"Aristophanes, comic fantasy and political satire in the fourth century B.C." Seminars on Greek literature and culture, Delphi 2014. (original) (raw)
Related papers
Aristophanes’ Ecclesiazusae and the remaking of the πάτριος πολιτεία
2016
Ecclesiazusae, the first surviving work of Aristophanes from the fourth century b.c.e., has often been dismissed as an example of Aristophanes’ declining powers and categorized as being less directly rooted in politics than its fifth-century predecessors owing to the after-effects of Athens’ defeat in the Peloponnesian War. Arguing against this perception, which was largely based on the absence of ad hominem attacks characterizing Aristophanes’ earlier works, this paper explores how Ecclesiazusae engages with contemporary post-war Athenian politics in a manner which, while different to his earlier comedies, remained closely rooted in the political and cultural concerns of the 390s. By examining the figure of Praxagora, I will first consider recent suggestions that Ecclesiazusae hints at the possibility of an anti-democratic coup. I will then examine how contemporary discussions of constitutional and legal reforms (including the invocation of ‘founding fathers’ such as Solon and Lycurgus) are incorporated into both Praxagora's language and the scenes featuring the Selfish Man and Hags that follow the establishment of Praxagora's regime. Examining these final scenes, I conclude that Ecclesiasuzae does not suggest that the idea of democratic equality itself is fundamentally flawed, but instead argues that Athens needs a suitable leader, well suited to the rough and tumble of assembly rhetoric, in order to successfully function. In the world of Ecclesiazusae, the men of Athens have failed too often to inspire any hope, putting their own interest above the state, and the new leader must be someone different. Thus Aristophanes sets up Praxagora as a female Solon to remake the state and lead the democracy. The second half of the play demonstrates this need for a strong leader, as problems arise both from the quarter of critical bystanders (the Selfish Man and Epigenes, the Young Man in the ‘hag scene’) and from over-zealous enforcers (the Old Women).
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.
A Brief History of Athenian Political Comedy (c. 440–c. 300)
Transactions of the American Philological Association, 2013
This paper reassesses the production-pattern of politically engaged comedy of the Aristophanic type, traditionally considered the hallmark of the Old Comic period, in light of recent work on the comic fragments, and finds that such plays were relatively infrequent, produced only when demagogues were ascendant by poets who opposed them, and that this pattern seems to hold for the fourth century as well.
De Ste. Croix famously argued that Aristophanes had a conservative political outlook and attempted to use his comedies to win over lower-class audiences to this minority point of view. The ongoing influence of his interpretation has meant that Old Comedy has been largely ignored in the historiography of Athenian popular culture. This article extends earlier critiques of de Ste. Croix by systematically comparing how Aristophanes and the indisputably popular genre of fourth-century oratory represented the social classes of the Athenians and political leaders. The striking parallels between the two suggest that Aristophanes, far from advocating a minority position, exploited the rich and, at times, contradictory views of lower-class citizens for comic and ultimately competitive ends. As a consequence his plays are valuable evidence for Athenian popular culture and help to correct the markedly fourth-century bias in the writing of Athenian cultural history.
Polis: The Journal for Ancient Greek and Roman Political Thought, 2024
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY 4.0 license. In this article, jumping off from Geoffrey de Ste. Croix’s treatment of Aristophanes and the Megarian Decree, I argue that Old Comedy is an underutilised category of evidence for the study of the popular intellectual history of Athens. My particular focus here is the Athenian empire: how does Old Comedy present Athenian power and what does this comic presentation tell us about how at least some ordinary Athenians understood it? Can one popular Athenian imaginary of the empire be constructed through analysis of Aristophanes and his contemporaries? I will argue that Old Comedy, taken as a corpus, presents a very Athenian empire, that is to say one focused on Athens and its exploitation of others. The comic poets, therefore, likely assumed parochialism and myopia on the part of their audience, but also significant topical interest in the mechanisms of Athenian power, particularly those which brought revenue to Athens. This impression of highly topical engagement with the empire is corroborated by bringing Comedy into dialogue with other sources, in particular the epigraphic record.