by Aristophanes
5. Miscellaneous scenes
The parabasis is followed by a series of scenes, usually farcical, for which there is no technical term. These are generally in iambic trimeters. In some cases, particularly where the protagōnist’s outrageous plan has turned out well, we see a string of impostors who hope to gain by his success but are promptly drubbed (e.g., Acharnians, Peace, Birds). In such plays we also see the fruits of the hero’s plan: usually a celebration and some kind of ritual marriage. In plays where the outcome is still in doubt at the end of the parabasis, the action is more varied. In Wasps, Philocleon is re-educated and launched into more glamorous society with hilarious results; in Women, Euripides has to intervene in person to rescue his ill-fated relative; and in Frogs, Dionysus has yet to decide which tragedian to rescue.
6. Exodos
This is the final scene or, more strictly, the actual finale. There are no specific formal requirements for the exodos. Some final scenes imitate tragic formal features. In Wasps and Birds, for example, a tragic-style ‘messenger-speech’ heralds the return of the protagōnist. Usually there are festivities of some kind, although not in Women or Clouds, both of whose endings are oddly subdued. The actual finale, in which the Chorus makes its exit, varies considerably. In Wasps we find a riotous dance, with the characters leading off the Chorus (a first according to Aristophanes). In Frogs, by contrast, the closing dactylic hexameters (the metre of epic, but also common in Aeschylean tragedy) suggest a more dignified exit.
An aspect of Old Comedy that contrasts with both its generic rival tragedy and its descendant New Comedy is the active role of the Chorus. In tragedy the Chorus, though present, does not as a rule actively influence the play’s action but rather looks on helplessly.14 In New Comedy the Chorus, which only sings non-dramatic odes between certain scenes, has no physical presence in the play’s action. The Chorus of Old Comedy is far more prominent both in the dramatic and non-dramatic parts of the play. The parodos usually involves the Chorus interacting significantly with major characters. In some plays the Chorus is integrated into the dramatic action by having the protagōnist defend himself before them (Acharnians, Birds and Women). The parabasis, which reinforces some of the play’s topical or thematic concerns, is also delivered by the Chorus-Leader and Chorus.
It is almost impossible for us to gain a precise sense of what Aristophanes’ Old Comedy meant as an overall experience to its original audience. The Greek dramatic festival was a civic, religious event experienced by citizens far more closely linked to the community as a whole than is remotely possible in our larger, more ethnically and culturally diverse modern democracies. Even in classical Athens, after the city’s defeat in the Peloponnesian War, Old Comedy declined rapidly as a genre, as the closeness of the relationship between individual citizens and their city-state decreased. For us the nearest thing to the experience of Aristophanic comedy’s original audiences – in feel if not in form or scale – is probably a school or college revue, insofar as it presents strongly topical material to a close-knit community and involves a palpable sense of participation among audience, writer(s) and performers alike.
There are, however, other useful modern parallels for many aspects of Aristophanic comedy. The scholar Ian Storey, for example, asks the reader of Aristophanes to imagine a combination of ‘the slapstick of The Three Stooges, the song and dance of a Broadway musical, the verbal wit of W. S. Gilbert or of a television show like Frasier, the exuberance of Mardi Gras, the open-ended plot line of The Simpsons, the parody of a Mel Brooks movie, the political satire of Doonesbury, the outrageous sexuality of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and the fantasy of J. R. R. Tolkien wrapped up in the format of a Monty Python movie.’15 While this farrago of modern comparisons represents a fair attempt to capture the confection of farce, variety, carnival, fantasy, parody, satire, vulgarity and absurdity in Aristophanes’ plays, it seems to downplay Aristophanic comedy’s form and character as highbrow comic drama. Perhaps the nearest single modern parallel with Aristophanic comedy from contemporary theatre is the work of Tom Stop-pard. His Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, for instance, parodies and imitates other texts, most obviously Hamlet but also Waiting for Godot. It has inconsistency of characterization and action, and involves its own absurd logic (at the start of the play, a coin in a coin-tossing game lands ‘heads’ eighty-five times in a row and yet Rosencrantz shows no surprise). It indulges in reflexive theatrical games; part of the text is identical to Hamlet, while most of it complements its Shakespearean model by presenting the action that might have happened offstage. As with Aristophanes, several of Stoppard’s plays are plays of ideas that polemically explore major cultural issues often while presenting comic versions of well-known figures onstage (e.g., Joyce and Lenin in Travesties; the philosopher George Moore in Jumpers; Wilde and Housman in The Invention of Love). If we add Stoppard to Storey’s list, we perhaps gain a fuller idea of the form, variety and ingenuity of Aristophanic comedy.
What makes Aristophanic comedy seem so contemporary in its outlook, and gives it enduring relevance, is that its defining qualities – a spirit of inquiry, a determination to question the democratic powers that be, a penchant for extensive cultural reference, a willingness to entertain new ideas, a healthy sense of self-criticism and, of course, a readiness to see the funny side of things – are ones that we generally endorse. What is more, the core values that Aristophanic comedy affirms seem very much to chime with our own. Foremost among these are the freedom of expression, the independence of the human spirit and – last but by no means least – the therapeutic power of laughter.
NOTES
1. Henceforth abbreviated to Women.
2. My own translation.
3. Another major festival, the Rural Dionysia, was celebrated within Attica but outside Athens itself. It took place in various towns and villages, such as Piraeus and Eleusis, on different days in the month of Poseidon (late December/early January). The festival comprised various fertility rites, including songs to Dionysus and a procession with a large phallus (as seen in Aristophanes’ Acharnians), but it also included dramatic performances. While Aristophanes and both Sophocles and Euripides are known to have had plays put on at the Rural Dionysia, it is probable that these were not first performances of new plays (which would very likely have taken place at the City Dionysia and Lenaea).
4. According to Aristotle, Sophocles raised the number of actors from two to three (Poetics 1449a), just as Aeschylus had earlier raised the number from one to two. The likely date for the introduction of the third actor is 468 BC, or some time shortly after it.
5. For a detailed discussion of the issue, see D. Bain, Actors and Audiences (Oxford, 1977).
6. Indeed Menander’s New Comedy takes its illusionistic credo to such lengths that one ancient scholar felt compelled to write, ‘Oh life, Oh Menander! Which of you imitates the other?’
7. My translation.
8. It is their universality that makes poetry and philosophy theoretical; theoria (‘contemplation’) is described by Aristotle, in his Nichomachean Ethics, as man’s highest form of activity.
9. In the handbook On Style, wrongly attributed to fourth-century scholar Demetrius of Phaleron (it is probably from the second or first century BC), Aristophanes is praised on a number of occasions for his charm (charis) and wit.
10. The translations are my own.
11. Various scholars have tried to trace this structural pattern back to a prototypical comic revel or komōs.
12. Recited (as opposed to spoken) lines would have been delivered with some kind of musical accompaniment in a manner generally termed ‘recitative’.
13. In formal terms the English translation does not correspond exactly to the Greek components of the agōn. Thus the katakeleusmos appears to belong with the ode that precedes it in the English, but is in a different metre (anapaestic rather than the iambo-choriambic of the ode) in the Greek; conversely, the epirrhema and pnigos appear metrically different in the Engli
sh but are in the same (anapaestic) metre in the Greek.
14. While this is true of extant tragedy from the 430s and 420s, the period at which tragedy seems to have conformed most strictly to what we might call tragic conventions, it is not as true of Aeschylus. In Eumenides, for example, the eponymous chorus, who are non-human and aggressive towards the hero, seem much more like an Old Comic chorus than a typical tragic chorus.
15. I. C. Storey, ‘Poets, Politicians and Perverts: Personal Humour in Aristophanes’, Classics Ireland 5 (1998), p. 85.
Further Reading
Greek Texts of Aristophanes and Commentaries
There are editions of all eleven plays with Greek text, translation and commentary by A. H. Sommerstein (Warminster, 1980–2001). There are very good individual editions (Greek text and detailed commentary) of Wasps by D. M. MacDowell (Oxford, 1971), Women at the Thesmophoria by S. Olson (Oxford, 2004) and Frogs by K.J. Dover (Oxford, 1993).
Aristophanes and his Plays
K. J. Dover, Aristophanic Comedy (London, 1972)
K. McLeish, The Theatre of Aristophanes (London, 1980)
E. W. Handley, ‘Comedy’ in P. E. Easterling and B. M. W. Knox (eds.), The Cambridge History of Classical Literature, vol. 1 (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 355–498
R. Harriott, Aristophanes: Poet and Dramatist (Oxford, 1986)
K. J. Reckford, Aristophanes’ Old-and-New Comedy I: Six Essays in Perspective (Chapel Hill, 1987)
A. M. Bowie, Myth, Ritual, Comedy (Cambridge, 1993)
P. A. Cartledge, Aristophanes and his Theatre of the Absurd (3rd edn; Bristol, 1995)
D. M. MacDowell, Aristophanes and Athens (Oxford, 1995)
E. Segal (ed.), Oxford Readings in Aristophanes (Oxford, 1996)
Aristophanes and Ancient Theatre Production
C. W. Dearden, The Stage of Aristophanes (London, 1976)
D. Bain, Actors and Audiences (Oxford, 1977)
L. M. Stone, Costume in Aristophanic Comedy (New York, 1981)
A. W. Pickard-Cambridge, The Dramatic Festivals of Athens (3rd edn, revised by J. Gould and D. M. Lewis; Oxford, 1988)
C. F. Russo, Aristophanes: An Author for the Stage (London, 1994)
E. G. Csapo and W. J. Slater, The Context of Ancient Drama (Ann Arbor, 1994)
D. Wiles, Greek Theatre Performance: An Introduction (Cambridge, 2000)
A Note on the Revised Translations
For the translator, attempting to capture the poetry and humour of Aristophanes’ plays is a formidable challenge. First, one must work under the shadow of Robert Frost’s famously negative pronouncement, ‘poetry is what gets lost in translation’. Secondly, as everyone knows, jokes are notoriously difficult to put into another language. In addition, one is often at a loss as to what to do with some of the more obscure topical references of Aristophanic comedy. In spite of all this, David Barrett’s 1964 translations are outstanding for their accessibility, wit and charm. They succeed, with a remarkable lightness of touch, in capturing the freshness, the comic spirit and the poetic qualities of Aristophanes’ original plays.
Barrett’s translations have received only minor alterations. My primary aim in revising them has been to update them where necessary for the contemporary reader in terms of idiom, topical reference and jokes. I have also pursued a few specific objectives. One is to reflect, wherever possible, the stylistic pitch of the original Greek in the English, particularly where Aristophanes uses the language of tragedy (while Barrett has done this with most specific quotations, he has not with a small number of more general, or subtle, imitations of tragic or other kinds of poetic language). I have also tried, in a few cases, to render the Greek more accurately in English where it is possible to do so without sacrificing readability or losing the underlying sense of the original. Finally, I have restored the line order of the translation, and very occasionally the attribution of speakers (this is not indicated in the manuscripts), in the few instances where Barrett departs from the general consensus. To this end, with one or two exceptions, I have followed Alan Sommerstein’s excellent editions of the individual plays published by Aris & Phillips: Wasps 1983; Thesmophoriazusae (translated here as Women at the Thesmophoria) 1994; and Frogs 1996. The line numbers of the original Greek text are indicated in the margin of the translations at ten-line intervals. Inevitably, there are some instances where, because of the word order in the translation, such numbering is approximate.
WASPS
PREFACE TO WASPS
When Wasps was performed at the Lenaea festival of 422 BC, Aristophanes was still only in his early-to-mid twenties. At the time, Athens and Sparta, and their respective allies, had been at war for nine years. For the moment, though, actual fighting was restricted primarily to northern Greece, where the energetic Spartan general Brasidas was hoping to relieve his beleaguered garrison at Scione, a situation to which the play alludes (210). Like many of Aristophanes’ early comedies, Wasps focuses on a single political issue, namely the abuse of the judicial system by Cleon, the demagogue whom Aristophanes had savagely attacked in his Knights two years previously.
At the time of the play the Athenian judicial system worked as follows. Every year a list of 6,000 jurors was drawn up from volunteers, who had to be citizens over the age of thirty. Juries for each trial were selected from this list by lot. The size of the jury varied from a minimum of two hundred up to five hundred, but in certain important cases it could be larger. There were several courts each having assigned to it a specific magistrate (archōn) and set of jurors. Magistrates were not legal specialists but ordinary citizens chosen by lot for one year; they simply chaired the proceedings. In the cases themselves, the prosecutor spoke first and then the defendant. Neither party was represented by a lawyer, but witnesses and friends could be called (and usually were). The time limit for each side was fixed by a water-clock, a vessel with a small hole. After speeches, the jury voted by placing a pebble in one of two urns marked for conviction and acquittal respectively. The majority vote carried, with a tie counting as an acquittal. Some offences entailed fixed penalties, otherwise the prosecution and defence would both propose a penalty (the defence’s would naturally be lighter) and make supporting speeches. The jury would then vote again. Wasps itself offers the only evidence for this procedure: jurors each had a wax tablet on which they would draw a long line for the prosecution’s sentence or a short one for the defence’s.
Jurors were paid. The amount was three obols per day. This was not a good rate of pay but it was enough to attract older citizens with little other means of income. What is so amusing about Philocleon’s obsessive jury service is the indiscriminate zeal with which he convicts those who come before him. The main reason Bdelycleon wants to dissuade his father from jury service is that he fears Philocleon and his fellow jurors are controlled by unscrupulous demagogues, in particular Cleon, who had raised jury pay from two obols per day to three. The argument runs as follows: most jurors are so dependent on their pay that they become extremely suggestible, particularly when men such as Cleon either personally prosecute or publicly decry defendants who are their political opponents (the farcical trial of the dog Labes in Philocleon’s kitchen humorously illustrates the point). Bdelycleon does not blame the jurors themselves – Aristophanes emphasizes the poverty of the Chorus, who do not have a wealthy son to support them, as Philocleon does – but he does expose their irresponsible role in a corrupt process.
Wasps is not just an attack on Cleon and the jury system. While the jury system forms the background to the first two-thirds of the play’s action, the final third is effectively a comedy of manners. The sophisticated Bdelycleon tries to teach the simple, old-fashioned Philocleon how to behave in refined social circles; we then see the amusing consequences. Some hints of earlier topical concerns remain. The fellow guests at the drinking party Philocleon attends are in fact the loathsome Cleon and his cronies. Philocleon also ends up having a court summons issued against him for violent conduct. But the prospect of going to co
urt in no way dampens the play’s riotous, exuberant conclusion.
What unites the two parts of the play is the sustained conflict between unruly father and concerned son. As Aristophanes himself suggests, the play, pared down to its essentials, works like ‘a little fable’ (64). Philocleon starts the play as a juror possessed. When Bdelycleon finally cures this compulsive disorder, he tries to turn his father into a respectable man-about-town. Philocleon, however, ends up as an equally compulsive reveller. Proving himself to be utterly incorrigible, Philocleon ends the play literally spiralling out of control (in a dancing competition) and off the stage. Ironically, for a play that begins as a fable about an obsessive juror, we are left not so much with a moral as an open verdict: both Bdelycleon and Philocleon are caught in a vicious circle, at once disquieting and comical, in which the former keeps failing to learn that the latter is incapable of reform.
The play starts with two drowsy slaves talking about their recent dreams. This opening exchange contains significant clues about how Wasps works. Both dreams are premonitions about the city’s future, and involve the kind of phenomena we find in the play itself, particularly the symbolic transformation of prominent political figures and ordinary Athenian citizens into animals. The play too is presented as something of a cautionary tale, with Athenian war veterans appearing as wasps and the demagogue Cleon thinly disguised, in the kitchen trial, as ‘The Dog’ (a well-known soubriquet of Cleon’s). The two antithetically named main characters – Philocleon means ‘Cleon-lover’ and Bdelycleon ‘Cleon-loather’ – carry an allusive, metaphoric significance. Bdelycleon’s fruitless endeavours to correct the delusional Philocleon seemingly reflect the vain efforts of the young, well-meaning poet Aristophanes to enlighten his older, blinkered fellow citizens. The parallels between Aristophanes and Bdelycleon and between Philocleon and Aristophanes’ largely pro-Cleonian audience – Cleon was, after all, in office at the time – are reinforced in the play’s formal debate. Bdelycleon describes his attempt to turn Philocleon from supporting Cleon in terms of the wider efforts of comic playwrights to convince a deluded Athenian public (650-51).
