Aristophanes: Essays in Interpretation (Yale Classical Studies (No. 26))

246 Pages·2009·2.85 MB·English

by  Jeffrey Henderson

YALE CLASSICAL STUDIES

YALE CLASSICAL STUDIES
EDITED FOR THE DEPARTMENT OF CLASSICS
by
JEFFREY HENDERSON
VOLUME XXVI
ARISTOPHANES:
ESS A TS IN INTERPRETA TION
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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Contents
Introduction page vii
Aristophanes' Acharnians i
LOWELL EDMUNDS
Aristophanes and Socrates on learning practical wisdom 43
MARTHA NUSSBAUM
Aristophanes as a lyric poet 99
MICHAEL SILK
Lysistrate: the play and its themes 153
JEFFREY HENDERSON
War and peace in the comedy of Aristophanes 219
HANS-JOACHIM NEWIGER

Introduction
No special justification is needed for a new collection of interpretive
essays on Aristophanes: of all the major writers of the fifth century
he is surely (at least in the English-speaking world) one of the most
neglected by classicists. The absence of up-to-date texts and
commentaries for most of the plays exacerbates the problem. As
anyone who has tried to teach Aristophanes in Greek or in
translation will attest, the task of making the plays available to
students is beset by many formidable problems not encountered
in the case of other Greek authors. Aristophanes is a comic
playwright composing in a defunct and often alien mode about
topical subjects only imperfectly intelligible to a distant posterity.
An ancient tragedian, historian, philosopher or orator has at least
the advantage of writing in forms either still viable or made much
more viable by extensive scholarly and critical exegesis. It seems
to me that as a result an unfortunate trend has developed:
Aristophanes, despite his own insistence to the contrary and
despite his having written about the same topics as his contem-
poraries, has more and more been denied the status of a serious
and/or intelligible spokesman for his times. Rather than perform
the difficult job of establishing a methodology for deciding the
matter one way or the other, many scholars have decided that
Aristophanes is primarily a humorist of genius whose views about
matters of perennial concern are either undiscoverable or, if
discoverable, much less important and useful than those recoverable
from other contemporary sources.
This volume is an attempt to reexamine such conclusions. Each
contributor sets out from the assumption that Aristophanes' claim
to be serious as well as humorous is sincere. Each attempts to
discover the uniquely Aristophanic approach to topics of import-
ance to students of Athenian history, literature and society. I hope
that the result will go some way toward restoring Aristophanes to
the list of those ancient voices still accorded an undivided and
respectful hearing.
Ann Arbor J-H.
June igyg
5
Aristophanes Acharnians*
LOWELL EDMUNDS
6 6e |3acriAe0s TOV 'HaioSov eaTecpavcocrev elmbv SiKaiov eTvai TOV
6TTi yecopyiav Kai eipf|vr)v TTpoKaXoupiEvov VIKOCV, OU TOV
TToXetious Kai o^ayas 6I6£I6VTCC.
The Contest of Homer and Hesiod, 32 2G
' Politics. . . are a stone attached to the neck of literature, which,
in less than six months, drowns it. Politics in the middle of
imaginative interests are like a pistol-shot in the middle of a
concert. The noise is deafening without being emphatic. It is not
in harmony with the sound of any of the instruments.'1 Thus
Stendhal. He spoke ironically; but critics of Aristophanes are dead
serious when they make this same distinction between poetry and
politics, and proceed to shut their ears to all those supposed
pistol-shots that every Aristophanic concert contains. Acharnians,
like the other 'peace plays', thwarts this muffling of the ears,
because the whole play is deafening. Aristophanes has a clear
'program'. The play is thoroughly political, beginning with its
title, the name of the most hawkish demesmen of the day (Thuc.
2.21. 3), and with the name of the dove, Dicaeopolis, 'Just City'.2
* Full references for works cited in the footnotes are given in the Bibliography,
pp. 34-6.
1. Beyle (1926), vol. 2, ch. 52 (p. 189). A similar statement is found in ch.
23 of The Charterhouse of Parma.
2. On the name, see Russo (1953) 133; de Ste Croix (1972) 365. 'Dicaeopolis'
is not a comic compound, but is an historical name (IG n2 1622, line 685). It
is one of 47 personal names ending in -TTOXIS listed in DornseifF (1957) 191-2.
These names, as well as such adjectives as orrroAis (Soph. Ant. 370), OvyhroAis
(Pind. 0. 2. 8), and the adjectival use of 8iKai6iToAis (Pind. P. 8. 22), show that
the name cannot mean 'Just Citizen'. Whether the first element in these -TTOAIS
compounds is verbal or adjectival, the second element is always 'city', not
'citizen'. If 5IKCXI6CO could mean 'to make just' (Pind. frag. 169S-M seems to be
the only example), then 'Dicaeopolis' might mean 'He Who Makes the City
Just'. But the analogies of such personal names as EChroAis, KaAAhroAis,
KAeoTioAis, NeoiroXis, 'Aycrfte-TToAis, and others (in Dornseiffs list) suggests that
the first element of'Dicaeopolis' is adjectival, and that the name means 'He of
Just City'. I shall call him 'Just City'.