"Talking beasts, animal choruses, and the fantastic plots of Greek comedy". International conference: Mascheramenti animaleschi nelle tradizioni satiriche e carnevalesche europee. Fondazione Ignazio Buttitta, Palermo, February 8, 2024. (original) (raw)

The appearance of animals as dramatis personae (members of the Chorus or individual characters of the plot) was a common motif in Old Attic Comedy, traceable for a period of almost 150 years – from the early improvised popular spectacles in the last decades of the sixth century to the twilight of the genre after the end of the Peloponnesian War (Archippus’ Fishes, ca. 402; Aristophanes’ Storks, ca. 399). The speaking and anthropomorphic beasts were a distinctive component of the Attic Märchenkomödie, the type of play based on materials drawn from the world of fairy tale and the popular imaginary, which seems to have been the most pristine manifestation of the native Athenian comic spirit. Many comic dramas of this kind are only attested as titles. Nevertheless, the extant comedies of Aristophanes and a handful of fragments from the works of his contemporaries allow some insight into the dramatic use of personified beasts on the comic stage. A number of plot types and thematic patterns may be discerned in the known repertoire. The simplest form consisted in the amusing portrayal of the animals and their life in their natural habitat. The animal Choruses or characters were endowed with human voices and spoke or sang about their experiences. They may also have been humorously compared or assimilated to human types from contemporary society (e.g. avant-garde musicians or upper-class gourmets), but their anthropomorphism was not carried further; the animals were not shown performing properly human tasks. The Archaic plays depicted in a series of black-figure vase-paintings (ca. 540-480 BCE), as well as the pioneering productions of Magnes, which were characterised, according to Aristotle, by simple storylines and artless plots, must have belonged to this category. Aristophanes’ Frogs and perhaps Eupolis’ Goats represent sophisticated and poetically self-conscious revivals of this early form. In a more complex form of storyline, developed by the mature years of the fifth century, the animal characters were involved in typically human activities, sometimes indeed in civic duties and endeavours of civilised society, similarly to the beasts of the Aesopic fables. Also, like the personages of fable, the animals of comedy might symbolically represent anthropological types or attributes of the human psyche. The most emblematic example is the trial of the dogs in Aristophanes’ Wasps, in which the two litigating hounds stand for contemporary Athenian statesmen and their respective political attitudes. Aristophanes’ Storks was possibly another such case, if the storks of the title incarnated the ideal of filial piety, in contrast to the ungrateful son who was a character of the plot, in a play apparently preoccupied with the conflict of generations. A variant pattern is exemplified by the Chorus of the Wasps, stage hybrids of men endowed with waspish features, which represent graphically the central traits of their character (cf. also the Hoopoe of the Birds and perhaps Pherecrates’ Myrmekanthropoi). In the most elaborate kind of plot, the anthropomorphic beasts were combined with another capital theme of fairy-tale comedy: the creation of fantastic secondary worlds and utopian societies. The animal Choruses and heroes founded an imaginary state of their own and undertook its various civic operations and offices. This central mythopoeic structure might be enriched with further magical motifs, such as marvellous abundance of food (“Cockaigne”), animation of objects, or supernatural metamorphoses, so that the entire comic storyline resembled an anthology of fairy-tale materials. This form is represented by the greatest masterpieces of Attic animal comedy: Crates’ Beasts, Aristophanes’ Birds, and Archippus’ Fishes, three plays that are directly linked to one another in a chain of literary influence. Many thanks to my friend and great philologist Professor Piero Totaro for the invitation to give this paper. I dedicate it to the memory of the three scholars who have shed light, more than anyone, on the fantastic and fabulous nature of Old Comedy: Tadeusz Zielinski, Cedric Whitman, and our own Gregory Sifakis. Nothing of what I have written here would have been conceivable without their work.