ARISTOPHANES (ca. 448-380 B.C.E)
and OLD COMEDY

There are few reliable biographical facts about 5th Century Greek playwright Aristophanes. We do know he was the son of Phillippus whom many believe was a wealthy man, a supposition based on Aristophanes' conservative attitudes in The Knights. However, his fondness for the rustic man of good sense and his opposition to the ruling war class may mean just the opposite. (My view.)

In any case, Aristophanes was a crony of the intelligentsia. He shows up in an anecdote in Plato's Symposium wherein it is reported that Aristophanes out-drank and out-talked all the guests at an all night party and left in the wee hours debating with Socrates whether one man could be capable of writing both comedy and tragedy. Plato invented what John Gassner describes as "a delightful parable of love for him." Aristophanes must have enjoyed a friendly rivalry with the likes of Socrates and Euripides. It's fun to think of him as the passionate, hard living gadfly constantly challenging the established wisdom of his age.

He certainly held an open animosity with the ruling political party focusing on its leader Kleon. [After the death of Perikles in 429 B.C.E., the foreign policy of Athens was determined by Kleon, Nicias, and Alcibiades, each of whom attempted to revitalize Athens, but instead contributed to the defeat and eventual fall of the city.] In The Acharnians (426 B.C.E.), he sharply criticized Kleon's treatment of Athens' allies with the result that Kleon took him to court to prove Aristophanes was a foreigner, who would, therefore, have no right to criticize Athens and should be banished. But Aristophanes was a native Athenian, and proved his citizenship and so remained a thorn in Kleon's side. In The Knights (424 B.C.E.), the most personal attack on Kleon, neither mask makers nor actors would portray Kleon, so Aristophanes played the part himself, daubing his face with red in the "old-fashioned way." He continued attacking Kleon and the war party in Peace (422 B.C.E.), The Wasps (422 B.C.E.) and of course Lysistrata (411 B.C.E.).

Aristophanes wrote some forty plays, of which eleven are extant. Nine of these are in the form scholars refer to as Old Comedy. One, Ekklesiasuzae (Women in Power), is a transitional form and one, Plutus, is referred to as Middle Comedy.

Old Comedy apparently originated in fertility rites centered on Priapus at festivals to Dionysos or in the komos, a drunken revel in his honor. It became a part of the City Dionysia and the Lenaea in 486 B.C.E. Aristotle seems to credit Kratinos with originating Old Comedy. The only complete extant examples of Old Comedy are by Aristophanes.

Old Comedy deals with either politics, literary satire (Euripides comes in for a fair amount of abuse) or religious or moral foibles in a frank, outrageous, often obscene, frequently unfair manner. At the same time, they resemble in some respects a poetic musical comedy, with moments of great beauty, all encased in an atmosphere at once fantastic and unrealistic. At its best, it resembled Saturday Night Live at its best, and served many of the same purposes. While there was mass appeal and coarse humor, the underlying satirical intent was never far from the surface.

The characters are all low comedy types falling into three general categories:

The khoros is often non-human: wasps, birds, frogs, etc.

The typical structure of an Old Comedy is less formal than tragedy, with loose, seemingly carelessly constructed plots which focus on broad farce and buffoonery. The plots generally include the following elements:

Some peculiar recurrent features of these plays include a pnigos, literally "choker", a sort of Danny Kaye patter song reeled off in one breath by the khoros. There was a good deal of slapstick violence including torches and beatings of which our more enlightened age might disapprove.

Aristophanes' Plays of Old Comedy are:

The Acharnians (426 B.C.E.) In the sixth year of the Peloponnesian War, Aristophanes emphasizes the hardships the War places on the rural population, and takes a few shots at Euripides along the way.

The Knights (424 B.C.E.) In this eighth year of the War, Aristophanes directly attacks on Kleon and the War as alluded to above.

The Clouds (423 B.C.E.) Here the Sophists are satirized, unfairly lumping Socrates in with the more specious of the species. Alcibiades saw himself satirized as well in the character of Phidippides, a spendthrift son who wants to learn new ways of thinking so as to avoid his debts.

Peace (422 B.C.E.) The War is in its tenth year and Aristophanes continues his opposition to the War policies. The central figure Trigæus flies up to Olympos on a beetle to bring the goddess Peace to earth.

The Wasps (422 B.C.E.) Two years after his court battle with Kleon, Aristophanes satirizes the Athenian courts and the Athenian passion for litigation, a topic we might want to visit in our own day. Philokleon (friend of Kleon) is held prisoner by his son Bdelykleon (enemy of Kleon) to keep him from going to the courts. Philokleon tries to escape through the chimney, through a hole on the roof, where he pretends to be a little bird. Each of his attempts is foiled until the Wasps (his fellow jurymen), wielding their prodigious stingers, come to his rescue. In the ensuing melee, the wasps are at last fended off, and Philokleon agrees to stay at home if he can have his own tribunal there. This gives rise to the trial of a pet dog that stole a Sicilian cheese, in which Philokleon inadvertantly votes for the defendants acquittal, something he had never done! After the parabasis, Kleon's social graces come in for a drubbing.

The Birds (414 B.C.E.) Two disgruntled Athenian citizens form a coalition with the birds to create a new city between Olympos and earth called Cloud-cuckoo-land. There is a subtle satire of Alcibiades and the ill-fated Sicilian expedition.

Thesmophoriazusae (412 B.C.E.) In this literary satire, Euripides is called to defend himself before the women of Athens at the Thesmophoria or Festival of Demeter and Persephone. He sends his father-in-law disguised as a woman in his stead.

Lysistrata (411 B.C.E.) This is probably Aristophanes most famous play in which the women of Athens decide to withhold sex from their men unless they stop the war.

The Frogs (405 B.C.E.) In another satire of Euripides, Dionysos goes to Hades to retrieve one of the dead dramatists whom he sees as superior to those practicing the art on earth. When he gets there, he encounters a debate between Aeschylos and Euripides on who should occupy the throne of tragedy in Hdes. Dionysos eventually settles on bringing Aeschylos back to earth with him and leaves Sophokles on the throne below. The beginnings of dramatic criticism are in this little play.

Middle Comedy

As the Fifth Century came to a close, Athens lost the war and with it most of the independence of thought and action which it formerly possessed as a free state. The new vulnerability from without could not allow criticism from within. In Ekklesiazusae (Women in Power) (392/1), the attacks are on ideas only with no discernable attacks on those in charge. The happy idea is one which modern audiences would not allow: A group of women steal their husbands clothes, don false beards and take over the state by voting themselves into power with ludicrous consequences. The anti-feminist bias, which so distracts us, was less his focus than his satire on the welfare state. But it is sad to see this great mind satirizing the democracy he once championed.

The play labeled "Middle Comedy" is a unique play in a number of regards. Plutus (Wealth) (408 & 388 B.C.E.) Plutus, the blind god of wealth, is discovered by a poor, but honest Athenian and his comic servant who take him to the precincts of Æskulapios to have his sight restored in hopes that wealth will be bestowed only on the good and the just. Poverty and Wealth are personified and Poverty makes a compelling case, of which Adam Smith would have heartily approved, that without the motivating presence of Poverty, no work would ever get done. Stylistically, the play is very different from the biting, personal satires of Old Comedy. The obscenity is largely confined to a brief, but hilarious scene, antedating Blazing Saddles by two and a half millenia, in which those waiting to by ushered into the presence of the god of healing are subjected to a debilitating stench as an old woman and Chremylos' servant break wind. It seems particularly out of character in this poetic, gentle little play.