also states that ‘some have supposed that this play is spurious and not a work of Euripides’.
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(Daos) If it is true, though, and you find her in the house here, Moschion, I am the man who has engineered it all on your behalf, the man who persuaded her to come here, drafting countless arguments, and who has got your mother now to grant her refuge, and to meet all your wishes. So what is to become of me? (Mo.) What sort of life, see now, Daos, most of all attracts you? Ponder that. (Da.) I do. Is it best to be a miller? (Mo., probably aside) Daos here will make his way any day now to the mill! (Da.) Do not name an art or craft to us! (Mo.) I should like to see you as an overlord of Greek affairs and a marshal of land forces . . . (Da.) I do not care for mercenaries, who will promptly cut my throat for any theft, if given the chance. (Mo.) But you will thieve (?) by farming contracts, that is the way you will secretly pocket seven talents out of every eight. (Da.) A general store, Moschion,
The guessing game in Greek drama
is what I would like, or in the market on a stool selling cheese. I swear I have no desire to be a millionaire. That is my line, I find it more attractive. (Mo.) It is a wicked plan. I recall the proverb: ‘let me never meet a pious hag selling honey’ (?). (Da.) A full belly – that is attractive, and I claim I deserve it, after what I have told you. (Mo.) By Zeus, you are no fool, Daos! Sell your cheese, and work your fingers to the bone. (Da.) That is fine. As the proverb goes: ‘let us say amen to that’, etc. (the texts and all trans. of Menander are from Arnott ).
At lines – Daos asks Moschion what he will now become ( % [ ], ), thanks to the service he has performed for his master – the question opens a short debate, a sort of priamel of the perfect reward, similar to the one discussed in the Rhesus, though the scope of the rewards is from the beginning comically exaggerated by Daos, and the perspective of a drastic change of life seems playfully fantastic. Moschion pretends to engage seriously with this issue, and instead of openly proposing a reward or approving a reward suggested by Daos, he begins the discussion by questioning his slave: [ ] / !), [, | ], @ " ; (–). At this point Daos as well might have answered simply by stating his preference, without beating around the bush, as Dolon does when questioned by Hector in Iliad . But Menander prefers to set up a dialogic exchange, so that two possible kinds of life are proffered by one of the two characters (unfortunately, the distribution of the lines between the two is uncertain) and rejected or commented on in turn either by the speaker who mentioned each of them or by his interlocutor. The result is a series of two exchanges – proposal and negation or criticism – which essentially constitute guessing games in miniature. First of all Moschion, or more probably Daos, suggests that Daos might become a miller (2 ! , ), but in a scornful comment (perhaps
This question doubtless reminded the audience of a favourite philosophical topic of conversation concerning the best-possible life (often that of the tyrant was the ostensible winner, only to be revealed as the worst of the lot: cf. the end of Plato’s Republic, Xenophon’s Hieron, etc.). It is common opinion, after Schmidt : , and Gomme and Sandbach : , that the first suggestion should come from Daos about his future life, after Moschion’s invitation (b–) to ponder the issue; of course, as already pointed out by Schmidt, this idea implies that Daos would practise a sort of self-irony on himself, as turning the grindstone was a common punishment for miscreant slaves (also mentioned in Men. Her. ). There is a possibly analogous case of such self-irony in Aspis b–a, where again the uncertain distribution of lines leaves it unclear who is speaking (according to the papyrus the speaker seems to be the waiter; but, for instance in J.-M. Jacques’ text, the lines are ascribed to Daos): cf. Konstan (). 2 ! can mean to be the overseer of a mill (cf. Gomme and Sandbach : ‘if the suggestion that he should manage a mill comes from Daos, a counter-suggestion by Moschion () that he should “manage the affairs of the Greeks” would follow effectively’). But Daos may simply
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an aside) Moschion affirms (b–a) that it would rather suit Daos, as a slave, to be sent to turn the grindstone as a punishment. Daos replies that in any case he wants nothing to do with a professional manual craft ("# ) of any kind. Moschion then suggests, as an alternative, that Daos might become an ‘overlord of Greek affairs and a marshal of land forces’ (–) – clearly a superior kind of occupation, and surely beyond the reach of a slave such as Daos; in other words, this is already a kind of crescendo in the direction of an implausible glory. But Daos refuses this other possibility as well, because he fears that he will be killed – if he is caught stealing (). There is again an instance of para prosdokian here. As a military man, Daos might have risked death, of course, and it is even possible that historical events made Daos’ fear quite justifiable: behind Moschion’s description of the career he proposes to Daos, and Daos’ own fear, may lie a memory of the murder of Alexander son of Polyperchon, who was elected 6 [ 2 by Cassander in bc and soon after was killed by a group of Sicyonians. However that may be, as the second hemistich of reveals, Daos’ thoughts are on the level of disburser of goods or paymaster; still, even the prospect of profit, which Moschion points out as an advantage of the military role he has recommended (–a), is rejected by Daos, who ignores the idea and puts forward his own preferred profession, which belongs to a completely different and much lower social register. For Daos in the end proposes that he become a retailer (as distinct from a craftsman) – either the owner of a general store or a cheese-seller, as he suggests immediately afterwards, in a sort of further humiliating anticlimax. He motivates his humble choice by explaining (it would seem: there is a lacuna in the papyrus at this point)
have expressed here the wish to become a miller, because millers were believed in Greece never to be likely to be short of bread: cf. Lloyd-Jones b: . Gomme and Sandbach : ; Lamagna : . If Jensen’s supplement Z[5 ] at l. is correct, Moschion’s phrase . 2@ . [ | . E Z[5 ] may borrow a similarly malicious double entendre addressed by Dionysus to Pentheus in Eur. Bacch. - Z5 – a phrase that Pentheus interprets as referring to his being carried shoulder-high in triumph, whereas Dionysus means that Pentheus’ head will be ‘carried’ to his mother. That Menander alludes here to the Bacchae was suggested by Robert and Goossens , but strongly denied by Whittle and Gomme and Sandbach : . I agree with Lamagna that the allusion might have been perceived by at least a part of the audience, despite its brevity. But Z[5 ] is not at all sure, and &[ ] , to be ascribed to Moschion or to the following intervention by Daos, seems paleographically more probable: cf. Arnott : . Maybe ‘he thinks of occupations followed by slaves who had been manumitted or allowed to live independently’ (Gomme and Sandbach : ), as the majority of the freed slaves worked in Athens as artisans: Calderini : –. As usually agreed, after Schwartz : . The transition from the more generic to the more specific 2 has the comic function of further trimming down Daos’ ambitions: Lamagna : .
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that he has no ambition to become rich (), whereas the profession of shopkeeper is ‘on his level’, and thus he likes it more: ) ' (), [
) " ] (). Not without some further sarcasm (see the pun on 2 and , ‘endure hardship’), Moschion accepts this choice, and Daos at once ratifies this option for his future (), so that the solution of the question concerning Daos’ ‘best life’ appears to be found. The same ideal of fulfilling his basic materialistic needs and sticking to a low level that is appropriate for him is expressed by Daos again at lines – ( 1! could not be more explicit). As soon as the reward for Daos’ service (as he pretends) is decided upon definitively (), he promptly asks Moschion to let him enter the house () so that he can confirm that the situation in fact conforms to what he has claimed. Moschion agrees and assigns him in formal terms the mission of reconnoitering the situation inside the house as a scout or spy (. g " >, ], @ | (, ‘Go in, please, Daos, and be my scout for all the actions’, –), thus making sure that Glycera is now in Myrrhine’s house and determining both what she is doing and in what frame of mind Glycera and Myrrhine are likely to receive Moschion. This debate about Daos’ ‘best life’ as a reward for his enterprise, which seems the miniature of an Aristophanic guessing game, thus contrasts two humble professions (the miller and the cheese-seller) to the prestigious job of managing materiel and marshalling armies, which is framed by the lesser two. In this respect, it seems to develop a device of the guessing game as illustrated in Aristophanes’ Frogs: rather than providing a list of more or less plausible alternatives, and then topping them off with a truly unexpected and indeed unimaginable solution to the riddle, there is a kind of back and forth movement, proceeding from a low but entirely reasonable recommendation to the surprise suggestion of a post well above the level that Daos might aspire to, only to have Daos come up with a final choice that is surprising just because it reverts to a more humble ambition, one that is not in itself startling for a slave but becomes so after the more elevated and pompous position proposed by Moschion. Despite the obvious difference in size, and the tangled structure of this brief debate, that the debate which we have in the Perikeiromene alludes to the guessing game of the Rhesus is confirmed (for us modern scholars)
As remarked by Gomme and Sandbach : , setting up as small shopkeepers was common for many slaves when freed (cf. IG ii –), ‘but Daos need not have immediate freedom in view; slaves were often established in some craft or business, paying their masters a fixed sum, and keeping the balance of their earnings’.
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and must have been highlighted (to the ancient audience) by the role of that Moschion invites Daos to assume at the end of the discussion about the reward. In the jocular arrangements for the reward between Moschion and Daos this mission seems to be a must-do final confirmation of Daos’ merit and the lead-up to his reward. A scoutingor spy-mission had been also the mission for which Dolon, in the Rhesus, demanded his reward from Hector, as Dolon’s task consists precisely in being a (, ; also ( @ ) , –, , ). And we can believe that very few other literary texts (if any) will have displayed a discussion of the reward to be given to a soldier in the context of, specifically, a spy mission. Besides, both in the Rhesus and in the Perikeiromene the guesses through which the reward is decided have the same kind of subject: both are priamels, namely lists of alternatives which serve as a foil to final and privileged options, which thus stand out in relief – though, we repeat, in the comedy this list is extremely short and no more than hints at the neatly articulated and expanded list in the Rhesus. In particular, Daos’ wish for what is ‘at his level’ () ' ((), ) may also be another cue for the audience to connect Daos with Dolon, who had stated in the Rhesus that he did not want to marry into the royal family because he belonged to a different social level: *) 5 2 ( 1 !" (). Last but not least, the contrast between an option that represents a highly public and visible reward that brings glory and one that offers rather concrete and private self-advantage and profit may have its model in the similar contrast between Hector’s and Dolon’s different ethical values in the Rhesus. The main difference, indeed, between the characterization of Dolon in the Rhesus and in its Iliadic model consists in the greater greediness of the tragic Dolon. Interestingly enough, the perspective of the Rhesus is in substantial agreement with a traditional exegesis of the dialogue between Hector and Dolon in Iliad , which is documented for us in the scholia to the passage but may well have been prior to the Hellenistic age. In fact Hellenistic and later philologists display a consistent tendency to interpret, or over-interpret, the text of Homer as derogatory in respect of Dolon’s character, behaviour and words. Within the frame of their usual belief that Homer was - " , the scholiasts invested their malice in finding clues in the Homeric text which could be read as stigmatizing Dolon as
A. Petrides points out to us, per litteras, that the name Daos is also particularly associated with the crafty slave, master of ruses and tricks (the from which Hector paretymologizes Dolon’s name in Rhesus ): such slaves probably wore masks with reddish complexions, a physiognomy of foxy deceit not unlike the wolfish disguise of Dolon.
The guessing game in Greek drama
the quintessence of pure avarice and lack of military intelligence – very differently from what happens on the Greek side, where Diomedes did not even ask for a reward (8 Il. ., B ' ] *' " ), and wisely co-opted a companion for the spy mission (8 Il. ., , ] 2# ). Homer’s text was not precisely kind towards Dolon, but the way the scholiasts read it attests to a deep antipathy towards him, which gives rise to a kind of negative deconstructive bias. Fully in tune with the openly demeaning characterization of Dolon that we find in the Rhesus, and also in the scholiasts to Homer (and possibly others in the classical period), Menander characterizes Daos’ contribution to the guessing about his best future life in terms of his prosaic choice and lack of more noble ambition. After he refuses the manual profession of miller (motivated in part, no doubt, by his master’s little joke) and then craftsmanship in general (), and when he next excludes the political or military position offered to him by Moschion, the audience might have expected that Daos would have requested a relatively grand bourgeois living standard, like Dolon, or (since he is a slave, after all) an idle sinecure without labour. But Daos’ wish in the end is reduced to the lowbrow option of working in the tertiary sector as a shopkeeper (), for the sake of the even more vulgar ideal of always enjoying a ‘full belly’ (). With a degradation which is natural enough in light of Daos’ inferior social level (and consistent at the same time with the poetics of comedy), the material greediness of the bourgeois ( >#2 ) Dolon for the possession of Achilles’ magnificent horses becomes in Daos the basic physical desire for a full belly and a humble job. The surprising twist that we noted above thus takes on yet a further dimension by means of the subtle intertextual allusion to the Rhesus. If the dialogue between Daos and Moschion alludes to this tragic antecedent, as we think likely, then Menander would have adapted this antecedent quite neatly to the broader context of his poetics. Coming after the epic point of view of Agamemnon’s promised gifts in the Iliad, and the transformation of these parameters in the guessing game between
On Dolon’s greed and unheroic behaviour, see in particular 8 Il. . (despite his being rich, he insisted on compensation); . (he was ugly or insignificant, but despite that he dared to conceive the idea of having the horses of Achilles); . (what could you expect from someone who has grown up together with many sisters?); . (how could a person of such a low level deal with Hector?); . (as a barbarian without loyalty, he can only trust oaths); . (he asks for impossible things and compels Hector to swear impossible things, whereas Diomedes did not do that at all). On Dolon’s total lack of military experience (especially for his decision to carry out his mission without a companion), see 8 Il. .; .; ..
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Hector and Dolon in the Rhesus, with its polarized representation of the values of the two men, Menander summons attention to the humblest of everyday values and wishes, which he places in the mouth of a slave, the lowest social status in the classical world. It is plausible that this scene in the Perikeiromene was meant to be understood in the light of the two heroic models of epic and tragedy: Menander took the episode of the Rhesus, which had already rendered Dolon more materialistic in his values in respect to the Iliad (this in line with the Homeric interpreters’ emphasis on Dolon’s greed), yet another step forward, and, by means of this metaliterary allusion, he both evoked his tragic predecessor and affirmed the more prosaic ideals of comedy as a genre. Last but not least, we may note that there is perhaps a particular motivation for an allusion to this play in the context of Menander’s comedy. Wilamowitz famously defined the Rhesus as a ‘Soldatenst¨uck’. Many other tragedies focused on the deeds of heroes in arms, but the attention paid by the Rhesus to the life – indeed the everyday life – of soldiers and the meticulous accuracy that the play reveals in respect to military terminology are distinctive features of this tragedy. The Rhesus also evinces a specific concern to highlight the nature, limits and aberrations of military power and military leaders in relation to the army – a neat variation on the interest displayed in many other tragedies of the fifth century in the nature of power among political leaders and in relation to the city. Alluding to the Rhesus through the guessing game, and equating the ‘mission’ of Daos to that of Dolon, might thus have a particular meaning in the context of the Perikeiromene, in which, just a few lines before Moschion assigns Daos the job of and probably alludes to Dolon in the Rhesus, Moschion expresses his particular antagonism to the profession of Polemon, Glycera’s lover and a professional mercenary soldier. In fact, he seems obsessed with the military profession, to which he refers twice, and in both cases not without a certain display of self-conscious technical precision: first he identifies the high political and military power with which he proposes to reward Daos’ merits by way of two rather specialized titles: . . . J0 [@ | , " (–, quoted above). A little later he remarks on Polemon’s military title and flashiness with a similar flourish of technical details: . . . ! #! E # # (‘ . . . over a god-damned commander – with a feather in his cap’, ). ‘Militarizing’ the scouting mission of Daos may thus be a private joke on the part of Moschion, inasmuch as his enemy
Wilamowitz-Moellendorf : –. See also Geffcken : .
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is a soldier (later, Polemon’s own slave, Sosias, will in turn propose organizing a regular military attack on Moschion’s house in order to rescue Glycera). Creating this military atmosphere through an allusion to the ‘Soldatenst¨uck’ Rhesus is an elegant literary operation. We conclude by suggesting one further function of the guessing game in these texts. Riddles of all sorts invite the audience to venture their own guesses, before the characters have a chance to respond. This is the more so in drama, where the characters speak aloud and can allow significant pauses. It was a recognized device of ancient rhetoric that the audience’s interest could be aroused by allowing it to fill in gaps in the argument, or to take an active part in constructing the text. Theophrastus, for example, affirmed that a speech is more persuasive if it omits some things, and leaves it to the listener to supply what is missing: ‘for by catching on to what has been omitted by you, he becomes not just part of your audience [akroates] but also a witness [martys] on your side’ (cited in Demetr. De interpretatione = Theophr. fr. Fortenbaugh). Fables, allegories, symbolic tales that went under the name of ainigmata or ainoi, which conveyed their meaning by implication or hyponoia (cf. Pl. Resp. d), were a staple of early literature. When the priestess of Apollo emerges in terror from the temple at the beginning of Aeschylus’ Eumenides, where she has seen Orestes stained with blood and next to him the crowd of Furies, she expresses her wonder at the sight and offers guesses as to the identity of the strange creatures: they are like Gorgons but not quite, or perhaps they are Harpies, but not these either (–); the audience is presumably able to guess their nature, and to feel in the know at being able to provide the answer. One has to wait in wonder at the beginning of Aristophanes’ Peace until the purpose behind the feeding of the dung beetle is revealed; one of the slaves explicitly remarks: ‘One of the young, smart-aleck spectators must already be saying: “what’s this? What’s the dung beetle for?” And then some Ionian sitting next to him says: “I think it’s a riddle signifying Cleon”’ (–). Aristophanes is here plainly indicating how mysteries and conundrums within the text elicit efforts on the part of the spectators to solve them and so enter into the action, as it were. It is only a further step, but a significant one, to dramatize successive answers to a potential riddle in the form of a dialogue, and more particularly one that involves a choice on the part of one speaker that the interlocutor must guess at. To the best
A soldier, by the way, whose name, Polemon, sounds terribly like an omen, as it points to substantive " ‘military enemy’: he is thus predestined to be what in fact he is at this point of the comedy: a soldier and an enemy of Moschion’s. Cf. Konstan for the discussion of ‘active reader’ and further bibliography.
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of our knowledge, Euripides was the first to make this move, or, if not the first, then at least he was the dramatist with whom the device was closely enough associated for Aristophanes, who liked to poke fun at Euripides in any case, to target him in particular when he parodied it. Thus, while the particular format of the guessing debate identified in the Rhesus and in Menander’s Perikeiromene, along with the partial antecedents in Aristophanes, is a peculiar and identifiable scene type in its specific structure, it is part of a larger set of literary strategies for engaging the audience or reader in the construction of the text. On the other hand its very specificity also enabled the guessing game to be co-opted for intertextual resonances, and this allowed for the kind of spoof or caricature that could travel across genres, from tragedy to comedy – whether Old Comedy or New. In fact this technique turns out to be a new unstudied case in the ongoing and subtle exchanges that both distinguished and united the dramatic genres in antiquity, and fourth-century comedy and tragedy (and Menander and tragedy) in particular.
On the overlappings of tragedy and comedy in the fifth century bc, see Rau ; Seidensticker ; Medda, Mirto and Pattoni ; for the fourth century bc see Xanthakis-Karamanos . On Menander and tragedy, Pertusi ; Webster (especially ch. ); Katsouris ; Arnott ; Hurst ; Gutzwiller ; Cusset ; Konstan (forthcoming); regarding the parallel evolution of Menander’s and tragic masks, A. Petrides is preparing a volume on Menander.
c ha p te r 11
The Aesopic in Aristophanes Edith Hall
Unlike most genres that informed and interacted with Old Comedy – epic, tragedy, satyr-play, choral lyric – the ancient fable tradition did not manifest its presence in comic theatre through the insinuation or parody of distinct metres, melodies, musical conventions, or dance movements. But since my first introduction to Aristophanes in the s, when I attended a reading of Aristophanes’ Frogs, I have been forcibly struck by the prima facie affinities between the world imaginatively conjured up in the Aesopic fables and the world dramatically realized in Old Comedy. The most obvious affinity is in the use of animal allegory. Of course, archaic ritual had played a role in the adoption of animal choruses in early comedy, as evidenced by the choral performers in various animal and bird costumes in vase-painting, and Aristophanic animals, as well as those in the plays by other poets of Old Comedy, will have had residual ritual associations. But in the plays which have survived, almost all the animals are actually used vicariously, to stand in as surrogates for certain types of character, social or political stereotype, or point of view – litigious wasps, for example. Animals used to represent human characteristics, in both Aesop and Aristophanes, are animals used allegorically. This aspect of Aristophanes also opens up the scope of Old Comedy’s ‘intergeneric
I would like to thank the editors of this volume for their kindness and patience and Gregory Hutchinson for helpful comments. Schirru lists and analyses most of the evidence for Aesopic fables in Aristophanes, but his emphasis, which is on the comic effect of allusions to the fable rather than their philosophical, ideological or socio-political functions, is very different from mine. The animal allegories in Plato’s Republic, which Saxonhouse argued are part of a conscious Platonic strategy to bring Old Comedy to mind, may imply that Socrates regularly used animal fables in his teaching (for Plato’s engagement with the rhetoric of Old Comedy, see Prauscello in this volume). It has also been suggested that animal allegory was used frequently by some Presocratic philosophers, most of whom composed treatises in prose. See also below, pp. – on Democritus and fable. See Sifakis for a discussion of the theriomorphic choruses on sixth-century vases, with the excellent photographs in Rothwell . See, in addition to Sifakis : –, the testimonia in Rothwell : –.
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dialogue’ to the symbolism of oracular language and proverbial sayings, as we shall see; it extends it even to the ancient tradition of dream interpretation, which, like Aesopic and other types of fable such as those anciently labelled ‘Sybaritic’, is a genre that primarily manifests itself in prose. The earliest example of a fable in Greek literature may be the reference to the story of the hawk and the nightingale in Hesiod (Op. –), and verses about battles between certain species of animal certainly existed, but this does not mean that the fables were ordinarily performed in metre even in the archaic period, from which we happen to possess no records of storytelling in ancient Greek prose. In Aristophanes’ Wasps the audience are introduced, by the dreaminterpretation session conducted by the slaves Xanthias and Sosias, to the notion that they will later need to ‘read’ wasps and dogs on stage as symbolic substitutes for political figures and constituencies. Xanthias has had a dream in which an eagle picked up the shield that the notorious rhipsaspis Cleonymus had discarded, and this raises the question (which is actually not answered) of whom the eagle might represent (–). But the animal symbolism in Sosias’ more complicated dream is read quite explicitly as a political allegory (–). Sosias saw a rapacious whale, screaming like a pig, haranguing sheep in the Athenian assembly and weighing portions of ox-fat. Xanthias immediately interprets this scene as Cleon depriving the Athenian people of what was theirs. Sosias also saw Theorus turning into a crow, witnessed by Alcibiades, which Xanthias hopes holds the significance that Theorus will ‘go to the crows’. This dialogue is conducted in the language which we know from the surviving examples of the ancient oneirocritical tradition was the standard way in which dreams were presented for interpretation. Although the Oneirocritica of Artemidorus of Daldis was composed several centuries later than Aristophanes’ comedies, it not only uses the identical vocabulary to denote the experience and interpretation of dreams but is indeed self-consciously dependent on a much older established body of dream interpretations, dating from the fifth century bc onwards (see especially .). Moreover, not only does animal symbolism play a prominent role in
On the relationship between proverbs and fables as instantiated in the example of the ‘dog in the manger’, see Priest : –. Trygaeus in Peace, who cites Aesopic fables and aligns his mission to Zeus with the fable of the eagle and the dung-beetle (see below), is probably himself to be associated through his name with the proverb ‘to strip unwatched vines’: see Hall : . On Aristophanes, fable, and the Batrachomyomachia see the remarks of Bliquez : and n. . On the implications of this for the early writers of artistic prose, who often self-consciously (if ambivalently) aligned their works with the Aesopic tradition, see the excellent article of Kurke (esp. n. ). See further Hall : . On the oneirocriticism in Wasps see Reckford .
The Aesopic in Aristophanes
Artemidorus’ analyses, but he implies that slaves have always participated in dream interpretation, as both dreamers and dream analysts themselves. Another dimension of experience shared by the worlds of ancient fables, dreams and Aristophanic comedy is the somatic, especially sexual activity and eating. But whereas it is with dream interpretation that comedy shares its tendency towards the discussion of erotic matters in its characteristically matter-of-fact idiom, unabashed by explicit naming of body parts, genitals, apertures, and techniques of masturbation, the emphasis on food and drink overlaps more specifically with the world of fable. It is connected with the third prima facie affinity between the Aesopic and Aristophanic worlds – that the perspective they share is so often that of the peasant farmer. Aristophanes’ Dicaeopolis and Trygaeus are the primary examples, but even his more urban heroes are never from the upper class of Athenian citizen families and have much in common with their rural counterparts; Philocleon has a history of stealing vine-props, and Chremes’ most valuable possession is his wine-sieve (Vesp. , Eccl. –). The modern distinction between town and country, as Robin Osborne rightly insists, is wholly misleading in the case of classical Attica. The literary genre most closely allied to comedy – tragedy – sidelines eating almost completely, as well as preferring aristocratic personnel. This throws the fable/comedy affinity into sharper perspective. Besides animal allegory, a strong interest in food, and a subjectivity and agency of an agricultural smallholder, a further feature that the Aesopic and Aristophanic worlds had in common, at least in the fifth century, was the physical presence and involvement in the narrative of gods, often in an aetiological role. Gods and aetiology, which tended to be excised in the later, secularized Aesopica, were still prominent in the Aesopic tradition in the fifth century bc. Evidence for this is supplied by Plato’s Phaedo. Just after his wife has been led away, Socrates rubs his leg and remarks on the intimacy of the relationship between pleasure and pain. If a man pursues pleasure, he is usually compelled to accept pain along with it (b–c), as if the two were joined together at a single head. ‘And I think,’ he said, ‘if Aesop had thought about them, he would have composed a fable telling how they fought each other and god wished to make a truce between them, and when he couldn’t do it, he fastened their heads together; and that is the reason why, whenever one of them comes upon someone, it is followed by the other. That’s what seems to have happened to me. I had pain in my leg because of the fetter, but pleasure seems to have come following after it.’
R. Osborne . See the references in Dover : and n. . Hall . All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated.
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Socrates here invents, extempore, an aetiological explanation for a universal principle of human experience in a manner that he explicitly associates with Aesop. The fable not only is aetiological but uses embodiment to make pleasure and pain – concepts that have no material form – concrete and material: they are a creature with two bodies but one head, which once upon a time consisted of two separate creatures. It can be no coincidence that the closest parallel to this aetiology in Plato is constituted by the story of the primeval two-faced, four-footed, four-handed hominid, split asunder by Zeus and Apollo for challenging the supremacy of the Olympians and destined to feel yearning desire for reunion for ever (Symp. d– b) – a story told, of course, by none other than the comic playwright Aristophanes. ‘Aesopic’ cosmic aetiology, where both animal and human bodies are used to discuss abstract principles such as pleasure, pain and desire, thus has a demonstrable affinity with its Aristophanic counterpart. The final obvious feature shared by the worlds of Aesop and Aristophanes, at least in the fifth century, is the prominence of the god Dionysus. Dionysus is the god of the festival at which comedies were produced, as well as god of vines and wine production, and he of course appears not infrequently in plays by Aristophanes and his contemporaries, including, famously, Frogs. But he also features prominently as the architect of aetiologies in the Aesopic fable tradition, as early as the poet Panyassis of Halicarnassus in the first half of the fifth century bc. A fragment of Panyassis quoted by Athenaeus (.d = fr. Bernab´e) describes Dionysus apportioning wine at a symposium. The first share goes to the Graces, the Hours, and Dionysus himself; the second to Aphrodite and Dionysus again; but the third share goes to Hybris and At¯e, personifications of the kind of regrettable behaviour which drinking in excess can provoke. As Ben Perry saw, this was an Aesopic fable, discussed as such in great detail in a letter by Photius. It is actually related by Aesop himself in the Life of Aesop (Vit. Aesop. ), but in a later, ‘secularized’ form in which Dionysus gives the servings of wine directly to men, the first for pleasure, the second for joy, and the third for irresponsible or violent behaviour. Vines, wine and Dionysus form a thematic cluster which belongs to both comedy and fable, and indeed to a third genre which has its own close dialogues with both comedy and fable, and that is the Attic skolion (drinking-song). The affinity between the Aesopic and comic worlds was certainly recognized explicitly in the fourth century bc, when Aesop appeared in several
Perry : –; Photius’ text is discussed in detail by Grumel . On fable and skolia see Van der Valk : –. Perry : .
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plays as a character, including one by Eubulus, entitled either Semele or Dionysus, which actually enacted the fable narrated by Panyassis. A fragment of the play features Dionysus as a character serving portions of wine to himself, then to the gods of love, and then to Hybris (fr. , quoted by Ath. .b–c). The wine theme seems also to have been important in Alexis’ Aesop, the sole fragment of which (fr. ) features Solon explaining to a surprised Aesop that the Greeks drink their wine mixed with water. Other fourth-century comic playwrights seem to have structured whole fables around their plots, since Archippus composed a comedy entitled The Ass’s Shadow, which refers to one of the most famous fables of the day. In New Comedy it may have been common practice for character types from fables to be absorbed into the dramatic narrative. It has been plausibly suggested, for example, that the character of Cnemon in Menander’s Dyskolos is the equivalent of the dog in Aesop’s fable of the gardener and the dog. Cnemon has fallen down a well, like the dog in the fable, whose character is similarly ungrateful and aggressive, and the Aesopic connection is rendered more likely by the explicit reference to the ‘logos’ in Menander’s comedy (–). We have already noticed that a fable narrated by Panyassis and dramatized by Eubulus – Dionysus and the three servings of wine – is actually quoted by Aesop himself in the Life of Aesop, generally regarded as reaching its full development in around the first century ad, but including elements that can be traced back as far as the fourth century bc or earlier. Three decades ago, Adrados demonstrated that there are wide-ranging echoes of the diction of Aristophanic comedy in the Life of Aesop, especially in the scatological language, an inference supported by the apparent popularity of Aristophanes as reading material in Roman Egypt; one detailed example of shared diction, discussed by Dickie, shows how deeply the language of Old Comedy seems to have become ingrained in the traditional narrative of Aesop’s own life, in an intergeneric dialogue conducted over several centuries after the work of Aristophanes himself. While discussing metalwork, Pollux (.) says that blacksmiths attached baskania to their furnaces. These were ridiculous objects ( ) with an apotropaic function. He illustrates this with a line and a bit from Aristophanes (= fr. ):
This is fr. . Hunter : suggests that the play may have ‘concerned the birth and early career of Dionysus’. See Freeman : with Ar. fr. ; Hall : –. See Lissarrague : . Adrados . See Tzifopoulos : . Aristophanes assumes thirteenth position in Willis , a review of the Greek authors most frequently found in the papyri from Egypt.
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The idea seems to be that nobody would have purchased something or someone unless they were so laughably ugly that a blacksmith could use them as a baskanion. Dickie points out that in the Life (Vit. Aesop. ), when Aesop is bought by a slave-dealer and sent into the slave quarters, the good-looking slaves ask each other, ‘What has become of our master that he has purchased such a filthy creature? It can only be that he has bought him to protect the slave shop from envious fascination’ ( , 6 / . . . ). Dickie suggests that the joke in Aristophanes did indeed originally refer to someone with some of the physical characteristics commonly attributed to Aesop, presumably a newly purchased slave. Goins has accumulated a series of further parallels between the content of these two genres of ancient Greek literature. One is the similarity between the characterization of the lascivious wife of Aesop’s master Xanthus in the Life and the treatment of women in Old Comedy. Another is the resemblance borne by Xanthus to the Aristophanic Socrates of Clouds. Xanthus studies claptrap disguised as philosophy and surrounds himself with a crowd of students who want to share in ‘the beautiful’. But, as Goins stresses, what is more important than questions of direct influence is ‘the common perspective held by both authors’. Like Aristophanes, the author of the Life ‘used a deceptively simple cleverness to demonstrate the arrogance of the intellectually pretentious’. To sum up the argument so far: there are strong prima facie similarities between the worlds of Aesopic fable and the world dramatized in Aristophanic comedy (animal allegory, eating and drinking, peasant personnel and perspective, aetiology and the Dionysiac); the post-Aristophanic comic tradition, in Middle Comedy and Menander as well as the prose Life of Aesop, suggests that the intimate connection between the two genres of fable and comic drama was consciously perceived and elaborated over centuries. We are now in a position to address the extended sequences of dialogue between the genres as they are conducted within the extant plays
Goins : –. Dickie : . The fable tradition is also fairly well represented in other types of ancient Greek prose fiction, including the Lucianic Onos and ‘romances’ of Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus. See Van Dijk . Goins : .
The Aesopic in Aristophanes
of Aristophanes. Although the manifestations of fable are diverse, I argue that incorporation of Aesopic material performs three main functions in his comedies: (i) Aesopic fables are used as a source of knowledge by individuals engaged in trying to control other people’s behaviour; (ii) they signify a cultural product almost universally known, familiar even to the least educated members of the audience, and with rather ‘low-class’ associations; and (iii) the act of interpreting a fable is presented as analogous to the process of interpreting allegories staged within the play. Before turning to the texts themselves, however, it will be helpful to define a key concept which I have used in exploring the Aesopic in Old Comedy: knowingness. Almost all the passages I am about to discuss feature an invocation of Aesop by individuals engaged in trying to control other people’s behaviour, whether to good or evil purpose, through positioning themselves as in possession and control of specially significant knowledge. I first came across the notion of dramatic ‘knowingness’ in the culturalhistorical sense in which it is used by Peter Bailey in his brilliant analysis of the ideological workings of Victorian music hall: The bourgeois man and wife . . . were learning to savour the collusive but contained mischief of the performer’s address, in whose exchanges they too could register the competencies of knowing-ness. By the turn of the century, music-halls’ knowingness was fast becoming a second language for all classes, as music-hall itself became an agreeable national alter ego, a manageable low other.
In the nineteenth century those who used the term ‘knowingness’ or its cognates in a tone of disparagement were invariably asserting a position of superiority in class, taste and actual education: James Hardy Vaux can in speak of a thief who ‘affects a knowingness in his air and conversation’. But, in the music hall, all classes could unite in adopting the knowing but manageable collective ‘alter ego’, despite (or perhaps on account of ) this persona’s somewhat d´eclass´e identity. In such heroes as Dicaeopolis, Philocleon and Trygaeus, the ancient Athenians had similarly identified collective ‘low others’ who were, however, extremely shrewd and knowledgeable. Knowingness has recently attracted the interest of contemporary psychoanalysts and philosophers, who use the term in two slightly different ways. For the psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear, knowingness can have tragic effects. In the political realm, cynical journalists’ assumption that politicians are
Bailey : . Vaux , s.v. knowingess. See also the ‘knowing look’ in Martineau : i.: .
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corrupt has the potential, for example, to occlude occasions on which individual politicians are acting altruistically and with integrity. In the personal realm, knowingness – feeling confidently in charge of information both technologically and intellectually – can prevent us all from understanding deeper emotional and psychological currents at work which are obscuring crucial information, often with tragic results. For the philosopher Richard Rorty, on the other hand, ‘knowingness’ is particularly a hallmark of the postmodern literary critic, who no longer believes in any of the grand narratives of social progress and in tandem with this cynical political stance rejects aesthetic appreciation of literature in favour of controlling it through knowing sociological analysis. In a trailblazing lecture entitled ‘The Inspirational Value of Great Works of Literature’, delivered in , Rorty began with the famous Horatian advice to Numicius, ‘Nil admirari’: to stand in awe of absolutely nothing is virtually the only way in which to feel good about oneself (Epist. ..–). Rorty argued that contemporary critics ‘substitute knowing theorization for awe, and resentment over the failures of the past for visions of a better future’. Knowingness is the enemy of utopian thinking and enthusiasm; it is ‘a state of soul which prevents shudders of awe’. This formulation is helpful, I think, in approaching the perspective of Aristophanic comedy, with its underlying cynical pessimism about human nature, allied with a competence in parodying all kinds of literature and philosophical discourse. It can also help us to understand the way that Aristophanic comedy functions socio-politically. Raymond Tallis has used Rorty’s definition of knowingness to characterize the stance adopted by a certain type of demagogic politician whose appeal actually depends on suspicion of intellectuals and the premise that fundamental ignorance about the world, far from being a problem, is actually an advantage. Tallis points to the use by the North American republican politician Sarah Palin of unverifiable or entirely false ‘knowledge’ to impress and amuse her listeners. This kind of knowingness, Tallis urges, should ‘be of interest to philosophy if only because it is the obverse of the anguished sense of uncertainty that drives philosophy’s primary discipline – epistemology, the scrutiny of knowledge itself.’ Knowingness functions by binding the speaker and his or her hearers
Lear’s classical paradigm for this psychoanalytical definition of knowingness is the figure of Oedipus, who is on one level master of knowledge (he has regularly consulted the Delphic oracle, etc.), but this mastery actually inoculates him against asking really penetrating questions when he should have – for example, who killed the husband of the woman he is about to marry. See Lear . Rorty : . Rorty : –.
The Aesopic in Aristophanes
into an an ‘epistemic community’, affirming cognitive solidarity. This is linked to a wider, unspoken solidarity with a constituency out there of the like-minded . . . A shared cultural reference . . . reinforces the warrant that comes from being established as a regular guy talking to others who feel themselves spoken to as regular guys. Knowingness . . . carries an air of cognitive privilege. Reinforced by the wink, the finger tapping the nose, the complacent smirk, it lays claim to the superior condition of the one who is ‘in the know’.
Aristophanic comedy certainly lays claim to the superior condition of being ‘in the know’, and it functions to create an ‘epistemic community’ through cognitive solidarity, often achieved through the humorous use of fiction, falsehood, unverifiable information or unsubstantiated allegation. The invocation of Aesop in Aristophanes almost always constitutes just such an amusing appeal to fiction. The earliest Aristophanic use of an Aesopic fable appears in the memorable scene in Acharnians when Dicaeopolis looks closely at Pseudartabas’ retinue and sees that its members are Athenians (–): ' * ># 6 G 2 ) , c !" B 8 /2 2. X !/ 2 6 52" , ), X !, 6 $ ) %# * (# & N! 2" ; (Dicaeopolis) Well! I recognize one of this pair of eunuchs; it is Cleisthenes, the son of Sibyrtius. Behold the audacity of this shaved rear-end! How did you think, monkey-man, you could play the role of a eunuch coming to us with a beard like that?
The joke here seems to parody Archilochus fr. W , from an epode addressed to Cerycides, itself related to an Aesopic fable ( Hausrath). This instance of Aesop in Old Comedy may come by way of the iambographic tradition of invective, psogos, which seems to have been similarly attracted to animal allegory, as Semonides’ invective against women amply testifies. The physical image of a monkey with a hairy bottom is somehow connected, through mask or costume, with the appearance of Pseudartabas’ attendant, who is likely to have worn an imposing beard. Aristophanes and his audience are far too knowing to be fooled by the attempt of public men to camouflage their true natures. But the joke also implies that the decoding of an animal identity in Aesop (here, the monkey) is analogous to seeing through the allegorical personae in which public men might
Tallis .
Rosen : –.
Chiasson : .
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appear in comedy, equipped with costume and props (here, Cleisthenes’ skeue). Reading the political scene, like reading theatrical personae, is akin to reading the ‘real’, human meaning underlying an animal fable. In their lives beyond the theatre Aristophanes’ audience also frequently encountered animal allegory in the context of oracular language; in the mouth of the Delphic Pythia, Cyrus, King of the Medes, could be just a ‘mule’ (Hdt. .). In Aristophanes, Aesop tends to figure in the attempts of knowing charlatans to control the behaviour of others. In Peace – the charlatan oracle-pedlar Hierocles, who (in order to continue making a living) needs to promote the war with Sparta, seems to refer (although text is slightly problematic) to the fable of the noisy she-dog who gives birth to blind puppies: hierocles . . . it does not please the blessed gods that we should stop the War until the wolf shall unite with the sheep. trygaeus How, you cursed animal, could the wolf ever unite with the sheep? hierocles As long as the wood-bug gives off a fetid odour, when it flies; as long as the noisy bitch is eager to litter blind pups, so long shall peace be forbidden.
A more extended example of the same trope occurs when the Sausage Seller in Knights tries to manipulate Demos, who does not know how the navy is to be paid, with an oracle from Apollo (–): sausage seller ‘Son of Aegeus, beware of the dog-fox; he bites in secret and runs swiftly away; he is cunning, crafty, knowing.’ Do you know what this means? demos The dog-fox is Philostratus. sausage seller No, it’s Cleon here, who is constantly demanding that you send light ships to collect tribute, and Apollo says that you should not grant them to him. demos How can a trireme be a dog-fox? sausage seller How? Because a trireme and a dog both move at speed. demos So what is the point of adding the ‘fox’ bit to the dog? sausage seller The god is likening the soldiers to fox cubs, since they both eat grapes in the fields.
The ‘knowing’ Sausage Seller is trying to confuse Demos, who is indeed bewildered by his use of animal allegory. When the Sausage Seller explains that the dog-fox is Cleon, Demos thinks he means that the dog-fox is a trireme! Finally, the Sausage-Seller ends up completely inverting the original allegory by equating foxes, seeking grapes like the fox in the
As E. L. Brown showed, there are of course several other reverberations in the canine imagery which surrounded Cleon and which reached a climax in the trial scene of Wasps (see also below pp. –).
The Aesopic in Aristophanes
famous Aesopic fable ( Hausrath) which is certainly already portrayed on a fifth-century vase-painting, with the sailors in the Athenian navy. The effect of this interchange is to show how a manipulative orator could invent extempore and radically reinterpret animal allegories, lending them a sheen of oracular profundity at will, in order to gain political leverage. Another individual aspiring to political influence who finds Aesop useful is Peisetaerus in Aristophanes’ Birds. The Athenian defector is attempting, in a formal and oratorical manner, to persuade the birds to rise up against the Olympian gods, and he elaborates an argument that the birds had once been rulers of the universe (–). peisetaerus I feel great pain on your behalf, because you were once kings. chorus We were kings? Who were our subjects? peisetaerus Everything that exists – first me, then this man here, and Zeus himself. You birds are more ancient than Cronus and the Titans and Earth, and prior to them. chorus Even prior to Earth? peisetaerus Yes, by Apollo, chorus By Zeus, I never knew that! peisetaerus That’s because you are so undereducated (! ) and unquestioning and have never studied your Aesop ( *) \j ). He is the one who tells us that the lark was the first creature to be born, even before Earth. His father died of disease, but Earth did not exist then, and so he lay unburied for five days. The lark, at a loss for a solution, gave his father a grave in his own head.
Peisetaerus elaborates an aetiological story about the origins of the universe which sounds like a parody of theogonic poetry, in order to flatter the birds’ sense of their historic importance. Manipulating myth in order to buttress the contingent political claims of a particular city-state or ethnic group was of course customary in classical Greek diplomacy, and Aristophanes is certainly here creating humour out of the absurd lengths to which such argumentation could go. But in order to impress these undereducated birds, the authority he chooses to cite is an Aesopic fable, rather than Homer or Pindar (or, like the Sausage Seller in Knights, an Apolline oracle). The implication is that the birds are without learning (! ) to such a remarkable degree that they do not know their Aesop. The verb used here, , may conceivably be a joke referring to the birds’ lack of hands and fingers with which to handle a papyrus, since
See the jug reproduced as the frontispiece to Daly . The photograph belongs to the University Museum, Philadelphia, but the vase is in a private collection.
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the primary meaning of " is ‘tread’. Many translators choose to retain here the idea of physically handling a text, by translating as, for example, ‘thumbed’. But there is a direct parallel, indeed a Platonic one, for a purely metaphorical meaning of " , ‘to study’ a book: in the Phaedrus, Socrates remarks to Phaedrus that he has studied his Teisias very carefully ( , _ *6 /@ , a). The birds are so very uneducated, the implication seems to be, that they have not ‘even’ studied Aesop, which in turn suggests strongly that Aesop may have been regarded as an element in rudimentary education, even perhaps (as he was in later antiquity and remains today) an author to whom little children were introduced at the same time as they learned their alphabet. If this is the case, then the reasons become obvious for the popularity of Aesop amongst the least educated of the Athenian citizenry – the ones who were perhaps only just functionally literate; the ‘default’ or bottom-line text to which orators, oracle-mongers or comic poets alike could refer, because they could assume their audience were familiar with it, was the Aesopic fables, in whatever form they were available in the fifth century bc. Indeed, having established Aesop as an authority by reference to whom he can persuade the birds to do what he wants, Peisetaerus repeats the strategy a little later, when he needs Epops to enable him, although a human, to fly (–): Peisetaerus reminds the hoopoe that Aesop’s fable of the fox and the eagle ( Hausrath), in which the fox came off badly, shows that alliances between dissimilar species can be hazardous, and the hoopoe reassures him that he will be enabled to grow wings after eating a particular root. On the question of the date at which written collections of Aesop became available, further illumination has often been sought once again in Plato, this time in the section of the Phaedo which I have already mentioned in connection with Aesopic aetiology. When Cebes is prompted by the imprisoned Socrates’ proposed ‘Aesopic’ aetiology for pleasure and pain (see above) to ask him about his recent poetic compositions – versions of Aesop’s fables and a hymn to Apollo – Socrates answers (b):
See Perry : . The earliest certain recension and collection was made by Demetrius of Phalerum (perhaps during his regency at Athens of – bc), according to Diogenes Laertius’ biography of Demetrius (.). This collection, which has not survived, may have been a repertory of fables designed for consultation by rhetoricians (see Arist. Rh. .). The Athenian local colour to some Aesopic fables may also be attributable to the Demetrian recension (so Keller : –). But most scholars accept, on the evidence of Hdt. ., that there had been very specific information circulating about Aesop in the fifth century (so M. L. West : ), and indeed many assume on the strength of this passage in Birds that there was a book on Aesopic wisdom of some kind available at Athens in the late fifth century (M. L. West : –).
The Aesopic in Aristophanes
So first I composed a hymn to the god whose festival it was; and after the god, considering that a poet, if he is really to be a poet, must compose myths and not speeches, since I was not a maker of myths, I took those of Aesop, which I had at hand and knew, and turned into verse the first I came upon ( ( , # 2 L# >! 2 U W \.$ 2, >
; $ "2# ).
My interpretation of this passage is not that Socrates has a papyrus text of Aesop available to him in prison, like a bible in a Mormon hotel, but that Socrates uses Aesop because these are stories which he, like everyone else, knew off by heart, and this is something which Cebes would immediately understand. Christopher Rowe translates, ‘I just took the stories that I had to hand and actually knew, which were Aesop’s, and turned into verse the first ones that happened to occur to me’, and he has confirmed that he interprets the passage as I do. Although ‘the first ones that occurred to me’ ( ; $ "2# ) could just mean ‘the first ones I lighted on in my text’, this interpretation of the Greek seems quite unlikely since one would naturally come across the first items in the text, and ; $ "2# is not the obvious way of saying ‘I started at the beginning’. But it is much more telling that the evidence for Plato’s use of # (‘at hand’) shows that this adjective for him has no tendency to imply physical proximity: for example, at Theaetetus c, something is metaphorically ‘at hand’ because it is available in the intellect ( ). But the fact that Socrates knows some Aesopic fables off by heart, as I would imagine almost all of his fellow citizens did, does not mean that there was no written collection of the fables available in late fifth-century Athens (see below). On the contrary, I would imagine that the one cultural phenomenon would very likely go in tandem with the other, at least as soon as writing technologies had become accessible and used in elementary education. In Wasps is to be found the most extended Aristophanic engagement with Aesop, and the emphasis is slightly different, although the association of knowledge of Aesop with rudimentary cultural awareness remains the same. Philocleon, as representative of the common Athenians who supported the demagogue Cleon, enjoys his Aesop. When he delivers his pseudo-legal speech in defence of jury attendance, he lists the types of entertaining performances he can expect to witness in court (–): I can listen to the defendants letting forth every manner of voice in order to get acquitted . . . Some bewail their poverty and exaggerate their plight . . . Others tell us stories or a funny Aesopic fable; others crack jokes to make me laugh and put
Rowe : .
Email of Monday, October .
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me in a good mood. And if these means don’t persuade me, they drag in their little children by the hand forthwith, girls and boys, who cower together and bleat in chorus . . .
Aesopic fables subsequently play a significant part in the formation of the contrast of class politics and their cultural expression during the scenes just before and after the symposium. Bdelycleon is rehearsing his father in the role of refined symposiast. He has dressed him in soft Persian clothes and Laconian slippers and shown him how to adopt an elegant gait. Now he must train him in elevated conversational strategies for dining in the presence of well-educated and clever men ( 2 W " | @ 2!@ 5 @ , –). Philocleon suggests he could tell the story of Lamia farting, or ‘Cardopion and his mother’ (–); Bdelycleon protests that such mythoi are not appropriate to the occasion; what is needed is stories connected with reality – ‘stories with human beings’ in them, which have a connection with the life of the household. Philocleon ignores the reference to humans, and launches into a ‘household’ story about a mouse and a weasel, which (if it were not cut short by Bdelycleon’s protests) looks distinctly Aesopic in potential (see e.g. Hausrath). But Bdelycleon does object that, in the company of gentlemen at a symposium, ‘mice and weasels’ play no part in the conversation, any contribution to which should be a reminiscence about participating in a state pilgrimage, or an athletics event, or something distinguished achieved in one’s youth. Philocleon jumps on the third alternative, saying that his own most brilliant feat was the distinctively agricultural exploit when he stole some vine-props (): Bdelycleon is exasperated and says that a tale of a hunt or deed of daring would be much more suitable than a peasant’s tale about petty theft of vine-props. Yet even Bdelycleon admits that there is a place for the Aesopic fable in the social life of the educated gentleman. His father is concerned that if he goes out and becomes inebriated, then he will start fighting and damaging property and end up financially liable to his victims. Bdelycleon reassures him that this is not a problem (–): . . . if you are with fine and refined gentlemen ( ! ). Either they undertake to appease the offended person or, better still, you say something witty, you tell some comic story, perhaps one of those you have yourself heard at table, either in Aesop’s style or in that of Sybaris; everyone laughs and the trouble is ended.
Here Bdelycleon admits not only that fables are indeed told at the drinking parties held by refined elite gentlemen, but that they can come in useful when you need to avoid paying damages for the sort of crimes of violence
The Aesopic in Aristophanes
which heavy drinking can provoke. The class politics here are complicated: if you want to impress other people at an upper-class symposium, then you avoid anecdotes of the Aesopic or Sybaritic type (whatever the latter may mean). Such fables can, however, prove helpful to upper-class gentlemen when manipulating and indeed exploiting those less well educated. Philocleon takes his son’s advice to heart and after the symposium tells four fables in quick succession: one to the female bread-seller who has a grievance against him (–), two to a man he has assaulted (–), and finally, when picked up and hauled inside, the story of the eagle and the dung-beetle to his son (–). In the case of the bread-seller, Philocleon announces that he will use one of those ‘clever stories’ ( . . . 5
, ), a ‘charming fable’ ( . . . # , –), to avoid being prosecuted for damages to her stock of loaves. But rather than tell a wellknown fable, he invents an episode in Aesop’s own life, in which Aesop corresponds to himself and ‘a drunken bitch’ to the bread-seller (–): \j 6 2 / 1 !’ R " ! !> > . V ) L A ‘X > > , . , ] ) $ !' 2 W , - V .’ One evening when Aesop went out to dinner, a drunken bitch had the effrontery to bark at him. So Aesop said to her, ‘Oh, bitch, bitch, if by Zeus you sold your evil tongue and bought some wheat, I would say you were acting sensibly.’
Philocleon compounds his display of knowingness, at the expense of the bewildered bread-wife, by alluding to another, non-Aesopic story about a singing competition, and to Euripides’ heroine Ino. He figures himself as the joke-teller and thus aligns himself not only with Aesop but with the comic dramatist; this generic alignment is counterpoised to the suggestion that the bread-seller might end up suffering the fate of a tragic heroine, or rather, to be more specific, a famous Euripidean one. But the Aesop joke
According to 8 on Vesp. and Av. , the distinction between Sybaritic and Aesopic fables was simply that animals featured in one and humans in another. But these statements, as MacDowell : points out, look like little more than ancient scholastic guesswork. On this scene see Rothwell a: –. I am not sure that the same generic contrast would have worked so well between Aesopic fable, and, for example, Aeschylean tragedy, with its rich zoological imagery. The story of the pet lion cub which grew up to savage its master’s flocks is almost certainly related to a fable (Ag. –), as is the passage on the nestlings in Cho. – (see Janko : n. ). A fragment of Aeschylus’ Myrmidons (TrGF F ) involves the fable of an eagle killed by an arrow made with its own feathers.
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has been even more complicated than this. It shows Philocleon extemporizing an Aesopic fable which describes a situation almost identical to his own (he has gone out to dinner and is being addressed by a female), but in which the female has turned into an animal or at least is signified metaphorically by a she-dog, who does not use speech but merely barks. As MacDowell put it, the application of the fable to the bread-seller ‘becomes more and more obvious as it goes on. Dogs do not have any use for wheat, but bakers do’. This image of the prosecuting she-dog of course also creates a link with Cleon, the prosecuting dog in the trial scene earlier in the play. Philocleon is using his grasp of the principles of Aesopica in order to reveal how he has in fact distanced himself from his previous admiration of Cleon and demagogue-led litigation in order to move culturally ‘up-market’. To the man who accuses him of physical assault, Philocleon tells two ‘Sybaritic’ tales, both involving inhabitants of Sybaris who decided to solve their problems practically, one by taking his injured head to a doctor, and the other by mending her broken box with a piece of string (–). There are no animals here, nor eating, nor other somatic function; the outlook is not even specifically connected with the countryside or peasant farming. But the moral of both fables, it is implied, is that people with a problem need to go away and sort it out for themselves rather than blame someone else. Bdelycleon, exasperated, decides that the time has come to get his talkative father off the streets and safely inside. Philocleon responds with his final fable, or rather fable within a fable: the account of Aesop telling the fable of the eagle and the dung-beetle ( Hausrath) when he was framed for a crime of robbery at Delphi. The Delphians hid a sacred cup in Aesop’s baggage, accused him of stealing it and condemned him to death. But before his death he told them the fable, the implication of which is that they would be no more likely to escape revenge than anyone else. Referring to this part of Aesop’s biography therefore amounts to a prediction by Philocleon that any outrage Bdelycleon commits against him will one day be avenged (–): . \j ]-
’ – d. + " . . - @ "4 ( ! (. B ) %5 * : B ! – d. j’, : ! .
MacDowell : . See further the Vit. Aesop. – and the exhaustive discussions of Wiechers .
The Aesopic in Aristophanes
(Philocleon) One day at Delphi, Aesop . . . (Bdelycleon) I could not care less about that! (Philocleon) . . . was accused of having stolen a sacred cup. But he said to them that one day the dung-beetle . . . (Bdelycleon) Oh no! You will be the death of me, you and those beetles of yours!
An Aristophanic chorus, the angry old women of Lysistrata, also refers to the fable of the eagle and the dung-beetle (). So does the discussion in Peace –, where the very stage presence of the beetle, a substitute for Bellerophon’s winged horse, Pegasus, is inspired by the stock dramatis personae of Aesopic fable. A scholion on this passage in Peace (8 Pax ) related the fable in full: the eagle stole the young of the beetle, and the beetle in revenge rolled away the eagle’s eggs. The eagle appealed to Zeus and was invited to nest in his bosom, but the beetle came and flew round Zeus’s head, causing him to jump up and break the eggs. This meant that the beetle successfully extracted revenge from the eagle. But in this, the earliest surviving Aristophanic use of the fable, merely the words ‘one day the dung-beetle’ seem already to be quite sufficient to let the audience see the point. In ‘reading’ himself as the dung-beetle within the fable of the eagle and the dung-beetle, Philocleon is demonstrating the art of decoding animal allegory in a personal way. Aristophanes’ audiences could clearly understand the identification of specific figures in animal stories with themselves and their acquaintances, and moreover the identification of specific figures who ‘stood’ for a particular position in class politics. But Philocleon’s allegorical exercise has another twist: he knows something at least of the biography of the fabulist Aesop himself and can identify himself with the storyteller when the storyteller identified himself with the dung-beetle. As in the Aesopic scenario he dreamed up in order to deal with the baker-woman, Philocleon here likens himself to Aesop, who had himself likened himself at Delphi to the dung-beetle, who had subverted both the eagle and Zeus. There are therefore no fewer than three parallel stories of subversion of superior authority going on here – Philocleon is challenging his upwardly mobile son, as Aesop challenged the Delphians, and the dung-beetle challenged both the eagle and Zeus. Moreover, all three narratives are readable as allegories for a potential (although ill-defined) rebellion of the followers of Cleon within the Athenian political sphere. Aesop, as ever, is an important signifier that something allegorical is going on. It is the same fable, the eagle and the dung-beetle, with which Aristophanes encourages his audience to think about the correspondences
MacDowell : .
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between the characters of his comedy Peace and real-life figures in the contemporary political world – indeed, the correspondences, once again, with Cleon. Here is the relevant part of the dialogue between Trygaeus’ two slaves which opens the comedy (–): K . K ./
( ’;
* %!’
* % 6 " ( ] 6 / 2. K . * ( t S @ !@ " - , ‘6 ' ; B ! ' 6 ;’ ) * ) , )P - ! A ‘ " " , c" () . , : re ! .’ (First Slave) Who was it then? [sc. who afflicted the household with the dung-beetle] (Second Slave) No doubt Zeus, the God of the Thundercrap. (First Slave) But perhaps some spectator, some beardless youth, who thinks himself a sage, will say, ‘What is this? What does the beetle mean?’ And then an Ionian, sitting next him, will add, ‘I think it’s an allusion to Cleon, who in the Underworld feeds on filth all by himself.’ –
The first slave imagines a dialogue between two spectators going on simultaneously with his own conversation. Before the beetle has even been seen by the audience, they are wondering what it will signify. The second slave has used the audience’s knowledge of the fable of the eagle and the dungbeetle to introduce the idea that Zeus must lie behind the presence of the household’s strange new pet, but the first slave knows that people in comic audiences are expecting a political allegory. The young philosopher is clear that the dung-beetle must signify something more than a dung-beetle, but the Ionian (whose provenance suggests the genre of iambic invective, which, as I have already noted, itself drew on Aesopic fable) is equally clear that the correspondence is insulting and is with Cleon. The slave, himself very knowing about theatre audiences, imagines a hyper-knowing spectator who can decode both fables and staged comic allegory. The introduction of the animal allegory, and its explicit discussion, thus functions as a prompt to the audience to start thinking allegorically: ‘what does the beetle mean’? The intergeneric dialogue conducted in Aristophanes’ Peace, as I have discussed elsewhere, is simultaneously an aural battle between genres which are fighting for peace and those which fight to prolong the war. On the
I follow here the distribution of lines adopted by Olson . See Rosen .
The Aesopic in Aristophanes
side of peace are ranged drama, Hesiod’s Works and Days, and choral lyric, while martial epic and (to an extent) elegy signify Athenian and wider Greek militarism. But in the opening dung-beetle stunt, Aesopic fable is simultaneously both allied with tragedy in terms of the play’s overarching narrative (that is, Trygaeus’ effort to bring about peace) and also tonally contrasted with it in a manner similar to the contrast between on the one hand Philocleon’s identification of himself with Aesop and the Aesopic dung-beetle, and on the other the baker-woman’s potential identification with the tragic heroine Ino. Trygaeus’ daughter protests that it is a strange idea to harness a beetle to travel to heaven (–), to which he responds, ‘In Aesop’s fables the dung-beetle has been revealed as the only creature that can fly to the gods’, adding the information that it went ‘to take vengeance on the eagle and to break its eggs’ (–, –). The girl suggests that Trygaeus would cut a more impressive, tragic figure if he rode Pegasus instead (–), as Aristophanes’ audience knew that the hero of Euripides’ Bellerophon had done. Trygaeus responds that the dung-beetle is easier to feed since it can recycle Trygaeus’ own excrement (–). What we are seeing here is the specifically Aesopic parody of a tragic episode – its ‘Aesopification’. For the winged horse of mythology is substituted the bathetic dung-beetle of fable. This intergeneric counterpoint is wrapped up, at the end of the stunt, with the daughter’s warning that if her father falls off and becomes disabled, he will cut quite another tragic figure – one of Euripides’ ragged heroes (–, such as Bellerophon, Telephus or Philoctetes: see also Ach. , –; Ran. ). Even within tragedy, it is implied, heroes can be more or less d´eclass´e. The precise significance of the functions of Aesop in Aristophanes depends to an extent on the ideological import of the Fables in antiquity more widely, a question that is notoriously fraught. The two most dominant types of moral to be drawn from the fables are () the inevitability of force majeure (the hawk is simply bigger and stronger than the nightingale), and () the notion that smaller or weaker entities can, through favours or superior intelligence, ameliorate to some extent the unfairness created by the naturally superior power of other creatures (the mouse controls the lion through reciprocal favours; the hare is vanquished by the pluck and persistence of the tortoise). Both of these moral lessons seem to me to be entirely compatible with the worldview of either rich or poor, free or slave, in ancient Mediterranean society. There seems, however, to be little
Hall : ch. . Cf. also Revermann and Tel`o, in this volume. See Finke : and Hall . Unfortunately Kurke’s excellent book was published too late for it to be considered in detail.
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doubt amongst classical scholars that the fables reflect at some level their origins as ‘low’ or ‘popular’ culture, oral stories generated and circulated by slaves and lower-class individuals in antiquity. This line of argument can be traced to the classical Greek prose writers themselves. The point at which agreement ceases is when the question is asked as to how ‘progressive’ or truly subversive the ideology of the fables is. Some, such as Kenneth Rothwell, have identified Aesop’s Fables, especially in the classical period and markedly in Aristophanes, as the literature of the underdog, with a healthy rebellious and subversive content. But Page DuBois has argued persuasively that the fables operated in antiquity in a rather reactionary way. She thinks that in ‘naturalizing’ what are actually human social inequities by comparing them with inherent biological and natural differences between animals, they suggest that human inequities are immutable and unchallengeable as well. My own view is that the Fables actually worked in both ways – they are indeed expressions of the tensions that underpinned a deeply hierarchical society but they expressed that tension dialectically in ways that spoke with an equally loud voice to people on both sides of the power divide and created an ‘epistemic community’ in the process. I would argue that the socially ‘low’ knowingness of stance in which this tension is expressed is the greatest debt ancient comedy owes Aesop and is moreover one of the greatest debts it owes to any genre. The knowing Aesopic stance may even take us into an intergeneric dialogue of a far more ancient and transcultural kind. Long before Hesiod’s allusion to the fable of the hawk and the nightingale, fables in what seems to be similar to an Aesopic form appear in Sumerian, Akkadian, Egyptian and Aramaic texts from the third millennium onwards. Once Edmund Gordon began to publish his collections of Sumerian proverbs and fables, hundreds of which refer to animals, classical scholars including Ben Perry became convinced that the Aesopic fable came to the Greeks by way of the neo-Babylonian and Assyrian wisdom tradition. One example is Hierocles’ proverb about she-dogs in a hurry giving birth to blind puppies (Pax –), which is partially preserved in a collection of Sumerian proverbs published in : ‘The bitch is weakened . . . the puppies’ eyes will not
On the role of the Aesopic in the birth of Greek prose cf. Kurke . For another example of Aristophanic reception of ‘popular’ culture cf. Rusten in this volume. Rothwell a. For further bibliography see Heath : with n. . See DuBois : –. For a fascinating discussion of pre-Aesopic mouse fables in ancient Egyptian sources see Dawson . On this scene see above.
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open.’ The fable of the eagle and the fox in Birds – has also been traced to an archetype in Mesopotamia. Much closer to Aristophanes’ time, fables similar to those associated with Aesop also appear in the Aramaic papyrus of about bc recording the story and sayings of Ahikar. The papyrus was found in or in the Jewish temple at Elephantine, Aswan. The dialect in which the sayings themselves are expressed is, however, of greater antiquity, belonging to southern Syria in the eighth to seventh century bc. The very antiquity of this papyrus makes it more likely that at least some truth lies behind Clement of Alexandria’s claim that sayings from the story of Ahikar were known, from a stele in Babylon, to none other than the philosopher Democritus (Strom. ... = [Democr.] b D–K). Ahikar’s stance is that of adviser to his nephew, whom he has adopted having been unable to beget a son himself. The boy, according to the story, did not take kindly to being hectored by his adoptive father. I would like to conclude with a recent description, by Ingo Kottsieper, of the social world implied in the tone and content of the sayings of Ahikar, a world, tone and content which bear many resemblances to those in Aristophanes. My reason is not, of course, to claim any direct relationship between specific passages of Syrian wisdom literature and Aristophanes, but to emphasize the importance of taking psychosocial stance into consideration when we are not only defining genre but attempting to identify more subtle forms of intergeneric dialogue: Most of the admonitions address free men, who are adult and occupy a social position that allows them not only children but also servants. In addition, they own weapons . . . Their economic situation is typical for free members of a rural society in which one could easily procure wealth through a bountiful harvest, but also could lose it again by a bad year . . . The economic situation of the addressees . . . is also shown, where both the danger of borrowing and the advantages of giving out loans are mentioned . . . That the addressees belong to the ‘middle class’ is illustrated by the admonitions against desiring sizeable possessions, which are beyond their reach, or power . . . in political or social arenas.
Gordon : ; see especially Moran . Kottsieper : –.
Williams .
c ha p te r 12
The mirror of Aristophanes The winged ethnographers of Birds (1470–93, 1553–64, 1694–1705) Jeffrey Rusten The propelling force and central metaphor of Birds is wings, which enable suspension, superiority and sublimity. Wings and flight sustain Birds’ plot but also offer a stream of felicitous associations with sexuality, art and especially poetry. Among these flights are four trochaic strophes late in the action (–, –, –, –), which the chorus of birds opens by announcing (–): , !2’ ! ’ j . We have flown over many novelties and marvels, and seen strange things.
They go on to relate the thaumata that they have seen in four distant lands. These four ‘voyages,’ separated into three different locations to mark scene changes between the sycophant, Prometheus, the Poseidon embassy, and the final messenger, and receiving only passing attention from commentators, not only form a metrical unity but evoke and impersonate a hybrid poetic-geographic genre of fabulous ethnography, of which wings are both the means of transport and the recognizable generic marker. But its specific placement here, as we will see, marks the completion of Birds’ distinctive two-stage movement: evidently like other comic utopias,
For some new insights and refinements to the original version of this chapter I am indebted to an audience in the Classics Department at Columbia University in , as well as to this volume’s editors. See in general Luck-Huyse . For wings and sexuality, see especially Arrowsmith ; for wings in Birds see Taillardat : – and Dobrov : –; on the connection between wings and poets in the play, see Martin . Here and elsewhere, unless otherwise indicated, the translations are mine. In addition to Dunbar ad locc., cf. W¨ust : –; Hofmann : –; Moulton : –; and Silk . Crates’ Beasts (frr. –), Pherecrates’ Savages, Krapataloi and Mine-workers (frr. –, –, –): see Ruffell .
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it is a process of crossing over, imagining the breakdown of existing boundaries between civilization and the wild, human and avian, land and sky; but unlike them (as far as we know), it proceeds to establish a new midair imperial city, which sidelines men and gods, earth and heaven alike. From this brand-new Nephelokokkygian centre, the bird-chorus’s ethnographic reports of its voyages will display a new periphery to wonder at and speculate on and, in more than one sense, will take us back to where we began. poetry, wings, hyperboreans and laughter When ancient poets speak of themselves or their work as winged, they conventionally express one of two ideas. First, poetry can be thought of as something that flies because it is above the level of daily life, somehow loftier and therefore more meaningful than ordinary speech. The famous ‘winged words’ in Homer perhaps belonged to this category once, although Milman Parry showed that the phrase is used in the Iliad and Odyssey without regard to the sort of speech which follows. Later lyric poets, especially Pindar, come to use wings all too often in describing their own work, so that Aristophanes never tires (in Birds and elsewhere) of ridiculing the bombast of the ‘winged dithyrambs’ and their authors. Opposed to these winged lyrics are the ‘earthbound’ words not only of prose, but also of less elevated poetry such as iambics, and it is from this metaphor that in ancient as well as modern times the word ‘pedestrian’ came to be applied to everyday, uninspired language. Sophocles can therefore speak of ‘pedestrian songs as well as lyrics’ ( 1 - , TrGF F ), and an unknown comic poet has a character exclaim ‘stop singing lyrics, and tell it to me on foot’ ( ( (’, 1 - ). Callimachus closes the four books of his Aitia with the promise that he will now ‘proceed to the pedestrian pasture of the Muses’ (* g M 2" 16 . [%] , fr. . Pf.), that is, exchange the divinely inspired elegy of that poem for the Iambi. Finally, Horace speaks of his satires as ‘creeping along the ground’ (sermones . . . repentes per humum, Epist. ..–).
See the list of passages in K¨ Parry . ohnken : – n. . See Dover on Ar. Nub. . On poets’ occasional self-characterization as birds D. Steiner . Kassel and Austin have dubitatively assigned this fragment to Aristophanes (fr. dub. ). Norden i: n. collects passages contrasting 16 not with wings but with travel by chariot; yet the chariot in which poets travel is that of the Muses (Kassel : ), and it is winged (Pind. Pae. b.– M = C Rutherford), cf. the wings of the Muses in Isthm. .; the winged chariot of the soul in Pl. Phdr. a is possibly an adaptation of the idea.
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The other use of wings concerns not the height but the extent of flight – the great distances it can cover – and it is primarily this that poets have in mind when they explain how widespread their fame can be. Ennius (Varia – V.) had commanded his posterity in an epigram: nemo me lacrimis decoret nec funera fletu faxit. cur? volito vivos per ora virum. Let no one adorn me with tears, nor bury me with weeping. Why? Because I am flying, still alive, through men’s mouths.
And Theognis had boasted to the boy Cyrnus, to whom he had addressed so much advice in verse (– W ): ' g "’ % , W ;’ ’ , =l A !
' . " @ . I have given you wings, with which you will fly aloft with ease over the boundless sea and all the earth; and at all the feasts and banquets you shall be there, in many men’s voices etc.
But the exceptional fate Horace predicts for himself in the sky, escaping death, is no mere poetic metaphor (Carm. ..–): non usitata nec tenui ferar pinna biformis per liquidum aethera vates neque in terris morabor longius invidiaque maior urbis relinquam. non ego, pauperum sanguis parentum, non ego, quem vocas, dilecte Maecenas, obibo nec Stygia cohibebor unda. iam iam residunt cruribus asperae pelles et album mutor in alitem superne nascunturque leves per digitos umeros plumae iam Daedaleo notior Pcar
visam canentis litora Bosphori Syrtisque Gaetulas canorus ales Hyperboreosque campos . . .
For an interesting contrast between the ‘bird’s-eye’ or cartographic view (also in Pl. Phd. b–c: see Nightingale ) and the ‘pedestrian’ or touring approach to ethnography see Purves : ch. (and see n. below). Stewart .
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No common or fragile feather will carry me aloft through the clear air, a singer with two shapes; nor shall I delay further on earth, but leave the cities behind, triumphant over envy. Not I, though the offspring of poor parents, not I, whom you invite, beloved Maecenas, shall die, nor be confined by the waters of the Styx. Even now the rough skin is settling on my legs, and I am being changed into a white bird above, and light feathers are growing on my fingers and shoulders. Soon, more well-known than Daedalic Icarus, I shall inspect the shores of the resounding Bosporus, as a melodious bird I shall visit the Gaetulian Syrtes, and the Hyperborean plains . . .
In an almost Birds-like metamorphosis, Horace feels his legs become rugged skin, his fingers bonded with feathers; he will leave humanity behind (urbis relinquam), but his flight will place before his view (visam) the distant places of East and South and, to the north, even the land of the Hyperboreans. Now claims of visits to the Hyperboreans had occasioned Herodotus’ famous comment on imaginary ethnography (.): ( ' ~ / " " .! . 6 r/ ( " 2 L ~ / " 2 * " " : 6 +l6 9 "- *' . . " . /
V ! , . V . @ ' B" 2 4 W S *" # 5 . And let that be the end of discussion about the Hyperboreans. For I do not repeat the story about Abaris, who was said to be a Hyperborean, which tells that he carried an arrow all around the earth and ate nothing. If there are some men beyond the north, then there are also men beyond the south. When I survey the already numerous authors of [ , not a one of whom has related anything that makes any sense, I can only laugh.
Herodotus’ laughter can help lead us to the specifically winged sub-branch of ethnography in which the birds are engaged. fabulous ethnography The task of describing distant lands and peoples was one which the earliest Greek prose writers undertook with enthusiasm. The first accounts of this kind to survive complete are the numerous ethnographical digressions in Herodotus, and the shorter notices in the Hippocratic work On Airs, Waters, and Places, but there are enough citations preserved from earlier authors, in particular from Hecataeus of Miletus, to show that ethnography
Cf. Romm .
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was a completely developed literary form long before Herodotus wrote on the Egyptians and Scythians. If we cannot always know precisely what the earliest ethnographers had to say about the places they discussed, it is nonetheless clear that they tended to follow certain categories about each people they examined. A brief list of these would include, in a consideration of the land itself, its location and topography, plant and animal life; and on its inhabitants, their physical appearance and their social, political and religious customs. Serious ethnography of this kind might seem to offer limited opportunities for parody. But there existed a separate department of this genre that was given over to entertainment or anthropological speculation in the guise of ethnography. Here sensationalism was the rule, and the peoples described were as often as not freely invented. A comprehensive introduction to this literature is provided by some remarks in Strabo, taken from the preface to the second book of On the Homeric Catalogue of Ships by Apollodorus of Athens of the second century bc, one of the most well read of Hellenistic literary scholars. He is commenting on the puzzling fact that, whereas in the Catalogue of Ships in the second book of the Iliad the geographical information seems mostly accurate, Homer has also mentioned fantastic tribes such as the
(‘horse milkers’, Il. .). On this question Apollodorus agrees with Eratosthenes that Homer had no real geographical knowledge of distant lands but was content in these cases to invent fabulous peoples whom the gods could visit, and that such inventions are perfectly natural and excusable. At one point he adds an additional argument from the practice of later writers (Str. .. = FGrH [Apollodorus of Athens] F a):
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> 3 , @ J0 , , n (FGrH F ) M , ’ J0 ' (FGrH F ) c , ’ 0*" ' (FGrH T ) , [#e , ’ r " ' 2 ! 2 5 V 2 ' @ 3/ ! , ' Y /> ] > 2 L , > ’ * "#! 6 *6 52 .
See Tr¨udinger , M¨uller ; for the Hippocratics and Herodotus, see Thomas . See Schroeder , the list of topoi in Tr¨udinger : and the index of Thomas .
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And (Apollodorus says) that it is not surprising about Homer; for even those still later than he are in many cases ignorant and tell monster stories, Hesiod speaking of Half-dogs and Big-heads and Pygmies, Alcman of Narrowfeet, Aeschylus of Dog-heads, and Breast-eyes, and One-eyes and countless others. And from these Apollodorus moves on to those who talk about the Rhipaean Mountains and Mount Ogyion, and the settlement of the Gorgons and Hesperides, and the Land of Merops in Theopompus, and the Crimea in Hecataeus, and the land of Panchaea in Euhemerus, and river stones made from sand in Aristotle that melt in the rain, and that in Libya there is a city of Dionysus, but that it is not possible for the same man to find this twice.
From the list we can see how popular this other sort of ethnography was – it began with Homer and continued to Apollodorus’ own day, and beyond. To find the precise connection between works of this kind and the reports by the chorus of birds in Aristophanes, we should examine briefly two of the earliest examples of fabulous ethnography, both of them poetic. winged ethnography Apollodorus’ list begins with Hesiod, and there can be little doubt about the Hesiodic work that is meant, for it was one of the most popular sections of the Catalogue of Women. In Book of that work, the story of Phineus and the Harpies was told: Helios had sought to punish the blind prophet by sending these birdlike creatures to steal or befoul his food, so that he was on the point of starvation. The Argonauts desperately needed directions from Phineus for the voyage to Colchis, and these could be obtained only if they rid him of his affliction. So the sons of Boreas, Zetes and Calais, began to pursue the Harpies. This chase, which reached to every corner of the world, was described at great length within the Catalogue, and the account was famous enough to warrant a separate title – Ephorus called it the [ , ‘circuit of the world’. We need not, however, rely entirely on Strabo and Ephorus for a description of this work, since POxy. (fr. col. ) preserves a substantial part of the very section in which the Boreadae pursue the Harpies (fr. M–W = Most); the poet places considerably less emphasis on the principal characters than on the places and peoples they reached during their chase, and almost all the tribes mentioned are the half-legendary sort which Apollodorus also noted:
‘Aristotle’ here is probably an interpolation, since all the other citations are in chronological order, see Radt in TrGF . ad fr. and Rusten a: Appendix . Str. .. = FGrH (Ephorus) F = Hes. fr. M–W = fr. Most. Translation by Most .
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of the Subterranean Men and of the Pygmies [ ] of the countless Black Men [ ] monstrous Earth bore [ ] and all-oracular Zeus’s [ ] so that they be subject to the gods [ ] whose mind is superior to their tongue, Ethiopians and Libyans and mare-milking Scythians. Hephaestus] was born, son of Cronus’ very strong son, and his grandsons,] the Black Men and the great–spirited Ethiopians and the Subterranean Men] and the strengthless Pygmies: they all] belong to the lineage of the sovereign Loud-Sounder. Around [them all] in a circle they kept going, rushing ] the peoples [] of the well-horsed Hyperboreans. ] bounteous, pasturing the widely dispersed beside the steep streams of the deep-flowing [Eridanus
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] of amber. Atlas’] steep [mountain] and rugged [Aetna ] Ortygia and the Laestrygonian race. He] was born the son of mighty Poseidon. Around it] they ranged twice, around and about they circled eager] to catch them, but they [scil. were eager] to flee and run off. To the] tribe of the lordly [Cephallenians] they hastened, whom Calypso, queenly nymph, [bore to Hermes; and to the land of lord [Nisus], Aretiades’ son; and they heard the [Sirens’ piercing] voice; but them too ]with their feet high in the air ]through the barren air . . .
They see the Pygmies, M" and c 2 (‘underground-dwellers’), the Aethiopians, Libyans, and horse-milking Scythians and finally the Hyperboreans. Like the birds of Aristophanes’ chorus, the Boreadae in the Catalogue of Women visit the distant lands where these fabulous peoples lived and, like them, they could do so because they had wings. Wings become ubiquitous in the accounts of the Hyperboreans. Of all the distant peoples known to the Greeks these were the most difficult to reach, for they lived far to the north and were separated from the rest of the world by an impassable mountain range – the Rhipaean mountains, which we have already encountered in Apollodorus’ list, and which were known as early as Alcman. The means of transportation to this tribe is the subject of a famous assertion by Pindar, who begins his account of the visit of Perseus to them in Pythian .– with the statement: 2 ’ ` 16 .$ H ~ / " @ !2 B . Neither by ship nor going on foot could you find the marvellous road to the assembly of Hyperboreans.
Pindar tells us only that we cannot reach the Hyperboreans in any normal way, which has left some readers wondering just how one could in fact cross the mountains and find them. The answer to this question would
See especially the last two lines, and for the traditional iconography of the Boreadae LIMC iii. –. Alcm. PMGF; Soph. OC ; FGrH (Hellanicus) F b; (Damastes) F . Cf. Desautels . 2 . . . 1 is meant to encompass all the normal modes of transport, cf. Od. .–, ., ., .. That 1 merely means ‘by land’ (or even ‘without a ship’) is shown by Od. .– ’ j! ( W e ’ R | . ’ !" 1 , - b (which Page a: called one of the ‘silliest lines in Greek epic’), ., Il. .–; cf. also Theoc. Id. .–.
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probably not have puzzled anyone in antiquity who was familiar with the various visits made to the Hyperboreans in legend. To begin with, Perseus himself managed to get there on his way to the Gorgons, and it is known that for this entire adventure he had the use of winged sandals. The mythical Hyperborean Abaris, on the other hand, who made several crossings from his home across the mountains to Greece and back again, travelled around the world on a winged arrow. Even Apollo first reached this land in a special chariot given to him by Zeus, which was drawn by swans according to a story ascribed to Alcaeus. We are told by Pausanias that one of the first temples built at Delphi, which is also mentioned in a fragment of Aristotle, was built from honeycombs and feathers, but the temple is no longer to be seen there, because Apollo had it sent to the Hyperboreans. Ovid (Met. .–) mentions Hyperboreans who cover themselves with feathers, Lucian refers to them flying (Philops. ), Iamblichus (VP .) calls them .! / , and Herodotus (.) tells of a region in these same Rhipaean Mountains which is pure white – not from snow, but because the peaks are covered with feathers. When told that one can reach the Hyperboreans ‘neither by land nor sea’ we are clearly meant to think of the air. For the same reasons, we can see the plausibility of an emendation in a passage where Pausanias tells us of a poem in which Musaeus is made to fly followed by the senseless words 6 d " 2 @ . Otto Kern and Willy Morel suggested that Musaeus actually flew . ~ / " #$ . The man who is best known in connection with Hyperboreans, Aristeas of Proconnesus, did not in fact ever reach that tribe himself. All the information on the Hyperboreans which he recorded in the Arimaspea came, as he himself admitted, from neighbouring tribes. But Aristeas’ poem stood nonetheless just as firmly in the tradition of fabulous ethnography as Hesiod’s [ ; in fact the reason why the Arimaspea is not included in Apollodorus’ list is probably that the authors cited there employed marvellous stories only in parts of their works, whereas Aristeas’ narrative consisted solely of fabulous places and tribes. The Arimaspea is therefore especially suitable for comparison with the stories told by Aristophanes’ chorus.
See [Hes.] Sc. ; Eur. El. ; Apollod. Bibl. .. (); and Preller, Robert et al. : n. . Alc. fr. L-P; cf. Page b: –. See Meuli : –. See Fr¨ ankel : and K¨ohnken : , . See Paus. . and Arist. fr. Rose. See Paus. .. = Musae. T Bernabe.
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Although the entire tradition on Aristeas is filled with uncertainties, the testimonia all agree on one point, his method of travel. His ability to reach distant parts of the world to perform his wonders came from Apollo, and he journeyed in the form of Apollo’s special bird, the crow, as Herodotus (..) and Pliny the Elder (HN .) both attest. As Maximus of Tyre describes these journeys (. = Bolton, Aristeas T = Aristeas T Bernab´e): & ' 42#, ( ( $ .!" 3 ! , H ! " , , ! , > , , %! @ , !, ->
A I! .9 2 " 6 @ , F + # " ,
D L" S 2 , ’ V V. His soul was separated from his body and wandered in the sky like a bird, observing everything to be seen below, Earth, the sea, the rivers, cities, and tribes of men, and their sufferings, and all sorts of features; and when it had entered back into his body and he had awakened, using the body as a tool, he explained whatever he had seen and heard, different things among different peoples.
the birds ’ So we have seen that one of the basic requirements of this early fabulous ethnography was a correspondingly fabulous means of transportation, namely wings; it is obvious from the introduction to these four strophes that Aristophanes invokes this genre. In the four narrations of the birds, Aristophanes has composed his own [ , adapting material from ethnographical works of all kinds; yet to look for an actual location for these various places and tribes would be a great mistake, since he has chosen them not for their real properties, but for the names and associations he
As with Abaris, the earliest preserved source mention of Aristeas’ Arimaspea is Herodotus, who gives a rationalized account, turning an originally fabulous flight into a normal journey of exploration: see especially S. West , also Meuli and Dodds : n. . This and other descriptions of the flight of the soul are probably influenced by the ‘soul-bird’ in representations of the dead or dying: see Vermeule : ; Weicker : ; Dodds : n. ; Peifer . The soul’s progress out of the body is described as a flight already in Hom. Il. . = .. There were of course more sober ethnographers such as Hecataeus, who did not claim they could fly but still willingly recorded and commented on the accounts of their winged predecessors. Herodotus may have suggested the theme, but his resolutely rationalistic treatment of Abaris and others shows he is not Aristophanes’ direct target here, though indeed some of his marvels may have resembled those in Birds in suggesting points of resemblance to his audience (Munson : chs. and ).
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can give them. As is hinted at in their closing comments, there is only one place that the birds are really describing. The first report deals with Cleonymus (–): , !2’ ! ’ j . % " -26 % , c " , c$ 2 , # ' *" , V ' 6 ". ( ' N / 2 - , ( ' # @ -2 .
We have flown over many novelties and marvels, and seen strange things. There exists a strange tree that grows further away than Kardia, a Cleonymus, in no way useful, but otherwise large and cowardly. In the spring, this tree blossoms and produces figs, but in the winter it alternates and sheds its shields.
It was customary for ethnographers to describe the plant life of any country they visited – even Xenophon, whose concern with ethnography was limited, thought it worthwhile to include the tree whose fruit gave his men such headaches. Aristophanes has turned Cleonymus into such a tree located ‘further away than Kardia’ not because he is connected with this town in the Thracian Chersonnese, but because Cleonymus’ (courage) is notoriously wanting. The fourth-century comic poet Timocles found a similar means of mocking Hyperides; in an apparent parody of a passage from [Aesch.] Prometheus Bound , he made him into a river which ‘bubbles with boasts and wheedling cleverness . . . and irrigates the fields of the highest bidder’.
All four descriptions begin with the % + noun (here an attested place-name involving a pun), followed by a relative clause or the equivalent, an epic method of opening a narrative topographically (Fraenkel : –): cf. e.g. Hdt. . and Thuc. .. Note that despite the initial ‘cartographic’ (above n. ) or ‘aerial’ (S. West : –) perspective, the four subsequent vignettes are narrated from an Earth-based point of view. An. ..–. Cf. Herodotus’ descriptions of the plants of Babylon (..–) and Scythia (.., –.). Storey . Timocl. fr. . For the ethnographic @ cf. Hdt. .–.
The mirror of Aristophanes
The second strophe introduces another distant curiosity (–): % ) I #$ 6 * ># , % ! Z V ! 52 @ 5> , R " . ( ) *") N -' 52 2# . . ># Z @ / @ > )K", 2 6 N ) * ( "5 .
There is a certain land far away, near the very darkness, in the desert of lamps, where men dine and keep company with heroes, except at night. At that time however, one could no longer associate with them safely. For if any mortal encountered the hero Orestes at night, he wound up naked, and soundly thrashed by him over all his right side.
Commentators here have usually been content to refer to popular superstitions about Greek heroes and their powers; but it is possible that this description was inspired by a particular legend. Everyone has heard of the Isles of the Blessed, which lay in the West, and to which selected heroes were transported after their deaths, but there was another such island in the East as well, called Y2, ^ or ‘White Island’. This island belongs especially to Achilles and is already mentioned as his in the Aethiopis, by Pindar and by Euripides, but other heroes, including Helen and Ajax, lived there as well. The Isles of the Blessed were located vaguely to the west; the White Island, on the other hand, is always placed in the Black Sea (already by Pindar), and though it is very distant, men claimed to have sailed there and used the altar and oracle; but there were important limitations to the presence of mortals on Y2, ^ . In the third-century ad second sophistic dialogue Heroicus Philostratus has given a full account of the island and its formation, which is of course long after Aristophanes but appropriates and adapts the brief references in Pindar and Euripides; according to him no men were allowed to live on
Aethiopis, Procl. Arg. . Bernab´e; Pind. Nem. .; Eur. Andr. –, IT –. Cf. Rohde : ii. n. and Preller, Robert et al. : –. In addition to Rohde (see above, n. ) see Hedreen ; compare especially the epithet 2 ! in Eur. Andr. with Philostr. Her. . (cf. Weicker : –). On Heroicus see especially Grossardt and Whitmarsh .
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the island, and any sailors who used the altar had to depart by sunset, for the night belonged to the heroes, especially to Achilles and Helen. Aristophanes has made use of the fact that Athens could be dangerous at night for one without a torch, and that a thief nicknamed Orestes was one of the chief dangers; the heroically named Orestes is transported to the White Island with the other heroes but men leave at sunset for a different reason: Orestes can not only inflict paralysis on men like other heroes but will steal their cloaks as well. The only reason that Aristophanes has not made this particular land of the heroes an island like Y2, ^ is that he was too fond of the night-time puns in 6 , and the ‘desert of lamps,’ which is modelled after the 82!@ (Ach. ). Needless to say, neither phrase should be interpreted as a real indication of place. The third story is inspired by the double meaning of the word 42# , which Aristophanes finds in the metaphorical meaning ‘persuade, entice’, and applies literally (‘conjure souls’) to Socrates (– ): 6 ' 8 %), V 2 Q 42# 8 A % ! [ N! 42#, . f 1@ ’ ` , - ’ %# ’, q W $ , F < !’> K2W !, ’ !’ * ! 6 6 2 . b @ - / ’ *#" 6 ( - 2 6 4># ; ! . . . . . /" ! . 2 . #! ’ 2 #! !) J0 6 -! " . [.] ( #! ] . 2. . R6 . ( . . ,
Q ) g5 " H #" 82 . [] . Come, stranger, stand on the grassy precincts of the fearful lake, and once you have cut the throat of this sacrificial animal, let drop the blood, for the soulless ones to drink, into the dim depths of the reeds. Invoking ancient earth, and Hermes of the Underworld, conveyer of the dead, beg the Zeus of the Underworld to send up the swarm of night-wanderers from the mouths of the river, of which a branch, this miserable water, with which the hands are not washed, has been sent forth with the streams of the Styx.
Od. .. Cf. Vermeule : n. . Hdt. .. (Peisander’s wife). See Rusten b. Chaerephon was nicknamed ‘the bat’, and dead souls are compared to 2 in Od. ..
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There are many interesting features in these lines, but one new word, #" in line , is especially meaningful in the current context: it seems to denote that the water in this lake, which was one of the branches of the Styx, must not be used for washing, and B¨arbel Kramer aptly compared the word V 2 in Aristophanes. The adjective has always been taken to refer only to Socrates (which is certainly possible despite the word order) but in the light of the papyrus text, it is also possible that it is applied to both nominative nouns. In its normal passive sense, it designates the unwashed philosopher, but in an active sense it refers to the lake whose water cannot be used for washing and is exactly parallel to H #" , so that an Aristophanic double meaning is finally revealed. The last of these four narratives has the greatest concentration of ethnographic tropes (–): % ’ 6 c4> ( )0 " ,
p ! 1 2 2 2@ $ 21 2 A // ’ . " , . 6 @ )0 @ - # ( r & @ # " .
In Phanai near Klepsydra, there lives a villainous race of Englottogastores (‘tongue bellies’), who reap and sow and gather fruit and pluck figs with their tongues. They are of barbarian stock, the Gorgiai and the Philippoi. And on account of these tongue-bellied horse-lovers, everywhere in Attica the tongue (of a sacrificial animal) is cut off separately.
Phanai and Clepsydra seem to have been real places, the former a harbour in Chios, the latter a spring in Athens; here they evoke the water clock of the Athenian court and the verb - , in the sense ‘denounce’. The )0 are furthermore one of Aristophanes’ most felicitous inventions. They are based on a mythical tribe of )0# , ‘hand bellies’, who were originally viewed as creatures with hands directly attached to their stomachs but had by the fifth century been rationalistically explained as ‘those who fill their bellies with their hands’, that is, men who
The mirror of Aristophanes
lived from manual labour. (No one had of course ever seen them, only heard their name.) This revision was probably found in Hecataeus’ ethnographic work, since he was in general fond of rationalistic explanations and is known to have mentioned this people under the name i ( ! W > 2 , D ' 2# 6 . W @ > 2 , 1
, , # .
Halliwell : (author’s italics); cf. also Halliwell : . This of course does not exclude but indeed encourages the ‘comic loop whereby the audience is expected to laugh at a gibe against its own “shamefulness” ’ (Halliwell : with reference to Nub. –). At Resp. e–a verbal abuse ( ( ), reciprocal mockery ( ( 2 ) and use of obscene/foul language ( .# ( ) ‘stand[s] as a kind of synecdoche for comic drama (Halliwell : (= : )). For the persistence of invective, personal satire and abusive language well into the fourth century bc, see Halliwell a: –. This selection is necessarily partial and my treatment of it will cover only the points that are more relevant to the present argument. This is routinely observed for the Philebus but, to the best of my knowledge, hardly so for the passages of the Republic; most telling is the second alternative at c–: ' T . > (‘at a comic performance or in private life’); cf. Halliwell : n. . Halliwell : rightly qualifies that in e Plato’s argumentation about mimetic ‘imprinting’ does not mean a condemnation of comedy per se.
lucia prauscello When [the decent man] comes [i.e. in the course of his narrative: cf. c– ] to someone who is unworthy of him, he will not be willing to liken himself in earnest to that man who is his inferior, unless perhaps briefly when [the inferior character] is doing something good, but he will be ashamed, both because he is untrained in imitating such characters and because he resents shaping and fitting himself to the moulds of inferior people, despising it in his thoughts unless it is for the sake of play.
The focus of the whole section is mainly oriented to the psychology of the actor/performer, yet the scope of reflection is broader. Several commentators have rightly noticed that this passage represents a conditional overture to comedy and have emphasized how the terms of the condition are best summed up in the expression # (that is, a decent man can imitate someone his inferior as long as it is ‘for play’s sake’). Comedy’s self-consciousness of its ‘fictional status’ ( ) and the self-contained, ‘inconsequential’ dimension of comic mimesis allow for ‘a marginal acknowledgment that role playing can sometimes be separated from psychological internalization’. This is certainly true and is surely part of what Plato meant. But there is also another equally important qualification to the (conditional) propriety of some forms of comic mimesis that has often passed unnoticed. This qualification is #6 (‘when [the inferior character] is doing something good’) at d. This is as close as Plato ever gets to acknowledging that an inferior/comic character may find itself, after all, doing ‘something good’ (# ). In Old Comedy the adjective # is almost a catchword for Aristophanes’ repeated claim, be it serious or not, that comedy is socially useful. The ‘comic hero’ defines his identity by aligning himself with the #
(of which the audience is meant to be part) against the ‘morally bad’ (
). It is thus difficult to resist the temptation to see in the Platonic #6 an echo of the slogan so obsessively advertised by Aristophanic comedy: namely that (his) comedy says what
Halliwell : n. observes that at e ‘need not refer exclusively to comedy . . . though comedy seems the most obvious outlet’. Cf. e.g. Rosen : ; P. Murray : . For this rendering of # , see Halliwell : with n. . The accountability of comic laughter to legal curbs is a highly controversial subject. I side here with Halliwell in believing that Old Comedy enjoyed licensed performance conditions that removed the consequential effect of comic abuse that would have otherwise applied in everyday reality (see Halliwell : –, –, , a). For a very different reading, see Sommerstein (with previous bibliography). On the value of # , see Giuliano : . Halliwell : . See e.g. Eccl. , Ach. –, Eq. – and Ran. – (cf. also – and but with reference to tragedy). For the semantics of # vs. in Aristophanes, see Storey : –.
Comedy and comic discourse in Plato’s Laws
is # for the citizens and the polis. Even in Kallipolis, where the ethics of mimesis for the guardians has been argued to be stricter than in Magnesia, there is some qualified and cautious concession to comedy. At Philebus a–b the psychology of laughter, on and off the stage (b–), is introduced as an instance of the ‘mixed pleasures’ of the soul, that is, of pleasures inextricably linked to pain (d–). The ‘laughable’ ( ) springs from the sense of ‘childish/playful resentment’ ( 6 -! , a) towards our ‘neighbours/friends’ ( " , b–; - , d, d–e, a–) who exhibit ‘self-ignorance’ (V , c) about the true state of affairs of their inner and outer qualities. In so doing, they are ‘weak and unable to revenge themselves when laughed at’ (b– , !) ! ( > $ ! ). Halliwell has perceptively observed that ‘the notion of comic characters as “friends” in the Philebus . . . points towards a sense . . . that at some level we are (partly) “on their side”, at least for the duration of the play’. What has not been observed is that the degree of implicit attraction that the spectator is supposed to feel towards comic characters (inasmuch as they are our - ) finds a fitting comparandum in the projected image of the comic audience as ‘friends’ that we have already found, for instance, at Acharnians . The qualification of the ‘envy’ (-! ) experienced by the agent and beholder of the comic situation as is also interesting. Its primary meaning may well be ‘playful’ inasmuch as ‘it conveys a form of amusement or pleasure’: this is why 6 is both a pain (> ) for the soul (as an expression of -! ) but also a pleasure (& ). Yet also conveys the dimension of , ‘play’, as the ‘proper’, prescribed sphere of 6 . Feelings of envy that prompt laughter, though a mild version of Schadenfreude, are something ‘not taken in earnest’ not even by their own practitioners, so to speak. Once again, in this
On this most famous passage, see Halliwell : –; Delcomminette : –; Frede : –; Cerasuolo . Halliwell : . V is Cornarius’ emendation: the reading of the MSS is V . This aspect has often puzzled modern interpreters. In particular the exact sense of - in the Philebus passage has been highly disputed. For a minimalist reading of - as ‘someone who is harmless with regard to ourselves’, see Delcomminette : –. See also Frede : . See above, p. . For a subtle analysis of how the agent/prompter of laughter and the receiver of it (the spectator) tend to collapse into a single psychological profile from e onwards (esp. a–), see Cerasuolo : . I am deeply grateful to Malcolm Schofield for an illuminating discussion on this issue. See Delcomminette : n. . Frede translates it as ‘comic malice’ (Frede : ). See also Benardete : . Cf. above the expression # at e.
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passage of the Philebus there seems to be, on Plato’s part, a marginal acknowledgement of the ‘self-contained’ and inconsequential nature of laughter directed towards innocuous friends. That Plato in this way erases a priori the possibility of thoroughly nasty laughter (comic laughter included) directed against ‘friends’ reveals the extent to which he offers here a prescriptive (and not descriptive) notion of 6 (and this even taking into consideration the archaic ethos of ‘helping your friends and harming your enemies’). Comic laughter has often been understood, by ancient and modern interpreters alike, as an outlet for ‘social’ envy (-! ). Plato was doubtless aware of this aspect but in the Philebus he has chosen to ‘introject’ the social dimension of this phenomenon into the individual soul ‘in communion with itself’ (d, *, , 42#, ). And yet this critique of our enjoyment of 6 does not lead to a straightforward condemnation of comedy: as already observed, in the Philebus Plato’s ‘diagnosis leaves open the question whether we can do without them [that is, the mixed pleasures activated by tragedy and comedy] or whether the emotions created by the arts might not on occasion be quite therapeutic’. comedy at magnesia (i): the spectacle of otherness What, then, is the answer of Magnesia’s god-inspired lawgiver to the moralcum-psychological problems raised by comedy? The first passage where the issue is directly tackled is at d–a: ' @ .#@ @ ( " " , "5 , 3# > " , ' !! 1 A V 2
2 9 @ ! ' * 2 , . " - %! , ' * I 2 6 -, j I " 6 !"5 , *@ G > ! * , ( ) V T " , ' " , > ' ( 5" ! ! , 2, ' * L " ’ & ( , " 9 ! * ! - 6 @ 2!" , 2 V , 6 ' * - ! @ . '
I " , ? , " , H ! A .
For a survey of this topic, see Carey : – and –. On the continuity of Plato’s reflections on laughter between Philebus and Republic, allowing for the different contexts and perspectives, see Halliwell : . Frede : liii. See also McCabe : –.
Comedy and comic discourse in Plato’s Laws
As to what pertains to the shameful bodies and thoughts and those who turn themselves to laughter-provoking comic performances through speech, song, dance and the comic imitations of all these, it is necessary to observe and get to know them. For, if someone is going to be one who understands, it is not possible for him to understand what is serious without what is laughable, nor to get a grasp that way of any of two opposites without the other. But it is not possible for someone to practise both things, if he is going to partake of even a small part of virtue, and indeed it is just for this very reason that he must learn the laughable, so that he may avoid ever doing or saying through ignorance what is laughable, if he does not have to. The imitation of such things must be imposed upon slaves and hired strangers and there should never be any seriousness whatsoever about these things, nor should any free person, either woman or man, be seen learning [i.e. to practise] these things, and something kainon must always be manifest in these imitations. As far as laughter-provoking amusements, which we all call comedy, are concerned, let this be established by law and argument, etc.
Before addressing its content in detail, it may be worth noting that this discussion of the function of comedy in Magnesia takes place within a broader section (d–e) specifically devoted to those bodily movements that may be ‘correctly’ (+!@ ) categorized as ‘dance’ (3# , de). The Athenian Stranger has just acknowledged the existence of two ‘forms’ of dance (j, e). The first consists in the imitation of ‘beautiful bodies’ moving ‘in a solemn way’ (e–), the other in the imitation of ‘shameful bodies engaged in low behaviour’ (e, , ' @ .# 6 -( ). It is as representative of this latter L of dance that comedy (together with other kinds of comic representations) is introduced at dff. Plato’s aetiology of dance at a– represents the movements of the body as a natural extension of the voice. Its immediate consequence is that bodily figures (#) are never ‘autonomous with reference to the content of the song’. Hence the easy shift of focus the Athenian
I follow Sch¨opsdau : (with parallels) in understanding @ . . . " as masculine participle instead of neuter. I take > as objective genitive of : see again Sch¨opsdau : for the text. For * at e acting as descriptive genitive and closely linked to the ensuing , see England : ii. ad loc. For their further subdivisions, see Sch¨opsdau : –. I cannot treat here in any detail the problematic " of dances labelled as * ; for the present let it suffice to say that I side with Sch¨opsdau : – in not identifying them with satyr-play (cf. Morrow : –, ). This inclusive aspect of the phrasing at d– is clearly emphasized by Morrow : –. The ‘moral problem of comic dancing’ is acknowledged en passant by Wiles : . Peponi : .
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Stranger can bring in almost immediately in his digression on comedy by extending his argument to every kind of comic representation ‘with regard to speech, song, and dance, and the comic imitations they all entail’ (d–). What then is the actual content of this digression on laughterprovoking performances? In the reformed world of Magnesia its citizens must observe (!! d) and become intellectually acquainted ( 1 ) with them, since the knowledge (e, ! ; e, 9 ! ) of what is ‘serious’ ( 2 ) necessitates also the knowledge, but not the practice (cf. at e), of what is ‘laughable’ ( ). Slaves ( ( ) and hired strangers (5" % ! ) must then be ordered ( ) to be the performers of the otherness at Magnesia: the purity of the civic body must not be contaminated. And even in this case of performances enacted by slaves and strangers any ‘seriousness’ ( 2) must be avoided: what we call comedy belongs to the dimension of (e) and its performances ( ) must always reveal something that is . At least three aspects are most interesting here. First, the idea that comedy (and comic performances: ' I " , e) are . Once again, as in the Republic and Philebus, we have a prescriptive notion of what ‘the laughable’ should be: 6 must be exercised and contained within the realm of what is ‘safely’ playful (and, therefore, not socially divisive) if it has to have any positive social effect on its recipients. Old Comedy constantly exploits its dramatic ‘playful’ dimension by paradoxically exposing it while at the same time claiming (more or less disingenuously) some seriousness of purpose.
The metaphorical sense of the verb !! for ‘theoretical reflection’ is doubtless meant to evoke also the language of the ! as physical spectacle (something we should watch). For the citizens and not the lawgiver as the implied subject of !! 1 at d–, see Morrow : n. . ! at e– must refer to ‘learning how to enact’ the laughable, not to mere intellectual comprehension. For the contrast ‘intellectual knowledge’ vs. ‘practice’ of bad behavioural models, cf. e.g. Resp. a– and d–e. The analogies with the conditions of the Spartan helots, obliged to perform humiliating dancing and songs in front of the homoioi have often been noted: see e.g. Sch¨opsdau : . That the Athenian Stranger is striving here to give us a ‘persuasive definition’ of comic laughter is confirmed by his attempts to make his definition pass as generally and unproblematically shared: cf. a, ? , " . On comedy as ‘play’ in the Laws, see Jou¨et-Pastr´e : and ; : –; : –. This aspect is explicitly restated at c–a (see below). Examples could be multiplied: see e.g. Ran. –, Plut. , Ach. . For a survey of Aristophanic passages where the comic poet is presented as striving to speak out ‘what is just’ ( ) on the behalf of its fellow citizens, see Bakola : with nn. –. On the purposely elusive and ambiguous nature of Old Comedy’s advertised ‘seriousness’, see Silk a: – (esp. –); Heath and Halliwell : –.
Comedy and comic discourse in Plato’s Laws
Plato, on the other hand, has no doubt that the only civically ‘useful’ form of comedy for Magnesia is that which abdicates a priori all ‘seriousness’, at least on the part of its author(s)/performers. What is more interesting is that this impermeable distinction between serious and playful repeatedly advocated in Magnesia when it comes to comedy is potentially at variance with the otherwise pervasive notion, in the Laws, of play ( ) as the most ‘serious’ and divine mode of existence. In the Laws ‘play’ is the most serious activity by means of which human beings can assimilate themselves to the divine (b–c): of ‘true’, ‘blessed seriousness’ only god is worthy (c–, -> ' L !6 ' 2 2 V5 ). ‘Human’ forms of seriousness must be commensurable (b, > ) to our limited mortal nature: the self-absorbed dimension of is the ‘fitting medium’ (b, ) through which human seriousness can be expressed. It is ‘by adopting this mode of being (playfulness) that every man and woman must live out his/her life playing the most beautiful plays’ (c–). With the exception of comedy, in the Laws and 2 are constantly presented by the Athenian Stranger as false alternatives: they are not only compatible and complementary but actually interchangeable modalities of being. Comedy as mirror of the ‘otherness’ with which to confront oneself finds its place in the ‘second best city’ at a very heavy cost: that of opening a breach into Magnesia’s theology of play. A second interesting aspect, strictly linked to the distancing effect (from an audience perspective) implicit in the acknowledgement of as the ‘proper’ sphere of comedy, is the split identity of performers versus spectators. We have already seen how the stability and cohesion of the social body in Magnesia finds its surest foundation in the identity of performers and spectators. The loop whereby citizens performing qua citizens are at the same time also the recipients of their own performance is temporarily suspended (only to be ultimately reinforced in its validity) by the introduction of slaves and strangers as actors of an otherness that must be rationally but not emotionally processed. This, as we have seen, is perhaps the most marked distortion, in terms of psychology of emotion, of what a comic audience was encouraged and repeatedly invited to experience at the theatre
Comedy as something distinct from other ‘serious’ forms of poetry: apart from the already mentioned c–a, see also e– and c–. Jou¨et-Pastr´e : (with n. ) perceptibly undermines this tension. See also e–. On this passage see Jou¨et-Pastr´e : –. Cf. c, b, a. See Jou¨et-Pastr´e : and –; see also Ardley . This of course is a contextually motivated idiosyncrasy of the Laws.
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in Plato’s time. So what kind of laughter, if any, does Magnesia’s comedy envisage for its spectators? In the Philebus, where the psychological profile of the promoter (author/actor) of laughter and its recipient (spectator) are brought to overlap sensibly and merge into each other, the natural result was the mixed pleasure of a laughter prompted by 6 -! . In the Laws, by severing the psychology of performers (a body external to the city) and audience, Plato is able to purge comic laughter of the ‘playful envy’: the disposition of mind of the beholder towards the actor will be such that he/she will not be able any longer to consider the ridiculed as his/her ‘neighbour’ or ‘friend.’ In the Philebus (d–) we were told by Socrates that ‘to rejoice’ (# ) at one’s enemies’ misfortunes (if we can call ‘enemies’ the representatives of bad moral behaviour) with laughter is neither ‘unjust’ (V ) nor ‘resentful’ (-! ) conduct, and as such not a pain for the soul of the good citizen. Slaves and hired strangers are physically and metaphorically considered as neutral vehicles of the ‘enemy within’: a dangerous otherness that can be kept under control only by avoiding contamination. The ‘distancing’ laughter that the citizens of Magnesia will experience watching comic performances will morally absolve them from their potential complicity with the shamefulness of the event itself. Comedy is then the social space in which the citizenship as such can and must become vicariously acquainted, at a rational level, with a form of otherness with respect to its collective identity. In this sense the function of comedy in Magnesia is partially similar to that envisaged for the symposium (wine as a vehicle for personally experiencing otherness with respect to oneself ), with the fundamental difference that citizens at the symposium are also the performers. This relationship, in Magnesia, between symposium and comedy as places, respectively, for experiencing otherness with respect to oneself and otherness with respect to a communal sense of shared identity represents another significant distortion of comic rhetoric, where sympotic and komastic moments, with a varying degree of inclusiveness, tend to be fully integrated into comedy’s triumphal narrative pattern. Thirdly, at e– we are told that ‘something must always be manifest in comic imitations’. The phrasing of this line has often caused
The same tendency to blur any precise boundary between the psychology of the promoter and enjoyer of laughter can be seen also in Resp. cff.: see esp. Halliwell : –. For the purely ‘instrumental’ role of the slaves in Magnesia’s society, see Panno : –. On the relationship between symposium and comedy in Magnesia, see Jou¨et-Pastr´e and Panno : –. Aristophanic comedies often end with some kind of ‘komastic’ or ‘sympotic’ triumph (be it either wedding komos or epinician); symposium and komos often appear in a combined form in comedy: see P¨utz : . For the rhetoric of comic nike in the exodoi, see Calame and Wilson b.
Comedy and comic discourse in Plato’s Laws
trouble to interpreters, and emendations of have been proposed to correct what may look like an unexpected and unmotivated afterthought. Why should comic representations always exhibit something ? And what is the exact meaning of ' . . . - ! ? The adjective has usually been interpreted in two different ways: either in the sense that ‘there ought always to be felt to be something unfamiliar and strange’ about all comic representations or in the sense that ‘such comic representations should be constantly changed, for fear that familiarity might give them too strong a hold on the public mind.’ The semantics of allows, of course, for either possibility, and if we look at the spreading of the word in a work so obsessively concerned with stability and negation of change, -related word formations usually carry a negative moral evaluation. The two possible interpretations mentioned above are not, I believe, mutually exclusive. Something constantly changing in its nature necessarily becomes ‘unfamiliar’, ‘extraneous’ as a result of its precarious relation with us. In particular, with reference to the dominion of the arts, Egypt is repeatedly praised by the Athenian Strangers for having ‘sacred’ and thus unalterable laws that do not allow for innovation ( ). Yet change leading to improvement is not totally banned in Magnesia (see c–d) and there are occasions, isolated though they are, where the positive nature of change is advocated. In particular at c– we are told that ‘the whole city’ (c–, , * ) must ‘never cease to enchant itself’ (c–, . . . 2 , >! ) with an incessantly changing variety of songs (c–, /9 # ), so that they can infuse in the singers an ‘insatiable eagerness and pleasure for singing’ (c–, F L @ H . . . & ). In this passage the word does not appear, yet the ‘variety’ and ‘changing nature’ of songs
See e.g. Post’s conjecture ‘humiliating’ (Post : ). England : ii.. For the first interpretation, see e.g. Bertrand : ; Jou¨et-Pastr´e : ; : –; and : ; for the second, see e.g. Stallbaum –: ii.; Morrow : ; Sch¨opsdau : ; Panno : . With the exception of those passages where - words refer to the ‘newly’ founded city of Magnesia (b, d, b, c, c, d). A lexical search on the Irvine TLG E has revealed thirty-eight attestations of in the corpus Platonicum and ten for - stem. Nineteen out of these forty-eight occurrences are in the Laws alone. See Panno : –. e, on which see Nightingale . Variation and diversity ( ) in songs have been explained by Kowalzig : as mainly referring to the necessity of distinguishing, through dance and song, different types of worship within a polytheistic society, and this may well be part of what is going on. Yet the necessity to generate an ‘inexhaustible eagerness and pleasure for songs’ in the performers (who are also the recipients of the songs themselves) seems more directly linked to the ‘correct’ physiology of pleasure and pain exposed at a–c.
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become a positive medium when linked to fostering a correct physiology of pain and pleasure. My contention is that at e– Plato, by emphasizing that the comic representations must always exhibit some element of ‘novelty’ ( ), is at the same time drawing on his own reflections on the physiology of pleasure and deliberately exploiting (or better exposing) a recognizably ‘comic’ rhetoric of speech. Variously interpreted either as a mere rhetorical exercise pointing to the existence of ‘a common pool or repertoire of comic material’ accessible to everyone or as a vehicle of an ideological avant-guard, the rhetoric of and its self-reflexive character are one of the most conspicuous features of Old Comedy. Aristophanes in particular ‘regularly claims to be a comic innovator and does his best to shape his audience into one prepared to value comic innovation’. The comic ‘seriousness’, both literary and ethical, of poetics of is indeed at best elusive and ambiguous: yet it is a brand to which Aristophanes constantly returns, with more or less pronounced irony. The audience’s taste and propensity for innovative ‘originality’ is what Aristophanes constantly seeks to control in his parabases, where the comic poet presents his own persona as endorsing both ‘old’ traditional values and ‘new’ sophistic . No doubt the self-fashioning of the comic persona around key concepts such as is deeply indebted to its obsessive relationship with tragic practice. In particular, Aristophanes repeatedly tries ‘to negotiate and relate innovation and satire’, with special emphasis on a satire which purports to be civically beneficial to the community. Yet the poetics of comic has its own anxieties: it is a double-edged weapon, inasmuch as it might turn out to be a device distancing the audience from the comic poet. Aristophanes is perfectly aware of this but at the same time strives to use the rhetoric of innovation as a further element for drawing the audience to his side. In the Laws Plato exploits the inner ambiguity of the poetics of comic for his own
See e.g. Bakola : –; Ruffell ; N. W. Slater : –. Heath a: . See Silk a: –; Slater ; Sommerstein ; Bremer . Sommerstein provides a thorough collection of passages from Old and Middle Comedy. N. W. Slater : . Cf. the caveats of Wright at p. n. in this volume and Biles : –, –. Bakola : –. See esp. Thesm. – on which cf. Silk a: –. For self-conscious as part of Euripides’ self-definition, see McDermott . Cf. Ruffell : . Vesp. – (cf. also –), Nub. –, Eccl. –. See Bremer : –. See Ach. – (the Athenian audience as unstable in its tastes and ‘quick to change its mind’), Eq. (the audience is prone by nature to change taste every year), Vesp. – (the audience failed the poet by not being able to understand his ‘brand-new ideas’), Eccl. – (Praxagora worries about the tastes of the spectators: they may look down at novelty and prefer what is stale).
Comedy and comic discourse in Plato’s Laws
pedagogic goals. The trumpeted ‘comic brand’ of will be part of Magnesia’s comedy but at the same time will expose itself for what it is to the eye of the philosopher: the only ‘novelty’ possible will be one denouncing its own unsuitability to a true spirit of shared comradeship. comedy at magnesia (part ii): comic mania and bad speech In Kallipolis the manipulation of language and state censure extended to the acts both of speaking and of listening: the speaker of false speeches (specifically about the gods) and his listener were both equally subject to reproach and censure (Resp. b–). This collapsing of the distinction between the two poles of the verbal exchange does not take place in Magnesia: its citizens not only can but must attend comic spectacles in order to acquire a (merely) rational apprehension of morally bad models of behaviour. This brings us close to another interesting feature of Magnesia’s policy towards its own citizens: the necessity to exert control, quite literally, over citizens’ modes of speech. Comedy must provide a negative foil to what has to be avoided not only in terms of experiential and representational mimesis but also in terms of specific speech-acts. The second passage in the Laws where the Athenian Stranger dwells at some length on comedy (c–b) is in fact framed within a broader reflection on the absolute necessity, at Magnesia, of avoiding any form of improper, abusive and foul language. This passage is most interesting for various reasons and has already been the object of a thorough analysis with regard to what, for lack of a better word, I shall call the ‘licensed, fictional’ nature of comedy (that is, its being a form of 1 ‘without animosity’ (V 2 !2 ()) and its role within Magnesia’s society. In Magnesia, even if the status of is fully acknowledged for comedy, still no form of 1 , either with !2 or without, will be allowed if addressed against its citizens (e–). Those allowed to practise it (that is, the slaves and hired foreigners of d) must do so by limiting the target of ridicule to themselves (a–,
On aischrology as ‘a special kind of speech-act . . . not reducible to the status of its subject-matter’, see Halliwell : (= : ). For the text and the train of thought of this much-discussed passage, see above all Saunders : –. For a historical contextualization of the legal measures proposed here by the Athenian Stranger, see Halliwell a: – (and : –). For the exact meaning of in this context, see Rotstein : . For of a referring to dff. rather than to c (as, for instance, England has), see the detailed arguments of Saunders : .
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2 ) and by adopting a tone of mockery which must be V 2 !2 ( and (a–). I would like to dwell on a different aspect of our passage that has so far been neglected: the larger frame informing the ways in which the comic character and poet are represented with specific reference to the forms of expression. Secondly, I would like to show how the psychological profile of the promoter/agent of comic abuse as described in c–b, while finding significant resonances in Plato’s physiology of psychic vices, is also exploiting a well-identifiable comic trope, that of the ‘comic’ hero and/or poet as ‘madman’. We have already observed that this second extended discussion of comedy and comic representations (comedy, iambi and lyrics: e–) is part of a broader legal section on the necessity, at Magnesia, of avoiding any form of improper, abusive and foul language. In the ‘second best city’ there must be only one law about verbal abuse (e–, ; , % ) and this must apply to everyone ( ): " (e–, ‘let no one insult anyone’). ‘Irreverent speech’ (/- ), ‘vituperation’ ( ), ‘abuse’ ( ) and ‘ridicule’ ( ) are used throughout almost interchangeably to define the most representative speech-acts of comic representations (comedy included). If we read this passage bearing in mind d–e, we are led to conclude that not only must the content of comic representations be, in itself, something inherently extraneous to the civic body of Magnesia (comic imitations must always exhibit something ) but also the comic language as language must be something alien to the citizens of the ‘second best city’. Here Plato anticipates Aristotle very literally, so
For not punctuating with a comma after , see again Saunders : ad loc. Cf. also a. Morgan : – with n. traces back this attitude to epinician tradition. The overlapping between the two roles is most explicit at d–. , S ./ T 2@ , 5" . (‘a poet of comedy or of some of the iamboi or of the Muses’ song must not be allowed . . . ’): I take the phrase as a disjunction between three different literary genres, that is, comedy, iambos and melos: cf. Rotstein : – for a detailed discussion of the passage and its textual difficulties. /- , d–e; , e–, e; , c, c, d; , d, e. It may be interesting to observe the absence of / #-related formations. / # with specific reference to the bad moral effects of ‘ridicule’ is mentioned at Resp. c–: the Laws’ obsession with religious purity (cf. e.g. the criticism against the perverted sacrificial and choral practices of contemporary Greek cities at c–e: a crowd standing not far from the altars, but at times right beside, pours every kind of blasphemy on the sacred offerings ( /- @ @ #" 2 )) may be part of this linguistic taboo. For the poetics of ‘bad’ language in Aristophanes, see Storey . Cf. Rotstein : – with a perceptive discussion of the whole passage (esp. ‘[Plato] . . . is not strictly concerned with false allegations as such, but with the use of abusive language for the sake of humour and derision’).
Comedy and comic discourse in Plato’s Laws
to speak: and .# are de facto reduced to a verbal medium that coincides with a distinct socio-ethical category (slaves; hired strangers). Again, this picture is clearly prescriptive and in no way a faithful reflection of what we know of ancient comedy: at least as far as Aristophanes goes, ‘there is no clear evidence that the language of slaves differs in any systematic way from that of free persons of the same gender’. What I find worthy of further consideration in this systematic alignment of good behaviour/good speech-acts (and, conversely, bad behaviour/bad speechacts) is its visible intersection with the ways in which the Pindaric epinician tradition thematizes the problem of moral badness and blame at the level of expression. As recently put by Morgan, ‘the struggle between good and evil in Pindar plays out most insistently not in the realm of deeds but in the realm of words. His focus is on speech acts . . . In the epinician world virtue often tends towards poetic virtue and vice towards poetic vice . . . all characterize the good citizen as well as the good poet.’ In Magnesia’s world, actions count as much as words (and vice versa). Yet, to borrow once again Morgan’s words, we can see reflected in the background the same idea that ‘a continuum stretches between private, public and poetic speech and these realms enjoy a reciprocal relationship’. Of course, the authorial voice has its own licences: even if the practice of must be avoided by citizens, at d– we hear the Athenian Stranger directly engaging in his own performance of verbal abuse: ‘this [i.e. form of ridicule] we revile ( ( ( ), when it entails animosity’ (B !2 9 Nh). This form of performative utterance by the Athenian Stranger is not very different, in terms of rhetorical discourse, from what the chorus, in its authorial mood, states at Knights –: W W
*" ) -! , | , # , I 1 (‘there is nothing invidious in insulting bad people, but rather honourable for good people, if you think about it carefully’). This paradoxical rhetorical gesture by the Athenian Stranger nicely dovetails with the comic irony of an Aristophanes who constantly accuses his rivals of vulgar jokes while doing just the same himself. But let us go back to my second point, and pay attention to the specific context within which the psychological profile of the promoter/agent of
For .# as the archetypically servile form of speech, see Arist. Pol. . (= a–b). Morgan : . Morgan : . Sommerstein : . For the historical Plato as an ‘iambic’, Archilochean satirist according to his own contemporaries, see the passages quoted by Worman : –. For Plato’s use of figures of speech of the iambic traditions and of the mood associated with iambos, see Worman : ch. .
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comic abuse is introduced at c–b. This section of Book of the Laws comes immediately after the exposition of the legal measures to be taken in the case of theft or violence (" T / 1 at e; @ / at c–) and before those concerning beggars (b–c, #
). The broader frame is thus strictly legal: Book contains what comes close to what we could call a full exposition of Plato’s ideal penal code. Yet in Magnesia punishment, and especially state-sanctioned punishment, aims to reform the wrongdoer by curing his/her soul’s disease ( ), when it is curable. The criminal’s state of mind, that is, his predisposition to ‘injustice’ ( ), is repeatedly treated as if it were a disease of the soul. In Book at a–a the Athenian Stranger identified three main causes leading to forms of ‘psychic injustice’: !2 (anger, b–), & (pleasure, b–) and V (ignorance, c). What is interesting in this pathography of vice is that crimes are classified according to the psychology of the offender. This is also the case for our passage c–b. We have already seen that the psychology of the promoter/agent of laughter of d–b is subsumed within a broader category: that of a person who verbally abuses others. Yet what has passed entirely unnoticed is that also the portrait of the ‘verbal abuser’ is only a subset, in its turn, of a larger psychological profile, that of the ‘madman’ (c, ). In fact at c a new kind of psychic offender is introduced: the . The ritual purity of Magnesia requires that ‘if someone should be mad, he must not appear openly in the city’ (c, ' V Nh, , - 6 % ). His relatives must guard the
On Plato’s medical penology in the Laws, see Saunders (esp. ch. ); Lloyd : –; and Mackenzie ad loc. Cf. also Stalley (arguing for a ‘communicative theory’ of punishment in Plato’s Laws). See e.g. c– (about unjust injuries and gains): the cases that are curable (.) we must cure (.! ) as if they were diseases of the soul (: *@ 42# ). On the whole passage, see Saunders : –. Cf. Saunders : . See Saunders : –. For V denoting moral ignorance and not merely ‘non-moral technical ’ ignorance, cf. Saunders : – (vs. Sch¨opsdau). Saunders and Mackenzie both neglect this aspect. Velardi’s analysis of the language of in Plato also omits d (Velardi ). In Plato’s works the term covers a wide range of heterogeneous concepts, from that of vehicle of a higher, god-sent knowledge to that of physical disease: see e.g. Dodds : –; Casertano (on the link between and politics); Velardi ; Panno : –. In a wider sense, ‘since “sickness of the soul” is equated with the basic conflictual nature of the human soul, we are all, to one degree or another, mad’ (B. Simon : ). In this passage of the Laws is narrowly conceived of as a pathological behaviour determined by physiological and ethical-cum-social causes. On this passage see Panno : .
Comedy and comic discourse in Plato’s Laws
person in their homes or, otherwise, pay a penalty proportionate to their census (c–d). At this point we are told that there are many forms of madness (d–e). The text is worth quoting in full: ' I W 2 A ' ( j , 6 , . ' p !2 ( , -> D -, " ,
p , %#! " , , - , " @ 2 /- ( " 2 , * " * ! (9 *' * *@ . ; , % A " . Now many men are mad in many different ways. Those whom we just mentioned are mad because of diseases, but there are some who are such because of the bad nature of their temper and the bad upbringing [they received]. When there is a minor quarrel they loudly abuse each other with slanders and no such conduct is in any way or on any occasion becoming in a well-governed city. So let there be a single law for all about abusive talk: no one shall abuse anyone.
The connection between verbal abuse and madness is explicit: the person who pours abusive language over others with loud cries ( , - , " ) is nothing but a ‘madman’. His madness has a double cause: a bad natural disposition of temper ( !2 ( , -> ) and a defective education (D -, " ). Yielding to anger, he feeds his + with bad food (a, +, @ R ). By making the part of his soul that had been tamed by education (a, 6 &$!) savage again ( 5 @ ), he becomes a beast living in ill-humour (a–, ! > 2 1@ ). It seems to me hardly coincidental that this portrait of the ‘verbal abuser’ exhibits detailed verbal resonances with the portrait of the democratic populace, the Big Beast (!" " .#2 ) shouting and indulging its + at Republic a–c. The ‘verbal abuser’, its comic version included, is implicitly cast as the product of democracy: a further consonance with its comic counterpart. This passage of the Laws clearly identifies in the indulgence of the !2 and + the primary cause of this form of madness: the comic abuser is an uneducated, foul-mouthed person who yields to his passions.
On Resp. aff., see Rosen and Sluiter : –. For the mostly negative role played by the !2 within the psychology of the Laws, see now Sassi . On the complex dynamics of !2 - and +-related emotions within the reforming punishment system of Plato’s ideal city (both Callipolis and Magnesia), see Allen : – and –.
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This link between verbal abuse, madness and comedy is not, I believe, a chance element in Plato’s thought, nor indeed is Plato’s stance a unique one in this respect. But let us first look at Plato. It seems to me significant that in Republic e–a Socrates, immediately after describing the bad behavioural models proposed by comic mimesis (V > . . . ( ( 2 .# ( ), adds that Kallipolis’ guardians must not assimilate themselves to madmen either (a, *' " ! " - 9 ( > ). The behaviour of mad and bad men/women must be rationally known but must not be the object of experiential mimesis (a–, " ' " 2 W V 2 , " ' *' > *' " ). ‘Tragic’ madness is what commentators have usually thought of in relation to this passage. This may well be, but it is worth noticing that the theme of madness is brought in as an addendum to Socrates’ criticism specifically to comic mimesis (a, L "). It seems thus to me reductive to label madness here as only ‘tragic’ madness: comedy clearly plays an equal role as well. The prohibition to ‘become mad’ ( ! ) or to ‘assimilate themselves to madmen’ ( " - (! ) occurs again at b–, with reference to onomatopoeic mimesis and vocal mimicry (b–, horses whinnying, bulls bellowing, rivers/sea flowing noisily, thunders thundering, etc.). On the basis of a linguistic analysis, this passage (b–) has been usually interpreted as referring mainly to tragic and Homeric onomatopoeic diction. Yet this again is disputable. In the wake of Stanford, Murray argues that Iliad . ( ' #" 1 , ‘and [the horses] whinnied loudly’) is ‘the only occurrence of # 1 in Greek poetry before P[lato].’ This is only partly correct; between Homer and Plato we find, if not # 1 , the deverbative # in Aristophanes Knights –: # b > | # (‘the din and the whinnying of brazen-hooved horses’: a lyric, sung section: musical mimesis must have played a role here). Imitation of bellowing is found in comedy as well, and, more to the point, is strictly linked to ‘madness’: in
The shift from tragedy to comedy is already perceptible at e, where the banned object of mimesis is ‘female and male slaves doing what is proper of slaves’. On ‘comic’ madness, see below. See e.g. Adam : i. ad loc. Cf. Stanford and P. Murray : –. In addition to the Homeric passages quoted by Stanford, Giuliano : – interestingly observes that Plutarch in De audiendis poetis .e–e has in mind as referent not only Homer but also dramatic poetry (tragic and comic poetry: see the mention of Parmenon, a comic actor, at c). P. Murray : . Stanford : n. records the Aristophanic occurrence but does not attribute any significance to it.
Comedy and comic discourse in Plato’s Laws
Wasps ( ; 2, 2 , ‘how the snout bellows’) Philocleon’s dance, one of the symptoms of his insanity (cf. , # , ‘the onset of madness’), is accompanied by snorting and bellowing. In Frogs ‘bellowing like a bull’ (2 ) is again a manifest sign of madness (, ! @ ). The rushing noise of rivers and sea is evoked, for instance, at Clouds – (another lyric part). Furthermore at Knights – one of the hallmarks of Magnes’ comic ars is that of being able to make his characters ‘vocalize[s] all kinds of sounds, strumming, flapping, singing Lydian, buzzing, dyeing himself green as a frog’ ( ) - 4 2 1 2 1 4 1 / /# ). Comedy, in terms of both onomatopoeic mimesis and vocal mimicry, is as much a part of the play as are tragedy and Homer. A most interesting passage where the nexus /disease/bad speech/bad political institutions resurfaces is Timaeus b–c. The context is, of course, markedly different: in the Laws the language of medicine and cure is applied to vice only at a figurative level, whereas in the Timaeus ‘vice is an effect of physical disorder; thus, “vice is disease” literally’. In the Timaeus all psychic illnesses as such are due to the condition of the body (b–, ' 42# [that is, ] $ G5 [that is, 2/ ]). Folly (V ) must be considered a disease of the soul ( ' , 42# 2# " ) and we can distinguish two kinds (" ) of folly: one is madness, the other is ignorance (6 ' , 6 ' ! , b–), both deriving from excesses of pleasures and pains (b–). Differently, at Laws d– we have just seen that only some forms of madness are due to ‘physical’ illnesses ( 6 ), whereas others (for instance verbal abuse) do not have a strictly physiological cause but are ascribable to both a bad natural disposition ( !2 ( , -> ) and a defective education (D -, " ). Yet the position of the Timaeus is not totally incompatible with that of our
Bellowing like a bull is symptomatic of mental derangement in tragedy too: cf. Lyssa’s description of Heracles as a bull about to charge, bellowing frightfully ( 2 ) in Eur. HF –. Henderson’s translation. For this reading of the passage, see Sommerstein : and Imperio : –. For the legitimacy of studying the treatment of a given theme such as psychic illness ( ) across dialogues, see Gill (with Morgan’s response) and Gill : ‘localized’ readings (that is highly contextual-specific interpretations) are not incompatible with but complementary to ‘systematic’ readings as long as differences are not levelled. Mackenzie : . For the pathology of vice offered in the Timaeus as not incompatible with certain recurrent lines of Platonic thought, see Gill . For this strong reading of the passage (all the diseases of the soul arise because of the condition of the body), see Gill : and Mackenzie : n. .
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passage. At the end of the section concerning the diseases of the soul we find a telling acknowledgement, framed as an afterthought (cf. b–, ( ' I , V , ‘that, however, is another story’), that social and political circumstances can contribute as well to madness and ignorance (a–b): 6 ' > , H @ " . #!@ , % ' ! > . " ! , > > 2 $ !A m . " ' W -2> @ -22 " W "- @ - " , 9 !2" , > , - ) 2 ! -2 ' , * ' R . Furthermore, when men whose natural constitution is badly fixed in this way have bad forms of government and bad civic speeches are uttered, both in public and in private, and when besides they cannot learn from their youth onwards any study that could cure this situation, all of us who become bad, become so most of all against our own will for two reasons. For this the begetters must always be considered responsible far more than the begotten and the educators far more than the educated. And one should try as much as one can to avoid badness and pursue the opposite through both upbringing and pursuits and studies.
Bad political institutions (among which no doubt democracy must be implied) and bad speaking habits, both private and public, if not counterbalanced by a proper upbringing and education, also contribute to causing diseases of the soul. This is very close to what we find at Timaeus e–: the ‘mad’ or ‘ignorant’ is such unwillingly and should not be blamed as responsible for being as he is. He becomes bad ( ) ‘because of some faulty condition of the body’ ( ' G5 ( $ ) and ‘an upbringing that does not educate’ ( 2 - ). If we allow for the different notion of ‘health’ in the Timaeus (health as proportion between body and soul; illness as the disruption of such structure by the body), this last passage (e–) is very similar to the aetiology
Gill has persuasively demonstrated how the apparently bigger role Plato is willing to concede to the body in the Timaeus does not contradict Plato’s account of psychic illnesses in his other dialogues. What emerges from an integrated reading of the Timaeus ‘is not so much . . . that psychic illness derives from bodily defects, implying that we are, fundamentally, bodies, but rather that we are integrated combinations of psyche and body, and that sickness and health, body and psyche, depend on maintaining a proportionate relationship between them’ (Gill : ). On this passage as ‘compound[ing] the effect of “bad” physical constitutions . . . rather than as being an independent source of psychic disease’, see Gill : with n. . Cf. also Lloyd : –. On the soul-body interaction in the Timaeus, see Johansen (esp. –).
Comedy and comic discourse in Plato’s Laws
proposed at Laws d– for the ‘verbal offender’: !2 ( , -> D -, " . Both in the Laws and in the Timaeus we find a similar aetiology of insanity: it is a form of ‘illness’ (even if not directly a physical one in the Laws) attributable to both physiological and environmental conditions. Plato’s socio-physiology of the ‘verbal offender’ as in the Laws has thus deep roots in Plato’s thought, as the passage of the Timaeus shows. But this is only one aspect of the question. If the Athenian Stranger’s analysis of comic verbal abuse in the Laws is compatible with and fully integrated within Plato’s broader psychological reflections, it is very difficult not to see in his portrait of the also a consciously witty resonance of a well-identifiable comic trope, that of the ‘comic’ hero and/or poet as ‘madman’. If we limit ourselves to Aristophanes, we can see that the ‘comic hero’ before, during or after the conception and implementation of the ‘Great Idea’ is often cast as a madman. In the initial scene of Peace one of Trygaeus’ slaves explains to the audience that his master ‘is mad in a new kind of way’ (, 6 ): he wants to go up to heaven to persuade Zeus to stop the war. His madness is of an altogether new type (, *# , ) G 6 ): it manifests itself in his spending the days looking up at the heaven and verbally reviling Zeus (– , ) &" . 6 * 6 /" | : # g ] | - .). Trygaeus’ delusion (, 6 @ @ ) has been caused by an excess of his # . Madness/verbal abuse/choleric temper is exactly the nexus of associations we find in our passage of the Laws. Similarly, in the Wasps Philocleon too is presented from the prologue onwards as affected by a strange illness (, B , * ( ) which turns out to be a (–, ; ) ) ). His ‘cure’ from his obsession with lawcourts will be in the end another form of madness as well (cf. , #; , ). In the prologue of Birds Euelpides and Peisetaerus present themselves to the Athenian audience as ‘ill’ (–, & , X ,| ( ). Their illness is their desire to escape from
See Casertano : – (but he misquotes Laws cd inasmuch as he omits !2 ( at d–). See the seminal article by F. D. Harvey . Of course, the ‘madness’ of the comic hero and/or poet is exploited by Aristophanes for its comic potential of laughter and subversion; Plato’s literal re-semantization of the comic trope is part of his own philosophical agenda. Cf. also : (‘how deranged you are’) and *# ; (‘why are you mad ineffectively?’). Cf. also ll. , , , . See recently Ruffell : on Philocleon’s madness. See also Sidwell .
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Athens (–). Subsequently, when Peisetaerus comes up with his Great Idea, the coryphaeus refers to his plan of unspeakable prosperity as if it were the plan of a madman (, ;). In Wealth Carion complains about the deranged mental state of his master Chremylus (, - ( 2; , # @ ) . . . 6 ), and this already before his master conceives of his utopian plot to cure Wealth of blindness. Doubtless, behind this ‘mania/sickness’ motif there is a blatant, parodic appropriation by Aristophanic comedy of what was perceived as the archetypically ‘tragic’ theme. Comedy has its madmen too. But there is more than that. Cratinus in his Pytine used his trumpeted intoxicated mania ‘as the vehicle for self-defence as a political comedian’ according to a well-established iambic clich´e of the satirical poet as a madman. Plato’s psychological assimilation of the comic poet/actor to a madman under the broader category of ‘psychic offender’ is another exposure of the inadequate moral basis of abusive comic ridicule: Aristophanes’ Heraclean + (Vesp. , J}" 2 + ) %# ) has a dark side too and is taken by Plato for what it really is: the illness of a deranged soul. Magnesia’s citizens will enact ‘the best’, ‘most beautiful’ and ‘truest tragedy’ (b–; b) as a mimesis of ‘the most beautiful and virtuous life’ (b, ( 2 2 / 2). Comedy, though allowed, will always remain an extraneous body within the second best city.
On the equivalence # = ! , see Padel : . See already F. D. Harvey ; Sidwell ; Dobrov : . Cf. also Beta b. Ruffell : . On Cratinus’ dionysiac poetics, see Ruffell : –; Bakola : –. Iambic poet as a madman: see Callim. Iamb. .– (Hipponax as Alkmeon). See Beta b on it. On Plato’s careful negotiation of the mimetic status of Magnesia’s choruses and his mediation between dramatic (tragic mimesis) and non-dramatic (lyric mimesis) mode of performance, see Prauscello .
c h a p te r 14
Comedy and the Pleiad Alexandrian tragedians and the birth of comic scholarship Nick Lowe
The safest general characterization of the European critical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to the Frogs. Notwithstanding the deeper roots of literary criticism in epic and lyric metapoetics, in early Homeric allegoresis, and in the various forms of sophistic and Socratic engagement with language and its effects, it was comedy’s uniquely potent combination of heightened metapoetic consciousness with a strongly agonistic poetic drive that gave rise to the first systematic exploration and syncrisis of the different ways in which literature works on its audiences and how its effects should be judged, both in practice (through close reading, performance criticism, biographical interpretation, or audience-response analysis) and in principle (morally, aesthetically, pedagogically, politically, technically). The major premise of the fourth-century quest for a philosophically coherent view of how literature should be valued, a debate that runs through Isocrates and Plato to Aristotle and the first generation of his pupils, is the one principle agreed on by the Aristophanic Aeschylus, Euripides, and Dionysus alike: that the ultimate function of and critical yardstick for poetry is that it should make its audience ‘better in their poleis’. The contest in Frogs itself already constitutes a series of agonistic explorations of how this admirable-sounding mission of educating poetry’s consumers into more effective citizens might be imagined to work in practice, showing the consequences of attempting to apply a series of possible models to the seemingly minimal problem of the evaluation and canonization of two tragedians from different generations, and demonstrating the difficulty of achieving a decisive empirical verdict from any of the critical models canvassed.
Whitehead : wrote ‘philosophical’ and ‘Plato’; on the centrality of the Frogs to the narrative of ancient literary criticism see especially Hunter a. For the interaction of these elements see especially Ford (in whose discussion, however, comedy itself has a purposely marginal presence; it is sidelined in Ledbetter ).
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The moment would come, however, when tragedians finally wrote back. This chapter tells the neglected story of the emergence of scholarly discourses about comedy itself in the transition from Athens to Alexandria, and the curious part played by early Hellenistic dramatists in forging a new kind of critical practice which would determine how comedy would be canonized, studied and received for the rest of antiquity. Though the history of scholarly work on comedy in the period from Eratosthenes to Didymus, which is essentially the phase represented in the scholia compiled by Phaeinus and Symmachus under the empire, is comparatively well understood, the Philadelphan era tends to be either skipped over or dismissed as a generation of dwarfs whose shoulders were merely a convenient perch for the giants that followed. Yet it was the age of Lycophron that initiated a distinctively Alexandrian project of literary scholarship, different in fundamental ways from everything that had preceded, and which would decisively displace the previous century’s rival models of what writing about poetry had been and should be; and comedy and its intergeneric relations were central to this pivotal moment in the history of criticism in ways that would ultimately affect the very survival of comedy itself. Key to this story is the fact that, up until the Philadelphan era, scholarly writing on comedy had been a monopoly of the early Peripatetics, who established their own gallery of models for how comedy might be illuminated by philosophically informed modes of inquiry. Aristotle’s own seminal treatises already engaged with the genre in two distinct ways: the Didascaliae and Dionysiac Victories were the foundational texts of the pinacological tradition of chronology and canon establishment from archival sources, while Poetics and the exoteric On Poets were primarily theoretical, though with an empirical element of formalist practical criticism, and even a kind of synthesis with the archival approach in the brief historical discussions of the origins of comedy at Poetics –. None of these works, however, was a treatise specifically on comedy, and even the Baskervillean hypothesis of a dedicated book on comedy in the Poetics itself, which has some compelling arguments in its favour, would still merely locate comedy within a larger critical system whose primary engagement (as generally in the critical writings of the early Peripatetics) was with epic, tragedy and lyric, and whose direct impact in antiquity was in any case negligible, since
The otherwise very useful accounts of the history of comic scholarship in A. K¨orte : – and Nesselrath : both pass straight from the early Peripatetics to Callimachus (himself comparatively insignificant in the history of comic scholarship), with barely a word on the comic specialists prior to Eratosthenes; Rusten b: elides them entirely. Podlecki remains a useful survey; for Theophrastus see now Fortenbaugh : –.
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the Poetics itself seems effectively to have disappeared from circulation for the next three centuries and even thereafter goes uncited until Themistius. The early dialogue On Poets did circulate, and is now identified by Janko as the target of Philodemus’ On Poems ; but the very few citations from that work that concern comedy suggest that the genre was neither prominent in it nor as deeply thought about as it would become by the time of the Poetics, perhaps some twenty years later. It is instead with Theophrastus that we first meet with specialist treatises on comedy, but the actual scope and content of his On Comedy and On the Laughable are mysterious, as is the relationship of the extant Characters to these works and to comedy in general. Little light is shed by the single attributed fragment preserved from each treatise: from the former, the tale of the Tirynthians’ endemic philogely; from the second, a contribution to the interpretation of a widely debated mot by the citharist Stratonicus. Diomedes’ unattributed definition of comedy as ‘a non-threatening encapsulation of private affairs’ mirrors his explicitly Theophrastean definition of tragedy; these perhaps occurred as a pair in one of the two treatises entitled Poetics, of which nothing else is known. But none of these Theophrastean works seems to have rivalled the scale of Chamaeleon’s treatise, in at least six books, from which Athenaeus preserves a couple of biographical anecdotes typical of their author’s distinctive gossipy interests, and which he cites under the variant titles On Comedy and On Old Comedy, if these were the same work at all. The latter’s early use of the term and periodization is suspicious, though an On Old Comedy in at least three books is attested by our solitary reference to an undatable ‘Eumelus the Peripatetic’, from whom the scholia to the In Timarchum culled their historical snippet on Nicomenes’ citizenship decree of / bc. We should also note Dicaearchus’ On Musical Contests, sometimes cited as On Dionysiac Contests, which included some material on comedy; but the preserved
Or. .b (citing Poet. b, on the Sicilian origin of comedy with a storyline). See especially Fortenbaugh ; the concise survey of the status quaestionis in Diggle : with n. is supplemented now by a consideration of non-literary contexts in Millett . Ath. .d = Theophr. fr. . Fortenbaugh; Ath. .a = .– Fortenbaugh. Diomedes, Ars grammatica (xxiv. Koster); on the fragments of all these works see Janko : –; Fortenbaugh : – and –. Chamaeleon frr. – Wehrli = Ath. .a–b (two anecdotes of Anaxandrides, cited as from Book of On Comedy) and .e–d (four tales of the parodist Hegemon, from Book of what is here On Old Comedy). If these really were the same work, it is not easy to see how the two figures could readily have been the subject of a connected treatment, or indeed how either might fit into a discussion of ‘Old Comedy’. 8 Aeschin. In Tim. . (, p. .– Dilts) = Eumelus, FGrH F ; this Eumelus is generally identified with the author of a Histories whose fifth book is cited by Diog. Laert. . for an erroneous version of Aristotle’s death.
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citations suggest that its treatment of that genre was limited to historical realia. Alongside these generally titled works with their mixture of theory, anecdote and historical inquiry, we also find the first specialized monographs on individual named comedians. Of tantalizing interest and significance are the two or more books On Menander by the comedian and light essayist Lynceus of Samos, one of whose plays defeated Menander himself, and whose Suda entry describes him as a grammatikos and associate of Theophrastus. Lynceus was brother to the Peripatetic tyrant-historian Duris, who himself was sufficiently interested in comedy, but also sufficiently distant from the evidence and uncritical of the anecdotal tradition, to recount the story of Eupolis’ supposed drowning by Alcibiades. It is remarkable to see Lynceus devoting at least two books to Menander a good century before he makes it into the Alexandrian canon, and Sebastiana Nervegna has used this as part of a larger argument against the received wisdom on Menander’s supposed unpopularity during his lifetime – though Lynceus’ treatise was perhaps written after Menander’s death in bc, monographs on living authors being otherwise unknown outside the specialist field of philosophical polemic. The one fragment specifically attributed to the On Menander looks much like the kind of thing Athenaeus quotes from Lynceus’ other essays and letters: a biographical comparison between two of the celebrity parasites of fourth-century Athens which gives frustratingly little sense of what Lynceus might actually have said or thought about Menander. But it seems to have been broadly in character with other early Peripatetic treatises on named poets in being primarily anecdotal, prosopographical and historical; and it has an intriguing partner, perhaps even a model, in the one other author monograph on comedy
The only two fragments specifically to concern comedy (frr. – Wehrli) deal with the name of Aristophanes’ third son and the re-performance of Frogs. n - 2 $ also at Ath. .e. For Lynceus’ oeuvre and extant fragments see Dalby . Cic. Att. .. = Duris, FGrH F ; on the tradition and its refutation by Eratosthenes see Nesselrath ; Storey a: –. Rusten a: uses this fragment as part of a wider argument that Old Comedy’s very survival in the century before Lycophron was due principally to historiographic interest, particularly from the Peripatetic literary historians. Nervegna , arguing principally from monumental evidence plausibly datable to Menander’s lifetime. One of Lynceus’ collected letters was addressed to the comedian Posidippus (Ath. .c–d). Ath. .b–c. Momigliano summed up the general character of these treatises as ‘historical interpretations of selected passages from one classical author’, and as such representing a distinctive but preliminary step on the road to Hellenistic forms of literary biography (: ; for Peripatetic protobiography generally, –).
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attested for this period, which comes from Menander’s most controversial friend and Lynceus’ brother’s most notorious enemy. Demetrius of Phalerum’s On Antiphanes is known only as a title in Diogenes’ list; we have absolutely no idea of the content, or whether it was written in Athens before bc or in exile after. To fill the evidential void, Wehrli conjectured that some of the material in Antiphanes’ Suda entry and in the Anonymous De comoedia might derive from Demetrius, and Montanari makes what he over-modestly calls ‘a very hazardous suggestion, not to be taken seriously’ that Demetrius’ discussion, which Plutarch and Photius quote, of Demosthenes’ notorious metrical oath ‘by land, by springs, by rivers, by floods’ was in this work, since it seems from a passage in the Lives of the Ten Orators to have been made fun of by Antiphanes as well as by Timocles. Demetrius’ appearance in this narrative is of particular interest, since Demetrius was a, perhaps the, key figure in the transmigration of scholarship from Athens to Alexandria. Within a decade of his ejection from Athens and political life, he settled into a new role as the major literary scholar at the court of Ptolemy I, and some sources credit him with the very conception of the Museum and Library, which is certainly a very Peripatetic kind of project. After backing the wrong horse over the succession, however, Demetrius fell precipitously from favour under the new reign, and it is plausible to see, with Pfeiffer and others, an overtly anti-Peripatetic impetus in both the literary poetics and the scholarly practice that emerge in the age of Callimachus, with only the pinacological project of archival cataloguing and chronology surviving into the scholarly agenda of the Philadelphan Museum. The new philologists were, if anything, even more obsessed with comedy than their Peripatetic forerunners – but in a quite different way, and from a completely different kind of background. It is not just that we find ourselves plunged overnight into the world of the scholar-poets who would be the dominant force in the foundational century of Alexandrian literary research that culminates in Eratosthenes, Aristophanes and Aristarchus. What is truly remarkable about the Philadelphan scholars on
There are no compelling grounds to doubt the tradition linking Menander with Demetrius; but Demetrius’ fall came only at the midpoint of Menander’s career, which evidently managed to decontaminate itself from the association. Demetrius had an impressive flair for making enemies, and Duris would prove to be one of the most lingeringly effective, as author of the famous poison-pen portrait of Demetrius’ hedonic excesses quoted by Athenaeus (.b–e). Montanari : n. , collating Plut. Dem. .– and Phot. Bibl. .b– (= Demetrius frr. – Wehrli, a–b Stork–Ophuijsen–Dorandi) with Lives of the Ten Orators b. L. O’Sullivan offers a partly revisionist account of Demetrius’ regime. The literature is large; for sources and earlier discussion see now the valuable treatment in Too (and on Demetrius especially –).
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comedy in particular is that they were all practising tragedians, with firsthand experience of Athenian dramatic culture and competitions; whereas there are no writers of comedy attested in Alexandria before Machon in the mid third century, and no trace at all of scholarly activity by practising comedians. The tale in Alciphron (.–) of an attempt by Ptolemy Soter to lure Menander to Alexandria is taken seriously by some, but the striking fact is that not one comic poet seems to have succumbed to any such invitation – in notable contrast to the roll of tragedians, who were drawn in from all over the Greek world to constellate the so-called Pleiad with its variable cluster of seven stars, some of whom settled there permanently and developed second careers in the Museum and Library. The most important – and, as we shall see, the most systematically misunderstood – of the pioneer comic scholars was also the most distinguished of the Pleiad tragedians, though nowadays he finds himself discussed primarily in connection with a work to which the very attachment of his name is intensely disputed. So used are we to talking about a Lycophron who, as putative author of the Alexandra, may or may not have existed, at any time from the s bc to the Augustan period, that it is refreshing to be able to talk for once about the historical Lycophron of Chalcis, who on any reckoning was a fascinating figure in his own right. Lycophron
‘It does seem a little odd that all three of them were tragedians’ (Pfeiffer : ). Fraser : II. n. ; for Machon’s date and career, Gow : –. Machon himself is cryptically credited by Athenaeus (.f, cf. .a) with having been Aristophanes’ teacher @ @ , and Pfeiffer : wondered whether this might suggest that Machon actually published a monograph under that title, whatever it might mean; Pfeiffer himself renders it not altogether helpfully as ‘the parts of the comedy’ (sic), while Olson in his note ad loc. suggests ‘the divisions within comedy’ and relates it to the emerging periodization of Old, Middle and New. Meineke’s @ would make for more plausible Greek, but still less plausible literary history. At any rate neither passage in Athenaeus suggests that he imagined Machon as engaging in actual research. The permanent members are Homerus of Byzantium, Sositheus of Alexandria Troas, Lycophron of Chalcis, Alexander of Aetolia and Phili[s]cus of Corcyra; the canonical number of seven is variously made by co-opting two from the remaining four candidates Aeantides, Sosiphanes of Syracuse, Dionysiades of Mallus or Tarsus, and Euphronius of Chersonesus. It is unclear whether any of these was actively writing tragedy during the Alexandrian phase of his career; the victor list from the Athenian Dionysia may preserve the beginnings of the names Ai[antides, Hom[erus and Di[onysiades (IG ii .–), but Sositheus is the only Pleiadist specifically attested as having produced tragedies in the s, though Philicus was priest of Dionysus in Alexandria and led the Technitae in the procession recorded by Callixinus (in Ath. .bc; this is the earliest evidence for the Technitae in Alexandria). Lycophron and Alexander would become Zenodotus’ key colleagues in the Library; see further n. below. The fragments of Lycophron on comedy have proved to be generally unhelpful for the notorious ‘Lycophron question’: the authorship and attribution of the Alexandra. H¨olzinger : – tried to argue that some of the non-tragic lexical items, particularly in the sphere of the sexually risqu´e, argued for the comic glossographer as the poem’s author, though sceptics were quick to point out that these are accountable for in terms simply of the subject matter, and there is a notable absence of compellingly comic glosses. More recently Andr´e Hurst () has tried to make the case on wider grounds, such as a connection between the poem’s use of riddles and the role of riddles in comic
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was probably a dramatist before he was a scholar, and indeed his career as a tragedian may have been entirely behind him before he ever arrived in Alexandria: since the Suda speaks of a family feud with Demetrius of Phalerum, it is more likely that Lycophron’s Alexandrian phase only began after Demetrius’ house arrest in bc, and the biographical tradition associates Lycophron’s Alexandrian career specifically with Philadelphus and Arsinoe. Tzetzes tells us the number of his plays was attested as either fortysix or sixty-four, and we have twenty titles listed in the Suda of which three or four seem to be historical. His best-attested play is the contemporary satyr drama Menedemus, about the lifestyle and circle of the colourful Eretrian philosopher politician of that name who was exiled to Pella in bc, so the play probably belongs to the Euboean phase of Lycophron’s career. Of particular interest is the contemporary-historical tragedy Cassandreis, whose title must refer to the inhabitants of Cassandreia, the former Potidaea resettled in bc, and which Niebuhr attractively argued to have dealt with the overthrow by Antigonus Gonatas of the tyrant Apollodorus in / bc.
repartee, the characterization of Cassandra as a narrator, and the superiority relationships between the author and the characters in the text, but though the exercise is a useful one the cumulative weight of proof is disappointingly light. Evidence in the other direction is even thinner: the extant fragments of Lycophron on comedy not only offer no positive support for Lycophronian authorship of the Alexandra but are mutely antithetical to such an identification, at least inasmuch as we find no mythographic entries, no interest in ethno-history, and no sign at all of the Alexandra poet’s dazzling flights of learning and recherch´e reading in all genres of verse and prose. Fraser rightly saw that the strongest argument for Lycophronian authorship was the tradition that the tragedian’s father or stepfather was the local historian of the West Lycus of Rhegium, which accords peculiarly well with the Alexandra’s remarkable command of western Greek aetiological traditions. But this only takes us further still from Lycophron’s qualities as a scholar of comedy, and even Fraser would famously unconvince himself on the matter a few years later (Fraser ); it seems safest to conclude that nothing can be safely concluded. Aeolus, Andromeda, Aletes, Aeolides, Chrysippus, Elephenor, Heracles, Hicetae, Hippolytus, Cassandreis, Laius, Marathonii, Nauplius (known in the form of a diaskeue or revised version), Oedipus (two versions), Orphanus, Pentheus, Pelopidae, Symmachi, Telegonus. The subjects of the Orphan and Allies are notably mysterious; Xanthakis-Karamanos (, ) regards them as possible neo-myths in the tradition of Agathon’s Antheus/Anthos. On the apparently choral titles, and the indication of a satyr chorus in the Menedemus fragments, see Sifakis : –. Menedemus is the only attested satyr-play; Sinko (–) and Steffen (: and : ), who accept Lycophronian authorship of the Alexandra, audaciously wondered whether the Menedemus too might have been a play-length monologue. No didascalic information is preserved, and we are at liberty to wonder how many of these plays were actually performed; the relative abundance of titles preserved, particularly in comparison with the other Pleiad poets, may simply be due to Lycophron’s opportune professional proximity to the archival hub of the Library. Text, German translation, and commentary in G¨unther ; on topical satyr-play in the fourth and third centuries, Sutton : –. See now Cameron : . Given Lycophron’s association with Arsinoe (whose name he famously anagrammatized alongside that of Ptolemy), it is tempting to seek a role for her own association with the city and her disastrous marriage there to Ptolemy Ceraunus; but there seems no easy way to make this and Apollodorus’ subsequent tyranny part of a single narrative.
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Lycophron’s role in the Museum is clear in outline, murky in detail. The famous opening of the various versions of Tzetzes’ prolegomena to Aristophanes tells us that Ptolemy II charged Zenodotus, Alexander of Aetolia and Lycophron with the diorthosis respectively of Homer, the tragedians and the comic poets. Many scholars have been sceptical about the verb !$ , which asserts fairly unambiguously that Lycophron produced an actual edition, and they take refuge in the formulation of the Latin version of the passage in the Vatican Plautus, which merely refers to collecting and organizing texts for the Library. But pace Pfeiffer and Fraser, we need not assume that Lycophron made an edition as such; it is likelier that Tzetzes, his source, or his source’s source was insufficiently informed about the early history of Alexandrian textual scholarship to assume otherwise. What we do know with certainty is that, in addition to this practical and archival aspect to Lycophron’s work in the Library, he also wrote discursively about comedy, in a work of at least nine books and possibly many more which would be the first of the monumental Alexandrian projects on comedy – a genre with which the scholars of the Library were obsessed second only to Homeric epic. Yet the actual evidence for Lycophron’s On Comedy has been extremely difficult to access. The only edition is the one made by the young Karl Strecker in , in a remarkable dissertation that until its recent digitizations was not widely accessible for first-hand consultation; and though Strecker’s edition has been the basis for all modern discussion of these authors, both its editorial judgement and
Tzetzes Prooim. II init. (XIaII Koster): r"5 B \. 6 Y2- B , o B )0-" "- [ 2 !!" / @ B ' , Y2- ' / / 2 $! , o ' B 2 @ @ @ . Similarly Prooeim. I (XIaI Koster); also Anon. Crameri I–II (XIbc), and cf. the Scholium Plautinum (XId, preserved between the end of Poenulus and start of Mostellaria in Vat. Lat. .): ‘Alexander Aetolus et Lycophron Chalcidensis et Zenodotus Ephesius impulsu regis Ptolemai Philadelphi cognomento, qui mirum in modum favebat ingeniis et famae doctorum hominum, graecos artis poeticae libros in unum collegerunt et in ordinem redegerunt, Alexander tragoedias, Lycophron comoedias, Zenodotus vero Homeri poemata et reliquorum illustrium poetarum.’ For those who know Strecker only as the titan of medieval Latin studies in the first half of the twentieth century, it is fascinating to encounter him as a brashly brilliant -year-old. A foretaste of things to come appears in the Sententiae controversae included in the back after the style of the day: a collection of a dozen textual-critical animadversiunculae offered as part of the disputation ritual, where the last four of Strecker’s dozen are on medieval German texts, in a fascinating early declaration of independence from the kind of philology for which he had been trained up by his mentors Wilamowitz and Kaibel. The Bodleian Library’s copy appears to be the last physical copy publicly accessible in the United Kingdom. There is a short but useful account in Ziegler , and brief discussions in Pfeiffer : – and Fraser : i.– (but note Pfeiffer’s warning on Strecker’s edition at n. : ‘should be
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its evaluative assessment have dated badly in ways that have never been properly faced. It should be said that establishing a corpus of the fragments of the first Alexandrian scholars of comedy was an unusually challenging undertaking. Since their work was subsumed early on into the work of Aristophanes of Byzantium and his successors, and probably was not read at all after Didymus except by a few diehard comedy bibliophiles like Athenaeus, the fragments have to be painstakingly strained out of the glossographic soup of the scholia and lexicographers, where attribution notoriously tends to be an afterthought at best; and already in the third century these figures were writing monographs Philodemus-style demolishing one another’s monographs, so that by the time the material enters the scholia it is often nigh impossible to tell who is citing whom. Eratosthenes, for example, seems to have spent a good deal of his time disagreeing with Lycophron, so that when Eratosthenes is cited as correcting an unascribed earlier view it is a plausible suspicion, if no more, that the unattributed opinion is that of Lycophron. For this reason Strecker’s edition is organized as a single sequence of numbered fragments encompassing all three authors, of which over a third are anonyma attributed to one or more of these figures on more or less persuasive grounds of attributional patterns and intellectual style. This, however, is where the treatment of Lycophron is especially problematic. Strecker has a set view of Lycophron’s scholarship as distinctively flimsy and irresponsible, and he duly trawls through the Aristophanic scholia for unattributed examples of such wildness that can be added to the meagre collection of fragments propter temeritatem and thereby double the size of the corpus at a stroke. Though only nineteen fragments name Lycophron as their source, Strecker manages by an assortment of questionable means to muster a further eighteen fragments which he conjecturally attributes to Lycophron. By far the largest group of these are glosses in the Aristophanic scholia of a particularly stupid kind of wrongness, where it looks as if the author of the gloss not only was making it up off the top of his head but had not even read the text before him properly. Yet none of
used with great caution, as the author is very generous in assigning anonymous glosses to these three grammarians’). A few examples will serve to give the flavour: (i) fr. = 8 Eq. [glossing , as , , , ]. ‘Interpres dubius de natura vocabuli diaskandikizein ex ipso loco significationem concludere conatus est. Cum autem praecederet vers. . * % 6 !", de timore aliquid proferri putavit et temere interpretatus est , . A quo potius tale quid admissum esse putemus quam a Lycophrone?’; (ii) fr. = 8 Nub. . -> – 6 ' 1@ ( 2 2 S 2 . ‘Putat interpres 1@ et & opposita esse. Strepsiades autem est pauper agricola, igitur 1@ est 2 2 . Quae ineptiae prorsus
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the attributed Lycophronian fragments is anything like as witless as this; Strecker’s attribution of all such glosses to Lycophron is based on a subjective characterization of Lycophron as a scholar which lacks all evidential foundation and yet has been largely accepted in the influential discussions of Ziegler, Pfeiffer and Fraser. Scarcely less problematic is Strecker’s view of the form of Lycophron’s work, which he wants to have comprised nine or more books of mere glosses – despite the fact that this flies directly in the face of the evidence of the most substantial fragment, the politically charged anecdote about Antiphanes and Alexander with which Athenaeus chooses to open his thirteenth book. Strecker dismisses this by the somewhat desperate recourse of attributing it to a preface of more general scope;
Lycophronem redolent’; (iii) fr. = 8 Eq. – ' ' + @ @ 6 ( j 2 "! . @ . ‘Lycophroni tribuo propter temeritatem interpretationis. Posivit enim quod ex antecedentibus coniecit, non quod vocabulum significabat’; (iv) fr. = 8 Av. 2 %# – K 6 & 2 . ‘Lycophronem intellego ex temeritate interpretationis, quippe qui inde, quod dicitur 2 , coniecerit avem esse 2 ; quod autem dicitur 2 , parvam avem esse.’ The sole egregious case is on Vesp. , where Lycophron glossed 6 ( as ‘after breakfast’ (Strecker fr. ) rather than ‘after dinner’ as the joke and context require. Otherwise, such errors as we find in the attributed glosses are venal. On Vesp. (Strecker fr. ) Lycophron seems to have understood the sense but not to have known the word , and on he wrongly glossed as a kind of fish, for which he was corrected by Eratosthenes. On Plut. Eratosthenes rebutted a claim by Lycophron that this was the earliest occurrence of the motif of calling for torches (Strecker fr. ); but Eratosthenes’ correction is also badly wrong and something seems garbled in transmission. The - / - of Cratinus’ Drapetides fr. were differently interpreted by Lycophron and Eratosthenes (Ath. .d–e = Strecker fr. ), but later sources sided as much with Lycophron as with Eratosthenes on the matter; similarly on the meaning and derivation of 1! (fr. Str.), 21 ( Str.), and at Pax ( Str.), while on Epilycus’ / Athenaeus (.a = Strecker fr. ) asserts that Lycophron and Eratosthenes were both wrong. On Lys. 2 " Lycophron’s gloss is wrong, but so is Eratosthenes’ etymology ( Str.). On > at Pax Eratosthenes took issue with Lycophron’s gloss ( Str.), but more likely both are correct (see Olson ad loc.). Strecker’s fr. shows Lycophron to have regarded the exclamation //5 as an older synonym for > 5, for which a later writer (probably Eratosthenes) rebuked him for missing the former’s ironic usage; but Lycophron was still more right than wrong on the matter. Finally, Strecker’s fr. supposes Lycophron to have misunderstood a use of 1 in an unknown comedy, but without a context we have little to go on. Thus the passage memorably singled out by both Pfeiffer (: ) and Fraser (: i.) to illustrate Lycophron’s incompetence as a commentator is not in fact Lycophronian at all. One of the alternative glosses offered by the scholia on the word $ at Av. is the clueless suggestion 5 L + " 2, ‘pinax is a kind of bird’; this becomes Strecker’s fr. on the sole grounds that ‘videtur mihi haec levitas solo inter comicorum enarratores Lycophrone digna esse.’ ‘Antiphanes the comedian, my friend Timocrates, was reading one of his comedies to King Alexander, who was clearly not entirely appreciative. “Ah, well, your majesty,” he said: “to appreciate this stuff you need to have had plenty of bring-your-own dinners and to have got into a lot of punch-ups over party-girls.” So says Lycophron of Chalcis in his On Comedy.’ (r - B , R _ , : " / r5 @ R2 ( @ , x ' N * 2 # , “ ,” %- , “X / (, 6 ( 5 6 2/ " R .-" " ,” F - Y2- B