Against demagogues : what Aristophanes can teach us about the perils of populism and the fate of democracy. New translations of the Acharnians and the Knights

293 Pages·2020·0.981 MB·English

by  Robert C. Bartlett

Against Demagogues

Against Demagogues
what aristophanes can teach us
about the perils of populism and
the fate of democracy
new translations of the
acharnians and the knights
Robert C. Bartlett
university of california press
University of California Press
Oakland, California
© 2020 by Robert C. Bartlett
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Aristophanes. Plays. Selections. English. | Bartlett, Robert C., Against
demagogues. | Aristophanes. Acharnians. English. | Aristophanes.
Knights. English.
Title: Against demagogues : what Aristophanes can teach us about the perils
of populism and the fate of democracy, new translations of the Acharnians
and the Knights / Robert C. Bartlett.
Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2020] |
Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: lccn 2020008276 (print) | lccn 2020008277 (ebook) |
isbn 9780520344105 (hardcover) | isbn 9780520975361 (ebook)
Subjects: lcsh: Aristophanes—Translations into English. | Aristophanes—
Criticism and interpretation. | Democracy in literature. | Populism in
literature. | Justice in literature.
Classification: lcc pa3877 .a2 2020 (print) | lcc pa3877 (ebook) |
ddc 882/.01—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020008276
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020008277
Manufactured in the United States of America
28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
List of Abbreviations vii
Introduction: On Reading Aristophanes Today 1
The Acharnians 15
On the Acharnians 109
The Knights 141
On the Knights 249
Appendix: Cleon’s Speech to the Athenian Assembly
(Thucydides, War of the Peloponnesians and
Athenians 3.37–40) 277
Further Reading 283

Abbreviations
Budé Aristophane. Vol. 1. Ed. Victor Coulon
and Hilaire van Daele. Budé ed.
Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1995.
Henderson Jeffery Henderson. The Maculate
Muse: Obscene Language in Attic
Comedy. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1991.
Henderson, Acharnians Aristophanes. Acharnians. Trans.
Jeffery Henderson with introduction
and notes. Focus Classical Library.
Newburyport, MA: Focus/R. Pullins,
1992.
Henderson (Loeb) Aristophanes. Acharnians, Knights.
Ed. and trans. Jeffrey Henderson.
Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.
Mitchell The Knights of Aristophanes. Ed. T.
Mitchell with notes critical and
explanatory. London: John Murray,
1836.
[ vii ]
Neil The Knights of Aristophanes. Ed. R. A.
Neil. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1966.
Originally published in 1901.
OCT Aristophanes. Fabulae. Vol. 1, Acharn-
enses Equites Nubes Vespae Pax Aves.
Ed. N. Wilson. Oxford Classical
Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
2007.
Olson Aristophanes. Acharnians. Ed. S.
Douglas Olson with introduction and
commentary. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002.
Sommerstein, Acharnians The Comedies of Aristophanes. Vol. 1,
Acharnians. Ed. A. H. Sommerstein
with an introduction, translation, and
commentary. Warminster: Aris &
Phillips, 1980.
Sommerstein, Knights The Comedies of Aristophanes. Vol. 2,
Knights. Ed. A. H. Sommerstein with
an introduction, translation, and
commentary. Warminster: Aris &
Phillips, 1981.
Wilson N. G. Wilson. Aristophanea: Studies on
the Text of Aristophanes. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2007.
[ viii ] abbreviations
Introduction
On Reading Aristophanes Today
O democracy! Are these things to be tolerated?
—acharnians 618
This volume contains new translations of the two earliest extant
plays of Aristophanes, the Acharnians and Knights, together with
explanatory notes and interpretive essays meant to aid readers
coming to the plays for the first time.
It is reasonable to wonder at the outset why this author and
these two plays deserve our attention here and now. As for
Aristophanes (d. circa 386–380 b.c.e.), we can begin from the
contention that he is not only the greatest Athenian comic play-
wright but also among the world’s greatest comic writers simply.
For although only eleven of the roughly forty plays he wrote have
come down to us, they are so filled with wild comic invention, zany
plots, and unforgettable characters, both lovable and loathable,
that they have easily earned him a place alongside Rabelais,
Molière, and Shakespeare. In brief, Aristophanes is an unsurpassed
master of comedy and its devices—mockery, blasphemy, parody,
and the scatological among them. As a result, anyone interested in
the peaks of world literature, and in enjoying them, would do well
to turn at some point to Aristophanes.
Still, this contention runs the risk of making of Aristophanes an
impressive antique or a giant of the past and only of the past. Hence
it may not quite do justice to the fact that Aristophanes’ plays can
[ 1 ]
still speak forcefully to contemporary audiences, as I hope the
Acharnians and Knights will confirm: there remains something
remarkably fresh about them. This is ultimately traceable to the
fact that Aristophanes the comedian was also and above all a
thinker of a very high order. In fact Aristophanes sought nothing
less than what he himself calls wisdom (sophia), a wisdom that,
however much it may be rooted in a specific time and place, also
transcends time and place in the direction of the permanent human
condition and hence the permanent human problems. Aristophanes
boasts not only of his unrivaled “novel conceits” (Wasps 1044), of
the madcap inventions and comic twists that enliven his plays, but
also of the “subtle things” (Acharnians 445) that fill them. In the
revised version of his Clouds, Aristophanes famously complains
that the audience watching its first performance failed to grasp that
it—the play on which he had expended the most labor—was also his
“wisest” one: Aristophanes prides himself above all on his wisdom
(Clouds 522–26). Or, as the Chorus in the Assembly of Women puts it,
speaking for the poet, “The wise, on the one hand, should judge me
by remembering the wise things [in the play], but the laughers, on
the other hand, should judge me with pleasure on account of the
laughter” (Assembly of Women 1155–56). Everyone can see that the
plays of Aristophanes are filled with jokes of all kinds, but it is good
to remind ourselves that there is also material in them intended for
“the wise,” actual or potential.
This much, then, in support of the possibility that Aristophanes,
the supreme jokester of antiquity, deserves to be taken seriously by
us—and more seriously, perhaps, than we may be inclined to take
comedians of any age. But to pursue this possibility, we must see
what the Acharnians and Knights in particular help make plain, that
the thoughts of concern to Aristophanes, while ranging far and
[ 2 ] introduction