Aristophanes

We revisit Aristophanes’ charge against Socratic education in the Clouds and, placing that charge in its democratic context, propose that the play is equally critical of Socratic education as it is of democracy’s narrowly utilitarian approach to learning embodied in the comic protagonist Strepsiades. The clash between the two, we claim, is the play’s main target. In the second part, we suggest that Aristophanes’ challenge is still with us and merits to be taken seriously by defenders of liberal education today. Discussing one institutional response to that challenge, we argue that if it is to be useful for modern democracy liberal education needs to address the heterogeneity of values, and that a core-text based curriculum is uniquely fit to do so.

In Rhetoric and Power, Nathan Crick dramatizes the history of rhetoric by explaining its origin and development in classical Greece beginning the oral displays of Homeric eloquence in a time of kings, following its ascent to power during the age of Pericles and the Sophists, and ending with its transformation into a rational discipline with Aristotle in a time of literacy and empire. Crick advances the thesis that rhetoric is primarily a medium and artistry of power, but that the relationship between rhetoric and power at any point in time is a product of historical conditions, not the least of which is the development and availability of communication media.
Investigating major works by Homer, Heraclitus, Aeschylus, Protagoras, Gorgias, Thucydides, Aristophanes, Plato, Isocrates, and Aristotle, Rhetoric and Power tells the story of the rise and fall of classical Greece while simultaneously developing rhetorical theory from the close criticism of particular texts. As a form of rhetorical criticism, this volume offers challenging new readings to canonical works such as Aeschylus's Persians, Gorgias's Helen, Aristophanes's Birds, and Isocrates's Nicocles by reading them as reflections of the political culture of their time.
Through this theoretical inquiry, Crick uses these criticisms to articulate and define a plurality of rhetorical genres and concepts, such as heroic eloquence, tragicomedy, representative publicity, ideology, and the public sphere, and their relationships to different structures and ethics of power, such as monarchy, democracy, aristocracy, and empire. Rhetoric and Power thus provides a foundation for rhetorical history, criticism, and theory that draws on contemporary research to prove again the incredible richness of the classical tradition for contemporary rhetorical scholarship and practice.

No comedies are preserved from 413 or 412 BC. But we do have two — Aristophanes' Lysistrata and Thesmophoriazusae — that were performed in 411. The plot of Lysistrata is overtly political. Scholars have nonetheless found it difficult to detect specific traces within the play of the tumultuous events of 411, much less any concrete recommendations for how to deal with what everyone in the city must by then have realized was a terrible military and political situation. I argue that the play is best understood as evidence for the even more confused and ambiguous situation in mid-412 or so, and that the heroine's plans, procedures and complaints, and how the opposition to them is characterised, offer insight not so much into the ideology of the committed oligarchs who briefly seized power a year or so later, as into widely dispersed patterns of political and social thought that made that seizure possible.

The topic of this paper (delivered at a recent seminar in Chieti, 13 December 2018) is the vision of democratic politics implicit in Aristophanes' Wasps, with particular attention to Cleon. In particular, I argue that what Cleon represents has changed over the last few years, as has the significance of the late 5th-century Athenian democratic experiment, as a result of the rise of Donald Trump. The paper will eventually appear in the Atti of the conference, but I am posting it in advance of that due to the timeliness of the topic. Readers interested primarily in Cleon and Trump may wish to skip the central section of the paper, which is largely occupied with Aristophanic politics.

Syllabus and Reading Schedule for The Rise and Fall of Popular Rule—Athens (Integrated Humanities Program, History Module, Fall 2018, UVM). Course Description: America's founders, when establishing our political institutions, took elements from those of ancient Athens and Rome, which pioneered representative government in various (and changing) forms. It is natural, after nearly two-and-a-half centuries, to think of our democracy as unshakeable and eternal. But independent popular rule in Athens—the focus of this class—lasted for less than two centuries, during which the city, after playing a leading role in the liberation of Greece from foreign control (The Persian Wars, 490–479 BC), grew into an Empire that imposed democracy on its subjects—some willing and others not—as a means of enriching and empowering itself. Athenian expansionism finally forced Sparta to lead a coalition against her rival (The Peloponnesian War, 431–404). Athens was eventually defeated. Though the city endured as an independent democracy until the conquest of Greece in 338 by Philip of Macedon (father of Alexander the Great), its defeat in the Peloponnesian War marked the end of the Athenian Golden Age. Through key ancient texts we shall follow the rise and fall of this political experiment, and examine the social and economic forces that led to the establishment and gradual corruption of Athenian democracy.

Edited by Philip Walsh, Washington College

Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Aristophanes provides a substantive account of the reception of Aristophanes (c. 446-386 BC) from Antiquity to the present. Aristophanes was the renowned master of Old Attic Comedy, a dramatic genre defined by its topical satire, high poetry, frank speech, and obscenity. Since their initial production in classical Athens, his comedies have fascinated, inspired, and repelled critics, readers, translators, and performers. The book includes seventeen chapters that explore the ways in which the plays of Aristophanes have been understood, appropriated, adapted, translated, taught, and staged. Careful attention has been given to critical moments of reception across temporal, linguistic, cultural, and national boundaries.

The appearance of hybris in the list of hunting dog names given in Xenophon’s Cynegeticus seems, at first glance, surprising. Why would Xenophon recommend such a term for man’s best friend? Often translated to mean violent arrogance, hybris, is socially and politically charged. This chapter explores how naming dogs, particularly in fourth century Athens, speaks to the tensions between the aristocratic hunting set, who, it appears, were Xenophon's intended audience, and the values of the Democracy.

This paper assesses Thucydides' thoughts on the causes and inevitability of conflict in the Peloponnese by incorporating realist theories of interstate relations in addition to a sound analysis of Athenian imperial policy and the role of kinship in ancient Greek warfare.

The uncouth old protagonist of Aristophanes' Acharnians marks his achievement of a personal peace with the Spartans, and hence his return to his countryside deme, by celebrating a private, miniaturized version of the Rural Dionysia. The only part of the festival he is able to enact before being interrupted by the hostile chorus of Acharnian charcoal burners is a phallic procession and song-the very thing Aristotle designates in the Poetics (4.1449a10-15) as the cultural forerunner of comic drama itself. Dicaeopolis treats himself and his family as a surrogate deme, just as he will later become, in fulfillment of his name, a surrogate or symbolic city. Assuming the organizing role of a demarch or local magistrate, he enlists the services of his daughter as a basket carrier, of Xanthias and another slave as carriers of the phallic pole, and of his wife as a spectator. He completes the procession himself as the solo singer (probably in lieu of a chorus) of the phallic song (to phallikon, 261) in buoyant iambic rhythm. 1 The song is addressed to Phales, the personified phallus. He is invoked with a cascade of vocatives-a kind of comic aretalogy, conveying Dicaeopolis's exuberant acclamation of the god's attributes: Falh`, eJ taire Bakciv ou, xuv gkwme, nuktoperiplav nhte, moicev , paiderastav , . . . (263-65) 120 Chapter Four Aristophanic Sex: The Erotics of Shamelessness º Stephen Halliwell Phales, companion of Bacchus, Fellow-komast, nocturnal wanderer, Marriage defiler, lover of boys, . . .

In 411 BC, when Lysistrata was first performed, it was neither a feminist nor completely a pacifist play. The Athenian playwright’s politics have been debated for a long time, but he seemed to have been more interested in a comical male-female role reversal and an honorable ending to the Peloponnesian war than pacifism and gender equality. Yet these are the two interpretations that have driven most modern performances of the play. As James Robson writes, “These are probably best described as ‘adaptations’ of Lysistrata works which, while inspired by Aristophanes, are recognizably distinct from the Aristophanic original.” And these “adaptations” fall perfectly within the remits of classical reception.

Il contributo intende ripercorre l’Εἰρήνη aristofanea in una retrospettiva data dall’apporto del centrale L’opera di Rabelais e la cultura popolare. Riso, carnevale e festa nella tradizione medievale e rinascimentale, di Michail Bachtin (1895-1975), sulla scia degli studi di Wolfgang Rösler e Bernhard Zimmermann. Sfruttando come strumento critico la teorizzazione dell’essenza della festa carnevalesca, con i suoi elementi principali, le sue occasioni, le sue forme e le sue ragioni, ci si propone una lettura della commedia alla specola dei principi teorico-critici illustrati nell’Opera di Rabelais, cercando di delineare il particolare rapporto dell’uomo aristofaneo con il senso che permea la sorte di ciascuno e sembra governare le invisibili trame del destino e della storia.
In particolare, l’analisi si focalizza sulle scene rappresentate nella commedia, sugli elementi costitutivi e peculiari di queste e sul valore antropologico che l’agone comico poteva avere presso i Greci. Secondo questa via esegetica, il destino dell’uomo aristofaneo, durante il periodo della festa cittadina in cui si rappresenta la commedia, è all’insegna di un’“utopia fantastica” in cui il δῆμος è in grado di autodeterminarsi ed autogovernarsi. L’ésprit che viene a crearsi in questa situazione è quello del “sentimento carnevalesco del mondo”, il quale permette il capovolgimento secondo una “scoronazione carnevalesca”, dalla quale nasce una sorta di vuoto che viene preso dal popolo, unico responsabile di se stesso in questa parentesi temporanea. Il personaggio di Trigeo, in particolare, è il promotore del “rovesciamento”: sfidando paratragicamente gli dèi, egli conquista la pace per il suo popolo, riportando così in Grecia i tempi di benessere. Il tutto viene celebrato con un banchetto (il simbolico banchetto nuziale di Trigeo ed Opora), altro elemento di centrale importanza tanto nella commedia quanto nell’analisi bachtiniana, la quale permette di interpretarlo come la celebrazione della “conclusione sempre gravida di un principio nuovo” tipica della festa popolare.

The first aim of this paper is to illustrate the various meanings of the word πονηρός (together with the antonym χρηστός) and especially its usage from the last quarter of V century b.C. to the first half of IV, both in theatrical literature and in political jargon; the semantic gap between the etymological sense of this term and its occurrences in post-Periclean age is due to the great social renewals in VI-V cent. and next to the decline of the democratic parabola in Athens. Consequently, the paper shows the tight connections between comic and political lexicon: according to Alessandro Grilli, all Aristophanes’ comedies concern politics and therefore refer to its vocabulary in order to inspire audience’s laugh and blame.

https://elibrary.steiner-verlag.de/article/10.25162/hermes-2020-0031

This article addresses the topic of excerpts by focusing on modern excerpting practices used in the analysis of Greek myth. It examines the mythological exemplum about Melanion and Timon from Aristophanes' Lysistrata within the context of Greek myth's flexibility and potential for innovation. After discussing the innovative details of the exempla, I turn to the use of the Melanion excerpt by two prominent classicists, P. Vidal-Naquet and M. Detienne. This leads to some general remarks on the transmission of knowledge regarding mythological lore, as well as on our modern scholarly practices of excerpting passages out of their original context.

The women of Lysistrata achieve as a unified body what individual women cannot: a public voice. In Aristophanes' representation the women act with a group mentality, resulting in the ability to upset the traditional balance of power between the genders. Several studies of women's voices in drama have looked at the ability of the women to affect public discourse through the limited means available to them . Taaffe (1993, 20) argues that the women of Lysistrata achieve political power by becoming super-feminine, using their sexuality to persuade men to accept their proposals. McClure (1999, 205) examines how women's speech in Thesmophoriazusae and Ecclesiazusae disrupts social order, arguing that fifth century Athenian drama gave women a voice in order to show its destructive nature. I continue this approach by evaluating how women's unification in Lysistrata allows them to affect public discourse in ways that they were not able to achieve when fragmented.

"This study gathers and interprets the earliest extant references to architects in ancient Greek philosophy, as found in select works of Plato and Aristotle.  Throughout this review, Plato and Aristotle [are] shown to consistently present architectonic agents as exemplary civic and intellectual leaders, acting in awareness of their own (and others’) limits, with knowledge of the most appropriate archē, and with a view to the most comprehensive aims—the common good. This discloses an alternative and more accurate etymology of architects: not as master-builders but as leaders and makers of beginnings (archai). The aim of this essay has been not only to rediscover the discursive beginnings for a renewed philosophy of architecture, but to suggest how these philosophical 'archai' might help present-day architects reimagine the full relevance of their still contested role."

Аннотация: Отождествление агона и конфликта в комедиях Аристофана затрудняет интерпретацию аристофановских пьес в плане содержания и композиции. Комедии без агона и комедии с двумя агонами свидетельствуют о факультативности данного структурного элемента. В работе проводится анализ места агона в структуре комедий Аристофана и его соотношения с конфликтом аристофановских произведений.
Ключевые слова: агон, Аристофан, комедия, конфликт, хронотоп.
Resume: Identification of the agon with the conflict in Aristophanes’ comedies complicates interpretation of substance and composition of his plays. Comedies without the agon and comedies with two agons prove optionality of this structural element. The article analyses role of the agon in the structure of Aristophanes’ plays and their correlation with the conflict of his comedies.
Key words: agon, Aristophanes, comedy, conflict, chronotop.

Among the preserved Aristophanes’ codices veteres, there is the Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional Mss/4683, an important manuscript for its paleographical and philological value which shows how Aristophanes was read and commented in Byzantium, especially during the Palaeologan period (1261-1453). The current paper deals with the textual and paleographical study of the main scribe and the marginal hands that wrote scholia on the comedies, to find out the exegetical tradition of the manuscript.

I ventotto contributi che compongono il volume affrontano dalle più diverse angolazioni, esaurendo praticamente tutti gli elementi costitutivi del processo comunicativo (mittente, destinatario, contesto, messaggio, codice), i molti e reciproci rapporti esistenti tra filosofia e teatro a partire dall’antichità greca fino alla modernità. I parallelismi tracciati in alcuni contributi tra la rappresentazione teatrale e la conoscenza filosofica invitano a riconoscere la parzialità e la limitatezza della conoscenza umana, ma solo per rivalutare la produttività e creatività di un sapere filosofico dialogico e aperto alla pluriprospetticità.

The article takes into account the lines and their distribution throughout the prologue of Ecclesiazusae basing on its last edition (by N. Wilson). A new insight into the play is provided by analyzing the ethe of the anonymous characters and the function of the leader of the chorus.

Nelle commedie di Aristofane, Esopo viene menzionato esplicitamente in sette occasioni: quattro volte nelle Vespe (vv. 566, 1259Vespe (vv. 566, , 1401Vespe (vv. 566, , 1446, una nella Pace (v. 129) e due negli Uccelli (vv. 471, 651). Le citazioni di Esopo si concentrano in tre delle undici commedie superstiti, e sono comprese in un periodo di otto anni, che va dal 422 (anno di rappresentazione delle Vespe) al 414 (anno in cui Aristofane mise in scena gli Uccelli): siamo nella prima fase della produzione aristofanea.

Peace is one of Aristophanes’ most poetically resonant comedies. This work provides an analysis of a paratragic feature hitherto almost neglected by scholars, the figure of Prometheus, especially as characterised in Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound. In his poetical and parodistic texture, Aristophanes uses some of Prometheus’ most evident peculiarities to describe Trygeus and Hermes, once he has accepted to join the Greeks in the release of Peace; the observation of the different uses that Aristophanes makes of this paradigm throughout the comedy helps to understand the progression of action and characterization in Peace.

O artigo examina a recepção das comédias Lisístrata e Assembleia de Mulheres, de Aristófanes, em As Mulheres de Atenas, de Augusto Boal. Escrita durante o exílio na Argentina (1971-1976), inicialmente intitulada Lisa, a mulher libertadora, é contemporânea da publicação do livro de maior projeção do dramaturgo brasileiro, Teatro do Oprimido e outras poéticas políticas (1975, edição brasileira, 1974, edição argentina), constituindo, de certa forma, uma resposta prática às questões teóricas ali propostas. A peça documenta a recepção da comédia aristofânica no Brasil.

Plavras-chave: As Mulheres de Atenas, Augusto Boal, Teatro do Oprimido, Aristófanes, Recepção dos Clássicos.

Abstract: This paper examines the reception of Aristophanes' comedies Lysistrata and Assemblywomen in Augusto Boal’s The Women of Athens. Written during the Argentine exile (1971-1976), initially titled Lisa, the Liberating Woman, it is contemporary of the publication of the most prominent book by the Brazilian playwright, Theater of the Oppressed (1975, Brazilian edition, 1974, Argentine edition), constituting, in a way, a practical answer to the theoretical questions proposed there. The play documents the reception of the aristophanic comedy in Brazil.

Keywords: The Women of Athens, Augusto Boal, Theater of the Oppressed, Aristophanes, Classical reception

Lexis, in accordo ai principi internazionali di trasparenza in sede di pubblicazioni di carattere scientifico, sottopone tutti i testi che giungono in redazione a un processo di doppia lettura anonima (double-blind peer review, ovvero refereeing) affidato a specialisti di Università o altri Enti italiani ed esteri. Circa l'80% dei revisori è esterno alla redazione della rivista. Ogni due anni la lista dei revisori che hanno collaborato con la rivista è pubblicata sia online sia in calce a questa pagina.

Although cooking has been regarded as a basic feminine domestic labour, with male labour displayed in the public space, there is little literary mention of the activities of ancient Greek women in the kitchen. As a consequence, the question of the presence of women at symposia or at private meals has been widely debated within the gender studies field, with scholars such as John Wilkins1 or Andrew Dalby2 arguing that women did not eat along with men, although they cooked meals. However this perspective has not adequately addressed the issue of the absence of women as cooks in ancient Greek literature. My paper addresses the portrayal of women as extraordinary chefs, with special attention to their skills resulting in the corruption of the principle of sharing of the food or of the purpose of cooking altogether. Thus, I will examine the examples of Medea in Simonides and Ovid and that of Praxagora in Aristophane's Ecclesiazusae, to highlight how both women corrupt a process that not only concerns the culinary but also the social and the political realms. In other words, I will discuss the political concerns of cooking and how it can be used as a means of unsettling gender and social status determined hierarchies. I argue that the absence of women engaged in culinary activities in Greek ancient literature and their occasional portrayal in an association of cooking with magic is to be regarded as a sign of the need of male control over the sensitive and critical domain of the daily life which is food. In conclusion, by closely examining the interference between gender and cooking, my paper sheds new light on the rarely acknowledged issue of women as both nurturing and disturbing culinary agents in Ancient Greece.