clio and thalia: attic comedy and historiography

268 Pages·2017·1.63 MB·English

CLIO AND THALIA: ATTIC COMEDY AND
HISTORIOGRAPHY
HISTOS
The Online Journal of Ancient Historiography
Edited by Christopher Krebs and †John Moles

Histos Supplements
Supervisory Editor: John Marincola

1. Antony Erich Raubitschek, Autobiography of Antony
Erich Raubitschek. Edited with Introduction and Notes
by Donald Lateiner (2014).

2. A. J. Woodman, Lost Histories: Selected Fragments of
Roman Historical Writers (2015).

3. Felix Jacoby, On the Development of Greek Historiography
and the Plan for a New Collection of the Fragments of the Greek
Historians. Translated by Mortimer Chambers and
Stefan Schorn (2015).

4. Anthony Ellis, ed., God in History: Reading and Re-
writing Herodotean Theology from Plutarch to the Renaissance
(2015).

5. Richard Fernando Buxton, ed., Aspects of Leadership in
Xenophon (2016)

6. Emily Baragwanath and Edith Foster, edd., Clio and
Thalia: Attic Comedy and Historiography (2017)
CLIO AND THALIA:
ATTIC COMEDY AND
HISTORIOGRAPHY

(cid:1)

EDITED BY
EMILY BARAGWANATH
&
EDITH FOSTER

HISTOS SUPPLEMENT 6
NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE
2017
Published by

HISTOS
School of History, Classics and Archaeology,
Newcastle University,
Newcastle upon Tyne,
NE1 7RU,
United Kingdom

ISSN (Online): 2046-5963 (Print): 2046-5955

© 2017 THE INDIVIDUAL CONTRIBUTORS
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface ............................................................................... i

About the Contributors ................................................... iii

1. Introduction: Clio and Thalia
Emily Baragwanath and Edith Foster .................................. 1

2. Insults and Humiliations in Fifth-Century Historiography
and Comedy
Donald Lateiner .............................................................. 31

3. Humour, Ethnography, and Embassy: Herodotus,
Histories 3.17–25 and Aristophanes, Acharnians 61–133
Mark C. Mash .............................................................. 67

4. The Death of Nicias: No Laughing Matter
Daniel P. Tompkins ....................................................... 99

5. Aristophanes’ Cleon and Post-Peloponnesian War
Athenians: Denunciations in Thucydides
Edith Foster ................................................................. 129

6. Memory and the Rhetoric of Σωτηρία in Aristophanes’
Assembly Women
Rob Tordoff ................................................................. 153

7. Comedy and History, Theory and Evidence in Duris of
Samos
Christopher Baron ......................................................... 211

Index Locorum ........................................................... 241
PREFACE
This Histos Supplementary Volume, Clio and Thalia: Attic
Comedy and Historiography, arose from panels we organised at
the annual meetings of the American Association of Ancient
Historians (‘Greek Historiography and Attic Comedy’,
UNC-Chapel Hill and Duke Universities, May 2012) and
the Classical Association of the Middle West and South
(‘Clio and Thalia: Reconsidering the Relation of Attic Old
Comedy and Historiography’, Iowa City, April 2013). Both
panels sought to direct attention to the complex and under-
appreciated relationship between two innovative and swiftly
changing genres, and perhaps particularly to emphasise the
connectedness of Herodotean and Thucydidean histori-
ography with comic paradigms.
Subsequent to these conferences, our hard working
panellists have thoroughly revised their papers. We would
like to extend our great thanks to them, to the audiences on
each occasion, and to the conference organisers. We would
also like to thank Professor Jeffrey Rusten for his contri-
bution to our panel in 2012, and the anonymous readers for
Histos, who provided valuable criticism on each contri-
bution. We thank Eduardo García-Molina, who compiled
the Index Locorum. Above all we thank Professor John
Marincola, Supervisory Editor of Histos’ Supplementary
Volumes, for his splendid combination of enthusiasm, sage
advice, and practical nous that guided the volume from the
very beginning through to publication. We are saddened
that during the course of the project Histos’ other key player,
Professor John Moles (founder and editor of Histos and
Professor of Latin at Newcastle University), passed away: we
will miss his brilliance, his generosity, and his tremendous
supportiveness of other and especially junior scholars.
ii Emily Baragwanath and Edith Foster
Finally, we would like to thank our respective
institutions for their support: The University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, Case Western Reserve University,
and The Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of
Strasbourg.

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill E. B.
Strasbourg E. F.
March, 2017
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

EMILY BARAGWANATH is an Associate Professor in the
Classics Department at the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill. Her publications include Motivation and Narrative
in Herodotus (Oxford, 2008) and articles on the literary
techniques employed by the Greek historians. She is co-
author of the Herodotus Oxford Bibliography Online and
co-editor of Myth, Truth, and Narrative in Herodotus (Oxford,
2012) (both with Mathieu de Bakker). At present she is
writing a monograph on the fourth-century Athenian writer
Xenophon.

CHRISTOPHER BARON is an Associate Professor of Classics
at the University of Notre Dame, specialising in the study of
the historical writing of ancient Greece and Rome as well as
the history of the Greek world after Alexander. He is the
author of Timaeus of Tauromenium and Hellenistic Historiography
(Cambridge, 2013). He is currently editing The Herodotus
Encyclopedia for Wiley and working on a monograph on
Greek historians under the Roman Empire.

EDITH FOSTER is a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced
Studies at the University of Strasbourg and a Senior
Research Associate at Case Western Reserve University.
She has co-edited (with Ryan K. Balot and Sara Forsdyke)
the Oxford Handbook of Thucydides, and is presently writing a
commentary on Book 4 of Thucydides for the Cambridge
Greek and Latin Classics series.

DONALD LATEINER has published books on The Historical
Method of Herodotus (Toronto, 1989) and Sardonic Smile (Ann
Arbor, 1995). He has co-edited collections of Lionel
Pearson’s papers (Chico, 1982), Thucydides and Herodotus
iv About the Contributors
(Oxford, 2012), Roman Literature, Gender, and Reception
(Festschrift Hallett, London and New York, 2013), and the
Ancient Emotion of Disgust (New York and Oxford, 2017). He
has introduced and annotated editions of translations of
Herodotus and Thucydides for Barnes and Noble. He is
Emeritus Professor of Humanities-Classics at Ohio
Wesleyan University.

MARK C. MASH is an independent scholar and public
school teacher who lives in Durham, North Carolina. He
received his PhD from the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill. His primary area of research is Herodotus, and
his recent essay on the historian’s use of stereotypes as faulty
resemblance appears in the Routledge monograph,
Resemblance and Reality in Greek Thought (London and New
York, 2016).

DANIEL P. TOMPKINS has retired from the Department of
Greek and Roman Classics at Temple University in
Philadelphia. He has written on Thucydides, Homer, the
ancient city, Wallace Stevens, and various topics in higher
education. He currently works on the intellectual devel-
opment of M. I. Finley and on language and politics in the
speeches in Thucydides.

ROB TORDOFF teaches Greek and Roman literature and
history in the Department of Humanities at York University
in Toronto. His research focuses on Aristophanes and
ancient Greek social history.
Histos Supplement 6 (2017) 1–30
1

INTRODUCTION: CLIO AND THALIA

Emily Baragwanath and Edith Foster

T
he sisters Clio and Thalia at first sight possess not
family likeness, but starkly dissimilar features: the
one serious-minded and noble, a worshipper at the
altar of truth;1 the other, a lewd mistress of distortions and
falsification who peddles base laughter. Yet to the observer
who lingers to take a closer look, their features disclose
affinities that shed light on both genres. The papers
collected in this supplementary volume of Histos move
beyond our well-established practice of using Attic comedy
and historiography to clarify each other, and set them side
by side to reflect upon how they responded and related to
each other in ancient times.2
Attic comedy and fifth-century historiography shared
important themes and aims.3 Perhaps most conspicuously,
comedy taught about historical individuals and contempo-
rary issues—famous political leaders, such as Pericles or
Cleon, the sophists, the new education, generation clash,
the foibles of the democracy, the courts, of policy toward
the war—that connected with Thucydides’ account of, and

1 Cf. Lucian’s characterisation of the ideal historian.
2 Strasburger (1961) reviews the presence of comic elements in Greek
historiography from the Classical to Hellenistic periods, and remarks
(16) on how little historiography owes to comedy. Cf. Will (2015) 109.
The present volume is concerned not with ‘influences’ of one on the
other, but with their relationships and affinities.
3 Tragic elements in the works of the ancient Greek historians have
drawn a good deal more scholarly attention than comic ones, e.g.
Chiasson (1982) and (2003), Macleod (1983), Pelling (1997), Saïd (2002),
Griffin (2006), Rutherford (2007), and Baragwanath (2012a), 300–10. For
the relation between tragedy and comedy, especially in respect to
comedy’s direct engagement with contemporary issues and figures, cf.
e.g. Taplin (1986).