Aristophanes and the Cloak of Comedy

Affect, Aesthetics, and the Canon

Mario Telò

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780226309729
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

The Greek playwright Aristophanes (active 427–386 BCE) is often portrayed as the poet who brought stability, discipline, and sophistication to the rowdy theatrical genre of Old Comedy. In this groundbreaking book, situated within the affective turn in the humanities, Mario Telò explores a vital yet understudied question: how did this view of Aristophanes arise, and why did his popularity eventually eclipse that of his rivals?Telò boldly traces Aristophanes's rise, ironically, to the defeat of his play Clouds at the Great Dionysia of 423 BCE. Close readings of his revised Clouds and other works, such as Wasps, uncover references to the earlier Clouds, presented by Aristophanes as his failed attempt to heal the audience, who are reflected in the plays as a kind of dysfunctional father. In this proto-canonical narrative of failure, grounded in the distinctive feelings of different comic modes, Aristophanic comedy becomes cast as a prestigious object, a soft, protective cloak meant to shield viewers from the debilitating effects of competitors' comedies and restore a sense of paternal responsibility and authority. Associations between afflicted fathers and healing sons, between audience and poet, are shown to be at the center of the discourse that has shaped Aristophanes's canonical dominance ever since.

1

Delayed Applause: Competitive Aesthetics and the Construction of the Comic Canon

Since Socrates was an uncommon subject and an unexpected spectacle on the stage and in a comedy, at first the play astonished the Athenians because of its oddity. Later, as they were jealous by nature and had taken to reproaching the best (aristois) men, not only those in politics and in public offices but even more harshly those highly respected for their good speeches or the dignity (semnotēti) of their life, this play, Clouds, seemed to be very pleasant to hear. They applauded the poet as they never did on any other occasion, shouted that he should win, and urged the judges in the front row to write the name of Aristophanes [as the winner] and nobody else.

AELIAN, Historical Miscellany 2.13

This anecdote fancifully rewrites a famous chapter of Athenian theatrical history.1 After defeating Cratinus with Knights at the Lenaia of 424 BCE, Aristophanes suffered a humiliating loss a year later at the Great Dionysia with Clouds, placing third behind that veteran of the comic stage and Ameipsias, who is barely known to us.2 However, in the account of Aelian—a third-century CE miscellanist—Clouds managed to transform the audience’s attitude from bewilderment to unconditional approval. Aelian emphasizes the force of the spectators’ change of mind not only by interpreting their final applause as a roaring recommendation to the judges of the dramatic competition, but also by eliding the outcome. Aelian’s omission implicitly converts the Athenian audience’s second thoughts about Clouds into a victory.3 This revision is, in a sense, emblematic of the larger story of Aristophanic reception, in which this momentarily defeated comic poet would rise to dominance over the other representatives of Old Comedy. In other words, the audience’s recommendation in Aelian’s account seems to retroject to the moment of the play’s original performance the verdict of later judges, first and foremost the Hellenistic scholars who relegated Aristophanes’ chief rivals, Cratinus and Eupolis, to a secondary position, which would ultimately contribute to their merely fragmentary survival. Posterity indeed preserved the work of Aristophanes and of “nobody else.”4 In implicitly merging two distant moments in the life and afterlife of Aristophanic comedy (the loss to Cratinus in 423 and the poet’s triumph in ancient literary-critical history), Aelian’s anecdote provides a fitting point of entry into the broad, interrelated themes of this book: dramatic reception, canonicity, and aesthetics.

But before we get to these matters, let us pause to lay down a few facts about the dramatis personae and the places involved in this story. The annual Great Dionysia—the most important Athenian civic festival, attended by the whole Attic community as well as foreigners—included dramatic contests for the star playwrights of tragedy and comedy. The tragic contest featured a trio of competitors, the comic one a group of five, possibly reduced to three during the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE). Tragedians were each responsible for three tragedies and a satyr drama, comic contestants for only one play. At the Great Dionysia and the Lenaia, a less prestigious festival, Aristophanes repeatedly competed against Cratinus and Eupolis, with varying outcomes.5 Aristophanes and Eupolis belonged to the same generation, occupying the comic scene in the last three decades of the fifth century BCE (the former debuting in 427, the latter in 429), while Cratinus, their predecessor, was active from the mid-450s to the late 420s. At the Great Dionysia of 423, Cratinus victoriously performed one of his last plays, Pytinē (“The Wine Flask”), in which, responding to Aristophanes’ ridicule of him in Knights, he put himself onstage as a drunken, yet vigorous, old husband of Komoidia (the personification of comedy).6 About two hundred years later, in the Hellenistic period, this fluid competitive milieu would become fixed by a set of critics and grammarians based in Alexandria, in the Egypt of the Ptolemies, whose mission of preserving and commenting on the patrimony of archaic and classical Greek literature entailed standardizing canonical rankings for each poetic genre.7 The canonical triad of tragedy (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides), which had already emerged by the fourth century, came to be matched by a comic triad (Cratinus, Aristophanes, Eupolis), with lasting repercussions for the later history of ancient drama.8

The canon looms large here, as several of Aristophanes’ works following the negative reception of Clouds display an aesthetic discourse that I will call proto-canonical. I use the term because this discourse establishes a self-serving axiology within Old Comedy that implies the generic demotion or even expulsion of rivals. Regardless of Aristophanes’ specific intentions, this discourse helped raise him to the top of the comic canonical hierarchy. Focusing on two plays programmatically reflecting on Aristophanes’ defeat—Wasps (422, Lenaia) and the second Clouds (419–417?), whose original version does not survive—this book examines the contours of this discourse, which served to turn a failure into the lasting applause depicted in the Aelian episode.9 It complements recent work on Aristophanic self-construction by exploring how a central moment in the poet’s career directs future perceptions of his oeuvre and of Old Comedy’s generic identity. The interconnected actions of Wasps and Clouds suggestively plot the relationship between Aristophanes, his audience, and his two major rivals by offering an ongoing commentary on the setback of 423 through a complex and coherent process of reimagining, reinvention, and restaging, which sets the terms of the critical evaluation and survival of Old Comedy. This is the story of how a revisionary narrative of dramatic failure creates the enduring illusion of Aristophanic comedy as a prestigious aesthetic object by presenting it as a vehicle of ostensibly transhistorical values: dignity, self-control, health, paternal authority.10

Aesthetics are at the center of my analysis. By aesthetics I mean the specific character (including psychological and even physical effects) of the connection between the dramatic form and an audience—or, more precisely, the way this connection is constructed.11 I begin in this chapter with the payoff of this construction, namely critical elevation culminating in canonical hegemony. I then lay out the methodology, grounded in intra-and intertextual readings, by which I reconstruct Aristophanes’ aesthetic discourse. I conclude with a preliminary examination of this discourse, showing how Knights previews themes of the narrative mapped out in Wasps and the second Clouds, a narrative which I proceed to analyze in chapters 2 through 5.

1. Triumphant Failure: Peace, Clouds, and the Poetics of Hierarchy

The parabasis, a standard feature of Old Comedy, was the moment in which the Chorus, breaking the fourth wall, addressed the audience, ostensibly offering the poet’s perspective. Surveying the continuities between the ancient literary-critical account of Old Comedy and the parabasis of Peace will help illustrate the place of proto-canonical discourse in Aristophanic self-fashioning and outline my argument.

From the Hellenistic period onward, Aristophanes was the favored poet of Old Comedy, eclipsing all others. The Hellenistic canon of Old Comedy is famously formulated in the opening line of one of Horace’s satires (1.4): Eupolis atque Cratinus Aristophanesque poetae. But this is not an equal triumvirate.12 The Hellenistic tripartite canonization of tragedy, already visible in Frogs and formalized in the fourth century, implied no clear-cut, stable internal hierarchy—at least not one that foreclosed the survival of any member.13 The axiology of the comedic triad, however, engendered a de facto monad.14 In one text of the so-called Comic Prolegomena, a twentieth-century edition of late-antique treatises that probably preserve Alexandrian material, the entry “Aristophanes” opens with a hyperbolic verdict presented as a statement of fact:15 “By far the most skilled in words among the Athenians and surpassing all in natural talent.” This judgment presupposes a larger evaluative schema evident in the anonymous critic’s much less enthusiastic view of Eupolis in the preceding entry: “He became powerful in diction and imitated Cratinus; indeed he displays much slander and crude outspokenness.”16 Not only is Eupolis dismissively treated as an imitator of Cratinus, but two qualities that may be perceived as ingredients of satiric discourse as such—“slander” (loidoron) and “crude outspokenness” (skaion)—become signs of literary second-ratedness if read against the description of Aristophanes as “more subtle and elegant” (leptoteros).17 Collected in the same edition, the critic Platonius pits the “vulgar humor” (phortikon) of Cratinus, Eupolis’s alleged model, against Aristophanic “gracious wit” (charis).18 Another treatise in the Comic Prolegomena ranks Aristophanes as the shining star in the comic canon for “having practiced comedy more skillfully (technikōteron) than his contemporaries” and having rescued the genre from the archaiotēs (“archaic style”) and ataxia (“disorder, lack of direction”) still manifest in its Cratinean form.19 In Satires 1.123–24 Persius reconnects his satiric self with the Old Comic triad and replays this schema by spelling out the climax implicit in the Horace passage, in which Aristophanes’ final position discreetly hinted at his role as generic telos.20 He pairs Cratinean boldness (audaci . . . Cratino) with Eupolidean anger (iratum Eupolidem) and singles out Aristophanes as the only comedian whose distinctive poetic and emotional qualities coincide with superlative (praegrandi) artistic value.21

The correspondence between this verdict and Aristophanes’ humorous self-fashioning is well illustrated in the parabasis of Peace—a play performed at the Great Dionysia two years after the fiasco of the first Clouds. It is here that Aristophanes claims through the Chorus to have turned comedy into a technē (“craft”), as robust and grandiose as a towering building, by safeguarding the genre from the destabilizing effects of cheap and vulgar humor (748–50):

τοιαῦτ’ ἀφελὼν κακὰ καὶ φόρτον καὶ βωμολοχεύματ’ ἀγεννῆ

ἐποίησε τέχνην μεγάλην ὑμῖν κἀπύργωσ’ οἰκοδομήσας

ἔπεσιν μεγάλοις καὶ διανοίαις καὶ σκώμμασιν οὐκ ἀγοραίοις

Having removed (aphelōn) such evils, vulgarity (phorton), and sordid, buffoonish acts (bōmolocheumata), he (= the poet) has devised a great craft (technēn) for you and built it up to a towering height (epurgōse oikodomēsas) with grandiose verses and ideas, and jokes you won’t hear in the marketplace (agoraiois).

Leucon and, in particular, Eupolis—Aristophanes’ competitors in the Great Dionysia of 421—are probably the immediate targets of these lines.22 The architectural imagery together with the evocation of the agora (agoraiois 750) constructs this rivalry around multiple sets of opposites: sophistication and vulgarity (phorton 748), order and disorder, craft and amateurish improvisation, symbolic capital and debased monetary exchange, monumental stability and performative ephemerality—and, by extension, writtenness and orality.23 The parabatic statement resonates with Platonius’s account of Aristophanes’ refusal of phortikon, but especially with the contrast between the Aristophanic “technical” (technikōteron) approach to comedy writing and the ataxia of Cratinus (Eupolis’s putative model) that is drawn in one of the treatises analyzed above.24 This resonance signals the convergence of the values that Aristophanes attaches to his comic mode with the Alexandrians’ own notion of poetry as fine craftmanship (technē),25 their critical selectivity (krisis), and, above all, their organization and monumentalization of the literary past.26 Significantly, Aristophanes also declares his hostility toward the debased poetic products of the agora (τοὺς νοῦς δ’ ἀγοραίους fr. 488.2 KA) in his response to Cratinus’s mockery of his alleged cultivation of (Euripidean) leptotēs (“subtle elegance”)—an important category of Hellenistic aesthetics, which, as we have observed, one of the comic treatises assigns to Aristophanic comedy.27 It has been argued that in looking for an author’s or a genre’s literary identity, “we are, always, to some extent, looking at ourselves” (Houghton and Wyke 2009, 5).28 The Alexandrian scholars may well have seen their technical, taxonomical attitude reflected in the comedian’s self-fashioning.

The proto-canonical valence of the Aristophanic edifice, which resembles Horace’s bronze-outlasting monumentum, is heightened by the semantics of phortos. The language of building (“[he] built it up to a towering height” [epurgōse oikodomēsas]) activates the materiality of phortos, setting the immobile, permanent, grand structure conceived for public display against the movable, p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Note to the Reader
• 1 Delayed Applause: Competitive Aesthetics and the Construction of the Comic Canon
• Part 1: Wasps
• Part 2: Clouds
• Synopses
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index