In his Parts of Animals, Chapter X, Aristotle mentions the definition of man as the “laughing animal,” but he does not consider it adequate. Though I would hasten to agree, I obviously have a big investment in it, owing to my conviction that mankind’s only hope is a cult of comedy. (The cult of tragedy is too eager to help out with the holocaust. And in the last analysis, it is too pretentious to allow for the proper recognition of our animality.)
Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action
In the Birds, the chorus leader implicitly critiques the possible boredom induced in the spectators by tragedies, addressing the audience and celebrating the joys of having wings: “Say one of you spectators had wings, and got hungry, and grew bored with the tragic performances [literally, ‘with the choruses of the tragedians’]; then he’d have flown out of here, gone home, had lunch, and when he was full, flown back here to see us” (786–89). The character speaking here lays out a “line of flight,” an escape from the boredom of didactic tragedies, a flight of movement out of confinement, toward the satisfactions of commensality, of appetite, material and political concerns that the choruses of the tragedians neglect. He suggests replacing and supplementing the experience of tragedy, and he does so under the aegis of becoming animal.
Let’s laugh, at ourselves, at the powerful, the ridiculous. Laugh at comedy. And by comedy, I mean not jokes, although they figure in this book.1 I refer rather to the comedies of ancient Greece, that is, the riotous, crude, vulgar, dancing, insulting, communal, often utopian, celebrations in honor of the god Dionysos that were performed, along with tragedies, in ancient Athens. These comedies often included choruses of men dressed as animals—insects, birds, frogs, ants, ant-men, horse-men—and as women. Birds dance, wasps sing.
In Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, Barbara Ehrenreich traces the practices of many assemblies who found ecstasy and union with divinities, as well as communal solidarity, in their dancing together. She links such actions with ancient peoples’ hunting in groups: “In communal hunting, the entire group—men, women, and children, advances against a herd of game animals, shouting, stamping, and waving sticks or torches. . . . One can imagine danced rituals originating as reenactments of successful animal encounters, serving both to build group cohesion for the next encounter and to instruct the young in how the human group had learned to prevail and survive.”2 Choruses, groups dancing and singing, figure in ritual and poetic practice from the very beginnings of ancient Greek culture. The choruses of ancient Old Comedy, performed in the fifth century BCE in honor of Dionysos, bear with them vestiges, perhaps, of ancient hunting practices, identification with animals, ritualization of those practices, choral celebrations of the Athenians’ many gods, as well as military allusions to the democratic institution of the citizen army, in a complex synthesis of collective dance and song. And some of these choruses continue to allude to the participation of women, and the masquerade as animals, even in the fifth century BCE.
My thinking about ancient drama has led me to believe that if we abandon the Aristotelian emphases on plot, on muthos, on linear narrative, and the “characters,” the personae, the so-called heroes of its plays, and read otherwise, ancient comedy appears unfamiliar, defamiliarized. This means reading for the chorus, bringing it to the foreground, at times finding two different comedies, sometimes at odds with one another. Rather than the tidy resolutions of those who seek to find all reasoned, all coming together in the dénouements of these spectacles, I discover a more ragged, uneven surface, contestation between chorus and plot/characters, where the utopian elements of the birds’ life, for example, in Aristophanes’ Birds, the pastoral, avian, airy imagination, has its own temporality, its own rhythms, not foreclosed by the assumption of tyranny of the human hero Peisetairos at the play’s end. I read for suturing of differences, the irresolvable messiness, the birds with their different bodies, their capacity to fly, making them another “kind,” another, different genos, or “tribe,” from the human characters, even as they are embodied by the human actors of the chorus.3
A preliminary to my appreciation of these choral swarms requires a critique of the relative emphasis on tragedy, plot, and characters in modernity and postmodernity, an emphasis that follows Aristotle and the lead of European scholars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, deviating from theatrical practices such as Shakespeare’s, so influenced by ancient comedy, especially the romantic strain of Roman comedies by Plautus and Terence.4 What I have to say about ancient Greek comedy and its value, its pertinence to the present, can be summed up by a bundle of arguments that concern the assertion by women of their rights to political and sexual power; freedom of speech (parrhesia) amid current debates; the implications of the utopian dimensions of ancient comedy; and the chorus, the collective, the swarm, as an entity that registers the participation of the inhabitants of a polity in communalism.
Classical scholarship on comedy has at times tended to neglect developments in the wider world of the humanities, and I go far back to the “death of the author” in the work of the late Roland Barthes. Even in such an enlightened, learned, and fascinating book as Mario Telò’s Aristophanes and the Cloak of Comedy there is still a focus on the intention of the author, that is, “Aristophanes.”5 Trying to discern the intentions of any author, but particularly one from antiquity, seems to me a dauntingly ungrateful task.6 And in the case of drama, where we have only the text, not the music, the choreography, the costumes of the players, the plays’ embeddedness in ritual and wider celebration, the focus on intention is drastically limited by a paucity of information concerning the spectacle that was ancient Athenian festival drama.7
Roland Barthes’s famous essay, published in English in 1967, proclaimed “the death of the author.” And he pointed out that “in ethnographic societies, narrative is never assumed by a person but by a mediator, shaman, or reciter, whose ‘performance’ (i.e., his mastery of the narrative code) can be admired, but never his ‘genius.’ The author is a modern character, no doubt produced by our society as it emerged from the Middle Ages, inflected by English empiricism, French rationalism, and the personal faith of the Reformation, thereby discovering the prestige of the individual, or, as we say more nobly, of the ‘human person.’”8 The “author” is an individual with a name. And, as Barthes argues, “it is logical that in literary matters it should be positivism, crown and conclusion of capitalist ideology, which has granted the greatest importance to the author’s ‘person.’” He is concerned with écriture, with writing in the wake of Mallarmé, Proust, and surrealism, yet his words point in a direction that should change our experiences of ancient drama. We need to look at the longue durée before the “birth” of the author, at historical periods when the performance of poetry and drama were in the hands of the collective. The poet Alcman, for example, said to have been done to death by a swarm of fleas, or lice, apparently wrote his Partheneion for a chorus of Spartan maidens of his day. The biographical information we have concerning him, and others—Sappho, for instance—is often derived, as Mary Lefkowitz has noted, from a projection mining the poetry we have inherited, fragmentary and allusive as it is, randomly preserved, often with dubious attribution.9 When students of classics study a list of “authors,” including Homer, as well as Sappho, and Aristophanes, they are led to project authorship backward into a remote and culturally distinct past, when ideas of composition and possession differed from our own.
I also find useful the work of Pierre Macherey, who described what he called the “suturing” of the text, the ways in which texts occlude the impossible, the unknowable, what the so-called author does not say, or even cannot say, given his position within ideology. An appreciation of the unevenness, the unresolved, sometimes ragged quality of the relationship between chorus and characters in ancient comedy recalls Macherey’s Theory of Literary Production.10 If we cannot see Old Comedy as “literary” in his sense, nonetheless, the ways in which Macherey discussed these matters illuminates the chorus, and especially the comic chorus in its relationship to plot and character in the ancient plays:
It is not a question of introducing a historical explanation which is stuck on to the work from the outside. On the contrary, we must show a sort of splitting within the work: this division is its unconscious, in so far as it possesses one—the unconscious which is history, the play of history beyond its edges, encroaching on those edges: this is why it is possible to trace the path which leads from the haunted work to that which haunts it. Once again it is not a question of redoubling the work with an unconscious, but a question of revealing in the very gestures of expression that which it is not. Then, the reverse side of what is written will be history itself.11
Macherey points to the sort of unevenness that characterizes ancient theatrical works: “A true analysis does not remain within its object, paraphrasing what has already been said; analysis confronts the silences, the denials and the resistance in the object—not that compliant implied discourse which offers itself to discovery, but that condition which makes the work possible, which precedes the work so absolutely that it cannot be found in the work.”12 What cannot be found in the work attributed to Aristophanes, his predecessors and contemporaries, includes the ritual, political, democratic context of comic performance in the fifth century BCE.13
This context has many dimensions, and among those that contribute to the critique of a single-author understanding of Old Comedy is the presence of what was called the khoregos, the wealthy Athenian, not necessarily a citizen, who financed choruses, including choruses for tragic and comic drama. These individuals were as crucial as the playwrights, as the actors and chorus members, in the production of ancient drama. Peter Wilson, in his important book on the institution of the khoregia, shows how these benefactors of the classical democratic city sought to inherit the brilliance and fame once attributed to the aristocrats of the archaic age. Ostentation and rivalries mark the history of the competition among khoregoi for victories; the volatile and charismatic aristocrat Alcibiades, who appears in Plato’s Symposium, who was involved in a notorious incident of sacrilege in Athens, fled to the Spartans, and later the Persians, betraying the city but remaining an object of intense desire, acted as a khoregos greedy for victory, according to Plutarch (Life of Alcibiades). Wilson notes the contradictory nature of the khoregoi’s ambitions: “That the khoregia represented an expenditure on the collective legitimated the extravagance of the individual philotimos [one desiring honor], and domesticated such lavish expense to its democratic environment. . . . One could not spend too much on the demos. Yet at the same time the basic logic on which this expenditure was predicated . . . meant that excessive spending and victory inevitably conjured up the anti-democratic spectre of the tyrant.”14 It may be in fact that particular khoregoi were disposed to select particular playwrights, noted for their prize-winning abilities, and inclined to favor their names as collectives were assembled to produce the comedies. As in the complex “authorship” of a contemporary film, requiring millions of dollars of investment, a producer, a director, actors, cinematographers, editors, as well as an “author,” a scriptwriter, ancient dramas entailed a complicated, politically significant network of actants, most of whom remain invisible when the surviving texts are attributed to a single author.
In an afterword, published forty years after the first appearance of Macherey’s Theory of Literary Production, the author added:
What do literary texts reflect? Certainly not a supposedly bare reality, but rather the contradictory ensemble of its representations, an ensemble which can be aptly designated by the concept of ideology. . . .
The argument which I was proposing was roughly as follows: the veritable object of literature is ideology in its material form, that is to say as a contradictory multiplicity of discursive and fictional complexes which render ideology in broken, laconic and decentred form. Literature does not merely offer a faithful reproduction of this object; it offers an analysis, decomposes its object, and implicitly or explicitly, exposes the internal fissures which simultaneously share and drive forwards the motion of its transformation. . . . All literature is, itself, though in various degrees, revolutionary, in so far as it reveals and actively contributes to certain fracture lines which run deep into historical reality and into the forms in which that reality is lived, imagined and represented.15
For Macherey, “literature,” so called, is not only an aesthetic object, but a form of knowledge as well. His insights can contribute to a way of looking at ancient comedy liberated from a focus on individual authorship and intention.
Michel Foucault also engaged with the problem of historicizing the origins of inherited texts, and asked, “What is an author?”:
Can we say that The Arabian Nights, and Stromates of Clement of Alexandria, or the Lives of Diogenes Laertius constitute works? Such questions only begin to suggest the range of our difficulties, and, if some have found it convenient to bypass the individuality of the writer or his status as an author to concentrate on a work, they have failed to appreciate the equally problematic nature of the word “work” and the unity it designates. . . . Discourse that possesses an author’s name is not to be immediately consumed and forgotten. . . . Rather its status and its manner of reception are regulated by the culture in which it circulates.16
This seems to me a particularly relevant point in relation to the name “Aristophanes” and his “work,” or “works.” The manner of reception, regulated by the cultures, ours and his, and all those in between, in which he, it, they, circulate, needs to be called into question more critically. Although Foucault is discussing contemporary culture, the death of the author, perhaps, in his culture, these remarks have purchase on the status of ancient “authors” as well. He asserts that “the ‘author-function’ is not universal or constant in all discourse. Even within our civilization, the same types of texts have not always required authors; there was a time when those texts which we now call ‘literary’ (stories, folk tales, epics, and tragedies) were accepted, circulated, and valorized without any question about the identity of their author” (125). And why not ancient comedies as well? It’s worth noting that the prizes in the ancient Greek dramatic festivals were awarded not to an “author” of a play, but to the plays’ producers, sometimes but not always what we call its “author.” For Foucault, “aspects of an individual, which we designate as an author (or which comprise an individual as an author), are projections, in terms always more or less psychological, of our way of handling texts: in the comparisons we make, the traits we extract as pertinent, the continuities we assign, or the exclusions we practice” (127). Here too, the relevance to ancient comedy requires interrogation; why must we find the “intentions,” the individual political stance, of something, someone, a text that we identify by the name Aristophanes?
“In literary criticism, for example,” Foucault writes, “the traditional methods for defining an author—or rather, for determining the configuration of the author from existing texts—derive in large part from those used in the Christian tradition to authenticate (or to reject) the particular texts in its possession. Modern criticism, in its desire to ‘recover’ the author from a work, employs devices strongly reminiscent of Christian exegesis when it wished to prove the value of a text by ascertaining the holiness of its author” (127). In relation to the comedic parabasis, a special choral interlude in many comedies in which the chorus directly addresses the audience, can we not usefully apply Foucault’s careful examination of the “author-function”: “It does not refer, purely and simply, to an actual individual insofar as it simultaneously gives rise to a variety of egos and to a series of subjective positions that individuals of any class may come to occupy” (130–31).
If we abandon such questions as “Who is the real author?” or “What has he revealed of his most profound self in his language?” Foucault argues that “new questions will be heard: ‘What are the modes of existence of this discourse?’ ‘Where does it come from; how is it circulated; who controls it?’” (138). Foucault ends this essay with the reiteration of a question posed by Samuel Beckett in his Texts for Nothing: “What matter who’s speaking, someone said, what matter who’s speaking.”17 Rather than asking what Aristophanes reveals of “his most profound self” in the works attributed to him, we can inquire: Where do these plays come from, how are they circulated, who controls them? This seems to me a particularly relevant point in relation to the name “Aristophanes” and his “work,” or “works.”
Other theorists of reading, of interpretation, share this sense of the unevenness of the text, of the collective nature of its production, and of the limitations related to authorial attribution, and these too have had their impact on my methods. Francesco Orlando, for example, author of the book exhilaratingly entitled Obsolete Objects in the Literary Imagination: Ruins, Relics, Rarities, Rubbish, Uninhabited Places, and Hidden Treasures, is focused on objects, and points to inassimilability, to unevenness, to the interruption of “official,” conventional notions of textual integrity and authorial intention.18 Elaine Freedgood, in The Ideas in Things, finds “fugitive meaning” that disrupts the novels she analyzes, meanings embedded in such objects as the “Negro head” tobacco of Magwitch in Dickens’s Great Expectations.19 In his Allegory and Ideology, Fredric Jameson presents allegorical reading as a way of gaining access to the complexity of texts:
Allegory raises its head as a solution when beneath this or that seemingly stable or unified reality the tectonic plates of deeper contradictory levels of the Real shift and grate ominously against one another and demand a representation, or at least an acknowledgement, they are unable to find in the Schein or illusory surfaces of existential or social life. Allegory does not reunify those incommensurable forces, but sets them in relationship with one another in a way which, as with all art, all aesthetic experience, can lead alternately to ideological comfort or the restless anxieties of a more expansive knowledge.20
These modes of encountering what we receive as texts, in the case of ancient drama a pale shadow of what was once living performance, allow for a richer interpretation than one that focuses on integrity, coherence, or authorial intention.
A model looking for “fracture lines,” for “internal fissures,” for contradictions and unruly, inassimilable objects, seems more adequate to the unevenness, the incommensurability, of elements of ancient dramatic texts, and the performances we cannot know, than studies concerned with the corpus of an author. The comic playwright cannot intend all that he wishes, cannot control all that is present, even in the limited textual version of comedy that we receive from the tradition. The roughness of the plays, the “fracturing,” the ways in which the chorus may be in contradiction with the characters, working through a play of their own, imagining a utopia, or relations of their own that fly off, evading the control of the characters and the plot—all these elements strongly affect my readings. The chorus appears at times to have minds of their own, fueled by the democratic, leveling ideology of equality in the ancient city; their story cannot always be gently and easily and seamlessly integrated into the plot of the whole. The chorus has its own liveliness, parallel or veering off from the plot and its characters, establishing another vector, a “line of flight,” as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call it in A Thousand Plateaus.21
In contrasting what they call “arboreal” form to the rhizome, Deleuze and Guattari describe and even celebrate a nomadic, proliferating entity more appropriate to my idea of Old Comedy than traditional conceptions of these plays as books, authored by authors:
Once a rhizome has been obstructed, arborified, it’s all over, no desire stirs; for it is always by rhizome that desire moves and produces. Whenever desire climbs a tree, internal repercussions trip it up and it falls to its death; the rhizome, on the other hand, acts on desire by external, productive outgrowths. . . . A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines. You can never get rid of ants because they form an animal rhizome that can rebound time and again after most of it has been destroyed. Every rhizome contains lines of segmentarity according to which it is stratified, territorialized, organized, signified, attributed, etc., as well as lines of deterritorialization down which it constantly flees.22
Comedy is a rhizome.
Especially since some of the comic choruses are constituted as animal, insect, bird, female, or cloud swarms, these can only reluctantly be harnessed and deployed as willing and obedient agents of the greater intention of the plot and the so-called comic hero(es). I think we should be looking at a more ragged, discontinuous, rougher comic object, one that allows for contradictory and disproportionate elements, not necessarily reconcilable with one another, perhaps even working against one another, with resistance to incorporation coming from the chorus, this set of creatures often not easily assimilable into the world of the human.
While many of my examples of ancient comic choruses come from the plays attributed to Aristophanes, this book is not meant to be a study of that man as author. Although contemporary literary critics, including classicists, still often tend to focus on authorial intentions, on the politics of the poet, and on the development of the writer across decades, in fact we know very little about the lives of such ancient figures as Aristophanes. The very project of biography, a study of an individual’s life from birth to death, appears relatively late in the history of genres. Although there are suggestions of the tracing of a whole life in some classical texts, as in Plato’s Apology of Socrates, it is in the hands of the writer Plutarch (ca. 46–120 CE), a Greek who became a Roman citizen, that the practice of recounting the lives of the notable takes definitive shape.
In the case of Aristophanes, one of many Old Comedy, that is, fifth-century BCE, writers, a “vita,” a life account, contains little information about his dates of birth and death, elements considered essential in our conception of a biography, the “writing” of a bios, a “life.” As Mary Lefkowitz, who most usefully collected and commented on the various Lives of the Greek poets, remarks in her introduction, “The advantage of concentrating on one poet at a time is that it helps to show why the character of individual poets’ works have developed in distinctive ways, and why (for example) biographies sound proportionately more like caricatures whenever biographers had access to characterizations in comedy.”23 This is all the more the case when the life in question is that of the comic poet himself. Other scholars have continued the examination of anachronism entailed in attributing a modern version of authorship to ancient names, and analyzed the instrumentalization for varied purposes of their biographies.24
The anonymous composer of the life of Aristophanes, writing some centuries after his death, mines the plays, ones that survive to our day, and others that do not, to which he had access, for the elements of biography. The “life” mentions Aristophanes’ innovations in writing comedies, his move to producing his own plays after first relying on others, his enmity with the popular leader Cleon, especially in the comedy entitled Knights. There, the biographer says, taking references in the play literally: “He exposes Cleon’s thefts and his tyrannical nature, and since none of the costumers had the courage to make a mask of Cleon’s face, because they were too frightened, since Cleon acted like a tyrant, Aristophanes acted the part of Cleon, smearing his face with red dye” (Lefkowitz, 156). Lefkowitz notes that the red dye might be an allusion to the rope dipped in dye that was used to herd the citizens into the classical Athenians’ assembly; latecomers were thus marked by Scythian slave police for their tardiness.
The details the biographer lists in relation to Aristophanes’ career are frequently inaccurate, and misreport the relative dates of the plays. He also repeats the various claims that Aristophanes was not in fact an Athenian citizen, but rather from the island of Aegina, or Rhodes. The emphasis in this “biography” is, throughout, on the playwright’s role as a writer of comedy, with little or no reference to family, barely sketching his political views in the debates of the city. The poet’s stance is described as follows: “People praised and liked him particularly because of his determination to show in his dramas that the government of Athens was free and not enslaved by any tyrant, and that it was a democracy, and that since they were free, the people ruled themselves” (Lefkowitz, 156). The life focuses on the career of Aristophanes, on his quarrels with politicians, on his wins and losses in Dionysiac festival competitions, noting that “he won praise and a crown of sacred olive (which was considered equal in worth to a golden throne) when he spoke in the Frogs about the men who had been deprived of their rights: ‘It is just that the sacred chorus give the city much good advice’ (686–87)” (Lefkowitz, 156). The biographer also cites a metrical pattern named for Aristophanes, his fame that extended even to the Persian emperor, a detail extrapolated from the parabasis of the Acharnians (647–54). Plato is said to have sent Aristophanes’ comedies to the Sicilian tyrant Dionysius, to instruct him about the Athenians.
The biographer notes that Aristophanes initiated the changes that led to so-called New Comedy, the work of Philemon and Alexander (the antecedents of Roman comedy), attributing the change, toward a more domestic, romantic sort of plot, to the Athenian decree that forbade the ridicule of individuals by name, and to the economic losses that diminished the power of the khoregoi, the funders of the city’s dramas, to train choruses.25 The biography registers the diminution of the role of the chorus in the fourth century BCE, after the Athenians’ loss to the Spartans in the Peloponnesian War: “When once again the subsidies for training choruses were taken away, Aristophanes, when he wrote the Ploutos [Wealth], in order to give the actors in the scenes time to rest and change, wrote ‘for the chorus’ in the directions, in the places where we see the poets of New Comedy writing in ‘for the chorus’ in emulation of Aristophanes” (Lefkowitz, 157). This change for some readers signifies the end of the great, often rowdy, and obscene choruses of the fifth-century comedy, when Athens was free, “not enslaved by any tyrant,” and a “radical” democracy. The biographer ends his account of the life of Aristophanes with this disappearance of the chorus from the comedies, when choruses do what they do, dance or sing without relying on the text of the playwright. The writer of the bios notes finally that with the Ploutos [Wealth ] Aristophanes introduced his son Araros, “and so departed from life, leaving three sons” (Lefkowitz, 157). He sums up the whole of the life with the claim that Aristophanes wrote forty-four plays, some of which are allegedly spurious.
This account, which is called a “vita,” a “life,” does have some of the elements later associated with a proper biography. The writer includes the name of Aristophanes’ father, his “nationality,” that is, his identity as an Athenian, and the names of the three sons he left behind at his death. Otherwise, though, the vita focuses almost entirely on the poet’s dramatic career, his victories and losses, his conflicts with Cleon, and his innovations in the production of comedies. If in our contemporary analyses of literary writers, the inclination remains to look for intention, for historical, social, or psychological determinants of style, narrative, and genre, then the ancient biographer fails us entirely. And as the vita assumes the individuality of Aristophanes, his sole production of the plays associated with his name, we see already the drift toward the author, the assignment of responsibility for a cultural artifact to a named single maker, an attribution that distorts the actual circumstances of such a spectacular, cultural, religious, and political performance as ancient comedy. What may seem familiar to us, the role of a single individual as author, gradually repressed the swarm of forces at play in producing ancient drama, unevenness and fissures in Attic society that are smoothed out and erased in an account such as this vita of Aristophanes. And as a theater industry began to spread throughout the Mediterranean as early as the fifth century BCE, plays began to be associated with particular poets and actors, and this phenomenon contributed to the erosion of the sense of collective production, the embeddedness of the comedies in the specific networks of democratic Athens.26
Other Old Comedy playwrights participated in the festival production of drama in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE in Athens. Although we often know less about their lives, fragments of their plays have survived, and scholars have attempted to situate them in the history of the city. Some of these poets belong to a generation earlier than that of Aristophanes, and from the fragments that survive we can possibly deduce some common themes with the later writer.
Ian C. Storey has contributed much to our knowledge and understanding of the work of Eupolis, contemporary of Aristophanes, who may have died in a sea battle during the Peloponnesian War, and whose death had the result that poets were no longer allowed to serve on active duty in the military (Suda ε 3657). In another version of the poet’s death, Alcibiades is said to have thrown him in the sea for having verbally abused him, and some attribute the prohibition on comic naming of those mocked in the comic plays from this incident. Storey has translated the scant remains of this poet, including lines from his play Demoi (Demes) (412–417 BCE?), and lists the tantalizing titles associated with him, including Poleis (Cities), with a chorus of female cities subjected to the Athenians, Heilotes (Helots), Kolakes (Spongers), Khrysoun Genos (Golden Race/Kind), Astrateutos e Androgunoi (Draft-Dodgers or Men-Women). Golden Race or Kind seems to suggest a setting in the past, in the period designated by Hesiod as the golden period, at the beginning of time, utopian in the way that Demoi seems to have presented the return from the underworld of dead leaders, among them Pericles, with a chorus made up of the demes, the subdivisions of the ancient polis. Another play, Taxiarchoi (Squadron Commanders), may have included the god Dionysos, as did Aristophanes’ Frogs. Baptai (Dyers?) contained a caricature of Alcibiades, the charismatic and erratic aristocrat mentioned earlier, who once served as a khoregos, financing the training of a chorus.27
Another contemporary of Aristophanes and Eupolis, Strattis, has recently claimed more attention as well. Christian Orth presents what is known of his work, which often involved mythic material and had a complex relationship to tragedy. Strattis alluded to tragic plots, seemingly turning them into “paratragedy,” burlesques of tragedy, addressing the question of acting in drama, and playing with genre in innovative ways.28 These poets and their work were known to ancient authors; the prominence of Aristophanes in subsequent centuries, when he is seen often as the only significant writer of Old Comedy, may be due to the excellence of his plays, but also to the filtering of a canon through millennia of loss and changing tastes.
The comic poet Cratinus rivaled Aristophanes in his reputation as one of the best at Old Comedy. Dionysalexander presents the god Dionysos, apparently a figure for Pericles, along with a chorus of satyrs.29 Cratinus’s most famous play, the Wine Flask (Pytine), depicted the comic writer himself, with his wife Comedy seeking a divorce on account of his drunkenness. His play Cheirons had a chorus of centaurs. In the Plutuses, the god Zeus, tyrant and usurper, has been overthrown, allowing for a return to plenty and for wealth to be redistributed, as in Aristophanes’ Wealth (Ploutos). The chorus is called “Wealths, Riches,” and they sing of their creation and existence in the era of Kronos, the god of the golden age.
Reading the fragmentary remains of the other Old Comedy poets can be frustrating, since we long to know more about the plays in which they were embedded, and especially, in this case, to see how the choruses of these plays performed. As well as the fragments of other comedies, there are many tantalizing lines attributed to Aristophanes himself, often without context, but nonetheless intriguing. Some of the varied fragments we have from other comic writers share themes present in the plays attributed to Aristophanes, including mockery of prominent citizens, utopian fantasies of the past or the future, animal choruses, women, even abstract entities serving as chorus members, and dreaming out loud about sexual liberty and culinary luxury. At times these playwrights won prizes when Aristophanes’ plays were also in competition, and defeated. The Wine Flask beat Clouds at the City Dionysia of 423. Yet although we have a significant number of the fragments from other comic writers, and plot summaries describing performances stretching from the beginning of the fifth century BCE into the fourth, we can conclude little about their choruses’ songs, and can only speculate about their membership, ranging from satyrs to centaurs to cities to helots, the enslaved serf-like laborers of Sparta. Perhaps most telling is that a vast number of these comedies, like many tragedies, were named for their choruses by posterity.
Given their embeddedness in festival ritual, celebrating the city’s god Dionysos, their support by the city and the wealthy khoregoi, their “producers,” and the participation in the chorus by a collective of citizens and others, one might say that the city makes the comedies. In some ways like film in the present, comedy existed far beyond any notion of an auteur, just as a collective makes a movie, and the Academy Awards, like the prizes for ancient comedy, barely come to terms with the swarm of forces that unite in a performance. In the case of ancient comedy, we know only a part of a whole, not the dancing, not the music, not the singing, not the costumes, only the text, which itself has its limits, given that there are references, even words, we cannot decipher. The texts themselves have passed through many hands, and there are lacunae, fragments, much loss.
Throughout this book, I emphasize the comic chorus, and the comedies’ relevance to the present, to the political concerns of our day, the sometimes vicious debates about women’s power, freedom of speech, foreigners and immigration, and democracy as an ideal form. I suggest that looking at ancient Greek comedy, rather than ancient Greek tragedy, could offer ways of conceiving of the polity that might enrich the discourse of the present.
Chapter 1 considers what has been an intense concentration in modernity and even postmodernity on ancient Greek, ancient Athenian tragedy, as a resource for thinking about questions of identity, foreignness, the family, and sovereignty. In his Poetics, Aristotle, the great ancient philosopher of the fourth century BCE, presents the elements of tragedy for his day, using categories that, I argue, lose much of the context of the dramatic festivals of ancient Athens. And the fact that the second half of his Poetics, on comedy, has been lost for centuries, has meant that much of Western philosophy and literary and political theory has come to see only tragedy in considering ancient drama’s contributions to the tradition. In addition, in what remains of his treatise on ancient drama, Aristotle discusses tragedy, and plot, and “character,” and barely acknowledges the role of the chorus in ancient drama, whether comedy or tragedy. Considering in some detail the influential pronouncements of Hegel that focus on tragedy, and especially on Sophocles’ Antigone, I also look at some of Hegel’s heirs and their focus on tragedy alone. These thinkers have produced a version of modernity grounded in tragedy, in a tragedy for modernity that emphasizes the heroic individual and his tragic choices, serving the interests of individualism in modernity while overlooking the collective, choral dimensions of ancient drama, and all of the festival and civic ceremony surrounding it.
Chapter 2 looks at “swarms,” at the possibility that a swarm, an anarchic leaderless body, can be seen not only negatively, as a threat, but also as a collective that might arrive at better solutions than would a great leader. The Greeks were interested in swarms—of bees, of wasps, of birds—as metaphors for human groups. What is the jury, if not a sort of swarm? I do a close reading of Aristophanes’ Wasps, and take what is offered there as a clue to what emerges from an attentive look at the choral dimension of Athenian comedy. The chorus of wasps in the comedy named for these creatures dances and sings as the metaphorical swarm of elderly jurors, veterans of foreign wars who express their strong views, backed up by threats of stings, concerning matters important to the city. They are a wild, lustful, greedy, and rowdy crew.
Chapter 3 focuses on the chorus and its centrality in many forms of religious and political performance in ancient Athens, and throughout the classical Greek world. Choruses were made up of singers, dancers, celebrants of the gods. In this chapter I give special attention to the only extant “satyr” play, one of the plays added each day to the three tragedies in performance in the ancient Athenians’ festivals held in honor of the god Dionysos. Enslaved satyrs make up the chorus of Euripides’ Cyclops, one of the strange, hybrid, seriocomic plays that would end the day for the ancient spectators of tragedy. In dramatic choruses, not only the men who made up the assembly of the democratic polis, but outsiders to the citizen body, were often represented, embodied always by male actors, men and boys, but nonetheless marking the presence of others—female, slave, animal, foreign—in the city, inhabiting the space, as they performed before the audience. The “comic collective,” that is, the chorus of comedy, like that of tragedy, comprised anonymous beings who danced and sang, at some moments in unison, at others led by one of their own. The comedy Lysistrata, also discussed in this chapter, features a strong woman leader and two choruses, one of old women. The Hellenic women in this utopian comedy, from both Athens and its enemy Sparta, succeed in achieving peace, a truce, an end to the suffering of endless war between the Greek cities.
I continue in chapter 4 to concentrate on those elements of ancient comedy that seem to me to have most to offer to thinking about politics in the present, here comedy’s utopianism. Speculative imagining about “nowhere” or “elsewhere” survives in various forms, including speculative or “science” fiction, which includes utopian elements but also resorts often to its complement, dystopic fiction. In this chapter, I consider the utopianism of comedy, to some degree overshadowed by readerly emphasis on what are seen as the reactionary, conservative politics of Aristophanes. I look in particular at the comedy The Birds as a utopian text, and at its chorus as a utopian collective, with a different temporality and mode of being from the play’s narrative line, which is focused on the comic hero. Moments of pastoral, idyllic luxuriating in country life, of animal existence, as well as gestures toward its constant potential for violence, alternate in this play with a plot that ends in tyranny.
Chapter 5 takes up the theme of parrhesia, “saying it all.” Often translated as “freedom of speech,” this aspect of the ancient Athenian democracy was treasured by its citizens, and referred to enviously by outsiders in tragedy. I connect discourses about parrhesia with the work of Michel Foucault on this subject, to show the beginnings of these ideas in ancient society, and their working out in comedy. I find parrhesia to be not the dyadic form, sited in individuals, that Foucault for the most part describes in The Government of Self and Others and elsewhere, especially in philosophical and religious contexts, but a collective, joyous, and extravagant swing at the powerful, especially in the plays Acharnians and Knights of Aristophanes.
“Democracy, Communalism, Communism,” chapter 6, considers the ways in which utopianism and parrhesia come together in Aristophanes’ Ecclesiazusae (Women at the Assembly), where the women of Athens infiltrate the citizens’ ekklesia, the assembly, and succeed in voting in a communistic regime. The radical nature of their solutions to the problems they see in their city, including what they see as sexual injustices, casts light on the situation of Athens at the time of the play’s first production, and on the possibilities of imagining the impossible that precede philosophical deliberations on these same questions.
The epilogue, “The Politics of the Present,” returns to recapitulate the ways in which the example of ancient Greek comedy can complement and refine a sense of what antiquity has to offer to our present. The emphasis on tragedy, seen as appropriate for a world in which there is the constant threat of war, impoverishment, displacement, and chaos, accompanies, it seems, a focus on individualism, the nuclear family, the private character. Comedy opens up the possibilities of laughter, of communalism, of pleasures, of ways of living more collectively. Ancient comedy confronts us with female victories, utopianism, the “saying it all” of comic parrhesia, and the spectacle of collectives, of singing, dancing, questioning crowds demanding their pleasures, their sexual gratification, their gourmandise, their joy in performing and in sharing the delights of material existence. I emphasize once more that a reorientation toward laughter and what Kristin Ross has called “communal luxury” might offer another sort of politics that supplements or leavens or enlivens a tragic emphasis on the character of the leader, or the sufferings of the individual. If, in a collective sense, there is still hope for particularity, for each one’s enjoyment within a communal setting, then the eternal burden of tragedy might be lifted at times by a collective politics of laughter, by another, celebratory, mode of being with others, based on equality and solidarity.