Aristophanes

 

                                      The Form of Old Comedy

        It is because of its religious origins and associations, doubtless, and because Greek art is always observant of form that Aristophanes' plays fall into a regular pattern; the pattern is modern comedy. As in tragedy there is a prologue; the parodos, or entry of the chorus; the equivalent of episodes, separated from one another by fixed choral elements; and an exodos, or marching-away song. The chorus (usually numbering twenty-four) is much larger than the chorus of tragedy and its apparently capricious arrangements accord to a strict pattern. In the parabasis the chorus comes forward to speak for the author in his own person. Here the author may justify his own work, defend  himself against rivals or attack them, and here he may comment, like a columnist in a modern newspaper, on whatever abuse4s in the contemporary scene he may wish to animadvert upon. It is from the parabasis of Old Comedy that the Roman genre of satire derived. At one point in the play the chorus divides into two, each half defending some point of view and abusing the other half, not only with words but sometimes even physically.  Rowdy and uproarious as it may be, this contest or agon is usually a serious presentation osome contemporary problem. For each of the parts of the choral performance there was a pre-scribed meter; for example a patter song, called pnigos or "choker," was sung rapidly without drawing new breath.

 

          The masks of comic actors, unlike those of tragedy, showed exaggeratedly coarse peasant types. The theory that there were a fixed set of masks-Old man, Cook, Courtsan,etc- somewhat as in the commedia dell'arte-does not apply to Old Comedy. Not only were the features of the masks coarse , but the actors were ridiculously padded on belly and but-tocks, and had oversize phalluses appended. The padding allowed for all kinds of farcical business, as in the singeing of Mnesilochus in the Thesmophoriazusae. The prominent phalluses and the beast costumes of the chorus, as has been suggested, derived from early ritual associations of fertility cults. Providing the fanciful costumes for the chorus and training them in their intricate performances involved great expense that is why the choral work is curtailed in Aristophanes' plays, presented when athens was improverished.

 

           The movement of an Aristophanic play is as regular as its form. The prologue, frequently a master-slave conversation, sets forth some fantastic scheme- a descent to hell, a sex strike, or the like-and the rest of the play is worked out on the assumption that the premises are the most commonplace in the world. In the agon the "good" side naturally wins and the bad is discomfited. the bad side goes off, often literally bruised, and the good goes to a riotous celebration, often accompanied by gay females. This is surely a relic of some sort of ritual "marriage" which was the culmination of fertility celebration; psychologically it is the only acceptable solution of a comedy. The endings of tragedy, however grim they may be, are psychologically satisfying, but how else is a comedy to end?

 

The Teaching Brief

            Aside from its creative fantasy and its purgative wit, what makes the comedy of Aristophanes memorable is its exquisite lyrics and its serious commentary-on politics, poetry, education, good citizenship. The qualities of lyric poetry are notoriously hard to communicate, in translation or description; all that can be said of Aristophanes’ is that they are singularly graceful, with a sweetness that is more appealing because of the soil out of which they grow. Richest of all in this kind is the Birds, which the lyrics transform into an idyllic fairyland, but there are fine pieces in all the comedies peculiarly unfortunate in his case. Without the lift of poetry much of his terrain is a malodorous and heavy bog in which people of certain tastes may take pleasure in wallowing, but which is a travesty of Aristophanes’ scintillating artistry.

            What is more surprising than lyricism or bawdiness to innocent readers who expect of farce only that it be rollicking is Aristophanes’ mature commentary on perennial problems of political and social life. All the classic poets were looked upon and looked upon themselves as serious teachers—the doctrine of pure belles letters was invented by the precious Alexandrian court poets under the patronage of the Ptolemies—but none seems so conscious of a teaching mission as Aristophanes. For one thing his teaching was more explicit and immediate. The tragic poet might explore large questions of the ways of God to man; the comic poet told his audiences what was wrong with foreign policy or politicians, or how corrupting good taste, and he invited immediate action, not merely a change in attitude. Outspoken criticism of what Euripides called “the statues in the market place” was a carnival privilege which probably originated in the revels of comedy. We think of Rabelais’ slashing criticism of state educational practices at the Sorbonne, or of was in the episode of the grape growers and cake bakers, of the entire anti-humanist outlook upon life in his ideal Abbey of Theleme. “For children have tutors to guide them aright,” Aristophanes makes Aeschylus say in the Frogs, “young manhood has poets for teachers.”

            So pervasive is the didactic in Aristophanes and so consistent the tenor of his criticism that many have thought that advocacy of a particular set of doctrines was his prime object and that he chose comedy as their most effective vehicle, and some have thought that he was actually in the pay of the conservative oligarchy. Nothing could be more mistaken. The proper description of Aristophanes is poet and comic genius. His object in writing plays was to amuse, and to do it so well that he would win the prize. But an intelligent man who is funny must be funny about something, and the traditions of the form in which Aristophanes worked involved comment on matters of public interest. In this respect the comic poet was something like a newspaper columnist, and as in the case of thoughtful columnists it happened that Aristophanes’ comments on all questions followed a consistent direction.

            The direction is at all points conservative. Aristophanes plainly does not like the relaxation of traditional standards which attended the rise of democratic power and looks back wistfully to the soberer ways of an earlier day. Like many upper-class Athenians he admired the Spartans and thought the war against them a regrettable mistake. This feeling is more or less under the surface in all the plays of the war period, but it is outspoken in the Acharnians and especially in the Knights. In the latter play he brushes aside the stunning victory of the Athenians as Sphacteria and exaggerates a minor success won by the knights at Corinth. He loathes Cleon (who took credit for the victory at Sphacteria), and thinks (in the Wasps) that the innovation of pay for jury duty, actually a measure to provide sustenance for the beleaguered and unemployed Athenians, was introduced by Cleon to strengthen his hold on the populace. And yet, as the Lysistrata shows, he is more moved by sympathy for the innocent sufferers of war than by anger against the warmongers. The amazing thing is that plays attacking the war policy when the state was at war could be given under state auspices and that Cleon could be most virulently attacked for bad morals and manners when he was himself in the audience.

            Aristophanes is most bitter against the sophists, for it was their doctrine of man the measure which was the greatest solvent for traditional privilege and for traditional morality, and which encouraged the loquacious impertinence of sailors and artisans. In order to give force to his attack on the sophists he is willing to make Socrates, who was himself opposed to the sophists, a butt, because Socrates was a familiar figure and his appearance and manner invited ridicule. This does not mean, of course, that Aristophanes’ shrewd attacks on the relaxed discipline and the criterion of expediency favored by the new education are without point. He strikes at Euripides in almost every play and makes him the chief butt of the Frogs and the Thesmophoriazusae because, following sophist doctrine, Euripides degraded tragedy from its lofty plane and vulgarized it by introducing commonplace characters and unseemly plots. And yet he pays Euripides the tacit compliment of imitating him, and for all his sympathy for Aeschylus, in the Frogs, he pronounces some unkind truths about Aeschylus; own faults of pomposity and turgidity. And the Thesmophorizazusae is a delightful piece of literary playfulness, wholly without malice. He dislikes innovations in music, and thinks the old tunes were better because they fostered manly discipline. He dislikes theories of social reform pointing to socialism of communism, mainly because people cannot in nature be equal, as these systems premise. Human nature, he holds, cannot be transformed by legislation: the exploiting officials whom communism was expected to reform, in the Ecclesiazusai, promptly turn up as even more grasping commissars. He is thoroughly Athenian in making the interest of the state the gauge for all values: when Dionysus cannot decide between Euripides and Aeschylus on grounds of poetic merit (in the Frogs) the decision is reached by the soundness of the political advice which each offers. It is significant that the Birds, which is the most carefully wrought of all the plays, is also the most charming and utterly free from malice. It is the sad state of the human condition, and not a particular set of malefactors, that prompts the establishment of a utopia in a fanciful never-never land.

            One final quality of the plays, which tells us more about the audience than the playwright, must be mentioned, and that is the volume of literary allusion which the audience was expected to recognize. There are allusions or intentionally garbled quotations from tragedy (of which we owe the identification to the scholiasts) in all the plays; the Thesmophoriazusae and the Frogs expects of its audience a high degree of sophistication in literary criticism. All of this would be understandable in works directed to an esoteric audience of scholars; but these plays were addressed to the whole population, and were meant to win prizes, not be a succes d’estime. We have no better evidence than the plays of Aristophanes for the high level of general literary sophistication in Athens, as we have no better evidence than his plays for the effectiveness of Athenian eleutheria and parrhesia, liberty and freedom of speech.

            Except for the parabases of his own plays, in which he speaks of his own and rivals’ works, we know no more of Aristophanes than we do of the writers of tragedy. One distinction of Aristophanes is that whereas the surviving plays of Sophocles and Euripides were written in full maturity and most near the ends of their long lives, those of Aristophanes except for Eccliesiazusae and the Plutus, are young man’s work. Aristophanes was born about 445 B.C., and the Acharnians, produced in 425 when he was barely twenty, is a fully mature work. Details given in the ancient Lives were extrapolations from his plays or imaginary. His death cannot have occurred before 388 B.C.

            In all, forty-four plays were attributed to Aristophanes, and of these some were produced under the names of other poets. The fact that the eleven plays of Aristophanes which we have are the only complete specimens of Old Comedy to survive is sufficient proof that his work was esteemed the best. Five of the eleven plays we have—Acharnians, Knights, Clouds, Wasps, and Peace—were produced one each year from 425 to 421. Then follow the Birds, Aristophanes’ acknowledged masterpiece, 414; Lysistrata and Thesmophoriazusai, 411; and Frogs, 405. The fall of Athens in 404 was a blow to comedy as to other aspects of Attic creativity, and the two last plays of out corpus show spiritual as well as physical impoverishment. The Ecclesiazusai, produced in 392 B.C., shows a flagging of comic verve; the choral portions oare perfunctory, and at one place our texts give merely the word “Chorus.” Plutus, produced in 388 B.C., leaves the exuberant face of the earlier Aristophanes almost entirely and makes a transition to the comedy of manners. There is no longer criticism of persons and policies but a travesty of the myth of the blind god of wealth to which no individual place. The Plutus was in face far the most popular of Aristophanes’ comedies in the Byzantine period.

There were of course, many other masters of Old Comedy, a number whom defeated Aristophanes in competitions, just as there were tragic poets who defeated Aeschylus, Sophicles or Euripidies. The Alexandrian scholars who constructed “cannons” of poets in various genre joined Cratinus and Eupolis to Aristophanes in a triad to balance the Tragic three. It is clear that Aristophanes towered above his rivals by a greater interval than any tragic poet above his, but the work of others , on the evidence of their fragments, is by no means negligible. Those whose loss is most regrettable are Epicharmus, the pioneer in the form, crates, and Plato Comicus.

            Greek Comedy after Old is traditionally classified as Middle and New. Of the Middle Comedy little can be said, for although the volume was enormous we have no extant specimen of the genre and can only surmise its character from Aristophanes’ Plutus and from such a play as Plautus’ Amphitryo, which is also a travesty of myth and presumably drawn from a Middle Comedy model. In New Comedy on the other hand, we have not only a complete play (the Dyskolos) and extensive fragments of the work of Menander but numerous adaptation of several other New Comedy playwrights in Plautus and Terence. It is New Comedy which has affinities with the later work of Euripides rather than tragedy of the farce of Aristophanes which is the ancestor of our European drama. The persons and plots of New Comedy are invented, as in Old Comedy not drawn from ancient “history,” but New Comedy represents the relationships and problems of Everyman, and is therefore the most exportable of all ancient dramatic forms.

            If Aristophanes is without direct progeny his influence on subsequent satire and farce is very great. But valuable as he may be as a commentary on a uniquely valuable are of human experience or as a begetter of arts in others, his true claim upon our attention is as the most brilliant and artistic and thoughtful wit our world has known.