Aristophanes: Peace

Ian C. Storey

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781350020214
• eBook ISBN: 9781350020238
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Arte dramático antiguo y clásico

This is the first volume dedicated to Aristophanes' comedy Peace that analyses the play for a student audience and assumes no knowledge of Greek. It launches a much-needed new series of books each discussing a comedy that survives from the ancient world. Six chapters highlight the play's context, themes, staging and legacy including its response to contemporary wartime politics and the possible staging options for flying. It is ideal for students, but helpful also for scholars wanting a quick introduction to the play. Peace was first performed in 421 BC, perhaps only days before the signing of a peace treaty that ended ten years of fighting between Athens and Sparta (the Archidamian War). Aristophanes celebrates this prospect with an imaginative fantasy involving his hero's flight on a gigantic dung-beetle to Olympus, the rescue of the goddess Peace from her imprisonment in a cave, and her return to a Greece weary of ten years of war. Like most of the poet's comedies, this play is heavy on fantasy and imagination, light on formal structure, being an exuberant farce that champions the opponents of War and celebrates the delights of the return to country life with its smells, food and drink, its many pleasures and none of the complications that war brings in its wake.

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Old Comedy, Aristophanes and a Play About Peace

Figure 1.1 Map of Attica and surrounding regions.

Old Comedy

The ancient Greek word for comedy was kōmōidia. The philosopher Aristotle, writing in the fourth century BCE, says that ‘because it was not taken seriously first, the origins of comedy have been forgotten’ (Poetics 1449a36–b3), and then proceeds to fill that gap with assertions that may or may not be based on substantive evidence. He maintains that for some comedy was a creation of the Dorian Greeks,¹ because drama (‘action’) was allegedly a Dorian word and kōmōidia was supposedly derived from kōmē (‘village’) and ōdē (‘song’), kōmē being a Dorian term for ‘village’. It seems more likely, however, that the term comes from kōmos and ōdē (‘revel-song’), the kōmos being an exuberant outdoor procession at public celebrations. According to Aristotle the Dorian origin was also supported by the existence of something called ‘Megarian Comedy’, Megara being the name of two Dorian cities, one in mainland Greece and the other in Sicily, and also by the known activity of the comic poet Epicharmus, writing in Dorian Greek, at Syracuse in Sicily in the early fifth century before the formal introduction of comedy at Athens.²

Aristotle goes on to say (Poetics 1449b) that before comedy became an official part of the Athenian dramatic competitions, any comic performances were unstructured and performed by ‘volunteers’, and that while tragedy developed ‘from those who led the dithyramb’, an assertion for which there may be some justification, comedy came ‘from those who led the phallic songs which are still celebrated’. This may just be Aristotle working backward from performances in his own time and postulating these as the ancestor of comedy. If comedy did originate in the kōmos, vase-paintings from the sixth century may perhaps be a more reliable source that later literary commentary, as they reveal that a kōmos, centred on the figure of the god Dionysus, was becoming a popular feature of Athenian life by that time. Aristotle also uses the adjective iambikē (‘iambic’) to describe early comic performances. This term originally referred to a metrical scheme, but later applied to personally abusive poetry which employed that metre:

the creation of plots originally came from Sicily, and of Athenian poets Crates was the first to abandon the iambikē form and to create tales and plots on a larger scale.

Poetics 1449b5–8

Ritual insults were part of the festive processions at the Athenian Lenaea and Eleusinian Mysteries, at the former against the spectators and at the participants in the latter case, and the personal humour that made Old Comedy distinctive may come from a combination of poetic tradition and festival insults. It is not clear whether Aristotle included the personally abusive comedy of Aristophanes and Eupolis in the ‘iambikē form’, or whether he means an earlier stage in Greek Comedy. Comic drama is known to have flourished in Sicily a little earlier than at Athens and this could have influenced the developing Old Comedy there, but a more likely influence is that of tragedy, established some years before comedy at Athens and certainly a narrative-based form of drama.

Whatever its exact origins, it is at Athens that comedy flourished most prominently in the fifth century. The canonical date for its introduction to the competitions at the City Dionysia there is 486, a date which most recent studies have accepted as not too far off the mark.³ Comedy was the latest of the three dramatic genres to become part of the public festival. Tragedy was introduced in the late sixth century; the traditional date is 534, but a strong case can be made for a later date, in the decade 510–500. Then satyr-drama was added around 501. Comic productions continued to be produced at Athens and elsewhere in the ancient Greek world until well into the third or even second centuries. Ancient scholars, probably following the lead of Aristotle, whose first reaction to anything was to classify and sub-divide it, identified three phases for comedy, called ‘Old’ (usually archaia), ‘Middle’ (mesē) and ‘New’ (nea), although the first such distinction, that by Aristotle (Ethics 1128a22–5) records only two categories: ‘Ancient’ (palaia) and ‘Modern’ (kainē).

OLD COMEDY: c. 486 to the death of Aristophanes, c. 385

MIDDLE COMEDY: c. 385 to c. 325

NEW COMEDY: c. 325 to the mid-third century

Certain surviving anonymous treatises about ancient comedy have provided us with information of varying quality, some of it very useful to the modern student. One such writer (Koster V) claims that Old Comedy and New Comedy differed in several distinct aspects: time, language, subject matter, metre and structure, but for the most part these writers see the difference between Old and later comedy as the political background and/or the presence or absence of personal humour. For the latter, Aristotle) claims that for ‘old’ (palaioi) comic poets aischrologia (‘saying shameful things’) was their source of humour, while ‘modern’ (kainoi) poets employed innuendo. By aischrologia I would understand both personal humour and what we would call ‘obscenity’. It is worth noting that Aristotle is writing before the début of Menander (late 320s) and the beginning of what we call ‘New Comedy’.

Platonius (Koster I, II), a writer of unknown date, attributes the existence and success of Old Comedy to the freedom of the Athenian democracy and the poets’ ability to make fun of the rich and powerful. Later comedy in his view was the result of the passage from democracy to oligarchy, when ‘fear fell upon the poets’. Ostensibly Platonius is talking about Middle Comedy, but his reference to the oligarchs in power ignores the fact that for most of the fourth century, the period usually assigned to Middle Comedy, the government of Athens was still a democracy. Platonius has confused the short-lived oligarchic regime of 404 with the advent of Macedonian rule after 323 and thus ignored sixty years of Athenian history. He continues and notice the emphasis on personal humour (Koster I):

the subjects of Old Comedy were the following: to censure generals and jurors who rendered bad verdicts, people who had acquired wealth through acts of injustice, and those who had adopted a sordid life-style. But Middle Comedy did away with such subjects and turned to making fun of poets for their writings, such as criticising Homer or the tragic poets for something they had written.

Middle Comedy may not be a substantive sub-genre as much as a chronological one, i.e. between Aristophanes (died c. 385) and Menander (début in the late 320s), a period without a single dominant poet. Features often seen as typical of Middle Comedy, such as plays about the birth of gods and heroes, can in fact be found in earlier comedies of the 430s, such as Hermippus’ Birth of Athena and Cratinus’ Nemesis (birth of Helen). There is some debate whether Aristophanes’ Wealth (388) should be classed as Old or Middle Comedy.

Even in the ancient world one hundred years is a long time for any art form, and we would not expect Old Comedy to have remained essentially static, but to have changed over that period. Investigating Old Comedy is complicated by the fact that we have extant plays for only one playwright, Aristophanes (career: 427–c. 385), eleven comedies spanning the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Titles and Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Old Comedy, Aristophanes and a Play About Peace
• 2 Peace as an Old Comedy
• 3 Peace and its Historical Background
• 4 Themes and Motifs in Peace
• 5 Staging Peace
• 6 Peace: Poets, Plays and Posterity
• Appendix: Was There Another Peace?
• Notes
• Glossary
• Guide to Further Reading and Works Cited
• Index
• Copyright