There is tenderness only in the coarsest demand: that no-one shall go hungry any more.
Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia
From the evidence in the surviving ancient comedies, we find hunger to be on the minds of their audiences, and talk of lavish feasts everywhere. The comic poet Pherecrates wrote, perhaps about a visit to the underworld, in fragment 113, from Metalles (Mine Workers): “Abundance was what everything there oozed. . . . Rivers, filled with porridge and black broth, flowed bubbling through the canyons, croutons and all, and chunks of cheese-stuffed bread; each mouthful went slick and easy by itself down the corpses’ throats. . . . Roast thrushes, seasoned to be boiled, flew round our mouths begging to be gobbled up as we lay beneath the myrtle and anemone.” The scene includes girls with their pubes shaved, giving wine to the drinkers; anything consumed grew back twice its size. Pherecrates seems especially interested in utopian culinary excesses.1 Is this a fantasy about the afterlife, trying to tempt those listening within the play? About the mines?
Old Comedies can contain radical proposals, extravagant feasts, even venturing so far as to support the freeing of slaves who participate in the defense of Athens. In his valuable survey of Aristophanic comedy, Aristophanes and Athens, Douglas MacDowell argues that the playwright, not aiming merely to amuse, divert, and entertain his Athenian audience, intentionally offers advice and counsel for the city.2 For example, in 405 BCE the chorus of the Frogs, in the first speech of the parabasis, sings that it is their duty to present good instruction to their audience. In this speech, they argue for equality among all citizens, for amnesty for those who have made errors in the past by supporting oligarchy, citing the case that slaves who fought in the naval battle of Arginousai were made citizens, became free men instead of slaves.3 And that this policy should be carried further, freeing all those willing to fight in the navy in the future. As MacDowell emphasizes, “All men, whether citizens, foreigners, or slaves, should be equal provided that they fight for Athens in its time of need. . . . This is, for fifth-century Greece, an astounding proposal. It echoes the proposal made six years before in Lysistrata. . . , but goes beyond it.”4 The radical nature of such proposals is the subject of what follows.
In this chapter, I consider contemporary calls for change that might seem “impossible,” and the history of utopia, including modern theoretical work on speculative fiction. Moving on to Old Comedy’s utopian passages, I review moments in fragmentary works of other playwrights, and look closely at the Birds, populated by a choral swarm of birds drawn into the utopian scheme of Athenians fleeing their failing city. I assess not so much the traditions of comic satire and mockery, but rather some ancient comedies’ resemblance to speculative fiction. Such an argument is meant not to ignore the tragedies unfolding around us every day, here and throughout the world, nor to deny that ancient Greek tragedy addresses some of the painful issues that never cease to haunt humankind—questions of belonging, of kinship, of identity and loss, and of death. But the emphasis on the tragic, not only in relation to drama but also as an abstract element in philosophy and political theory, comes to resemble an eternal work of mourning and individual sorrow. There is little respite from human problems in tragedy, unless we consider the burial of the female Furies of Aeschylus’s tragedy Eumenides, and the invention of the jury trial portrayed in that work, as signs of hope for democracy. But if we look to the utopian, joyful, collective mood of ancient comedy, even beyond its often explicitly utopian content, there is another side of human existence, one that is dialectically related and responsive to the somber strains of tragedy.
How are laughter, and comedy, and the chorus, connected to speculation, imagination, and the future? In October 2011, Judith Butler attended Occupy Wall Street, and, in reference to calls for clarification of the protesters’ demands, she said:
People have asked, so what are the demands? What are the demands all of these people are making? Either they say there are no demands and that leaves your critics confused, or they say that the demands for social equality and economic justice are impossible demands. And the impossible demands, they say, are just not practical. If hope is an impossible demand, then we demand the impossible—that the right to shelter, food and employment are impossible demands, then we demand the impossible. If it is impossible to demand that those who profit from the recession redistribute their wealth and cease their greed, then yes, we demand the impossible.
But it is true that there are no demands that you can submit to arbitration here because we are not just demanding economic justice and social equality, we are assembling in public, we are coming together as bodies in alliance, in the street and in the square. We’re standing here together making democracy, enacting the phrase “We the people!”5
Demand the impossible.
In their Utopia Reader, Gregory Claeys and Lyman Tower Sargent admirably conclude their text on utopias with “Occupy.”6 They offer no statements or manifestos, but instead summarize its utopian aspects, and then present a bibliography of writings by such thinkers as Noam Chomsky, who commented on the movement. The editors’ conclusions are suggestive; they identify utopian dimensions of the group, as well as the collective’s formation of utopian spaces, governed by utopian rules of procedure. They note the “horizontal” method of assembly organization, based on consensus and a variety of hand gestures to allow participants to communicate nonverbally.
The editors also call attention to the problems raised by such methods: the “crossed-arm” signal, denoting disapproval and the need to speak, “led to constant blocking by people who had no interest in building consensus but simply wanted to dominate the proceedings.” The last words of the Utopia Reader express some regret about the problems involved in such communal practices: “Consensus is a difficult process and requires prior training and, ideally, a group united on goals and methods.”7 The contradictory, risky, and uneven process of utopian praxis is also evident in moments of ancient comedy, where for example the collective chorus of birds in the Birds witnesses the murder and feasting on rebel birds at the wedding celebration that concludes the comedy. Even their utopia of Cloudcuckooland registers the “marks and scars” of social existence. Yet utopian groups in the present, formations such as Black Lives Matter, the Movement for Black Lives, and others, nonetheless continue to engage in speculative, hopeful, and utopian practices, to attempt to put into practice versions of leaderless, collective, spontaneous political action, oriented against racism, anti-Semitism, police violence, and tyranny, toward equality, social justice, and the redistribution of wealth.8
The word “utopia,” although based on Greek roots meaning “not a place,” “nowhere,” was invented by Thomas More in the sixteenth century as the name of his somewhat enigmatic and speculative fiction about a land that might be, that might or might not respond to the great changes taking place in the England of his day.9 Such speculative fiction existed before More named it, even in antiquity, and of course it has become a significant genre ever since, into the twenty-first century, where utopias and dystopias abound in what is now more likely to be called speculative than “science” fiction.10
Rhiannon Evans, in her Utopia Antiqua, discusses the presence of utopian elements in ancient Roman culture, touching on the question of Golden Age narratives and the importance of the notion of decline for Romans’ attitudes toward their history.11 She draws a contrast between Golden Age narratives, which look to an unblemished past, and a utopianism defined by “fictional and geographical fantasy worlds.” She also argues that “looking at the utopian as ‘the repository of desire’ . . . allows for the investigation of Golden Age narratives as they are specifically mobilized, rather than seeing them as repetitive examples of a universal trope.”12 “Make Athens great again.”
The nostalgia expressed in some of ancient Greek comedy fuses a nostalgia for a lost past, a “golden age” of democracy rather than the golden age of Hesiod, with a desire for a future that has speculative, fictional, fantastic elements marked by that past. Emphasis on hunger and its satisfaction persists. In the world of some ancient comedies fish roasting on the fire, requested to hurry it up, assert in their defense that they are done only on one side; the reply: “Turn yourselves over and baste yourselves with oil and salt” (Crates, frag. 16, from Athenaeus 267e). A jar full of aromatic oil will arrive on its own for a waiting bather (frag. 17). The desire that emerges in some comedies is not only for such a prehistoric past, for a random gratification of all hungers, but also, sometimes, for a remembered past, the age of another democracy, one that, as in Cloudcuckooland, the new colony of the Birds, to be discussed later in this chapter, preemptively did not permit father-beaters, sycophants, wealthy and nebulous poets, and other menaces to democratic contentment.
One of my desires in this chapter, and in this book as a whole, is to insert ancient comedy into the debates concerning utopias, especially communal, communist utopian thinking. The tendency has been, even in such a thorough, invaluable, and radical work as Doyne Dawson’s Cities of the Gods: Communist Utopias of the Greeks, to treat ancient comedy in a few paragraphs, and then to move on to the more serious philosophical utopias that have the gravitas historians of philosophy desire.13 Ancient literary utopias are given short shrift. In their Utopia Reader, Claeys and Sargent call Aristophanes’ Ecclesiazusae a utopian satire, noting: “Classical Greece provides both the earliest works we now call utopias, or descriptions of much better societies, and satires on those societies.”14 They include an almost thirty-page-long excerpt from Plato’s Republic, and then introduce Aristophanes: “Aristophanes (448?–380 BCE), the most important Greek comedic playwright, wrote the earliest utopian satires. In addition to Ecclesiazusae, excerpted here, these works include Lysistrata and Thesmophoriazusae, satires on the role of women in society, and Birds, which presents a simple utopia of pleasure.”15 They then present three pages extracted from the Ecclesiazusae. Of course the authors of this valuable anthology are considering a lengthy history of utopia, from the Hebrew Bible and Hesiod to twenty-first-century utopias, but the notion of a “utopian satire” is not really prepared for in their introduction to this vast backward gaze, retrofitted for ancient texts. All depends on Thomas More’s Utopia of 1516. A vast bibliography exists concerning this text, and all those retrospectively and subsequently added to the category. Its appropriateness for ancient Athens may need further examination.
Comic writers, before and during the time of Aristophanes—Crates and Cratinus, for example—mention previous eras of history that had more plenty, more material abundance. These golden age scenes, which include the garden of Alkinoos in Homer’s Odyssey, presenting a constant temperate climate, with endless crops of fruit to be harvested, differ from the communalism proposed in several surviving comedies. Crates, for example, who wrote a comedy called Beasts (Theria), alludes to some sort of utopia. Later writers cite lines from this play; Athenaeus gives us the following, with lines cited earlier:
A. Then absolutely no one will get a slave man or woman,
but an old man will have to be his own servant?
B. No! I’ll make everything able to walk.
A. But what good is that to them? B. Each of the utensils
Will come to you by itself, when you call it. “Appear beside me, table!
Set yourself! Grain-sack, knead the dough!
Ladle, pour! Where is the wine-cup? Go and wash yourself!
Up here, bread dough! The pot should spit out those beets!
Come here, fish.” “But I’m done only on one side yet.”
“Then turn yourself over, and baste yourself—with a little salt.”16
This is animacy, soul, activity attributed to inanimate as well as animate beings, the imagining of automata that obey human commands like robots, androids, drones, or zombies. Another character promises to bring hot baths to his people, on top of pillars, with water that comes from the sea: “The water will say ‘you can turn me off now,’” and the bottle of perfume will arrive along with an automatic sponge and sandals. Such fantasies resemble the dream of automata expressed by Aristotle (Politics 1253b), and imagined by Herbert Marcuse in his utopian projections about a future in Eros and Civilization, or Aaron Bastani’s arguments in Fully Automated Luxury Communism.17 And the arrival of such marvelous objects into daily life could not be further from the heavily laden and signifying objects of the world of ancient tragedy.18
Other fragmentary passages offer similarly utopian reflections. Teleclides, for example, in the Amphictyons (Neighboring States), has a character recounting the gifts once bestowed on humankind, including peace, and no diseases: “Every gutter gushed wine, breads fought each other for your mouth. . . . The fish delivered themselves to your house, broiled themselves up, and lay down on your table. A river of gravy flowed past the couches . . . ductwork for bouillabaisse. . . . Roast thrushes carrying crackers flew down your throat.”19 As in the utopian schemes projected in some of Aristophanes’ plays, food plays a prominent role in the imagination of past or future, a symptom of hunger in the audience during the difficult years of war in the fifth century BCE.
Claeys and Sargent’s characterization of Aristophanes’ Ecclesiazusae, sadly truncated here, and classified as “utopian satire,” needs more critical attention. I would recall Tom Moylan’s addition to the typical vocabulary concerning utopias and dystopias, his notion of a “critical utopia,” also described by Claeys and Sargent in their introduction to the Utopia Reader.20 A critical utopia is “a nonexistent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous reader (sic) to view as better than contemporary society but with difficult problems that the described society may or may not be able to solve and that takes a critical view of the utopian genre.”21 Moylan’s own formulation is somewhat different: “Utopian writing in the 1970s was saved by its own destruction and transformation into the ‘critical utopia’. ‘Critical’ in the Enlightenment sense of critique—that is, expressions of oppositional thought, unveiling, debunking, of both the genre itself and the historical situation.”22 Might we not see the Birds, for example, or even the Ecclesiazusae, the play Claeys and Sargent include in their anthology, as fitting into this category, with some modifications? It seems more appropriate to me than the notion of satire, which is not in fact listed as one of the definitions pertinent to Claeys and Sargent’s introductory discussion of the utopian genre, which includes “utopianism,” “utopia,” “eutopia or positive utopia,” “dystopia or negative utopia,” as well as the aforementioned “critical utopia.”23
The word “satire,” like “utopia,” is used anachronistically to apply to the fifth century BCE. The term applies to a Roman literary genre. As my late colleague Robert Elliott commented, in his entry on satire for the Encyclopedia Britannica, “Satura (which had had no verbal, adverbial, or adjectival forms) was immediately broadened by appropriation from the Greek word for ‘satyr’ (satyros) and its derivatives. The odd result is that the English ‘satire’ comes from the Latin satura; but ‘satirize,’ ‘satiric,’ etc., are of Greek origin.”24
And what is Aristophanes “satirizing”? He may be ridiculing Cleon in the Acharnians, but are the more high-flying utopian comedies such as the Birds and the Ecclesiazusae directed with irony and sarcasm at particular individual targets in this way, or at ridiculous utopian projects floating in the autopoetic universe of the democracy? The concept of “critical utopia,” even if anachronistic in its own right, seems more appropriate for Aristophanes’ practice in these plays. Especially with reference to Tom Moylan’s “difficult problems that the described society may or may not be able to solve,” the questions of redistribution of wealth, of equality, and of erotic gratification, as in the case of the utopias featuring women, touch on matters that may be treated with ridicule or sarcasm, but also with a sense of critique.25
Like the Monty Python sketches with their male transvestism so dear to the British, the presentation of men dressed as women in the Lysistrata, Ecclesiazusae, and Thesmophoriazusae may simply appeal to the funny bone of patriarchal, misogynist societies, but also smuggle in the desire to be the other, or to widen the spectrum of gratification to include the excluded. Although Mark Griffith, in his arguments concerning the shifting identifications of the audience, directs his attention primarily toward class differences, the transvestism and representation of female persons in many comedies, as well as tragedies, offer the opportunity for masculine identification with the opposite sex.26
Ancient Greek comedy was a complicated, multilayered performance that included not just topical reference, not just ridicule of leading politicians and decisions about war and peace, but also such speculations as we see in the philosophical deliberations on politics that follow. I am still surprised that many readers for centuries saw only mockery or satire in the communist utopian schemes of some extant comedies. Why is the perception of Aristophanes that he was a conservative satirist, rather than a wildly inventive producer of speculative fictions? Alan Sommerstein, in The Cambridge Companion to Greek Comedy, writes: “Our evidence indicates that from the 440s to the 400s comedy positioned itself pretty consistently on the political right.”27
In his essay, “Utopianism,” in the same volume, Ian Ruffell shares my perspective:
Among the many paradoxes of Old Comedy, perhaps the most striking is that it combines acute social commentary and political interventions with the expression and realization of wishes of the most thoroughly impossible kind, in the creation of a transformed world or an alternative society. . . .
In being prepared to contemplate and explore, however humorously, notions such as economic equality, women as political agents, or, from a modern perspective, perhaps the most laughable of all, a world at peace, Old Comedy seems in its own way to have been at the forefront of public speculation, going beyond and perhaps even leading the radical edge of Greek ideas.28
Ruffell notes that the later comedy of the Athenians—New Comedy and the work of Menander—retreats from this sort of radical speculation.
Old comic utopia, like comedy in general, is frequently seen as trivial, bound to its own time, local, absent the philosophical purchase of such weighty tomes as Plato’s Republic. Along with rehabilitating the idea of communism, or communalism, and setting comedy alongside tragedy as a deeply significant and still pertinent artifact from antiquity, I claim for comic utopias a central role in calling into question frustrations, desires, the worries of everyday reality, and politics in the past, present, and future.
Fredric Jameson, in a chapter entitled “Utopia, Modernism, and Death,” discusses the proletarian novel of Andrei Platonov, Chevengur, written in the 1920s but not published in full until 1988, (most of the works of Platonov, a Soviet Communist, were banned during his lifetime).29 The book by Jameson in which this chapter appears is entitled The Seeds of Time and opens with an epigraph from Shakespeare: “. . . for who can look into the seeds of time / And say which grain will grow and which will not . . .” These words are fitting not just for the Soviet writer, but also for Athenian Old Comedy; one might see in its plays many “seeds,” many speculative and experimental gestures tossed into the audience, some contradictory, some ironic, a sowing of ideas and thoughts and possibilities, with no claim for their realizability, their inevitability.
Some of Jameson’s remarks concerning Chevengur and utopia, although concerned with modernism, and so-called Second World culture, the culture of the former Soviet Union, shed light on the practices of Old Comedy, especially with regard to the more utopian plays. For example, Jameson notes, with regard to the collision between daydream and reality principle: “Historically, then, this is the sense in which the vocation of Utopia lies in failure; in which its epistemological value lies in the walls it allows us to feel around our minds, the invisible limits it gives us to detect by sheerest induction, the miring of our imaginations in the mode of production itself, the mud of the present age in which the winged Utopian shoes stick, imagining that to be the force of gravity itself” (75). In the case of comic utopian imaginings, we see the oscillation among the Birds, in which the tattooed slave, like the bird the francolin, finds refuge in Cloudcuckooland, but which also represents a form of bird rebellion, bird cannibalism; the Peace (421) in which the main character, Trygaeus, flies to Mount Olympus on a dung beetle to bring an end to war; and the world of the Women at the Assembly, where there is communism, communal luxury for all, except for the slaves who are still ordered about with utter disregard for their humanness by characters seemingly devoted to equality.
Jameson points to the difficulties inherent in the attempt to think one’s way back into another world: “[W]hatever attitude we choose, the historiographic or indeed historicist problematic of a Gadamer or even a Benjamin remains the dilemma, which is that of Verstehen or of contact, that of the mode of access to an era whose structure of feeling is at least substantively different from our own. This historicist dilemma poses itself, to be sure, for all the objects of the past” (81). Can postmodern, or modern, readers perceive the “structure of feeling,” to use Raymond Williams’s term, of an ancient Athenian democratic spectator, perceive the “seeds,” the randomly sown bits of utopian thinking that Old Comedy disperses? We need both a careful reading of the past and a commitment to recognizing both disjunction and the relevance of that past.
Jameson sees the historical conditions of possibility of recognition in disjunction, in Platonov the coexistence of peasant and industrial culture, and he points to Heidegger’s formulations concerning the pre-Socratics as enabled by the recognition of another such moment of transition: “Heidegger does not tell us, I believe, and perhaps he is not interested in such speculations, how one is to imagine the historical conditions of possibility of the ‘original’ metaphysical experiences designated as such by him—I mean the expressions and formulations of the so-called Presocratic philosophers, which nonetheless seem to have emerged from just such a secular break in life experience with the impact of nascent commerce on the elder cultures of Asia Minor” (85). One might see the transition occurring in the lifetime of Aristophanes as another such break; some of his chorus members view the world of the Persian Wars, the victory at Marathon, the democracy of the earlier part of the fifth century BCE, and are jolted by the new democracy dominated by new leaders, by the aggressive imperialism of Athens as it comes to rule over its subject allies. That disjunction, the transition between a relatively autarchic economy and one dependent on empire, calls forth in comedy utopian imaginings of a return to that earlier culture as well as recognition of the new forces at play in the late fifth century BCE.
Other remarks of Jameson in relation to Platonov illuminate comic practices in new ways. He writes of what he calls “the moment of ‘world reduction’” in the work of Ursula Le Guin, and such a moment seems to be present in the imagining of Cloudcuckooland, the escape from the old world that begins with the very first words of the play, but is also part of such plans as the Women at the Assembly, and other utopian performances. In Platonov’s novel, Jameson discerns “a fairy-tale narrative in which Sasha and other characters set forth to find that mysterious thing they lack, like the blue flower, which bears the name of ‘socialism’” (94). Novalis’s “blue flower,” the symbol that signals a lack, could stand for all that is missing in the city of Athens but can be constructed in the new world of the birds. The search that defines the earlier scenes of the Birds, before the decision to build a new city, can be seen as the yearning to fulfill a lack: “In the deepest unconscious mind,” writes Jameson, “the lost object, ‘petit a,’ is multiform, the heart’s desire is both something so material and domestic as a source of oral gratification . . . and something so complex it stands as the abstraction of everything people have been able to conceive as their ideal of collective life and of the world itself” (97).
I find especially intriguing the notion that the utopian impulse does not necessarily entail a totalitarian erasure of individuality and particularity and even peculiarity, as anti-utopian debunkers might insist. Jameson connects this potential with Theodor Adorno: “I gloss here a fundamental notion of Adorno’s, namely, that what we think of as individuality in the West, and what seems to us somehow to trace the outlines of an essential human nature, is little more than the marks and scars, the violent compressions, resulting from the interiorization by so-called civilized human beings of that instinct for self-preservation without which, in this fallen society or history, we would all be destroyed” (99). Individuality, or “individualism,” then, is not human nature, but a consequence of our history. And the fading of the need for the instinct to survive, Jameson argues, is Utopia, where “the constraints for uniformization and conformity have been removed, and human beings grow wild like plants in a state of nature” (99). Viewing the utopian moments of the Birds, even as the birds sing in chorus, we discover the variety, the multiplicity, the swarm of difference of all the birds.30 As in Chevengur, these are people, or birds “‘on vacation from imperialism,’” and from war, from the Peloponnesian War that has ravaged the land of Attica.
I return to the chorus of the Birds, composed of twenty-four dancer-singers, each a different bird. The characters name Flamingo, Hoopoe, Gobbler, Partridge, Francolin, Widgeon, Halcyon, Snippet, Owl, Jay, Turtledove, Lark, and many others. This collective sometimes moves as one, sometimes in countermeasures. It sings in one voice as an “I,” then as “we.” The chorus leader sings in the first person, then for the group, even for the playwright himself, addressing the chorus, the characters, and the audience. What I find most fascinating is the individuation of the chorus members, who are distinct and particular even as they participate in the whole. And that whole is likened to a cloud, to a swarm, to a demos, to a polis.
Jameson finds multiple ironies in the text of Platonov, and perhaps in a sense these too are relevant to the Aristophanic corpus. If there is a “wider sense of the global population brought to the metropolis by way of the new imperialisms” (118) of the twentieth century, fifth-century Athens too experienced such an opening to a wider world, through its imperialist adventures, and through the work of Herodotus, for example, who detailed the lifeways of Egyptians, Scythians, and other peoples of the Mediterranean basin. In the twentieth-century example, Jameson finds “an existential crisis in the metropolis whose effect is that radical devaluation of individual experience we call irony” (118). The chorus of the Birds is polymorphous, differentiated by kind, and offering an ironic perspective on the practices of the existent city, with its oraclemongers and its poets, and on the utopian dreams of the character Peisetairos as well. If Herodotus’s descriptions present “a mirror” for the Greeks, they also present a variety of ways of organizing culture and society, a multiplicity of choices that relativized the Greeks’ own assumptions about the proper way to live.31
Other ancient examples of invented places include, at the very beginnings of Western literary production, the island of Phaiakia in Homer’s Odyssey, where the king’s garden escapes the burden of seasonal change and is eternally productive of ripeness. There are speculative fictions in the philosophers; some would argue that the polity presented in Plato’s Republic is such a text.32 Alain Badiou, contemporary French philosopher, has recently published a “translation” of Plato’s Republic, setting it in the present, making one of the interlocutors in the conversation a woman, and arguing in essence that the important burden of Plato’s dialogue is not totalitarianism, as some have argued, but rather communism.33 This idiosyncratic “translation” of Plato’s Republic, its paperback cover (2014) adorned with a photograph of a parade in Tian’anmen Square prominently displaying a portrait of Mao Zedong, contains a rewriting of the myth of the cave:
Imagine an enormous movie theater. Down front, the screen, which goes right up to the ceiling (but it’s so high that everything up there gets lost in the dark) blocks anything other than itself from being seen. It’s a full house. For as long as they’ve been around, the audience members have been chained to their seats, with their eyes staring at the screen and their heads held in place by rigid headphones covering their ears. Behind these tens of thousands of spectators shackled to their seats there’s an immense wooden walkway, at head level, running parallel to the whole length of the screen. Still further back are enormous projectors flooding the screen with an almost unbearable white light. . . .
All sorts of robots, dolls, cardboard cut-outs, puppets, operated and manipulated by invisible puppeteers or guided by remote control, move along the walkway. Animals, stretcher-bearers, scythe-bearers, cars, storks, ordinary people, armed soldiers, gangs of youths from the banlieues, turtle doves, cultural coordinators, naked women, and so forth go back and forth continuously in this way. (Book 7, 514a-b; p. 212)
Other remarkable features of Badiou’s translation of Plato’s Republic include this passage in the myth of Er, describing the choice of a new life by one of the immortal souls:
The person who’d drawn number 1 came forward and chose the life of the CEO of the biggest retail conglomerate in his country, the one whose well-known chain of giant box stores, located on the outskirts of every town, bore the names More is Better, Load Your Cart, and Gimme more! Carried away by his insane greed, he’d chosen this life without having bothered to look into the details. He hadn’t realized that this existential fate included, among other horrors, the fact that the CEO, though of course in command of a huge fortune, married to a supermodel and the father of four sons, would only be truly sexually attracted to little girls under the age of seven. He’d bribe gangsters to procure them for him or, all in one day, he’d make round trips in his private jet to far-off Asian countries just to get a blow job on the sly from a little girl in disgusting public restrooms. Caught in the act during one of the sprees, he’d be arrested, repeatedly beaten, and handed over in prison to thugs who would turn him into a bedraggled sex slave. (619b-c; p. 350)
Plato’s Greek text here—briefly—concerns a soul that chose tyranny, and the eating of his own children.
Badiou also significantly rewrites Plato’s noble lie, describing three social groups: “the financiers,” the intermediate professions, and the “direct producers” (109), in the Phoenician myth like different metals. But, the teller of the tale, a Phoenician sailor says:
One day, say . . . subversive preachers, a counter-god of sorts will appear, though we don’t yet know in what form. . . . An idea, a single spark that can set the whole prairie on fire? . . . But in any event this counter-god will melt down all the Phoenicians, or maybe even humanity as a whole, and will re-make them in such a way that all without exception will henceforward be made up of an undifferentiated mixture of earth, iron, gold, and silver. They’ll consequently have to live indivisibly, since they’ll all share identically in the equality of fate. (109–10)
(As the English translator notes, this is an allusion to Mao Zedong’s 1930 essay entitled “A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire” [360n3].) Badiou elsewhere, controversially, again alludes to Mao in his translation of the conversation between Socrates and Glaucon: “The communist Idea must command the gun” (110). (Mao of course notoriously wrote: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun . . . [but] the gun must never be allowed to command the party” [“Problems of War and Strategy,” published in 1938].)
Badiou also trades in Adeimantus, inventing an often annoying sister of Glaucon, Amantha, who flirts, serves to undermine Plato’s pederasty and homoeroticism, and even denounces contemporary women, targeting the special pleading of feminists: “All they think about is getting ahead by stepping on men and their girlfriends. And on top of that they make everyone feel sorry for them. If the world were run by women it would be like a beehive, a nest of ants, termites!” (275). Clearly, this Amantha has not been persuaded by the comic presentation of swarms of female chorus members in the Ecclesiazusae.
The work of Alain Badiou is especially provoking and provocative, and relevant to the question of utopia. He declares himself to be an ardent Platonist, critical of various forms of anti-Platonism, including a Marxist anti-Platonism, “for which Plato is the origin of the notorious sensible/intelligible opposition, hence the source of idealism and the beginning of the history of ideology.” Badiou frequently refers to this mode of anti-Platonism by citing the dictionary of philosophy commissioned by Stalin, where Plato is defined as “ideologue of the slave owners” (ix).
Badiou describes Spartacus, like Paul, as a Lenin-like figure who galvanizes followers, who in turn, inspired by an event, and a truth, one that authentically moves toward equality, commit themselves to that truth. Elsewhere, in his Communist Hypothesis, in a letter to Slavoj Zizek, Badiou argues for the productivity of failure: “The Cultural Revolution plays the role that the Paris Commune played in its Leninist sequence . . . a terrible failure that teaches us some essential lessons.”34 In the introduction to Badiou’s new Republic, Ken Reinhard reminds the reader that “for Badiou, Plato is the first warrior in the eternal battle of philosophy against sophistry, of truth against opinion, and the progenitor of the living idea of communism” (vii, emphasis mine). Badiou’s Socrates argues: “Private property has to be abolished. None of the members of our political community will own his own lodgings, let alone a workshop or a storehouse. Everything will be collectivized” (416d; p. 111). In the Greek text, Plato says that in the community of the guardians “none must possess any private property save the indispensable. Secondly, none must have any habitation or treasure-house which is not open for all to enter at will.”35 (The translator of the Loeb edition, Paul Shorey, noted: “Plato’s communism is primarily a device to secure disinterestedness in the ruling class, though he sometimes treats it as a counsel of perfection for all men and states” [p. 310, n. a].)36
Doyne Dawson, in Cities of the Gods: Communist Utopias in Greek Thought called attention in 1992 to the point that, “on the one hand, the way of life Plato proposes for the elite of this paradigm polis represents the most dazzling vision of human potentiality that anyone in the ancient world had ever conceived. . . . He dares to envision a truly unified community in which individual properties and families are abolished. . . . [But even as he offers us this vision of perfectibility, he seems to rob it of its force. For this radical transformation is limited to a ruling minority.]”37 For Alain Badiou, the communism of Plato is the point. And it anticipates what Marx and Engels wrote in The German Ideology: “We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.”38 I am reminded of something called “cinderology,” as in Cinderella, used by Stewart M. Cameron in the British Medical Journal to describe how “scientists frequently borrow the tale to describe the neglect of concepts or disciplines, for the positive identification of a disease or condition, or to refer to a transformation and subsequent recognition.”39 Besides something mysteriously named “Cinderella dermatosis,” the concept of neglect seems most pertinent for the positive reading of the communist Plato.
Badiou sees Plato as a mathematician, a lover, and a communist, stressing a highly idiosyncratic and possibly cinderological reading of his works. He places greatest weight on Plato’s advocacy of communism for his guardians, and writes in the preface to his translation: “We think this Plato is, and will be, a monkey wrench thrown in the machinery of Capital, a small contribution whose aim is to stop the juggernaut from crushing everything in its path” (xxx). He sees Plato as invaluable precisely because he is an idealist, not bound to the material world as it is: “Plato has been saying, and will say again, I hope, in every language, that the order of thinking can triumph over the apparent law of things, that justice can triumph over the power of money—in a word, that communism, an old word whose utter newness the old philosopher will teach us, is possible” (xxx). He refers to what he calls Plato’s “fundamental intuition” on the symbiosis of communism and philosophy, his “restricted communism,” which Badiou cites in order to call for “a generalized communism” (38). He likens the ancient philosopher, imagining what is not yet, to the Watchman at the beginning of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon: “The philosopher must try to discern far into the distance, toward the horizon, whatever the glowing lights announce” (18).
Badiou is a controversial figure, denounced for sexism, idealism, anti-Semitism, Maoism, and other crimes. One reviewer of his translation of the Republic in Le Point (February 22, 2013), outraged at his tampering with a classic of the philosophical tradition, accused him of “incommensurable narcissism,” and of “succumbing to the fascist temptation of the totalitarianism of the extreme left”! Yet Badiou seems to me to be enacting imprecisely what Jameson calls the Marxist solution to the dilemma of identity and difference; in the confrontation of two modes of production, the past “calls our own form of life into question,” and passes judgment on us, the past points, in an allusion to Ernst Bloch, to “what we are not yet” (479).
Doyne Dawson discusses “low communism,” the sort of town planning typical of Greek colonization, in which founders of new cities imagined spaces different from those of mainland, ancient poleis. The philosophical utopian thinking differs, incorporating thought experiments that come to include all of the known world in new forms of cosmopolitanism. There is, I would say, no “utopianism” in Greek tragedy, no speculative fiction of the sort described by Dawson. There are explorations of the mythic, legendary past, another place, perhaps hope for democracy and its law in Aeschylus’s Oresteia, but not the imaginatively detailed creation of a better, or different, space and place that are characteristic of utopias per se.
Comic utopias offer something else, and for that reason they have particular relevance to the politics of the present. Fredric Jameson’s work on utopias and science and speculative fiction argues that such writings are valuable because they reveal what is missing in the present. He explains: “I want to convey a situation in which political institutions seem both unchangeable and infinitely modifiable: no agency has appeared on the horizon that offers the slightest chance or hope of modifying the status quo, and yet in the mind—and perhaps for that very reason—all kinds of institutional variations and recombinations seem thinkable.” Citing Louis Marin on utopia, Jameson reflects: “Utopia is somehow negative . . . it is most authentic when we cannot imagine it. Its function lies not in helping us to imagine a better future but rather in demonstrating our utter incapacity to imagine such a future—-our imprisonment in a non-utopian present without historicity or futurity—so as to reveal the ideological closure of the system in which we are somehow trapped and confined.”40 It is not that these texts necessarily urge the integrity of new worlds, in familiar settings or distant planets, but that their speculations are a symptom. Trying to make sense of such “nowheres,” to imagine their materialization, is not the point. Rather, we can see the description, for example, of the abolition of private property, or of communism, although these may seem impossible, even at best unlikely, but the degree of likelihood of these new arrangements is not the point. Nor is the “road map,” an account of what changes would have to be made to get to this new place, required of such fictions. Rather, they expose the fault lines, the fissures, the “sutures,” as Pierre Macherey calls them, concealing the real relations of the culture that produced them.
I’m particularly interested here in the utopian plays of Athenian Old Comedy. Although much ink has been spilled trying to characterize the actual “politics” of the extant plays of comedy, it opened up questions of democracy, demagoguery, and the Athenian Empire, in imaginary settings that express some compelling critiques of the world of Athens as its poets and theatrical collectives saw it changing around them.
Earlier comic playwrights had written plays with utopian aspects, mentioned earlier. Unfortunately, all that remains of the works of Crates and Cratinus, for example, is plot summaries and fragments. Crates wrote comedies with such titles as Feasts, Beasts, Games, Politicians. One of his comedies, the title now lost, seems to depict a golden age society, utopia as regression to an untroubled past. According to a late writer, Stephanus of Byzantium, Cratinus refers to a city of slaves, polin doulon (frag. 223; Stephanus 237.5).
Discussions of the politics of Aristophanes himself often focus on the overt expressions of adherence to an antidemagogic, conservative, pacificist position, and try to trace out a stance from the utterances of characters and of the chorus, especially in the parabasis, the address to the audience by the chorus leader, who seems to speak at times in the voice of the playwright. In his work on the issue of social class in comedy, which includes consideration of Menander as well as Aristophanes, David Kawalko Roselli, cited earlier, presents a more sophisticated model of analysis.41 He sees, implicitly at least, the staging of the contradictions of the polis in the work of Aristophanes, the polis in which there is, ideologically at least, equality, and at the same time, economic inequality. He sees the playwright as appealing to various elements in his audience, and he includes the poor as part of that audience, as recounted above, relying on the possibility that on the slopes of the hill above the theater of Dionysos, for example, the poor, even the enslaved, could enjoy theatrical spectacles without paying for the privilege of actual attendance in the city’s amphitheater.
Roselli argues also that the theorika, the city’s subsidies for viewing, at some periods allowed the poor to pay for admission to the theater. There is firm evidence for these subsidies only for a short period in the fourth century BCE; the scholarly consensus is that these were instituted in 350 BCE, long after the career of Aristophanes had ended. And, as Roselli notes, “while theoric distributions were regularized by about 350, there is some evidence that entrance fees increased . . . ; and in 322 theorika were most likely abolished under the oligarchs.”42 That is to say, the poor’s attendance was most likely not subsidized in the fifth century BCE, and the subsidies lasted for a mere twenty-eight years in the fourth.43 Nonetheless, Roselli’s picture of the politics of Aristophanes is revealing as he mines Raymond Williams’s theoretical contributions to reveal new dimensions of ancient drama. Williams described the contestation between dominant, residual, and emergent ideology, in a progressive model suggesting an almost inevitable overcoming of the past by the new.44 Roselli looks also to Antonio Gramsci, for thinking about ideology, and in his important essay on social class in The Cambridge Companion to Greek Comedy, while not taking into account Althusser’s important interventions on this question, very usefully points to the ways in which scholarship has failed to recognize some crucial dimensions of Old Comedy. He clarifies how, in a play such as Wealth, one character “accepts that communism is now the law (759) and notes that others are compliant”: “Many scholarly discussions, based on a priori assumptions about the poet’s conservative views, have dismissed these utopian desires as impractical and viewed Aristophanes as ridiculing such schemes. Surely it is important to note both support for and opposition to economic reforms built into these plays.”45 Such a formulation, emphasizing the contested presence of communism in the plays, provides a dialectical analysis of the various strains of political thinking set on stage, made into theater by the city itself, in a sense that echoes Vernant’s analyses of tragedy, as the city putting itself on stage.
One of the most fascinating of comedy’s choruses is that of the Birds, which I will look at in some detail here. The play has obvious utopian dimensions; here I stress the peculiarities of the constitution and performance of the chorus in the Birds. Rather than focusing on the plot and the characters of the play, as readers of Aristotle’s Poetics are encouraged to do, even perhaps in the lost chapters of the treatise concerning comedy, I will foreground consideration of the chorus, notoriously ignored by Aristotle.
Comic choruses, as mentioned above, included twenty-four members, while the choruses of tragedy had only twelve, and there is a long tradition of animal choruses in comedy, mostly in plays that have not survived.46 The Birds was produced in 414 BCE, and won second prize at the Dionysia festival. The play is unusually long for a comedy, and must have cost a great deal to produce; each of its chorus members wore a bird costume. As discussed earlier, an illustration on a vase from the fifth century BCE, owned by the J. Paul Getty Museum, shows two theater performers facing one another, dressed as birds, but they wear identical costumes, and some scholars contend they do not show actors from Aristophanes’ play, although their presence on this vase is evocative of the theater.47
The chorus in the Birds forms a swarm, a people (demos), and a city (polis). The play begins with the “characters,” the personae Peisetairos and Euelpides trekking away from Athens, seeking to escape the world of the polis and establish a utopia elsewhere, in a project that resembles the many exoduses from mainland cities in earlier centuries that resulted in the foundation of Greek colonies around the Mediterranean basin.48 After the introduction of the individual characters, revealing their discontent with life in the earthly city of the Athenians, the chorus of birds arrives, summoned by the resident of the heavens Tereus, who in a mythic narrative was for his crimes turned into a bird.
The story was the subject of one of the tragedies of Sophocles: Tereus had married Procne, but raped her sister Philomela, and then cut out the tongue of Philomela to prevent her from telling her story. She succeeded nonetheless in communicating with her sister Procne by means of an embroidered tapestry illustrating the rape. The two sisters came together to take revenge on Tereus. They killed Procne’s and Tereus’s son Itys, feeding his corpse to his father. Realizing with horror what they had done, Tereus tried to pursue the sisters with his sword, but the gods metamorphosed him into a hoopoe, while Procne became a nightingale, whose song mourned the dead child; Philomela was transformed into a swallow. This is the tragic version of the birds’ story. Aristophanes makes Tereus a comic hero, a help to the utopian Peisetairos, who wants to found a new city with the birds.
Tereus calls the birds to him, using a wordless song to summon them from the country, from gardens and hills and meadows, from over the sea. His utterance begins by imitating nonhuman forms of communication: “Epopopoi popopopoi popoi, ye ye co co co co” (227–28). And then his call transforms into recognizable Greek, third-person imperatives that command every bird to appear. The linguistic flexibility here, moving from meaningless, coaxing noise, to meaningful, coaxing summons, provides a compelling transition between the world of the animal swarm and the human beings in bird form who appear as the chorus in the next moments of the comedy. Sean Gurd, in his fascinating book Dissonance, refers to these sounds. And he adds: “When song evokes sound, it becomes one means by which the enclosure of a society resonates with its environment, developing sensitivities to ambient entities and influences.”49 Comedy’s porosity imbeds it in the environment.
Tereus the hoopoe’s invocation of the birds, the chorus here, resembles the song of the frog chorus in the play about Dionysos’s trip to the underworld to retrieve a tragedian, named for that chorus, the Frogs. They sing “brek ek ek ek coax coax,” froggy sounds that make no sense in Greek, but that mimic the croaking of the swamp.50 If human music begins as an imitation of animal sounds, and in particular of bird song, then Tereus’s call erases the boundary between the bird, the birds, and the human actors, who become animal, and sing and dance as a collective in imitation of these creatures. One of the first musical instruments discovered by archaeologists is a hollowed-out bird’s wing from the Paleolithic Ice Age, a simple flute, with stops for the fingers, which uses the bird’s body to imitate the noise, the sound, of the animal. The chorus in this play, dressed as birds, sings and dances and in an almost totemic way expresses the kinship between human and animal.
Tereus continues his call: “tio tio tio tio tio tio tio tio” (237), and the birds begin to alight. “Trioto trioto totobrix” (243), he sings, again in wordless syllables that imitate the song of his comrades, ending with the climax: “Torotorotorotorotix, kikkabau kikkabau, torotorotorolililix”! (260–62). Bird after bird appears, first the red-winged bird, the “flamingo,” the “mede,” and then another hoopoe, like Tereus a part of the growing chorus. These birds are likened to politicians, or members of the audience, mocked for their unsavory habits. And at last a whole group of birds has assembled. Euelpides, companion of the central character, Peisetairos, compares them to a swarm, a cloud, tou nephous (295), which for us recalls the chorus of another Aristophanes comedy, named for that chorus, the Clouds, the play that ridicules Socrates and the Sophists.
The two human characters point out each bird as it arrives, and then, after noticing an owl, totemic bird of the city of Athens, Athena’s bird, Euelpides utters a long list of eighteen different species, from “jay” to “woodpecker” (303–4). They dance, as Peisetairos marvels at them, wondering if they are threatening (shades of Hitchcock), and repeats as a sort of chant the word iou, iou, translated by Henderson as “Whooee,” “Whooee.”
The birds themselves first pronounce at line 310, with a sort of stuttering, noise-like sound, “popopopopopo,” the avian preface to the Greek word pou, “where?” The chorus of many, varied species speaks as one here, referring to itself as “me”: “Where’s the one who called me?” The sliding between plural and singular in the utterances of the chorus points to the flexible indifferentiation of this group, an equality, a unity, each one a synecdochic part for the whole, indicative in some sense of the isonomia, the “equality” of democratic ideology. One of the beauties of this chorus is the way in which it permits individuation of the different species, while embodying at the same time the wholeness of the whole.
The members of the chorus of the Birds, according to Gwendolyn Compton-Engle, were variously garbed: “One of the stunning features of Birds is the unparalleled proliferation of animal costumes throughout the play. Each member of the twenty-four-person chorus is differentiated as a specific bird; four other mute bird-costumed characters precede the appearance of the chorus; the aulos player is represented by a bird-costumed nightingale.”51 In some sense this translation of democratic existence into the avian world recalls the famous speech of Pericles recounted by Thucydides in his history of the latter part of the fifth century BCE, an oration that celebrates the Athenian way of life, the democracy that engages men in public life, but tolerates individuality in their private existence. Democracy and the ideology of equality, in representation, do not entail the erasure of difference, but rather allow for privacy, and the inclusion of difference within a whole committed to the embrace of all its members. The birds of this chorus make up such a community.
The chorus stutters birdily as it addresses Tereus, asking him what message he has for them, “me, his friend” (philon), again speaking of the collective as one. And he says that it concerns their koinon, their “common” thing, their community. The chorus leader speaks on behalf of this communal body, or swarm, in the dialogue that follows, expressing dismay at Tereus’s admission of the two foreigners, human beings, into their space. The chorus is outraged, and collectively laments, “ea, ea,” speaking of impiety and defilement. They complain, as birds, of having been entrapped by this foreign species that has always been their enemy, and the chorus leader suggests in a violent threat that the human interlopers be dismembered. One of the human interlopers, Euelpides, the hapless sidekick of the inventive and resourceful Peisetairos, points to the audience and wishes he were back among them. Here is another line of flight, a line of escape by which the performance of the play connects with the other multiplicity that is the audience, the city outside the theater, the countryside outside the city.
The chorus moves to assault these strangers, again using a wordless cry to rally the group: “io, io.” Assembled like an army against an enemy, they call for an attack and are confident of victory, since the human beings have nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. The language they use to describe their plans resembles that of the chorus of wasps but is consistent with bird powers, bird bodies: they will surround the enemy with wings, pluck and peck them, level out their beaks, skin them alive. Henderson brilliantly translates the birds’ reasoning: “[These men] were enemies of our very forefeathers” (374). Tereus advocates patience, caution, a willingness to learn from enemies. And as the murderous assault abates, Peisetairos observes that the birds seem to be calming and letting go of their rage.
The furious defense recedes, and the birds agree to listen to the human beings’ reasons for calling them together. The comedy continues to remind us that these creatures are—birds. They begin to listen, “all aflutter,” anepteromai (433), a verb in the first-person singular, “I’m on the wing,” using the root pteron, “feather,” to suggest a state of avian excitement. The birds solemnly promise not to attack again, as Peisetairos fears. He explains to the assembled company of many species that they once were “kings,” basileis (467), ruling over all that exists, including the great god Zeus, including Earth, Ge, herself. They express amazement, as Peisetairos continues his exposition of the history of the universe, citing Aesop as a source for his version of these matters. One of the fables describes the lark (korudos), first of all the birds to be born, even before the earth; when her father died there was no place in which to bury him, so she placed him in her own “head” (kephale, also the name of a part of Attica that contained a cemetery). So if the birds came first, before Ge herself, first in Hesiod’s almost canonical Theogony, then they should rule. Other evidence is adduced, to prove that the rooster, the cock, ruled over the Persians, still commanding attention as he announces the beginning of the workday. The kite ruled over the Greeks, the cuckoo reigned in Egypt and Phoenicia, and if a human being were to serve as ruler, his scepter was adorned with a bird. Portrayals of Zeus show the god with an eagle atop his head, Athena appears with an owl, Apollo with a hawk. The birds could grab the best parts of the sacrifice before the gods could make their move. Furthermore, human beings swear by the birds. Therefore it is wrong that, in the present, human beings disrespect them, throw rocks at them, set traps for them and sell them, roast them and serve them with hot sauces.
The birds understandably react with dismay to this catalogue of lost power and present torment, and surrender themselves to the scheme of Peisetairos, as their savior. He tells them to build a city (polis), and to construct a wall around it that fills up all the space between the sky and the earth. Then they can reclaim sovereignty from Zeus, refuse passage to the gods who want to descend to earth with their erections, to have sex with the many human women of legend who in the past submitted to the gods and bore them children, women such as Semele, impregnated by Zeus to become mother of the god Dionysos. Human beings will henceforth have to sacrifice not to the gods, but first to the birds, with appropriate offerings for each kind.
The chorus expresses doubt concerning how the human beings would believe they are gods: “We fly around and wear wings” (573). Peisetairos points out that many of the gods, among them Hermes, Nike, Eros, Iris, themselves have wings; and in addition, if the human beings resist, the birds can send a cloud of sparrows to eat all the seeds in their fields, leaving them with no crops to harvest. The ravens can peck out the eyes of their oxen and sheep. If they do accept the birds as their gods, then good things will rain down on the human community, pests won’t interfere with their farming, the swarm of locusts will be contained, and augury with birds will promise prosperity. The birds will show them where hoards of wealth have been buried, and add centuries to their lifetimes. The birds won’t need temples or shrines or sanctuaries; human beings can worship them by throwing a few grains of wheat, standing in the fields.
These compelling promises persuade the chorus. Tereus and Peisetairos discuss details, Tereus claiming that if his new ally chews a certain root, he will grow wings like a bird’s. The chorus requests the presence of Procne the nightingale, implicated in Tereus’s dark past; they make various obscene comments about how they would like to interfere with her, as she appears dressed as a pipe player. As Henderson translates, the chorus says: “We’d like to play with her” (660). Left alone with Procne on stage, the chorus sings her praises, and asks her to lead them in their “anapests,” referring to the meter and rhythm of their dance. In the long song that follows, the chorus leader gives a comical account of the creation that rivals the semicanonical version of Hesiod’s weighty Theogony. He begins as Hesiod does, with Chaos, Night, black Erebos and Tartaros. But he says, there was no Ge, Earth, no Aer, Air, no Ouranos, Sky. Instead, black-winged Night gave birth to a “wind egg,” hupenemion oon (695). From this egg came Eros, who had golden wings, mated with winged Chaos, and hatched the “kind,” the genos, of birds.
The rest of creation followed, including the genos of immortals, Sky, Ocean, Earth, and the others. Therefore, obviously, the birds are the eldest, and preceded the gods in existence, as the offspring of winged Eros: “We fly, and we keep company with lovers” (704). Boys, frequent objects of male desire in this society, give in to lovers, who “get between their thighs” because their lovers offer them love-gifts of birds. Such gift-giving appears on vases from the classical period, showing an older man, the lover, erastes, offering a cock, for example, to a boy, the eromenos, the “beloved.” The birds, in this case, form part of the courtship rituals of the institution of pederasty in the ancient city. And although Aristophanes has been seen by some as homophobic, as deploring same-sex eros, eros between male persons, in fact the plays often mention man-boy love without condemning it, reserving disapproval for adult men whom comedy seems to regard as feminized, adults like Agathon, the playwright who appears in the Frogs. Characters and chorus mock grown men who adopt effeminate ways, or who are in the position of being penetrated in intercourse, seen to resemble women, or boys. But the chorus accepts without questioning the desire of adolescent or adult men for boys, as it does here in the birds’ boast that they are on the side of lovers, that they enable courtship and amorous contact between male partners.
The chorus leader continues with his list of the benefits birds bring to humankind. They indicate the seasons of the year, helping farmers and sailors manage the changes in weather; they aid in divination. The Greeks engaged in ornithomancy, prophecy using bird flight, bird calls. In the Homeric poems, struggles between eagles prophesy conflict between the heroes Agamemnon and Achilles, for example. In the Odyssey, three times, an eagle appears, and flies to its right with a dead dove in its claws, this a prophecy interpreted as the return of Odysseus to his home and family, and as the killing and elimination of the suitors of his wife, Penelope. The chorus leader summarizes the benefits of bird sovereignty: “If you treat us as gods you’ll have the benefit of prophets, muses, breezes, seasons” (723–26). And, they add, Zeus is far away in the clouds, but the birds on the other hand are present always among human beings, bringing them the good life——“wealthiness, happiness, prosperity, peace, youth hilarity, dances, festivities, and birds’ milk”! (731–34). This is communal luxury, as Kristin Ross calls it.52 And the chorus chimes in with their bird song: tiotiotiotiotinx (741), the wordless music for dancing and inaugurating a new regime of plenty for all. They sing sacred songs for Pan, for Cybele, tototototototototototinx! (747), and recall the tragic poet Phrynichus, whom they liken to a bee; he drank the fruit of ambrosial songs, bringing sweet song, which they echo: tiotiotiotiotinx! (752). The pipers play the tune, the birds dance and sing.
The chorus retains the center of the stage and the action, as the comedy moves on, and the chorus leader addresses the audience directly, promising them a different life if they interweave their lives with the world of the birds. All that is shameful (aiskhra) there, in the world of the spectators, for those ruled by nomos, “law” or “custom,” are the opposite, kala, “good, beautiful,” among the birds. This is a world upside down, a utopia, or a dystopia. You can hit your father, and what is more, in an interesting challenge to what is usually assumed to be an unquestioned acceptance of the institution of slavery in this society, “if you happen to be a runaway slave with a branded forehead, with us you’ll be called a dappled francolin; if you happen to be no less a Phrygian than Spintharus, up there you’ll be a pigeon of Philemon’s breed; if you’re a slave and a Carian like Execestides, join us and generate some forefeathers” (760–65). Some of these remarks engage in the invective typical of comic allusions to members of the audience: Spintharus is a Phrygian name, Phrygia in Asia Minor the source of many Athenian slaves. But as Henderson points out in a note, “The Spintharus teased here for foreign ancestry may be the father of the fourth-century stateman Eubulus.”53 Having slave ancestors could disqualify one from citizenship; lawsuits were brought concerning ancestry, against people accused of passing as descendants of the autochthonous Athenians.
According to a source difficult to place historically, the great opponent of Aristophanes, the so-called demagogue Cleon, had accused him in a lawsuit of being of foreign birth: “Cleon could call him a foreigner (xenon) inasmuch as some say he was a Rhodian from Lindos, some say an Aeginetan.”54 Passing as an Athenian citizen when one’s parents were not Athenian was a crime. According to this source, Aristophanes supposedly defended himself by quoting Telemachus, son of Penelope in the Odyssey, who reminded his audience that no one could know who impregnated one’s mother. In another passage the source says: “Some record that he [Aristophanes] was of servile birth (apo doulon),” literally, “from slaves.”55 This was considered a terrible slur, used at times in lawsuits to discredit opponents by denying them any citizen rights. For the chorus to suggest, in these various ways, that slaves, the dappled francolin resembling the tattooed slave, that descendants of slaves could participate in the new city, was a radical proposition.56 We can conclude that such a policy was hilarious because of its very impossibility, as disgraceful as freely beating one’s father, or that the chorus was provocatively floating a challenge to the deeply embedded institution of slavery.
This play deploys myriad possibilities, or impossibilities. These comedies, the many plays of Athenian Old Comedy, both utopian and not, continuously speculate about how members of this community might relate to one another and to their environment, in the city including the citizens themselves, non-Athenians resident in the city, foreign visitors, slaves, and animals, even the material objects that surround them.57 Envisioning new forms of relation, as the dramas proceed, suggests the insights of what has been called the “new materialism,” work that reimagines matter, its fluidity, its reconfigurability, no longer bound to the fixed categories that limit and privilege the status of human beings,58 and that points toward the coexistence of species, the interweaving of kinds of beings, brought to the fore in contemporary theory by such thinkers as Mark Payne and Donna Haraway.59 This is a “line of flight,” away from the bounds of fixed categories.
This chorus is a swarm of birds. It reimagines human beings’ relationship with these creatures, with sound and music, with slaves and foreigners, as we have seen from the passage discussed above. And perhaps the radical nature of these imaginings has been neglected, with scholarly focus on the civic politics of the man Aristophanes, his satire of leading politicians and such matters. The web of references, the moving, singing bodies on stage, the address to the crowd, invocation of gods and assault on individuals, all of this is a protean, responsive, adaptable intervention into the politics and social relations of the city, and a model for a system that tests and moves forward in part through responding to the reception of its suggestive, ironic, contradictory impulses by the audience and by the judges of the city’s festivals.
The chorus of birds continues to participate vigorously in the action of the play, and also to offer a space outside the interactions of the characters to exhibit their noisy, musical selves. The singers recall the swans that “raise[d] a harmonious whoop for Apollo” (769–72), repeating their wordless call, “tiotiotiotiotinx!,” and claiming that the Graces and Muses, those entities embodying the arts, replied in song. As cited earlier, the leader implicitly critiques the possible boredom induced in the spectators by tragic performance, addressing the crowd and celebrating the joys of having wings. In the complex interrelationship between tragedy and comedy, this chorus, or chorus leader, competitively names the possible boredom experienced by those witnessing tragedy, and the greater pleasure afforded to the audiences of comedy, which followed the tragic performances on the festival days. The playwright relies on a profound knowledge of tragedy, echoing it, mocking it, deploying it especially in a play like the Frogs, discussed more fully earlier. But here he allows at least one voice in the spectacle that is comedy to express a preference for the comic spirit, and a rejection of the potential ennui tragedy can impose. Further advantages accrue to being a bird, equipped with wings, according to the chorus leader: needing to shit, one could fly away, fart and return; the adulterer can leave his seat in the amphitheater, having spotted his lover’s husband in the reserved seats, fly to her home and fuck her, and return with no one the wiser. Wings are a great benefit, not only for collective action, but also for the transgressive individual.
What follows in the Birds is a series of exchanges between the chorus leader, who speaks as a character for the chorus as a whole, and the named characters Peisetairos and Euelpides. They concur on a name for their city: Nephelokokkugian, traditionally translated as “Cloudcuckooland.” The made-up, portmanteau word incorporates the notion of the swarm, of the cloud, nephelo-, and the word kokku, used to describe a bird’s cry, “cuckoo” in English, the name of a bird as well, the cuckoo, used in Greek also to refer to a rooster, a cock. The sound echoes the birds’ wordless song of the earlier choral passages, and establishes the new city as a cloudy, bird-song-filled polity. The chorus leader allusively likens it to Athens herself, calling it liparon, “gleaming,” using an epithet often deployed to celebrate the actual city’s magnificent marble edifices, the Parthenon shining on the Acropolis. But instead of the goddess Athena, matron of Athens, the city will be protected by the “Persian” bird, the cock, bird of Ares, god of war (835).
Peisetairos urges Euelpides to help with the construction of a wall between the earth and the heavens, at the midpoint of the sky; he plans to sacrifice to the new gods, the bird-gods, and a raven appears, dressed as a piper, to accompany the sacrificial ritual, as the participants address the gods, who are given new names. Apollo becomes “the Pythian and Delian swan,” referring to the sites of Delphi and Delos sacred to the god. All the birds are invited, and Peisetairos objects that the tiny goat, victim of the sacrifice, can hardly feed all the predatory birds that arrive to take part in the festive meal. Suddenly new characters appear on the scene, annoying beings from the land below, first a poet, “frigid,” with slavishly long hair. Peisetairos chases him off with the help of some slaves, and an interpreter of oracles follows, also repelled. Then comes a famed astronomer, Meton, who seeks to measure the air and mark it up into parcels; the citizens of Cloudcuckooland want to cast out all foreigners, even beat them, and Meton makes a hasty retreat. All the annoying stock characters of the polis show up in the new city, including an “overseer,” someone sent from Athens to inspect and command the subject cities of the Athenian Empire. He runs away after encountering the fist of Peisetairos, who also chases off a seller of decrees.
And suddenly the chorus sings again, a lengthy song claiming the praise the birds deserve from mortals. They keep the fields and orchards safe from pests, they attack the creatures that harm human beings’ agriculture. The chorus leader then puts a bounty on a seller of finches, of thrushes, of blackbirds and pigeons. Any person who keeps birds in a cage must let them go. The birds respond with a chorus that celebrates the joys of avian life:
Happy the race (phulon) of feathered
birds, who in the winter
need wear no woolen cloaks;
nor in summer’s stifling heat
do the long rays roast us.
For I dwell among the flora
in the lap of flowery meadows,
when the sun-crazy cicada with voice divine
in the noonday heat intones his keen song.
(1088–96)
The birds lead a life of pleasure, living among the flowers, serenaded by the benign insects. The cicadas, singing like birds, are a special case of insect swarm, discussed more fully in chapter 2; as noted there, they are likened to the old-fashioned population of Attica, who wore golden cicadas as ornaments; they are compared to the elderly in Homer’s Iliad; they are said by Plato to be favored by the Muses; the voice of the beautiful Tithonos, lover of the goddess Aphrodite, becomes cicada-like as he ages eternally, according to the singer of the Homeric Hymn to that goddess, according to Sappho. The birds’ cicadas serenade their avian companions with a benign, divinely ordained blessing.
The birds’ song continues, celebrating the pleasures of their life guided by the seasons:
I winter in hollow caverns,
frolicking with mountain nymphs;
and in spring we graze on myrtle berries,
maidenly in their white florets,
and the fruits of the Graces’ garden.
(1097–1101)
The birds’ singing moves from a description of their kind in the third person, to a first-person “I,” to a “we,” the first-person plural that marks the collectivity of single beings that make up a chorus. These birds inhabit the world of plants and other insects, of divine creatures, nymphs and Graces, following the rhythm of change, from winter to summer to winter to spring, safe from harm in their bird feathers, in a cyclical, circular temporality, in harmony with other beings, plant, insect, immortal. The chorus of birds thinks, acts, dances as birds, lives in the world of the performance from the perspective of birds.
The choral parabasis follows their song about the joys of bird life. The parabasis, in the voice of the chorus leader, frequently addresses the audience directly, calls out individual members for ridicule and mockery, and has been interpreted often as the voice of the poet himself, presenting political opinions as well as requesting favor from the audience and judges, their positive reactions to the play guaranteeing its author a prize in the dramatic competition. In this case, remaining true to his nature as a bird, the chorus leader asks for the judges’ vote in favor of the play, and promises them swarms of owls, a metonymy for the coins of Athens, since the silver from the city’s mines at Laurion bore the image of the bird, companion of Athena, who appeared on one side. She is the glaukopis one, “with gleaming eyes.” The word glaux means a gleaming-eyed, glaring-eyed little owl, often used as an emblem for Athena, a sort of totemic animal, a bird representing the matron goddess of the city itself. So the chorus leader asks for owls, asks for the famous silver coins associated with his city’s goddess: “They will never run out on you, no, they’ll move into your house, and nest in your wallets, and hatch out small change” (1105–8). Owls don’t migrate, they’ll remain in the city, and keep on breeding. Other avian treats are promised to the judges—gifts associated with eagles, with a falcon—and if the judges don’t come through with the vote in favor of the Birds, the birds will shit on their white garments. This parabasis does not insult members of the audience, nor does it propose specific political solutions to the problems of the day, as do other comedies; it remains embedded in the utopian project of bird domination even as it calls out the judges seated before the performers in the first rows of the theaters.
Birds from all over appear, from Libya, geese, herons, ducks, swallows, woodpeckers, all contributing to the construction of the city. Guardian birds attempt to protect their fortress, but the gods send their messenger, the winged goddess Iris, to complain. The chorus has little role to play in the exchange between the birdlike emissary, and the character Peisetairos, merely alerting him to the possibility of other divinities arriving to object to the birds’ construction, which is blocking the sacrificial burnt offerings human beings extend to the gods. Peisetairos threatens the gods with bird retaliation, and the goddess Iris herself with rape (1255). She departs.
In Smell and the Ancient Senses, Ashley Clements clarifies the ways in which the scent of sacrifices nourished and placated the gods in the heavens: “In the concretizing world of Greek Comedy . . . knise (or knisa) [the burnt fat and its fragrance] is made into a sign of imminent feasting for men, and a food source for gods. . . . Old Comedy had unambiguously “carnalized” the gods into beings that do not simply enjoy, but rather, depend upon the smells of sacrifice for their sustenance.”60 The birds’ new city, new fortress, in midair, has deprived the gods of deference, offerings, and sustenance, and the chorus relishes its power:
We have barred the gods sprung from Zeus
from any further passage through my city (ten emen polin),
and no more shall any mortal on a single killing floor
send savory smoke to the gods by this route.
(1264–67)
Here the chorus speaks as a single entity, gliding from the first-person plural verb, “we,” to the possessive adjective, “my.” The old Olympian gods have been thwarted, and the chorus, oscillating between plural and singular, gloats.
Emissaries from human beings below then appear again, trying to placate the birds, and to persuade Peisetairos that human beings are now enamored of the birds, and imitate them in every way, even taking on bird names. “From sheer ornithophilia they’re all singing songs with a swallow in the lyrics” (1300). As the herald leaves the scene, Peisetairos addresses someone with a slave name, “Manes,” ordering him to bring him wings. Et in Arcadia servi. While the chorus celebrates the settlement they have created, with the verb metoikein, used for moving house, but also the root of the noun metoikos, “alien resident,” “metic,” their utopia still includes the presence of the enslaved Manes, who is verbally abused by Peisetairos and the chorus members.61 He is as slow as a donkey, deilos, objectively “vile,” subjectively “wretched” (1329). The chorus seeks to arrange the wings that have been brought by the slave, sorting them into “musical, prophetic and maritime,” and then they assault Manes, wing-less, for his slowness, as he scuttles away. The call to all birds to join them, which included an invitation to the tattooed francolin, does not protect this human slave from ridicule, from being the butt of humor.
Unwelcome types from the world below, characters despised by Aristophanes, apparently, in the city, arrive to beg for residence in the new world of Cloudcuckooland. A “father-beater” shows up, and is sent off to fight in Thrace. Kinesias, a composer of dithyrambs, part of another despised group, wishes to become a nightingale, has no desire to perform as director for a chorus of flying birds, a position beneath his dignity, and he too leaves the new settlement. A “sycophant,” an informer, appears on stage; he is exposed and flees. Peisetairos gathers up his silent slaves, and leaves the stage, as the chorus sings of the greater perspective flight gives them over human beings. They name the notorious, treelike, “voluminous and yellow” Cleonymos, frequently ridiculed for his effeminacy. The divine culture-bringer, advocate of humankind Prometheus appears, speaking under an umbrella so the god Zeus above can’t see him from the heavens, and explains that Zeus is finished: “Since you colonized the air. Now not a single human sacrifice to the gods any more, and . . . not a whiff (knisa) of thigh bones” (1515–18). Prometheus uses the conventional term for the founding of a colony, oikisate, for the building of this new city in midair.62 The “barbarian” gods are protesting as well. Prometheus urges a treaty, with the provisions that Zeus give his scepter back to the birds, and Basileia, “Queen,” or “Princess,” whose name in a slightly different form means “sovereignty,” to Peisetairos as his wife.
Poseidon and Heracles arrive, accompanied by the barbarian god of the Triballians, Thracian allies of the Athenians, whom Poseidon proceeds to insult, implicating democracy in the gods’ choice of ambassador: “Ah democracy, what will you bring us to in the end, if the gods can elect this person ambassador?” (1570–71). The assembly of the Olympian gods, usually seen as a monarchy with Zeus as the first among equals, is intriguingly seen to make up a democracy like that of the Athenians. Peisetairos returns, making preparations to devour some rebel birds who are attempting a revolution against the bird “people,” the demos, the populace of the birds, tois demotikoisin orneois (1584). Are these rebellious birds seeking to resist the tyrannical hegemony of Peisetairos, reactionaries revolting against bird-led democracy, or the inevitable appearance of opposition in the Greek cities vulnerable to stasis, to civil war? In any case, they are set for devouring. The always hungry Heracles wants to join the feast, and eagerly urges a settlement between his fellow divinities and the birds. The other members of the embassy are persuaded eventually, Peisetairos using legal arguments concerning inheritance to convince Heracles of the plan. The butchered bird flesh will serve as the wedding feast for Peisetairos and his bride, in a sinister reversion. Are these the eggs that must be broken to make the omelet? Is civil war, bird against bird, inevitable and necessary, like money, like slaves? The utopian moment flashes up, but the polyphony and tensions of the city persist.
The chorus exults in the excising of tongues, typical of sacrifice but here aimed at various proto-philosophical, sophistic, rhetorical types, “the Gorgiases,” et al. A herald congratulates the birds as a genos, a tribe, a “race,” “thrice-blessed and winged.” But he calls Peisetairos a tyrannos, a “[usurping] monarch,” as this central character enters with his beautiful consort, his queen, carrying Zeus’s thunderbolt. Democracy has vanished, as the winged Athenian, leader of the birds, has become their ruler, devouring members of the polity of the birds. The political structure of Cloudcuckooland, like that of Olympus, has oscillated, reverting from democracy to monarchy or tyranny.
Nevertheless, the chorus has the last words, leading the triumphal procession of the new ruler, and singing and dancing as they call for celebration, invoking “Hymen Hymenaios,” god of marriage, with the traditional formula of the epithalamion, the “wedding song.” They recall golden-winged Eros, who presided over the marriage of Zeus and his wife and sister, Hera. They call for celebration of Zeus, his thunder, his lightning, his thunderbolt, and ally the bridegroom Peisetairos with the great god:
With you this man now shakes the earth,
new master of Zeus’ estate
and of Princess, attendant of Zeus’ throne.
Hymen Hymenaeus!
(1752–54)
Zeus cannot be neglected, yet the position of Peisetairos is somewhat ambiguous; has he displaced the great god, appropriating his queen, or is he merely allied with the great power of the universe through this connection? The chorus urges all the birds, in their phula, their “tribes, or kinds,” to accompany the wedding party to Zeus’s ground, and to the marriage bed. Is Peisetairos to cuckold the king of the gods, is he, through the treaty reached with the embassy of god ambassadors, the new ruler of Zeus’s house? This possible sacrilege is greeted with hilarity and rejoicing, as Peisetairos swings his bride in the dance, and the chorus follows them offstage, singing:
Hip hip hooray! Hail Paeon!
Hail your success, you
highest of divinities.
(1763–65)
Marriage and festivity mark the end of comedy for centuries to come. Here there is a political as well as a utopian turn to the departure from the stage of the character and the chorus of brilliantly costumed birds. The highly varied collective of birds has enabled a coup d’état in heaven, even though their human advocate has been established as the new tyrannos, ruler in Zeus’s place. Briefly, ephemerally, he set up a new kind of community, one that repelled the negative elements of the Athenian world, and that welcomed the great variety of different beings exemplified in the democratic chorus of birds.63
If we see the chorus not as supplementary, not as an additive to the plot, but as an operatic alternative, another mode of communicating, anonymously, collectively, democratically, if we look to this comedy as a whole, then the celebration of Peisetairos’s assumption of tyranny, his wedding to Princess, or Queen, constitutes not a continuous flow with these activities in the play, but rather a rupture. The birds in the chorus, a swarm, are volatile, change their minds as a group, fear and comply in equal measure, but their sustained obedience to a tyrant seems at best highly unlikely, their rebellion imminent. They are individualized in their different bird natures, in their bird costumes, and resistant to Peisetairos’s ideas at first, reluctantly fall in with his plan, and then execute the construction of their new city because of the benefits they will receive. His assumption of tyranny seems to violate the principles in the name of which they have become a utopian site for all birds everywhere; the “hero” is winged, but not a bird. It may seem strange to resort to Althusser’s formulation considering a nineteenth-century tragedy for thinking about the structure of ancient comedy, but to repeat his words on Bertolazzi’s Il Milan Nost, in the Piccolo Teatro’s production,
Nowhere can it [the structure] be perceived directly in the play as can the visible characters or the course of the action. But it is there, in the tacit relation between the people’s time and the time of the tragedy, in their mutual imbalance, in their incessant “interference” and finally in their true and delusive criticism. It is this revealing latent relation, this apparently insignificant and yet decisive tension that Strehler’s production enables the audience to perceive without their being able to translate this presence directly into clearly conscious terms.64
The very composition of the comic chorus, its variety, the eternal, cyclical quality of avian life, following the seasons, not individuated, with the birds named by kind, not by individual names, even for the chorus leader, lends them a different sort of temporality from the linear plot of the Birds.
My point is that the structure of the play itself, the alternation between chorus and characters, must be taken into account, the chorus not seen as background, but rather as another reality, often pastoral and more utopian than the scheme to displace the Olympian gods voiced by the “hero.” The community of birds represents a variegated unity set against the plot, the actions of the named characters.65 The birds’ capacity to differ from one another, to dance, to sing, to evoke the joys of their existence in songs of remarkable beauty, always consistent with their avian perspective on existence, must be seen and heard as texturally, radically different from the course of events in the comedy, and read by us as an alternative to human ambition and striving.
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro discusses the “multinaturalism” of indigenous American peoples, in ways that illuminate a point of view different from our own: “Cultural relativism, which is a multiculturalism, presumes a diversity of partial, subjective representations bearing on an external nature, unitary and whole, that itself is indifferent to representation. Amerindians propose the inverse: on the one hand, a purely pronominal representative unity—the human is what and whoever occupies the position of the cosmological subject; every existent can be thought of as thinking (it exists, therefore it thinks), as “activated” or “agencied” by a point of view—and, on the other, a real or objective radical diversity.”66 Perspectivism, he argues, is a multinaturalism. Birds will be birds. The resolution of the linear plot of the Birds, with Peisetairos’s wedding celebration, is one kind of ending, but the world of the birds goes on, will go on, bird by bird.
The Birds is one of comedy’s great utopian exercises. The escape from Athens, the discovery of a space between heaven and earth, the persuasion of the birds and the construction of Cloudcuckooland, all establish an elsewhere. Is it a double utopia, one with two radically different political solutions? The birds constitute a democratic entity, individuals acting in concert; Peisetairos ends as a tyrant, a monarch allied with his mate, replacing the Olympian god to rule over the cosmos. Either one, or both, seem utopian when posed against the realities of Athenian everyday life, which erupts onto the scene in the form of sycophants, oraclemongers, dithyrambic poets, father-beaters, and other menaces expelled from the ideal space of the birds’ fortress. Less nostalgic than the chorus of wasps in the play called after that swarm, the birds revel in the pastoral pleasures of the countryside, singing gracefully even as they insist on their powers of destruction or vengeance on those who do not honor their omnipresence and the gifts they can bring, if they choose, to humankind.
Mark Payne’s discussion of the Birds in his brilliant book The Animal Part illuminates the role of imagination and natural wonder in the utopian fantasy of Aristophanes. He links the Birds to other Old Comedies, now lost: “Plays like Goats, Wild Animals, and Fish stage heterotopian encounters between human beings and other animals in which these animals voice their own understanding of their lives and the ways in which they have been hijacked by the human culture that makes use of them for food and labor.”67 He locates the Birds within this “subgenre.”
Payne’s illuminating reflections on Old Comedy, in light of his concerns with animals, tend to support my argument that the birds’ expressions of delight in their own life establish an alternative reality, in a swarming chorus that has its own being irreducible to the plot of the play, which ends with Peisetairos’s domination: “The birds of Birds are not merely ciphers for human behavior, as the wasps of Wasps stand for the unrelenting quarrelsomeness of old men addicted to the law courts. They are present as birds in the earlier parts of the play, with their own forms of social organization, and this vision of zoological sociality continues to encompass and interrogate the human society that takes center stage at the end.”68 Peisetairos the near cannibal stands apart. Payne’s work urges the possibilities for human self-understanding, sparked by the encounter between, among, species.
Thousands of modern performances of ancient Greek drama have taken place, but these are usually interpretations of tragedies.69 Comedies are the exception. Unusually, along with the Lysistrata, presented in concert with feminist militancy and pacifism in times of war, the Birds has also been performed in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In an essay on performance, Gonda Van Steen gives a fascinating account of the fate of the director Karolos Koun’s production of the Birds in twentieth-century Greece. Others in modern Greece had promulgated performance of ancient theater, especially tragedy, as part of a patriotic effort sponsored by “pro-western, anticommunist, right-wing national governments,” reinforced by the religious powers, and had dismissed or even banned Aristophanes’ plays, on the grounds that they lacked decorum, or were notoriously immoral.70 Koun and his Art Theatre produced Aristophanes’ Birds in 1959, in the Herodeion at the foot of the Acropolis in Athens, and scandalized the audience. In the scene in which Peisetairos summons a priest to sacrifice a goat to the gods, Van Steen relates: “Quite unexpectedly, the actor who played the role of the priest, dressed in the robe of a modern clergyman, began chanting in the familiar notes of Byzantine ecclesiastical music, but without altering the content of Aristophanes’ original mock prayer to the Olympian gods” (160). On the following day, a leading politician banned the subsequent performances of the Birds as “anticlerical.” The outrage of the conservatives was based in part on the “boldly anti-government and anti-American translation” (160) of the play by Vasilis Rotas, a communist activist.
This performance had a profound impact on Greek cultural politics. As Van Steen notes: “Through the 1959 incident, Aristophanes himself became a powerful, stirring symbol of the resilient vitality and stubborn struggle for freedom of the suppressed Left” (163), which had been defeated in the Greek civil war following World War II. Aristophanes had become “Aristero-phanes,” literally, “the one who reveals himself as leftist” (163). Although a revised version of the Birds production won international prizes, the military dictatorship of Greece (1967–74) ordered the theater company back from travel and forbade presentation of the comedy. Van Steen writes: “The comeback of the free Birds production [in 1975], which symbolized regained freedom of speech and fully restored democratic rights, dramatically relegated the junta era to the past” (169). In the opening scene of the Art Theatre’s 1975 revival, Peisetairos and his sidekick Euelpides announced that they went looking for a “land without juntas.” The scene with the priest and his parody of Orthodox liturgy was by far the most successful, and it became obligatory for this and other Greek productions of Birds (171). Van Steen regards the subsequent ossification of performances of the Birds as somewhat regrettable, yet the revolutionary, resistant, even communist associations of Aristophanes persist in the Republic of Greece.
The comedy has had similar reception in other parts of the world. As Betine van Zyl Smit describes them, performances of the Birds had political connotations in apartheid South Africa, a 1980 production by the University of Cape Town’s Drama Department exciting a strong reaction. One apartheid-friendly critic, cited by van Zyl Smit, objected in no uncertain terms: “By using Afrikaans accents and mannerisms for the gods’ delegation who come to negotiate with the birds, the play is clearly being used as an allegory for a similar usurpation of power which could arise in this country. But it is a powerless allegory, trite in its statement, and scarcely justifying the banalities used for its implementation.”71 Other South African productions of the play used its content to offer mockery of the apartheid prime minister B. J. Vorster, and deployed the colors of the African National Congress in the flag of Cloudcuckooland (237). Van Zyl Smit also lists a production of the Birds in the Zulu language, in which the author, Themi Gwala, “used the Aristophanic concept of creating a better society (in this case an enslaved people liberating themselves from enslavement by finding a better world) for his play called Izinyomi, which is the Zulu word for ‘birds’” (240). Van Zyl Smit also notes that although at the time of writing, there were fourteen Afrikaans translations of Greek tragedies, only two of Aristophanes’ comedies had been translated into that language.
Francesca Schironi describes a notorious incident in Italy, before a presentation of the Frogs in the ancient city of Siracusa in Sicily, in which the planned theater set included caricatures of leading politicians, including Silvio Berlusconi, Gianfranco Fini, and Umberto Bossi, all right-wing leaders. These were removed before the first performance after widespread objections.72 In Britain, at a National Theatre’s production of the Birds, anti-Americanism caused a walkout: “The wedding of Pez [the Peisetairos character] and Sovereignty was an extended dumbshow in which money rained from the ceiling. Sovereignty herself was the Statue of Liberty. It was probably just as well, at the first performance, that the two rows of American visitors had walked out at the interval.”73 The power of ancient comic productions to stimulate controversy and dissension, to produce outrage and censorship, has continued.
Some theater professionals, committed not only to inclusion of diverse actors in their performances, see the chorus as crucial to ancient comedy’s impact. Martina Treu describes the work of the Italian director Marco Martinelli, who worked with young people in schools in Scampia and Naples in rewriting Aristophanes’ Peace: “In the show the youngsters sing, dance, and move as one entity: a real comic chorus.”74 Martinelli also included references to immigrants and their suffering in a play called All’inferno, which featured immigrants from Senegal who travel to the underworld to look for “Wealth,” and were enslaved in a hell that resembled northern Italy.75 Treu is exceptional in emphasizing the crucial participation of the chorus of citizens in the plays of Aristophanes, and in discovering in the work of Italian directors and producers of theater a commitment to the collective, multifarious voices represented in the chorus.
Utopianism, even comic utopianism, survives in the present. See, for example, Bill McKibben’s Radio Free Vermont: A Fable of Resistance, published in 2017. In this fable, “terrorists,” that is, people who want to live sanely in an insane world, begin to foment a plot for the secession of the state of Vermont from the United States. As the author remarks in a concluding note, “An advantage to writing a fable is that you get to append a moral to the end. In this case it’s not ‘We should all secede.’ Instead, it’s that when confronted by small men doing big and stupid things, we need to resist with all the creativity and wit we can muster.”76 He points out that there have been previous attempts to persuade the citizens of Vermont to secede from the United States; these efforts echo the fantasy of escape from Athens of Peisetairos and his fellow birds.
If utopias tell us more about the undesirable, undesired limitations of the present in which they are generated, as Fredric Jameson argues, then the Birds might be seen to express a yearning for a rural life, for a mutuality, a reciprocity among species, for a democracy that can include a runaway slave, or, alternatively, a life of plenty and comfort and peace watched over by a benevolent dictator. As with the other utopian comedies, such as Lysistrata, Women at the Assembly, Women at the Thesmophoria, attention to the chorus of the Birds as an alternative set of voices, replete with lines of flight, not smoothly integrated into a “plot,” a muthos, not consistent or even principally engaged with the play’s characters, but establishing another reality, enriches the comic spectacle. There can be a sort of “jamming” of message, a disruption of “authorship” and of “character” that make these plays a rough and unfamiliar sort of object for readers and/or spectators accustomed to a very different sort of theater, one descended from the Aristotle of the Poetics on tragedy. The utopian impulses in the Birds, exemplified most fully in the colorful, various, wildly differentiated members of its chorus and their songs, speak to modernity and postmodernity, to a climate that demands not just mockery and laughter, but also an elsewhere defined by pastoral, eternal, paradisiac community.