This says two important things about classical drama. First, a fifth-century comic playwright could revise his work after its premiere, which begs the question of why and for whom—a reading public? Second, the revised ending accords well with another bit of information we know about The Clouds , that this comedy was a "flop," as far as we know, Aristophanes' first ever. Not only did it fail to win the Dionysia that year, but it was given the last prize.
As it turns out, one important factor in this play's failure had nothing to do with the work itself but was simply an unfortunate coincidence of timing. At the same festival, Aristophanes' older rival Cratinus produced what would prove to be his last great comic masterpiece, Pytine "The Flask" note. Still, the loss must have stung Aristophanes badly—first wounds always hurt the most!
It was his way of closing the wound inflicted by his first significant failure on the stage, all of which means we must proceed with some caution when looking to The Clouds for indications about the performance of plays outside of the Dionysia and Lenaea during the Classical Age. The text as we have it may not in every detail represent a script designed to be staged, even if it comes from the hand of one of the most productive and produced playwrights in western civilization.
In the following year BCE Aristophanes returned both to the Lenaea, where he had already had two successes, and to the comic turf where he had been most successful, the political arena. He produced a comedy called The Wasps , a satire of the Athenian jury system. This play features an old man who, since his son has become head of the house, has had much free time on his hands. This old man named Philocleon "Love Cleon" has lately been spending his many leisure hours in court serving as a juror, becoming virtually addicted to trials.
As a consequence, his son named Bdelycleon "Fart Cleon" fears that the old man and his senile cronies will ruin Athens by constantly voting according to their geriatric right-wing reactionary inclinations—read: Cleon's political agenda—so Bdelycleon has locked his father Philocleon in their house to prevent him from going to court and perpetuating Cleon's hate-mongering, hawkish policies.
In the first scenes of the play, Philocleon tries to escape but is stopped by Bdelycleon, who finally convinces the old man to stay home by staging a do-it-yourself, home-style trial. To understand the main joke of this play, it is crucial to understand current political events in Athens.
An Athenian general named Laches had recently been put on trial for embezzling tribute monies he was supposed to be bringing home to Athens from Sicily. In court, Laches' lawyers had pleaded that life at the front was terribly difficult and he needed the money to support his family while he was away.
They went so far as to bring Laches' family into court where they wept and wailed in the background, begging for mercy. To the horror of many, Laches won acquittal through these cheap courtroom antics.
In The Wasps , the case which Bdelycleon stages at home in order to entertain and distract his father is a spoof of Laches' trial. A household dog named Labes "Grabber" is charged with stealing a big piece of Sicilian cheese. Philocleon serves as the jury and behaves like a typical Athenian juryman, complaining about things, making rude interjections and falling asleep.
Playing the lawyer for the cheese-thieving cur, Bdelycleon pleads that his client leads a hard life protecting his master's flock and keeping his master's sheep in line all day—sheep is surely an insulting reference to the Delian League , the member nations of the empire the Athenians had built after the Persian Wars—and the poor dog does not get to enjoy the usual canine pleasures of sleeping at home all day. Labes' mate and her litter suffer from his absence, and on cue the bitch and her pups stand up in court and bay pitifully, going "How!
While it constitutes one of Aristophanes' best and most original plots, The Wasps won him only a second place. For some reason, his charm was beginning to wear off with the public. But what's wrong with these people? Why can't they accept genius when they see it. I'll tell you what it is. It's this pointless war, that's what's really to blame. It just keeps dragging on and on. I mean, how do they expect us to make people laugh with all this fighting going on?
Somebody should stop this stupid. Wait a second! That gives me a new idea! But he didn't need a new idea, because in BCE things began to change dramatically. Peace rose unexpectedly on the horizon, and in that spirit Aristophanes produced a comedy appropriately entitled The Peace at the Dionysia. It featured Trygaeus, another commoner-hero much like Dicaeopolis in The Acharnians , who seeks peace with Sparta. Like Dicaeopolis, too, this "average man" is fed up with war and wants to go to Zeus himself and plead for an end to the insane conflict.
But the gods live in the sky where normal mortals cannot go. So, to reach their abode, Trygaeus has devised an ingenious plan. He has raised a gigantic dung-beetle on whose back he plans to ride all the way to heaven. But to make it large enough to carry a human aloft, he has had to force-feed it with. For Trygaeus' kitchen staff, one can hardly imagine a more unpleasant task.
And so the play opens, with Trygaeus' servants running back and forth between the kitchen and the dung-beetle's stall carrying food items cooked up to tempt the gigantic insect's appetite.
Aristophanes takes the opportunity to wallow in the absurdity of the situation he has created by indulging in a series of crude but uproariously funny scatological cooking-jokes. The servants, for instance, dash in and out with courses designed to titillate the behemoth bug's appetite and the audience's baser tastes: "crap-cakes," "muddy buddies," "poop-overs," "dung-in-a-blanket," and for dessert, not Twinkies but "Stinkies.
After encouraging his fellow mortals not to do anything to attract the dung beetle back to earth, Trygaeus finally arrives in heaven, rescues the goddess Peace, and brings her down to earth for the collective good of all humankind. The play, however, brought home only second prize, the second of Aristophanes' career.
More important, this joyous, if not gold-medal finale also brings to an end a string of surviving Aristophanes comedies dating from BCE, all securely dated via scholia which provide unprecedented data about their times, their author and the history of ancient comedy. This depth of detail is unparalleled in ancient theatre history, except perhaps for the Roman playwright Terence 's plays more than two centuries later.
Though The Peace garnered only a second prize for Aristophanes, it was a significant play for him in at least one other respect.
In it he experimented with a comic device, ridiculing Euripides , which would serve him well in several future plays. Though The Peace was not the first time Aristophanes had bashed the renegade tragedian—as early as The Acharnians he had mocked Euripides' tendency to dress his heroes in rags—by BCE he was clearly coming to see the general utility and applicability of this stratagem. He later built two of his best comedies, The Frogs and Thesmophoriazusae , by playing the anti-tragedy card.
Indeed, now that Cleon was out of the picture, grand-mal Euripidomania seized Aristophanes' drama, attesting not only to its author's fascination with the bad boy of tragedy but also the burgeoning popularity of Euripides' plays in the waning days of the Classical Age note. The preposterous premise of this uproariously funny play is that Euripides, well-known for his psychotic female characters—which include but are not limited to murderesses, witches, liars, adulteresses, and incestuous sluts—has heard that the women of Athens are tired of his slanders and plan to get revenge on the seemingly misogynistic playwright.
After all, who could question why women are so angry with Euripides, since he constantly shows them doing all sorts of nefarious and unnatural things? As it turns out, however, that is not the problem the women in Aristophanes' play have with Euripides. In general, the female characters in this comedy admit freely that they do nefarious and unnatural things, just like Euripides says.
Their problem is that their husbands, who have by now been attending Euripidean drama regularly for decades, have started to clue into women's hidden nature and, as a result, have become suspicious of their wives. Euripides has revealed to them how women have affairs behind their husbands' backs and sneak wine on the side—none of this do the women in Aristophanes deny among themselves—but now men know it, too, and that has made it much more difficult to maintain their traditional level of debauchery and malfeasance.
The women of Athens feel they must shut Euripides down or risk never getting away with any crimes again. So they decide to use their annual meeting at the Thesmophoria , a sacred, females-only festival, to plot revenge. But Euripides is the master plotter and quickly discovers their intention. He convinces Mnesilochus, an older male relative of his, to sneak inside the women's rites so he can learn what the women are planning to do.
But first he needs to dress him appropriately, so Euripides and Mnesilochus go to the house of Agathon, a notorious cross-dresser—and, of course, a famous tragic playwright —who lets them borrow a frock. As it turns out, he has plenty to spare.
Mnesilochus, then, goes into the women's meeting and, though "she" watches quietly at first, cannot help "herself" when the women start into Euripides.
La femme Mnesilochus takes the floor and defends him by noting that "she," as a woman and moreover a mother of nine, has done all sorts of sordid things, many of which Euripides has not yet mentioned in his tragedies.
The women do not like that. A heated debate ensues, interrupted finally by an excited messenger who reports that Euripides has sent a spy into their midst. After an extensive search for the intruder, the women "uncover" Mnesilochus, who, like all male characters in Old Comedy, is wearing a phallus. While "she" tries desperately to hide her phallus by squeezing it between her legs, the women detect it—and him!
Identified now as the spy, Mnesilochus grabs one of the women's babies and runs in a panic up to the altar. Desperate for his life, he threatens to kill the baby, if the women try to hurt him, a spoof of a famous—or, better, in famous—play, Euripides' Telephus.
In this tragedy the title character seizes the baby Orestes from Clytemnestra's arms and threatens to kill it if Agamemnon and the Greeks will not listen to him. As Mnesilochus holds the baby aloft, he yanks the diaper off the baby and discovers that it is not a baby at all, but a wineskin that its "mother" had sneaked into the assembly for the party afterward.
She has even put little booties on it to make it look like a baby. Thinking he is in serious trouble now, Mnesilochus soon discovers that sometimes you don't need a baby at all, only a bottle, since the women are much more upset that he has their wine than they would have been if he had taken an actual baby from them. Trapped at the altar with his hostage wineskin, Mnesilochus starts screaming to Euripides for help. Then he gets a bright idea. Aristophanes used his plays to comment on issues like war, the Greek educational system, and Greek society.
One of his most famous plays, Lysistrata , has become well-known as one of the earliest works of anti-war literature, as the play is about Athenian women who deprive their husbands of marital privileges until they agree to stop making war. It was also a remarkable work because it was the first play to feature a female protagonist.
The work of Aristophanes continues to be engaging, dynamic, interesting, and revealing today, indicating the power which great literature has to transcend barriers of time, culture, and language. Ever since she began contributing to the site several years ago, Mary has embraced the exciting challenge of being a researcher and writer.
Aristophanes's career as a dramatist started in , when he put on a play, now lost, called The Banqueters. A year later he brought out another play which has not survived, The Babylonians, which had a political theme and expressed some outspoken criticism of Athens's imperial policies.
As a result, Cleon, the most influential politician of the day, hauled the author before the Council, apparently on a charge of treason, but no action was taken against Aristophanes. In he produced the earliest of the extant plays, The Acharnians; the hero, tired of the war, makes a private peace with the enemy, which brings him into conflict first with the chorus of patriotic Acharnian charcoal burners and later with a swashbuckling soldier. The following year came The Knights, a violent and abusive but often very funny attack on Cleon, who is represented as the greedy and dishonest slave of a dimwitted old gentleman, Demos the Athenian people personified ; the slave is his master's favorite until displaced by an even more vulgar and unscrupulous character, a sausage seller.
At the time Cleon was at the height of his influence and popularity, and it says much for the tolerance of the Athenians that even in wartime the play could be produced and, moreover, awarded first prize in the competition for comedies. In Aristophanes turned from politics to education with The Clouds, in which a dishonest old farmer tries to obtain from Socrates an education of the new sophistic type in an attempt to avoid paying his debts.
Aristophanes himself thought highly of the play, but it was a failure. A few years later, after , he revised it, but the text that has survived is an incomplete revision that could not be performed as it stands. For this reason the play is not entirely satisfactory, but the comic inventiveness of several scenes and the interest of the portrayal of Socrates have always made it very popular.
It has sometimes been described as an attack on Socrates, but the sympathetic picture of Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium suggests that the dramatist continued to be on quite good terms thereafter with Socrates and his associates.
In Aristophanes produced The Wasps, an amusing and good-natured satire on the fondness of the Athenians for litigation. A year later he greeted the prospect of peace between Athens and its enemies with Peace, a rapturous and sometimes very bawdy celebration of the delights of peacetime existence in the Attic countryside. During the 6 years of uneasy truce which followed the conclusion of peace in , Aristophanes presumably continued to write plays, but none of them has survived. The next extant play was The Birds, produced in , soon after the war had begun again with the great Athenian expedition to Sicily.
This splendid drama, one of Aristophanes's most poetic and exuberant creations, deals with the adventures of two Athenians who migrate to Birdland; they persuade the birds to found a new city in the skies, Cloudcuckoobury, and then to blockade Olympus till the gods are forced to hand over their power to the birds.
Political unrest in Athens and intrigues in the winter of resulted in an oligarchic revolution in May Shortly before this Aristophanes had produced a conspiracy of his own: in Lysistrata he depicted the women of Greece banding together to stop the war by refusing to sleep with their husbands until they have made peace.
With such a plot the play is inevitably bawdy, and much of the humor is forced, as if Aristophanes did not find it easy to jest in such depressing times. However, Lysistrata herself is one of his most attractive characters, and his sympathy for the plight of women in wartime makes the play a moving comment on the folly of war.
Another of the extant plays, The Thesmophoriazousai Women Celebrating the Thesmophoria, which was a women's festival in honor of Demeter , is also usually dated to , but it may equally belong to the following year when the war situation was temporarily brighter for Athens.
This lighthearted comedy deals with Euripides, who, faced with a supposed threat by the Athenian women to destroy him, sends an elderly relative in female disguise to speak on his behalf.
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