Nothing to Do with Dionysos?

Athenian Drama in Its Social Context

John J. Winkler, Froma I. Zeitlin, John J. Winkler, Froma I. Zeitlin

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691215891
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Geschichte der griechischen Antike

These critically diverse and innovative essays are aimed at restoring the social context of ancient Greek drama. Theatrical productions, which included music and dancing, were civic events in honor of the god Dionysos and were attended by a politically stratified community, whose delegates handled all details from the seating arrangements to the qualifications of choral competitors. The growing complexity of these performances may have provoked the Athenian saying "nothing to do with Dionysos" implying that theater had lost its exclusive focus on its patron. This collection considers how individual plays and groups of dramas pertained to the concerns of the body politic and how these issues were presented in the convention of the stage and as centerpieces of civic ceremonies. The contributors, in addition to the editors, include Simon Goldhill, Jeffrey Henderson, David Konstan, Franois Lissarrague, Oddone Longo, Nicole Loraux, Josiah Ober, Ruth Padel, James Redfield, Niall W. Slater, Barry Strauss, and Jesper Svenbro.

JEFFREY HENDERSON

The Dēmos and the Comic Competition

THE COMIC POETS of fifth-century Athens aimed, in the words of the Initiate-Chorus of Frogs (389-93), “to say much that is humorous and much that is serious, and to win the prize by playfulness and mockery, worthily of the festival.”¹ For students of Old Comedy “humorous” and “playfulness” are relatively unproblematic: the words and actions of the performers would make the spectators laugh. But the claim to be “serious” raises serious issues about the genre of Old Comedy, for the poets consistently said that their advice and admonishments to the spectators were true and just, that their explicit and often mordantly abusive treatment of individuals (through “mockery”) would purify the polis and advance the people’s interests, and that their portrayal of contemporary reality, however novel or facetious, was essentially believable. According to the poets, their genre was both artistic and political. Indeed, “worthily of the festival” inseparably links the genre with its civic context: the comic competition was a feature of the Lenaia and the Greater Dionysia, festivals attended by some seventeen thousand spectators, organized and regulated by the dēmos (sovereign people), the winning poet being voted by judges representing them.

In short, the comic poets pictured themselves as competing for the favor of the dēmos with a humorous spectacle of a special kind, which the dēmos’ arkhōn had granted them permission and funds to put on at the appropriate yearly festival, and as public voices who could, indeed were expected to, comment on, and seek to influence public thinking about matters of major importance—the same matters that were being or might be presented to the voting dēmos in other settings and in different ways, by competitors in a tragic competition, for example,² or by speakers in an assembly, or by litigants in a law court.

In this essay I will argue that the picture drawn by the Old Comic poets is accurate: they were the constituent intellectuals of the dēmos during the period of full popular sovereignty that began with the reforms of Ephialtes in 462/1, and in their institutionalized competitions they influenced the formulation of its ideology and the public standing of individuals. While their role was distinctive, it was also an organic feature of the sovereignty of the dēmos.

Ancient critics, beginning with such eyewitnesses as pseudo-Xenophon in Constitution of the Athenians (the Old Oligarch) and Plato, variously applauded or condemned this picture of what poets and spectators were up to at the Old Comic festivals but never questioned its accuracy. For them, as we will see, the Old Comic poets were what they claimed to be, so that ancient historians and biographers included comedy among their valid sources of political information and opinion. But for modern critics, beginning with Müller-Strübing in 1873,³ the accuracy of the picture is at issue, and so, therefore, is the sociopolitical significance claimed by the poets. A skeptical attitude has developed which has suspended confident use of comic texts as special evidence for important features of fifth-century social and political life.⁴ When Dionysios of Syracuse wanted to study “the politeia of the Athenians,” Plato sent him Aristophanes.⁵ Nowadays we would probably send Thoukydides or the Tribute Lists, or even Plato.

The reason is clear enough: in our world no one picture can contain both seriousness and humor, both festivals and the state, both art and politics. And so the ancient picture has been edited, the editors falling mainly into two groups. The skeptics separate seriousness and humor: the poets’ claim to seriousness must itself be a joke, or, conversely, the jokes are there to make the serious parts more palatable. The carnivalists separate festivals and the state: the poets’ seriousness was somehow detached from the “real” world of the spectators as being “mere” entertainment (poetry, play, ritual, carnival, satire, fantasy). Both groups separate art and politics: comedy may be topical and political but only in a reactive or alternative way, so that while there can be “political comedy” there can be no comic politics. But when we examine each new edition of the picture we see that something is missing, that something important should be restored.

The skeptics rely on an a priori assumption that humor, however artful, is not a moral or political determinant: what makes people laugh cannot affect the principles, criteria, and values that determine their choice of action when they are not laughing. In the case of fifth-century Athens, however, this assumption has insufficient explanatory power. The skeptics have not explained away the fact that the comic poets, despite their jokes, argue vehemently and purposefully about the most important and divisive issues of the day. The positions they advocate or denounce represent those of actual groups, and their techniques of persuasion and abuse are practically identical with those used in political and forensic disputes. After all, the comic troupe competed before the same audience—the sovereign dēmos—that arbitrated those disputes. What is more, it is not true, as the skeptics say, that anyone was fair game for comic ridicule: the poets show systematic bias in their choice of people and policies to satirize and not to satirize.⁶ Indeed, a poet could, as in Akharnians and Knights, find room in his production to prosecute a personal feud. As for the impact of comedy, it is hard to explain away the crown awarded by the city to Aristophanes for the advice he offered in Frogs, or the lawsuits brought by Kleon, or the special decrees defining comic propriety, or the comic portrayal of Sokrates which for Plato was a significant factor in his condemnation. Were these mere anomalies or accidents?

Ste Croix, believing that the poets had serious biases and wished to persuade their fellow citizens, confronts the skeptics on their own terms by identifying passages whose primary aim seems not to be humor, or which can be aligned with other contemporary voices.⁷ But this is again to edit the picture: in the former case humor is removed, in the latter the distinctive outlook of comedy. The comic poets may as well have delivered their criticisms and advice in Assembly or court. The rules of evidence on which the skeptics insist are, it would seem, necessarily distorting. They rule out in advance the possibility that comic humor might have been a persuasive mode parallel to those we call serious. One of the special powers of humor is “fool’s privilege”: to mediate between the poles of polite silence and impolite expression, to express ideas that want a public outlet but that would be too disruptive if expressed other­wise. What the fool brings out into the open the king and his court can pretend, if they like, not to have taken seriously. I will suggest that fifth-century comic poets played a similar mediating role: what might be too disruptive in Assembly or court could find an outlet at the comic competition. Thus the problem is not to distinguish humor and seriousness but rather to analyze the dynamics of comic persuasion.

The carnivalists, who examine the institutional status of comedy, seek to sidestep this problem by claiming that the comic festival was a holiday world, a world unto itself which could not have had any impact on the world where political decisions were made. This claim is an induction from the many features fifth-century comic plays undeniably share with carnival and that in fact belong to a vast tradition of popular grotesque which ignores the boundaries of time and place. In its typical carnivalesque form, this tradition appears as a counter-world embedded in an autonomous festival. When this counter-world mirrors the official world it can even be called political (as in “political comedy”), but it cannot itself be a form of politics. The counter-world of fifth-century comedy, however, differs from that of carnival in important ways, and the festival in which it was embedded was not at all autonomous.

As Bakhtin has shown, the counter-world of carnival in its political aspect typically has only the negative role of ridiculing and criticizing a dominant class and ideology. Thus it cannot generate positive positions and does not take sides in political debate. Fifth-century comedy, however, is a local variant which does not fit this model. Its counter-world contained not only ridicule and criticism but also positive alignments and appeals by the poet and sympathetic characters. Although they typically championed minority positions, they did so from a stance of ideological solidarity with the official culture, with those who had sole power to act on such positions: the sovereign dēmos. Moreover, their stance was essentially the same for everyone else who appeared before the dēmos. The counter-world of fifth-century comedy, unlike that of typical carnival, paralleled rather than opposed the official world, so that it cannot be used to support the claim of autonomous detachment for the festival. But we need not rely on the plays alone to reject that claim.

Unlike autonomous carnival, the comic festival shared with all other public assemblies an institutional structure whose common denominator was the dēmos, in this particular instance convened as a theatrical audience. The comic festival took place in a polis that devoted at least one-third of its year, and its largest special expenditure of wealth, to public festivals and that considered them to be a distinctive glory of their democracy; was itself a competition where decisions were made; was part of a larger festive complex that included unarguably political elements; was governed by the same official mechanisms as all other public assemblies; and was not, contrary to the “anything goes” view of the carnivalists, exempt from the laws regulating other forms of public discourse. Moreover, Old Comedy as a genre shows rapid evolution in ways not explainable in terms of esthetic criteria alone. To point out that such features of comedy as obscenity, parody, transvestism, and role-reversal were restricted to special poetic a...