When Wasps was performed at the Lenaea festival of 422 BC, Aristophanes was still only in his early-to-mid twenties. At the time, Athens and Sparta, and their respective allies, had been at war for nine years. For the moment, though, actual fighting was restricted primarily to northern Greece, where the energetic Spartan general Brasidas was hoping to relieve his beleaguered garrison at Scione, a situation to which the play alludes (210). Like many of Aristophanes’ early comedies, Wasps focuses on a single political issue, namely the abuse of the judicial system by Cleon, the demagogue whom Aristophanes had savagely attacked in his Knights two years previously.
At the time of the play the Athenian judicial system worked as follows. Every year a list of 6,000 jurors was drawn up from volunteers, who had to be citizens over the age of thirty. Juries for each trial were selected from this list by lot. The size of the jury varied from a minimum of two hundred up to five hundred, but in certain important cases it could be larger. There were several courts each having assigned to it a specific magistrate (archōn) and set of jurors. Magistrates were not legal specialists but ordinary citizens chosen by lot for one year; they simply chaired the proceedings. In the cases themselves, the prosecutor spoke first and then the defendant. Neither party was represented by a lawyer, but witnesses and friends could be called (and usually were). The time limit for each side was fixed by a water-clock, a vessel with a small hole. After speeches, the jury voted by placing a pebble in one of two urns marked for conviction and acquittal respectively. The majority vote carried, with a tie counting as an acquittal. Some offences entailed fixed penalties, otherwise the prosecution and defence would both propose a penalty (the defence’s would naturally be lighter) and make supporting speeches. The jury would then vote again. Wasps itself offers the only evidence for this procedure: jurors each had a wax tablet on which they would draw a long line for the prosecution’s sentence or a short one for the defence’s.
Jurors were paid. The amount was three obols per day. This was not a good rate of pay but it was enough to attract older citizens with little other means of income. What is so amusing about Philocleon’s obsessive jury service is the indiscriminate zeal with which he convicts those who come before him. The main reason Bdelycleon wants to dissuade his father from jury service is that he fears Philocleon and his fellow jurors are controlled by unscrupulous demagogues, in particular Cleon, who had raised jury pay from two obols per day to three. The argument runs as follows: most jurors are so dependent on their pay that they become extremely suggestible, particularly when men such as Cleon either personally prosecute or publicly decry defendants who are their political opponents (the farcical trial of the dog Labes in Philocleon’s kitchen humorously illustrates the point). Bdelycleon does not blame the jurors themselves – Aristophanes emphasizes the poverty of the Chorus, who do not have a wealthy son to support them, as Philocleon does – but he does expose their irresponsible role in a corrupt process.
Wasps is not just an attack on Cleon and the jury system. While the jury system forms the background to the first two-thirds of the play’s action, the final third is effectively a comedy of manners. The sophisticated Bdelycleon tries to teach the simple, old-fashioned Philocleon how to behave in refined social circles; we then see the amusing consequences. Some hints of earlier topical concerns remain. The fellow guests at the drinking party Philocleon attends are in fact the loathsome Cleon and his cronies. Philocleon also ends up having a court summons issued against him for violent conduct. But the prospect of going to court in no way dampens the play’s riotous, exuberant conclusion.
What unites the two parts of the play is the sustained conflict between unruly father and concerned son. As Aristophanes himself suggests, the play, pared down to its essentials, works like ‘a little fable’ (64). Philocleon starts the play as a juror possessed. When Bdelycleon finally cures this compulsive disorder, he tries to turn his father into a respectable man-about-town. Philocleon, however, ends up as an equally compulsive reveller. Proving himself to be utterly incorrigible, Philocleon ends the play literally spiralling out of control (in a dancing competition) and off the stage. Ironically, for a play that begins as a fable about an obsessive juror, we are left not so much with a moral as an open verdict: both Bdelycleon and Philocleon are caught in a vicious circle, at once disquieting and comical, in which the former keeps failing to learn that the latter is incapable of reform.
The play starts with two drowsy slaves talking about their recent dreams. This opening exchange contains significant clues about how Wasps works. Both dreams are premonitions about the city’s future, and involve the kind of phenomena we find in the play itself, particularly the symbolic transformation of prominent political figures and ordinary Athenian citizens into animals. The play too is presented as something of a cautionary tale, with Athenian war veterans appearing as wasps and the demagogue Cleon thinly disguised, in the kitchen trial, as ‘The Dog’ (a well-known soubriquet of Cleon’s). The two antithetically named main characters – Philocleon means ‘Cleon-lover’ and Bdelycleon ‘Cleon-loather’ – carry an allusive, metaphoric significance. Bdelycleon’s fruitless endeavours to correct the delusional Philocleon seemingly reflect the vain efforts of the young, well-meaning poet Aristophanes to enlighten his older, blinkered fellow citizens. The parallels between Aristophanes and Bdelycleon and between Philocleon and Aristophanes’ largely pro-Cleonian audience – Cleon was, after all, in office at the time – are reinforced in the play’s formal debate. Bdelycleon describes his attempt to turn Philocleon from supporting Cleon in terms of the wider efforts of comic playwrights to convince a deluded Athenian public (650-51).
But for all its hints about Aristophanes’ own frustration with the political short-sightedness of (most of) his audience, Wasps remains sanguine in its outlook. By making Bdelycleon something of a killjoy and presenting Philocleon as a lovable rogue, Aristophanes is careful to coax as well as to censure his audience. Philocleon is one of Aristophanes’ most likable creations. A protean figure, he is likened to various animals, including a rat, a limpet, a jackdaw, a mouse and a honeybee. He is wily and tireless. When we first see him, he pops out of various parts of the house, like a jack-in-the-box, in his numerous bids to escape. He then tries to get out by tying himself under a donkey, emulating Odysseus’ escape from the Cyclops. While he sometimes behaves like certain tragic figures who share his delusional condition – Euripides’ love-stricken heroines Phaedra and Stheneboea, and Sophocles’ possessed, stubborn, suicidal hero Ajax – what distinguishes Philocleon from such tragic counterparts is his capacity to bounce back. Of all Aristophanic heroes, he is arguably the fullest embodiment of the comic spirit – triumphantly and defiantly incorrigible, imperishable and irrepressible.