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Mysian Telephus and the Aristophanic Brand
Introduction
Aristophanesâ parody of Euripidesâ Telephus (438 BCE) and its famous king-in-rags in his Acharnians (425 BCE) is widely regarded as a signature â perhaps the signature â 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 Acharniansâs âseriousâ commentary on the ongoing Peloponnesian War, Telephus separates Aristophanesâ brand of comedy from his competitors.
Acharnians Athenocentrizes Euripidesâ 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 Euripidesâ play from thirteen years earlier. The heroâs appropriation of Euripides is achieved by physically assuming the costume and rhetoric of one of recent tragedyâs most recognizable characters. This sequence of paratragedy has generated several excellent studies. Among the most noteworthy is Foleyâs analysis of Aristophanesâ 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 comedyâs value to Athens, Aristophanes aggrandizes his (real or fictional) dispute with Cleon as a real-life analogue of Telephusâs heroic defiance of his Argive kinsmen.3
Beyond Aristophanesâ visually satisfying caricature of Euripidean hyperrealism in Dicaeopolisâs visit to the prop-filled house of Euripides,4 Telephus is central to the poetâs 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 Telephusâs special value to Aristophanic comedy. In and beyond Acharnians, Telephus is a salient symbol of the poetâs putative hybrid form of comedy that he designates trugĂ´idia. 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 âproduct placementâ 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 rivalsâ pandering and mediocre comedy and Athensâs corrupt demagogues. Culturally marginalized and wounded, yet politically potent and even unconventionally heroic, Euripidesâ 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 âpoliticalâ comedy in the 420s.
My analysis of Aristophanesâ strategic launch of his comic brand is organized in four parts. It begins with a comprehensive exegesis of the visual and audible codes of Dicaeopolisâs appropriation of Telephus. Dicaeopolisâs physical reconstruction of Telephusâs 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 Dicaeopolisâs appropriation of Telephus through an accumulation of physical properties affirms Telephusâs 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, Aristophanesâ reconstitution of Telephus is yet another contribution to the heroâs poetic biography. With the aim of contextualizing this paratragedy within that heroic tradition, the second section surveys Telephusâs larger heroic biography in the Archaic and early Classical periods. The prominent social and ethical features of the Euripidean Telephusâs generic and social ambivalence as understood by Aristophanes â he is wheedling, a chatterer, agile in speech â refashion the ethnic and cultural ambivalence of this heroâs earlier mythological persona. Euripidesâ 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 Euripidesâ version of Telephus seems to have become canonical, authors tailored the heroâs problematic cultural status to serve their particular ideological aims in different generic and historical contexts.
With this deeper appreciation for Telephusâs place in the Greek cultural imagination, the student of comedy is better positioned to grasp Acharniansâs contribution to the poetic legacy of Telephus, or rather, as I argue, Telephusâs contribution to Aristophanesâ legacy. While previous scholarship on Acharnians has analysed the place of Euripidesâ model in its plot, it has not examined the paradigmatic value of Telephusâs hybrid identity to the Aristophanic brand more broadly. Earlier scholars note that Dicaeopolis conceives the social ambivalence of Euripidesâ 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 heroâs hybridity as defined in cultural terms, specifically by his bridging of wholly different, though not necessarily opposed, peoples. Telephusâs divided cultural perspective, I think, drives Aristophanesâ selection of this complex and unusual hero among Euripidesâ 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 trugĂ´idia. This comic form is launched as Aristophanesâ âbrandâ 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...