Aristophanes and the Comic Hero

353 Pages·1964·26.75 MB·English

by  Cedric H. Whitman

MARTIN CLASSICAL LECTURES
ι The Martin Classical Lectures, Edited by Louis E. Lord
2 Aspects of Social Behavior in Ancient Rome, Tenney Frank
3 Attic Vase-Painting, Charles T. Seltman
4 The Humanistic Value of Archaeology, Rhys Carpenter
5 Greek Ideals and Modern Life, Sir R. W. Livingstone
6 Five Men: Character Studies from the Roman Empire, Martin Percival
Charlesworth
7 Early Greek Elegists, Cecil M. Bowra
8 The Roman Art of War Under the Republic, F. E. Adcock
9 Epigraphica Attica, Benjamin Dean Meritt
10 Archaic Attic Gravestones, Gisela Μ. Α. Richter
11 Greek Personality in Archaic Sculpture, George Karo
12 Thucydides and the World War, Louis E. Lord
13 Classical Influences in Renaissance Literature, Douglas Bush
14 Pindar and Aeschylus, John H. Finley, Jr.
15 The Classics and Renaissance Thought, Paul Oskar Kristeller
16 Ancient Book Illumination, Kurt Weitzmann
17 Boundaries of Dionysus: Athenian Foundations for the Theory of
Tragedy, Alfred Cary Schlesinger
18 Society and Civilization in Greece and Rome, Victor Ehrenberg
19 Aristophanes and the Comic Hero, Cedric H. Whitman
MARTIN CLASSICAL LECTURES
VOLUME XIX
The Martin Classical Lectures are delivered annually
at Oberlin College on a foundation established by his
many friends in honor of Charles Beebe Martin, for
forty-five years a teacher of classical literature and
classical art in Oberlin.

ARISTOPHANES
AND THE COMIC HERO
BY
CEDRIC H. WHITMAN
Published for Oherlin College by
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS
1964
© COPYRIGHT 1964 BY THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF OBERLIN COLLEGE
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
DISTRIBUTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, LONDON
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER 64-22724
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
TO
ANNE

PREFACE
^ALNTIQUITY transmits its power, for us at least, primarily in
forms imbued with high seriousness — the epic, tragedy, history,
philosophy. Yet, there is a saying attributed to Anne de Léñelos, the
famous Ninon, to the effect that the token of spiritual strength is
gaiety; and in that case, Aristophanes must have been the strongest
spirit of Greek antiquity, for he was surely the gayest. There is every
reason to believe that it took a tough-fibered temperament to make
merry during the grim years of the Peloponnesian War. The young-
est of the great fifth-century dramatists, and the last to frame in poetry
the heroic drive of the grand tradition, Aristophanes outlived his
city's greatness, and therewith the art of Old Comedy. But before
that happened, he created — or for us, at least, he created — a new
kind of hero, the comic hero, who parodies his two solemn older
brothers of tragedy and epic, but at the same time challenges their
supremacy in expressing human aspiration in the face of the world's
dilemma.
The present study had its beginning in the neglected question of
the nature and value of Aristophanes as a poet, and if much of the
answer was found to lie in the comic hero, that fact may explain
some of the book's peculiarities. For one thing, the emphasis result-
ing from such an approach falls naturally on the fantastic rather than
on the satiric aspect of Aristophanes; not that the satiric is unimpor-
tant, but that it is contained within the fantastic, not the other way
around. For another thing, the last two extant plays have been ex-
cluded. This may be rather arbitrary. But it is commonly agreed that
the Ecclesiazusae and the Plutus, whatever their intrinsic value,
mark a departure from Old Comedy proper, and it was the spirit
of Old Comedy which was the object of the search. The political
and personal invective of the real Old Comedies is gone from them,