The Political Theory of Aristophanes

Explorations in Poetic Wisdom

Jeremy J. Mhire, Bryan-Paul Frost, Jeremy J. Mhire, Bryan-Paul Frost

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781438450056
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

This original and wide-ranging collection of essays offers, for the first time, a comprehensive examination of the political dimensions of that madcap comic poet Aristophanes. Rejecting the claim that Aristophanes is little more than a mere comedian, the contributors to this fascinating volume demonstrate that Aristophanes deserves to be placed in the ranks of the greatest Greek political thinkers. As these essays reveal, all of Aristophanes' plays treat issues of fundamental political importance, from war and peace, poverty and wealth, the relation between the sexes, demagoguery and democracy to the role of philosophy and poetry in political society. Accessible to students as well as scholars, The Political Theory of Aristophanes can be utilized easily in the classroom, but at the same time serve as a valuable source for those conducting more advanced research. Whether the field is political philosophy, classical studies, history, or literary criticism, this work will make it necessary to reconceptualize how we understand this great Athenian poet and force us to recognize the political ramifications and underpinnings of his uproarious comedies.

Part I

1

Seeing Democracy in the Clouds

John Lombardini

I.

At Plato’s Protagoras, 319b3–d7, Socrates offers an analysis of the role technical knowledge plays in Athenian democratic deliberation. In technical matters, the dēmos willingly seeks advice from those possessing the corresponding technē, while dismissing those who claim authority based on their physical attractiveness, wealth, or noble birth. When it comes to political matters, however, the Athenians do not believe there is such a technē, and, hence, they allow anyone who wishes to offer political advice. Thus, though legally any Athenian citizen was entitled to speak regardless of the matter under discussion, Socrates’ analysis points to a set of cultural norms that regulated how discursive authority was distributed in democratic Athens.

Those that violate these norms, Socrates notes, will meet with the laughter of their fellow citizens. Their laughter, in the scenario Socrates describes, serves to puncture the speaker’s pretension to a type of knowledge he does not have, or to a type of authority that only the possession of such knowledge could grant. If we complete Socrates’ hypothetical scenario, we can envision a second moment of laughter. Imagine the Athenians needed advice on a political matter, and an individual rose (let us call him Protagoras), addressed the assembly, and declared that he alone possessed the political technē necessary to give advice on such matters. Protagoras announces that anyone else who lacks this technical knowledge should relinquish his desire to speak because he lacks the competency to do so. We can imagine the Athenians laughing just as hard, if not harder, at Protagoras’ claims: he would be attempting to exclude others from deliberation based on his claim to possess a type of knowledge they do not even believe exists.

In this chapter, I argue that we can use this (hypothetical) second moment of laughter as a lens to interpret Aristophanes’ critique of Socrates in Clouds.¹ At the core of Aristophanes’ critique of Socrates is a democratic anxiety concerning the antidemocratic authority of Socratic intellectualism. This anxiety comes to the fore if we focus on Socrates’ education of Strepsiades, what the latter learns from Socrates, and how he deploys this knowledge against his creditors. Just as Socrates mocks Strepsiades for failing to understand his teachings, so Strepsiades exploits these same arguments in order to mock his creditors. Yet the latter scene carries with it an important twist: Strepsiades interprets the intellectual inferiority of his creditors as marking them as unfit to hold him accountable for his actions. Knowledge, in the form of technical knowledge of subjects like meteorology and grammar, is understood by Strepsiades as a necessary prerequisite for being entitled to challenge him.

To read Clouds in this way is to shift our interpretive focus from the threat Socrates poses to traditional authority—represented by the divine authority of Zeus and the parental authority of Strepsiades—to the danger his intellectualism poses to the specifically democratic operation of authority in ancient Athens. In the play, of course, Socrates worships the clouds rather than the gods of the traditional pantheon, and the style of argumentation Pheidippides learns from the Weaker Argument he then uses to undermine his father’s authority. Given the later charges against Socrates—that he did not believe in the same gods the Athenians believed in, but introduced new gods, and that he corrupted the youth—this focus makes good sense. My argument here is not that this is an unimportant aspect of Aristophanes’ depiction of Socrates; rather, it is that the emphasis on Socrates’ challenge to traditional authority has obscured this other dimension of Aristophanes’ critique.

This chapter begins by grounding this distinction between traditional and democratic authority through an analysis of the operations of authority in democratic Athens. In contrast to the traditional forms of authority wielded by the gods, the authority wielded by political actors in democratic Athens—like the rhētor and ho boulomenos—was far more contingent on the performance of certain socially constructed roles. The construction of such democratic authority, and the place of ordinary citizens within its operation, is the subject of the next section. Section three turns to the play itself, providing an overview of the education of Strepsiades at the phrontistērion and his use of this learning against his creditors. Section four addresses the role that mockery plays in both the interactions between Socrates and Strepsiades and those between Strepsiades and his creditors. Attending to such mockery illustrates how Socrates and Strepsiades deploy sophistical knowledge to discredit the authority of others. The conclusion considers the implications of this analysis for the vision of Socrates that emerges from reading Clouds in this way.

II.

The principle of isēgoria stood at the center of Athenian democratic ideology, so much so that Herodotus, writing in the second half of the fifth century, could use it as a stand-in for dēmokratia (5.78).² Commonly translated as the “equal right to speak,” isēgoria symbolized each adult male citizen’s ability to address the assembly. While under the sixth-century Solonian constitution all Athenian citizens were permitted to attend the assembly (and, hence, the vote of the dēmos was held to be sovereign), only elites were entitled to speak (most likely, those of the top two socioeconomic classes introduced by Solon’s reforms). In the fifth-century democracy, in contrast, every adult male citizen in good standing was entitled to address his fellow citizens, a “right” enshrined in the question “Who wishes to speak?” (tis agoreuein bouletai), which initiated meetings of the assembly.³

Nonetheless, there were real distinctions in the authority wielded by Athenian citizens in democratic Athens. While every male citizen could speak in the assembly, it is unlikely that they all did. As M. H. Hansen explains, when thinking about democratic Athens, it is useful to distinguish between active and passive participation.⁴ Only a small number of citizens regularly addressed meetings of the assembly, while a slightly larger group might have done so on a less frequent basis; most citizens, however, participated in politics through listening and voting. This ability to speak, hence, was most often exercised by a small number of wealthy elites—professional politicians known as rhētores—which in turn gave rise to certain norms governing who was held to possess the authority to speak.

Up through the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, the path to being an orator passed through the office of the generalship. The ten generals (one from each Cleisthenic tribe) were elected, rather than selected by lot—the only officials (until the mid-fourth century) so chosen under the democracy. During this period, Athenian generals all hailed from aristocratic families: Pericles, the best-known example, was a member of the prominent and powerful Alcmaeonid family from which Cleisthenes, whose late sixthcentury reforms started Athens down the path toward democracy, was also descended. Cleon, his most (in)famous successor, did not share such a pedigree. Emblematic of the “new politicians” of the late fifth century, to borrow W. R. Connor’s phrase, Cleon was a non-aristocrat, a tanner by trade, albeit a wealthy one.⁵ In Aristophanes’ Knights, his questionable ancestry serves as both a stand-in for questioning his authority and an explanation for his base activities. Thus, while every Athenian citizen was entitled to speak, social status was an important factor in assessing the authority that such speech held.⁶

The fact that most of the citizens who addressed and offered advice to the dēmos were elites of some stripe stood in tension with the egalitarian ethos that underpinned Athenian democratic practice. This anxiety was heightened by the fact that elite orators had been trained in the arts of persuasion that they could potentially deploy to deceive assemblymen and jurors and disrupt the ability of the dēmos to exercise sound political judgment.⁷ Yet, as Josiah Ober has demonstrated, the ability of elite orators to offer advice to, and especially to criticize, the dēmos was effectively controlled via a mass ideology that channeled elite competition over the favor of the people into public benefits.⁸ The various “dramatic fictions” that elite orators and ordinary citizens “conspired to maintain”—such as the rhetorically trained orator’s portrayal of himself as an ordinary citizen—functioned as a check on the ambitions of elites while simultaneously authorizing their ability to oppose and critique the will of the people.⁹ In this way, the Athenians managed to harness elite learning and harmonize it with a strong belief in the wisdom of the masses to best decide matters of public policy.

We can observe a similar dynamic at work in the judicial sphere. There was no public prosecutor in the Athenian judicial system; public cases could be prosecuted by any citizen who was willing—the ho boulomenos.¹⁰ While legally any male Athenian citizen in good standing could try such cases, there were fairly clear social criteria for determining who counted as a legitimate prosecutor. In particular, as Danielle Allen has argued, the legitimate citizen prosecutor was one who was personally connected to, and hence justly angered by, the crime that had taken place.¹¹ These cultural norms served to distinguish between a legitimate prosecutor, on the one hand, and a sycophant, on the other hand. Though both had some personal interest in the case they were prosecuting, the latter’s interest was perverted by the quest for pecuniary gain, a misuse of anger, or some combination of the two.¹² Thus, though each citizen had the equal ability to prosecute such cases, not all willing prosecutors were viewed as equally legitimate.

The type of authority exercised in democratic Athens, then, is certainly distinct from the type of traditional authority that has a prominent place in Clouds; it is also distinct from the authority possessed by the philosopher-kings of Plato’s hypothetical Kallipolis. While all three are types of authority, they can be distinguished along two dimensions: 1) the norms that determine who is entitled to authority; and 2) the amount of deference such authority commands. The traditional authority of the gods, for example, is grounded in the obedience owed to time-honored rules and practices, and the deference it commands is unlimited.¹³ The authority of the philosopher-kings, in contrast, was epistemic—it was grounded in the knowledge of the Forms that only philosophers could possess—and, as with traditional authority, the deference it commanded was total—no one else in the Kallipolis would have the knowledge necessary to challenge the authority of the philosopher-kings. Finally, the authority of the orator was governed by norms dictating that he must demonstrate his friendliness to the dēmos in order for his speech to carry weight. In contrast to both traditional forms of authority and the authority of the philosopher-kings, however, the deference such authority commanded was far more defeasible.¹⁴

Within a democratic context, like that of fifth-century Athens, each citizen is authorized to track the commitments and entitlements of his fellow citizens; it is precisely through this process of “keeping score” that authority is constructed. If Cleon, for example, convincingly demonstrates his affection for the dēmos and has given good advice in the Assembly in the past, I may be willing to defer to his authority in deciding what course of action the city should take. Yet if his policies start to produce deleterious consequences for the city or I happen to witness Cleon treating an ordinary citizen hubristically, I may no longer be willing to act in such a way that his advice counts as authoritative for me. That I have the authority to track Cleon’s commitments in this way neither indicates, nor is predicated upon, the truth of my assessments (perhaps Cleon’s policies will turn out to be beneficial in the long term, or what I witnessed was actually Cleon retaliating against a prior assault made against him); I possess such authority simply as a member of a democratic political community.¹⁵ For the operation of authority to remain democratic, however, it requires that citizens exercise this authority to track each other’s commitments and entitlements; this, in turn, demands that we recognize our fellow citizens as fit to hold each other accountable in these ways.

It is this last point in particular that can illuminate the dimension of Aristophanes’ critique of Socrates that I wish to draw out in this chapter. What Strepsiades learns from Socrates is that those without the knowledge he acquired at the phrontistērion are not fit to hold him accountable for his actions. To demonstrate this point, we must now turn to the play itself.

III.

As noted in the Introduction, most commentators on Clouds focus on Socrates’ education of Pheidippides rather than on his relationship with Strepsiades. Given the historical fact that Socrates was prosecuted in 399 BCE on the charge of corrupting the youth, combined with Socrates’ identification of Aristophanes as the individual perhaps most responsible for this public perception, this emphasis is unsurprising. It is Pheidippides, of course, who deploys the teachings of the Weaker Argument to question the authority of the gods, the city’s laws, and his parents; the potential danger of sophistical teaching is thus forcefully displayed in the depiction of his corruption. Yet it is Strepsiades, and not Pheidippides, who successfully fends off his creditors at 1214–1302, despite the fact that the latter is sent to the phrontistērion for precisely this purpose.¹⁶ Strepsiades’ use of Socrates’ teachings, moreover, presents its own challenge to authority—the equal authority of democratic citizens to hold each other accountable for their actions. It is Strepsiades’ challenge to this aspect of democratic authority, and its connection to what he learns from Socrates at the phrontistērion, that is the focus of the following analysis.

When Strepsiades first attempts to persuade his son to become a student at the phrontistērion, he indicates that the students there engage ...