Parody, Politics and the Populace in Greek Old Comedy

Donald Sells

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781350166288
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350060531
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Greek Ancient History
• Index: Literature

This book argues that Old Comedy's parodic and non-parodic engagement with tragedy, satyr play, and contemporary lyric is geared to enhancing its own status as the preeminent discourse on Athenian art, politics and society. Donald Sells locates the enduring significance of parody in the specific cultural, social and political subtexts that often frame Old Comedy's bold experiments with other genres and drive its rapid evolution in the late fifth century. Close analysis of verbal, visual and narrative strategies reveals the importance of parody and literary appropriation to the particular cultural and political agendas of specific plays.

This study's broader, more flexible definition of parody as a visual – not just verbal – and multi-coded performance represents an important new step in understanding a phenomenon whose richness and diversity exceeds the primarily textual and literary terms by which it is traditionally understood.

1

Mysian Telephus and the Aristophanic Brand

Introduction

Aristophanes’ parody of Euripides’ Telephus (438 BCE) and its famous king-in-rags in his Acharnians (425 BCE) is widely regarded as a signature – perhaps the signature – moment of parody in fifth-century Greek drama and a standard by which paratragedy is studied.¹ This is a programmatic moment for a poet who distinguished himself from his contemporaries by persistent and overt engagement with Greek tragedy and Euripides in particular.² Telephus is a popular account of an expatriate son of Heracles, who defends his rights and those of his adoptive people, the Mysians, against unjust Greek aggression. As a frame for Acharnians’s ‘serious’ commentary on the ongoing Peloponnesian War, Telephus separates Aristophanes’ brand of comedy from his competitors.

Acharnians Athenocentrizes Euripides’ culturally and socially ambivalent hero in its conception of the comic everyman, Dicaeopolis, an Attic farmer of modest means displaced from the countryside because of a similarly controversial war. In frustration the hero reconciles with the Peloponnesians by striking a private peace treaty, which he defends to his fellow citizens by resurrecting the ingenious and rhetorically gifted Telephus, the eponymous hero of Euripides’ play from thirteen years earlier. The hero’s appropriation of Euripides is achieved by physically assuming the costume and rhetoric of one of recent tragedy’s most recognizable characters. This sequence of paratragedy has generated several excellent studies. Among the most noteworthy is Foley’s analysis of Aristophanes’ use of the biographies of Telephus and Dicaeopolis to project his own heroic quest as a principled and patriotic comic innovator. On the grounds that he too was smeared by the false charge of betraying his people in his comedy of the previous year, Aristophanes identifies himself with the wounded Telephus and his harrowing confrontation with the Argives after the Battle of Mysia. In order to make a uniquely compelling case for his comedy’s value to Athens, Aristophanes aggrandizes his (real or fictional) dispute with Cleon as a real-life analogue of Telephus’s heroic defiance of his Argive kinsmen.³

Beyond Aristophanes’ visually satisfying caricature of Euripidean hyperrealism in Dicaeopolis’s visit to the prop-filled house of Euripides,⁴ Telephus is central to the poet’s calculated branding strategy at a critical point of his career. This chapter looks beyond the visual and audible comic pleasures of that episode to find the deeper cultural and aesthetic terms of Telephus’s special value to Aristophanic comedy. In and beyond Acharnians, Telephus is a salient symbol of the poet’s putative hybrid form of comedy that he designates trugôidia. By modelling the comic projects of his hero and himself on that of a popular but culturally and generically ambivalent tragic hero, Aristophanes attempts what amounts to a crude form of ‘product placement’ in the highly competitive festivals of Dionysus in the fifth century.⁵ In emulating Telephus, Aristophanes positions himself as the heroic and victimized underdog of comedy, one whose sophisticated and politically and socially responsible product and sense of justice will inevitably win over audiences in spite of their distraction by his rivals’ pandering and mediocre comedy and Athens’s corrupt demagogues. Culturally marginalized and wounded, yet politically potent and even unconventionally heroic, Euripides’ king-in-rags is a model for the similarly innovative and principled comedy with which Aristophanes sought to define his career as a leading figure of the ‘political’ comedy in the 420s.

My analysis of Aristophanes’ strategic launch of his comic brand is organized in four parts. It begins with a comprehensive exegesis of the visual and audible codes of Dicaeopolis’s appropriation of Telephus. Dicaeopolis’s physical reconstruction of Telephus’s persona at the house of Euripides offers one blueprint of the visual, linguistic and gestural levels that defined paratragic performance and its comic mechanisms, a necessary first step in assessing the socio-political terms of parody. Furthermore, the process of Dicaeopolis’s appropriation of Telephus through an accumulation of physical properties affirms Telephus’s unique generic significance as a hero occupying the fluid generic boundary currently separating tragedy under Euripides from contemporary comedy at this moment of the fifth century.⁶ This process calibrates audience expectation so as to appeal as widely as possible to an Athenian audience of broad but stratified poetic competencies.

However, Aristophanes’ reconstitution of Telephus is yet another contribution to the hero’s poetic biography. With the aim of contextualizing this paratragedy within that heroic tradition, the second section surveys Telephus’s larger heroic biography in the Archaic and early Classical periods. The prominent social and ethical features of the Euripidean Telephus’s generic and social ambivalence as understood by Aristophanes – he is wheedling, a chatterer, agile in speech – refashion the ethnic and cultural ambivalence of this hero’s earlier mythological persona. Euripides’ development of a socially and aesthetically ambivalent hero, in other words, presents a further variation on the conflicting cultural affiliations that had been thematized in earlier representations of the hero in Archilochus, the Epic Cycle and ethnography. Although Euripides’ version of Telephus seems to have become canonical, authors tailored the hero’s problematic cultural status to serve their particular ideological aims in different generic and historical contexts.

With this deeper appreciation for Telephus’s place in the Greek cultural imagination, the student of comedy is better positioned to grasp Acharnians’s contribution to the poetic legacy of Telephus, or rather, as I argue, Telephus’s contribution to Aristophanes’ legacy. While previous scholarship on Acharnians has analysed the place of Euripides’ model in its plot, it has not examined the paradigmatic value of Telephus’s hybrid identity to the Aristophanic brand more broadly. Earlier scholars note that Dicaeopolis conceives the social ambivalence of Euripides’ version of the hero along generic lines: the beggarly tragic hero serves both tragic and comic purposes. This chapter demonstrates that Aristophanes, in fact, appropriates the hero’s hybridity as defined in cultural terms, specifically by his bridging of wholly different, though not necessarily opposed, peoples. Telephus’s divided cultural perspective, I think, drives Aristophanes’ selection of this complex and unusual hero among Euripides’ many other kings-in-rags. Telephus was especially attractive as a mouthpiece of paratragedy because his innate cultural hybridity could symbolize the generic and ethically hybrid comedy that Aristophanes would define as his own in Acharnians under the moniker trugôidia. This comic form is launched as Aristophanes’ ‘brand’ under the popular and distinctive visage that audiences could recognize: Telephus. Like an ancient advertisement or marketing campaign, Acharnians promotes Aristophanic comedy by fashioning it afte...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Mysian Telephus and the Aristophanic Brand
• 2 Visualizing the Comic
• 3 Members Only? Satyrism and Satire in Late Fifth-Century Comedy
• 4 Poetic Failure and Comic Success in Aristophanes’ Peace
• 5 Old Comedy and Lyric Poetry
• 6 The Feminine Mistake: Household Economy in Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index Locorum
• Index
• Copyright