Playwright, Satirist, Atticist: The Reception of Aristophanes in 12th-Century Byzantium (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Shadow of Aristophanes: Hellenistic Poetry’s Reception of Comic Poetics
M.A. Harder, R.F. Regtuit and G.C. Wakker (eds.) (2018) Drama and Performance in Hellenistic Poetry. Hellenistica Groningana 23. Leuven (Peeters): 225-271.
The significance and influence of Attic drama on Hellenistic poetry has been a topic of little consistent focus in recent scholarship, reflecting the dominant academic emphasis on Hellenistic poetry as a written artefact, allegedly detached from any immediate context of performance. This paper attempts to reverse this trend by setting out the continuing vitality and cultural importance of drama in the Hellenistic world, before exploring the role of Attic Old Comedy as both a precedent and a model for Hellenistic poetry. Much of what is often thought distinctively ‘Hellenistic’ can in fact be shown to have clear old comic precedent: Old Comedy, just like Hellenistic poetry, is heavily intertextual (even to the point of re-appropriating Homeric hapax legomena); engages in frequent generic manipulation; displays a strong interest in literary history; emphasises its own literary and metrical innovations; and displays a self-conscious awareness of the tensions between textuality and performance. Yet more than this, Old Comedy also offered a key paradigm of agonistic self-fashioning and literary-critical terminology which Hellenistic poets could parrot, appropriate and invert. Hellenistic poets’ direct engagement with Old Comedy extended well beyond the famous literary agon of Aristophanes’ Frogs.
2024
This is my doctoral thesis - at last finished. It aims, as I put it, to 'lift the weight' of Aristophanes by redirecting our attentions to the 'other' comic poets, primarily through a thorough analysis of the Protagoras' reliance on Eupolis' Kolakes (or 'Flatterers'). The title would have been better written as 'an analysis of the Protagoras *through* Eupolis' Kolakes'. The thesis is in many ways the culmination of my previous work but far exceeds it in detail and in major components: the third chapter, for example, sees in the Kolakes a 'competition in wisdom' characteristic of poets and sophists, the likes of which we see in Aristophanes' Frogs. I argue Plato appropriated or alluded to that competition in the Protagoras when showing Socrates and Protagoras locked in combat. I also argue, in the fourth chapter, that the Gorgias and the Protagoras are *metaphysically* linked just in respect of Plato's understanding of flattery as a fundamental feature of sophistry (at a certain point in his career, to be clear). There is of course much to be done on it yet, but I especially look forward to developing the conclusion--Plato's response to himself on the Middle Comic stage in the 'Digression' of the Theaetetus (unfortunately I had to rely on Farmer's - albeit excellent - translations of Middle Comic passages re: Plato due to haste; also I'm still perfecting my written 'British English' over my natural Americanisms; something also happened with the Word document after uploading here in terms of formatting; some infelicities, etc). In any case, a close analysis of Plautus and other sources with their profound similarities to the dialogue form (in the other Socratics too, not just in Plato) will help us, I aim to show in future, understand the *origin and development* of Sokratikoi Logoi as such, and perhaps also the development of comedy too throughout the period of Plato's literary and philosophical life. There are too many people to thank here for helping me with this project over the years, and only a few could be recognised in the document alone. Here is a snippet from the abstract not included in this document. It contains the spirit of the work: This thesis has two aims. The first is to reorient the scholarly norm when thinking about Plato in relation to the genre of Greek Comedy. That is, since modern scholarship started taking Plato’s relationship to comedy seriously as a means of analysing his work, it has been dominated by the thought and writings of Aristophanes, especially his extant Clouds. I aim to show that such scholarship has become overburdened by this figure. Socrates, for example, was a character of concern for many poets of the fifth century, those contemporary with Aristophanes. What, then, can or should we say about Plato’s reactions to the ‘other’ comic poets surrounding him both before and during his life? I thus aim in this thesis to ‘lift the weight’ of Aristophanes from the standard scholarly procedure in the discourse on Plato’s intertextual dealings with comedy.'
The combination of fantasy and political satire determines the hybrid nature of Old Comedy — this idiosyncratic type of comic drama which flourished in fifth-century Athens, between the glamour of Pericles’ Golden Age and the tumult of the Peloponnesian War, between the marbles of the Acropolis and the quarries of Sicily. On one hand, we find marvellous adventures and unrealistic utopias, magical qualities and supernatural creatures, castles in the air and beasts talking with human voice — elements of fairytale and popular imagination, as though drawn from the pages of the Brothers Grimm or the Baron Munchausen. On the other hand, there is intense preoccupation with political actuality and caustic ridicule of the leaders and institutions of the democratic polis. This kind of comedy flies towards the clouds of phantasmagoria, and at the same time walks in the Pnyx and the Athenian Agora. From the tension between these two opposite movements arises the rough harmony of a unique poetic genre. Fairytale fantasy and political satire mutually function and are expressed via each other. The extravagant conceptions become the means for bringing on stage and ridiculing the public life of the city. And conversely, the issues and personalities of Athenian politics are the materials that are metamorphosed, as though with the touch of a magic wand, and become the bricks for the building of the fantastic world. Especially in Aristophanes’ oeuvre, the process of political signification is applied par excellence to the materials of fantasy and fairytale. What Cratinus repeatedly did with epic myth (e.g. in the Dionysalexandros and the Nemesis), Aristophanes attempts with motifs and patterns from the folk tradition of magical Märchen. This practice is the trademark of Aristophanic comedy, which reconstructs and retells political reality in the guise of a fairytale. Aristophanes takes over the genre of “fairytale comedy” (Märchenkomödie), which had been perfected by Crates and Pherecrates in the preceding generation; and he mixes it with the art of political allegory invented by Cratinus. A series of examples from the earlier comedies of Aristophanes (Clouds, Acharnians, Peace) illustrate the poet’s method of work.