Aristophanes of Kydathenaion

Aristophanes of Kydathenaion

Rescued from the imminent obscurity of the sadly terminal Ancient Biography Thread!

(All dates BCE)

Aristophanes, son of Philippus, of Kydathenaion is remembered today as the “Father of Comedy”, since his satirical plays are the earliest surviving works of comic drama in history. Eleven of his acerbic, obscene, politically outspoken plays survive, covering some of the most turbulent and fascinating years in Athenian history, and it is a testament to his enormous talent that he is regarded not only as one of the earliest comedians, but still as one of the greatest.

Constructing a conventional biography for Aristophanes is extremely difficult. As an adult male citizen in a time of war, he must certainly have fought in battle for his city, and it’s fairly likely that he would have held political office at least once in his life, but we have no information on this. Nevertheless, it is possible to glean some hard facts about his life from his plays, because one of the peculiarities of pre-Hellenistic Greek comedy was the parabasis, a central choral ode where the chorus cast off their identity and speak in the person of the poet. From his works we learn that he was the son of a man called Philippos, from the deme of Kydathenaion, and that he had three sons, at least two of whom went on to become comic playwrights themselves. He may have had some connection to the island of Aegina, possibly being one of the Athenians who were resettled there at the establishment of the Athenian cleruchy on the island in 431. His name, and that of his father, is Eupatrid, suggesting he may have had aristocratic blood, and this seems to be supported by the generally conservative, pro-aristocratic tone of many of his plays. He went bald at a young age, a fact that he himself mocks in several plays, and he was prosecuted for slander on at least one occasion by the demagogue Cleon (more on this later). There is also a portrait of Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium, though it’s doubtful how accurate this picture is. Plato’s Aristophanes is an agreeable, friendly man, keen on sex, wine and absurdity, and a good deal more perceptive than his clownish exterior suggests.

In his earlier years as a dramatist, Aristophanes “hired” a professional director, Callistratus, and though he would continue to periodically employ theatre professionals throughout his career, as his confidence grew he increasingly took to directing his own works. His earliest known play, The Banqueters, premiered in Athens in 427, winning second place at the Dionysia Festival, and sadly it does not survive. In the following year he produced another non-extant play, The Babylonians, a play that would go on to cause him problems. The negative portrayal of Athenian imperialism in this play saw Aristophanes hauled into court by the prominent demagogic politician Cleon, on a charge of slandering Athens in the presence of foreigners (foreign dignitaries often attended the Dionysia Festival). Cleon’s prosecution failed, but this incident marked the beginning of what looks very much like a genuine vendetta between the politician and the comedian. Given Aristophanes’ eloquence and the survival of so many of his plays, it was a vendetta that poor old Cleon was bound to lose in the long term.

425 brings us Aristophanes’ earliest surviving play, The Acharnians. It is a simple story, but one full of well-handled and bitingly satirical scenes (the mockery of an Athenian assembly meeting springs to mind), suggestive of a great but as-yet-immature talent. The play is an anti-war satire in which a cranky old farmer, Dikaiopolis (“The Just City”), declares himself an independent republic, separate from Athens and therefore free to make peace with Sparta. Much of the humour comes from the contrast between Dikaiopolis’ new life at peace (full of parties, banquets and carousing) and the life of his neighbour, General Lamachus, a blustery pro-war politician who spends his miserable nights shivering away on sentry duty. Lamachus was a real person, and the portrayal of him in Acharnians is the first recorded “impression” in history. But the more scandal-hungry audience members must have been watching the play to see how Aristophanes would respond to being prosecuted by Cleon. The trial (which seems to have been in progress when Acharnians was being staged) barely gets a mention – but Aristophanes advises his prosecutor to watch out, as he intended to take his revenge the following year.

In 424, that revenge came, and in spades. Aristophanes’ surviving play from that year, The Knights, is perhaps the most complete and devastating character assassination in all literature. Cleon, the play’s central character, is portrayed as “the Paphlagonian”, a base, sycophantic, greedy slave, conning his doddery old master Lord Demos (who represents the Athenian people). There was no grand political ambition behind this play – it was simply Aristophanes repeatedly sticking his knife into the man who had foolishly sought to curtail his freedom of speech in the courts the previous year, and Cleon (who would have been in the audience when the play was performed) cannot have enjoyed the experience much. In an honour-shame culture like Athens, such gross and sustained public humiliation must have been unconscionable. The next year saw Aristophanes’ most ambitious play to date, a play which he may have regarded as his masterpiece. The Clouds mocks an elevated and refined subject, Athenian philosophy, and the “villain” of the piece is none other than the great Socrates himself! In Clouds, Socrates is a representative of philosophy, and so he ends up spouting a lot of nonsense that the "real" Socrates would never have espoused. Though an intellectual triumph, The Clouds was not a hit with the audience, and in a later play Aristophanes criticises his viewers for being too stupid to understand it! The Clouds also sees Aristophanes’ muse reaching its highest levels to date – the lyrical passages, sung by the chorus of clouds, rank among some of the most beautiful lyric poetry in the Greek language, a remarkable achievement for a man most famous for “gross-out” humour. But with this play comes a stark reminder of the responsibilities of the satirical comedian: in the Apology, Plato makes Socrates cite The Clouds as being responsible for much of the popular prejudice against him, prejudice that ultimately led to his condemnation to death.

Responding to The Clouds’ poor popular reception, Aristophanes belted out a real crowd-pleaser in the following year. Wasps is a satire of Athens’ lawcourts, and their corruption and exploitation by the demagogues. Yet again, Cleon features as a character, this time as a greedy and cowardly dog (appropriate for a politican who called himself “the watchdog of the people”). The play’s use of extravagant costumes, visual spectacles, mockery of the aristocracy and copious obscenity show Aristophanes desperate to win back the favour of the ordinary viewers whose patience had been tested by the refined intellectualism of The Clouds. His next surviving play, Peace (421) is another anti-war play, but one with a very different feel to Acharnians. This play was produced in the year of the ill-fated Peace of Nicias, and the play is not so much an urgent appeal for an end to the war as a celebration of the reality of peace. It features probably the most absurd plot in Aristophanes’ canon, where a man flies up to heaven on the back of a giant dung beetle to force the gods to bring peace to the Hellenes!

There then follows a long gap in the record of Aristophanes’ surviving plays, until 414, and the production of The Birds. This play gave us an English-language expression, Cloud-Cuckoo-Land (from the Greek Nephalokokkugia). In this play two Athenian chancers become birds, build a city in the sky, and declare war on the gods. Needless to say, their greedy, war-mongering ways shatter the pristine paradise of the skies, reflecting how Athenian greed, restlessness and hubris turn all things sour. Three years later, at the Lenaia festival in 411 (after the resumption of hostilities with Sparta), Aristophanes produced what many would call his greatest play, and the first in which he played with the theme of gender (to which he would repeatedly return in later years). Lysistrata is one of the all-time great anti-war dramas, and has also (through a slightly misguided modern reading) become a set-text for feminism. In this play the women of Athens and Sparta co-ordinate a sex strike, and refuse to sleep with their husbands until peace is made. The joy of the play is watching the men’s total collapse as they go from belligerent war-mongers to pathetic, wheedling, sex-starved puppets. The play’s eponymous heroine is a remarkable creation – not only is she the earliest female principal in comedy, but she doesn’t tell a single joke in the whole play. Lysistrata is no buffoonish comic trickster – she has all the stature and grandeur of a Sophoclean tragic hero.

Later in the same year, Aristophanes would exploit the gender theme once again, this time in pursuit of a new target. In Thesmophoriazousai (try getting your tongue around that title!), the famously innovative tragedian Euripides dresses as a woman and attempts to infiltrate an all-female religious festival, since he believes the women are out to kill him. This play is little-known, but it contains some of his funniest scenes, and the second half is a parodic tour de force – practically the whole second act is a long sequence of parodies of Euripides' plays, as the tragedian’s buffoonish uncle tries one trick after another to rescue his nephew from the clutches of the women. After another long gap, in 405, we find Aristophanes addressing matters theatrical once again in The Frogs (another contender for the “greatest Aristophanes play” title), in which the cowardly god Dionysus and his sassy slave Xanthias undertake a farcical journey into the underworld to bring back the ghost of Euripides and “save” theatre. The play ends with a contest between Aeschylus (representing classic, traditional tragedy) and Euripides (representing modern, innovative tragedy). Aeschylus roundly wins, and in doing so he shows up everything that is ‘wrong’ with innovative modern drama. Reading this extraordinary play (the earliest surviving work of literary criticism), it’s easy to see Aristophanes as a cultural conservative, looking back longingly to an age when theatre was simpler and purer. This has led to accusations of hypocrisy, since elsewhere Aristophanes boasts of his own theatrical innovations, but comedians are not philosophers or historians, and they do not need to be consistent.

Aristophanes’ last two plays are among his least-read and, in truth, his weakest. They both betray signs of changing trends in comedy – most obviously a focus on mythological themes and the drastic decline of the chorus’s importance. Assemblywomen (392) portrays the women of Athens taking over the state and creating precisely the kind of society that Aristophanes’ stereotypical women would create – a society based on food, alcohol and sex. The play may have much less appeal than his earlier works, but it still contains one stand-out, laugh-out-loud scene, when a poor young Athenian Romeo is almost torn apart by no fewer than three sex-starved old crones desperate for his body! His final surviving play, Wealth, is a fairytale about economic inequality. Both plays still contain some satirical “bite” (unlike the later Greek comedies of Menander, which have been thoroughly defanged), but his targets are too diffuse and his points too vague to really draw blood. Whether or not Aristophanes was driving or simply responding to changes in Athenian comedy in this period is unknown, but it seems that his sharp, witty, often rather unpleasant style was fast going out of vogue in the fourth century, and he was never quite able to regain the magic of his earlier triumphs.

Aristophanes died at some point in the mid 380s, leaving an extraordinary legacy to posterity. The variety of his talent and comic vision is remarkable. Satire, obscenity, surrealism, absurdity, comic songs, tragic and epic parodies, double-acts, puns, impressions, visual humour, slapstick – it’s hard to think of a type of comedy that he didn’t employ. The Athenian stage gave him more or less unrestricted freedom of speech (there were no civil libel laws in ancient Athens) and he employed that freedom of speech to the full, and not always fairly or responsibly. He accused his targets of all manner of things: effeminacy, taking bribes, lying to the public, cowardice in battle, poor personal hygiene, being cuckolded by their own slaves, being of foreign extraction, betraying the state to the enemy, profiteering from war, having sex with horses, being bad dancers and (most appallingly of all to the Athenian mind) enjoying performing oral sex on women. He knew no boundaries of taste or restraint, and the same pen that produced the soaring, heavenly lyrics of Clouds or Birds (where the verse meters of the choral odes were painstakingly constructed to reflect the sound-patterns of actual birdsong!) was capable of some of the most sickening smut in print. His refusal to curb his excesses at the behest of the great and the good, and his constant criticisms and mockery of any and every target, embodies the daring intellectual verve of classical Athenian culture. He stands as the father of a long and noble line of outspoken and impudent satirists that includes Villon, Baudelaire, Swift, Private Eye, Monty Python, South Park and The Daily Show. And he is greater than all of his children. Truly, the political leaders of the modern world ought to be glad that Aristophanes of Kydathenaion is not around to chronicle their misdeeds.