Greek Notions of the Past in the Archaic and Classical Eras

OLD COMEDY AND POPULAR HISTORY

Since antiquity fifth-century topical comedies have been combed for information useful for historians, but no one has systematically asked whether their authors can be viewed as historians. That topical comedians of any era look much more to current than to past events is only to be expected. But the fifth-century comedians were also poets, and they did occasionally share with most other poets an interest in the less recent past. What past interested them, and what were their sources? Did they simply reflect mythic and popular recollection? Or were their accounts historiographic, utilising factual research, seeking to inform or correct the record and proposing true accounts? If their portrayal of the past was critical, was it framed by the same consistent cultural and political biases now clearly established for their portrayal of contemporary events?1 Did the nature of their forays into the remoter past change over time? These are questions that deserve more extensive and systematic study, but meanwhile I offer some preliminary analyses, drawing examples mainly from four plays by Aristophanes: Acharnians (Lenaea 425) and Peace (Dionysia 421) on the run-up to war, Knights (Lenaea 424) and Lysistrata (Lenaea 411). Each example illustrates a distinctive appeal to the past as an element of the comic poet’s response to current issues.

But first we must ask whether the comic perspective on the past was informed by historians. The chronology is close. Topically engaged (‘political’) comedy was a by-form practised by a subset of poets during what we might call the demagogic era of Athenian history:² the 430s to the end of the Peloponnesian War and its aftermath in the 390s. This was also the era of intellectual advances that included the development of historiography proper, as distinct from earlier semior proto-historiographic accounts.3 Athens apparently had had no coherent, authoritative or even chronological narrative of its past (aside from bare archon lists and the like) until Thucydides began tracking the Peloponnesian War and its remote causes in the late 430s and Hecataeus and Herodotus began systematically vetting a welter of mythic, poetic and popular accounts of the more distant past, along critical lines exemplified in such programmatic statements as these:⁴

τάδε γράφω, ὥς μοι δοκεῖ ἀληθέα εἶναι· οἱ γὰρ Ἑλλήνων λόγοι πολλοί τε καὶ γελοῖοι, ὡς ἐμοὶ φαίνονται, εἰσίν. (Hecataeus of Miletus, FGrHist 1 F 1a)

I write what I consider true, for Greek accounts are in my view both numerous and laughable.

τὰς ἀκοὰς τῶν προγεγενημένων, καὶ ἢν ἐπιχώρια σφίσιν ᾖ, ὁμοίως ἀβασανίστως παρ’ ἀλλήλων δέχονται . . . ὄντα ἀνεξέλεγκτα καὶ τὰ πολλὰ ἐπὶ χρόνου αὐτῶν ἀπίστως ἐπὶ τὸ μυθῶδες ἐκνενικηκότα. (Thucydides 1.20.1)

People accept from one another hearsay accounts of the past, even their own local past, all equally without examination . . . [poets and chroniclers treat subjects] that are beyond the reach of testing and that for the most part have won their way through to the realm of myth so as to be incredible.

Aristophanes for one was clearly engaged with the intellectual currents of his time, so much so that he was teased for it by his older rival Cratinus.⁵ But was he aware of the new historiography in particular, that is, of formal investigation of the past as distinct from, or as a corrective to, popular models based on the hearsay or mythic past? Evidently not: historiography proper is not among the academic subjects on offer in Clouds, nor do Aristophanes or other fifth-century comic poets seem elsewhere even to have noticed, let alone emulated or satirised, historiography or any of its practitioners.

There is of course one passage in Acharnians that is still generally thought to echo or parody the opening of Herodotus’Histories:

καὶ ταῦτα μὲν δὴ σμικρὰ κἀπιχώρια·

πόρνην δὲ Σιμαίθαν ἰόντες Μεγαράδε

νεανίαι ’κκλέπτουσι μεθυσοκότταβοι·

κᾆθ’ οἱ Μεγαρῆς ὀδύναις πεφυσιγγωμένοι

ἀντεξέκλεψαν Ἀσπασίας πόρνα δύο·

κἀντεῦθεν ἀρχὴ τοῦ πολέμου κατερράγη

Ἕλλησι πᾶσιν ἐκ τριῶν λαικαστριῶν. (523–9)

Now granted, this was trivial and strictly local. But then some tipsy, cottabus-playing youths went to Megara and kidnapped the whore Simaetha. And then the Megarians, garlic-stung by their distress, in retaliation stole a couple of Aspasia’s whores, and from that the onset of war broke forth upon all Greeks: from three sluts!

Here the play’s hero, Dicaeopolis, traces the origins of the Peloponnesian War to reciprocal abductions of women, a motif attested elsewhere only in Herodotus, who attributes a similar story about the Persian Wars to Persian sources and then questions it.6 If Dicaeopolis is alluding to Herodotus, then Aristophanes, and presumably his audience too, knew about historiography and its critical treatment of such (presumably popular) stories as these mutual abductions. But beyond this shared motif, there is no other likely point of contact, here or elsewhere, between Aristophanes and Herodotus. It has been claimed that transitional μὲν δή is distinctively Herodotean, but in fact this usage appears elsewhere in Aristophanes (also in Euripides) and is anyway not so salient as to signal a borrowing, let alone a parody; and all comic references elsewhere to details also found in Herodotus are either traceable to tragedy (especially Aeschylus’Persians) or attributable to travellers’ reports of the sort dramatised and ridiculed in the prologue of Acharnians.

Ridicule of such reports does suggest the possibility that in the reciprocal abductions ‘we should see not so much Aristophanes parodying Herodotus, but rather Herodotus and Aristophanes as doing the same thing here. Both are “parodying” popular mentality – provided . . . we do not take “parody” too crudely as a sheer deflating technique, but rather as a provision of a model to build on and refer to.’7 This does not require us to assume that Aristophanes and his audience appreciated the historiographical distinction between ‘popular mentality’ and a more credible ‘model’, only that the comic example of popular mentality be recognisable as such; nor can the parody be of the ‘sheer deflating’ type, for Dicaeopolis, who in the prologue had ridiculed incredible tales in order to illustrate the mendacity of foreign ambassadors and the gullibility of the Athenian assembly, would hardly have offered in his own account of the war’s motivations an explanation designed to sound ridiculous or implausible.

The parodic element in Dicaeopolis’ reciprocal abductions is more complex. At this point he is disguised as Euripides’ cripple-hero Telephus, from whose speech to the Greeks he has borrowed his own speech to the Acharnians (and beyond them, the audience). His most striking argument is not his self-defence but his defence of the Spartans, so it is reasonable to assume that in Euripides’ play Telephus had similarly defended the Trojans; indeed if Telephus had defended only himself and his fellow Mysians, he would have been much less appealing as a model for Dicaeopolis. A defence of the Trojans would have cited Greek misdeeds to match Trojan misdeeds, principally the abduction of Helen. This gives us the tit-for-tat motif also found in Herodotus but probably not reciprocal abductions: that was not part of Trojan War mythology, and if Euripides had invented the variant or adopted it from some unattested earlier account, the absence of testimonia for it, and in such a famous play, is surprising.

But if not from Telephus and not from Herodotus, then where did Aristophanes get the idea of reciprocal abductions? Probably not from a mythic exemplar at all, but from recent history. The clue is that Dicaeopolis names the whore, Simaetha, and the audience was presumably expected to know something about her.⁸ No doubt there really had been an episode involving fights over whores between young Athenians and Megarians, fights that had been among, or could be comically placed on a par with, the many reciprocal complaints mentioned by Thucydides as leading to war.9 If so, Aristophanes’ innovation was to update the role of Helen in the run-up to the Trojan War (parodic) by including a recent episode involving Aspasia and privileged young men associated with Pericles¹⁰ that could be connected with the run-up to the Peloponnesian War (topical). Plutarch (Pericles 31–2) and Diodorus (12.39 = Ephorus FGrH 70 F 196) cite other such attacks on Pericles and (by proxy) on his friends shortly before the outbreak of the war or just after;¹¹ from among these Aristophanes would have chosen this particular incident because of its suitability for integration into the Telephus myth, not because the incident had any more currency as a casus belli than other such incidents seized on by Pericles’ opponents in order to discredit his policies.

Indeed four years later Aristophanes would again trace the origin of the war to Pericles’ exploitation of the Megarian issue as a mask for personal motives, but this time the alleged motive was to distract attention from a scandal involving his friend Pheidias that implicated himself (Peace 605–27).¹² Lines 615–18 both reveal Aristophanes’ reason for connecting this particular scandal with the disappearance of the goddess Peace (represented in the play as a large statue) and signal its novelty (but not fictionality) in connection with the run-up to war:

(Trygaeus) Well, by Apollo, no one ever told me that, nor had I heard how Pheidias was connected to (προσήκοι) the goddess.

(Chorus Leader) Nor I, until just now. So that’s why her face is so lovely, being related to (συγγενής) him!13 There’s lots we don’t know about.

Clearly Aristophanes did not feel bound to the earlier Simaetha allegation as an official explanation of Pericles’ motivation. It is simply that the Simaetha story would have been less effective for his purposes in Peace: ‘in such a context Pericles’ self-protection might figure more naturally than any self-indulgence in a private quarrel of Aspasia, and the Pheidias allegation is exactly what we need’.¹⁴ Unlike historians, comic poets felt no need to adopt a consistent version of events.

But did the comic poets also feel no need to make their version of events plausible (however satirically pitched)? The scandal involving Pheidias is real enough, but was it among Pericles’ other troubles just before the outbreak of war? Despite long-acknowledged uncertainties, the date of the scandal is generally thought to be 438/7, on the basis of reconstructed secondary accounts of Philochorus (FGrHist 328 F 121), including the scholia to Peace (605α and β). Events of 438/7 would be too early to be plausibly connected with the onset of the war, at least for a proper historian. If that date is sound, Aristophanes was either unconcerned about the chronology or, since it was recent enough for the audience to recall, he actually intended the connection to sound implausible, though (as in the case of Simaetha for Dicaeopolis) that would undermine the force of Trygaeus’ case against Pericles. But there are no strong reasons for privileging a dubious reconstruction of Philochorus over the testimony of the comic poets, followed by Plutarch and Diodorus, who place this and other such scandals just before the outbreak of the war.¹⁵ The earlier dating in fact rests on an emendation of the Peace-scholia as transmitted, which explicitly date the Pheidias prosecution to 432/1.¹⁶

Herodotus began his Histories with the reciprocal-abductions story as a provisional explanation, to exemplify a myth-oriented and therefore popular model of thinking about the past before quickly confronting it with the historian’s more critical model(s), which are rooted in knowable time beginning with Croesus of Lydia. Aristophanes does something similar for his own comic purposes: Dicaeopolis’ reciprocal abductions root what might otherwise be merely a ‘deflating’ parody of Telephus in reality and thus give the parodic arguments of his Telephus persona more topical point. The reciprocal abductions in themselves and qua parody may come off as incidents too trivial and indeed too characteristic of ‘the popular mentality’ to enlist as true motivations for a great war (so Thucydides), but persuasive points can of course be made in a parodic and/or satirical context, and that the abductions were too trivial to justify a war is exactly Dicaeopolis’ point;17 indeed much the same point had probably been made in Telephus.¹⁸

Unlike Herodotus, however, Dicaeopolis embraces the popular understanding: for him, as for most of the audience, such motivations really had been determinative factors in bringing about the present war, much as in the realm of myth the abduction of Helen had brought about the Trojan War; in both cases, leaders took the people to war for selfish personal reasons. The same applies to the similar attacks in Peace and other comedies. Only later would Thucydides articulate an ἀληθεστάτη πρόφασις through a kind of historiographic analysis unfamiliar to most Athenians at the time, including Aristophanes. Thus Plutarch (Pericles 30.4) was not wrong to quote our lines as representing actual Megarian complaints and to use other passages from contemporary comedies as evidence of popular knowledge and understanding in the run-up to war.¹⁹

Much of the persuasive power of Aristophanes’ parody, or rather recycling, of Telephus lies precisely in the mode of mythical thinking that still informed popular history in this period: epic and tragedy had no problem with a face that launched a thousand ships, and neither did their audiences. Comedy could operate within this mode as well and at the same time still represent the real world, at least at the time of Acharnians. Acharnians, for all its pioneering brilliance in paratragedy, was in fact unexceptional in using heroic myth as the primary lens for viewing the past, including the recent past.

As is amply noted by Plutarch and evident in plays like Cratinus’ Dionysalexander, Nemesis and Ploutoi and Hermippus’Moirai, the comic poets had long been attacking Pericles in this mode, in mythological plots that assimilated Pericles to Zeus, and Aspasia variously to Hera, Helen, Omphale and Deianeira, and that thus portrayed the motivations for the Samian War and then the Peloponnesian War as selfish and personal.20 In viewing even the recent past through the lens of heroic myth drawn from epic, choral lyric and tragedy – the historical models most familiar and congenial to their audiences – the comic poets sought both to clarify and to enhance the power of their engagement with topical issues.²¹ What they were doing in the comic mode was not so different from the mythological lensing employed by Aeschylus in Persians and Eumenides, and no doubt Euripides in Telephus, which was why Dicaeopolis thought the play so suitable for recycling.

And not only poets: in this period myth was also the mode in which Athenian public monuments depicted the past, portraying no historical figures or events other, or more recent, than the tyrannicides and the Persian Wars, which were cast in the timeless and heroic mode that enshrined memory of ancestral deeds.²² Political, deliberative and diplomatic speeches would occasionally, for practical purposes in a dispute, have appealed to the more recent past in non-poetic/mythologised fashion, but beyond commonly agreed facts, such as an inscribed record or agreement,²³ these appeals were selective, self-serving and contestable, not grounded in a universally agreed (historical) account or constrained by disinterested methods of research. It is unclear whether the annual funeral oration (epitaphios logos), a non-agonistic event, regularly referred to the more recent past: our only fifth-century example, Thucydides’ version of Pericles’ oration of 431, does not. It could be that ‘by avoiding comment on such [historical] exploits . . . Pericles shows knowledge of the practice of including them in the funeral oration’,24 but it is at least equally likely that this was not the practice; it is uncommon even in our later examples.

As reflections of popular history – history without ἱστορία – the comic accounts can thus provide a control to set beside the accounts of historians like Herodotus, who problematises mythical/popular explanations, and Thucydides, who ignores them. Although Thucydides duly registers the arguments over the Megarian decree and over Pericles’ culpability for starting the war, he prefers to trace and emphasise large national patterns going back several generations that more or less inevitably led to war, and he is completely silent about Aspasia, Pheidias and other private scandals. He is thus out of sync, or better, out of sympathy, with the emphases of comedy and the popular opinion it reflects: at the time most people thought that the war had been triggered by immediate issues like the Megarian Decree and by the self-interest and intransigence of the Olympian Pericles, and for the comic poets all this could be portrayed as a recapitulation of traditional myths for an audience accustomed to thinking this way. Clearly Herodotus and Thucydides had not yet taught people more accurate, critical and disinterested ways to know the past.

Yet by the mid-420s popular history was beginning to develop its own modes of critical inquiry under the twin stimuli of sophistic reality-testing of myth and new techniques of argument in oratory; both developments are reflected and absorbed by tragedy, particularly Euripidean tragedy, and by comedy. A similar change began to affect public monuments such as the temple of Athena Nike, whose construction was resumed at about this time and whose friezes, apparently for the first time, blended historical with myth-historical depictions.

In the arena of myth and on the role of poets as the chief authorities for the past, Aristophanes responded defensively. In Clouds the sophists, along with the orators and litigants who embraced their methods, are denounced for a critical treatment of myths that allows them to be literalised and misapplied, and Euripides is denounced for trivialising and sensationalising myths. In Aristophanes’ view, these innovations served to deprive mythology of its larger-than-life dignity and its normative and inspiring functions, leaving humanity to its own, inevitably low and mutable, moral devices. Two passages from Clouds (produced at the Dionysia of 423, incompletely revised c. 417) will serve to exemplify these claims against the sophists on the one hand and Euripides on the other:

(Wrong Logos) Now then, I’ll proceed to the necessities of nature. Say you slip up, fall in love, engage in a little adultery, and then get caught: you’re done for because you’re unable to argue. But if you follow me, go ahead and indulge your nature, romp, laugh, think nothing shameful. If you happen to get caught in flagrante, tell him this: that you’ve done nothing wrong. Then pass the buck to Zeus, on the grounds that even he is worsted by lust for women, so how can you, a mere mortal, be stronger than a god? (1075–92)

(Strepsiades of his son, fresh from sophistic training) Then I asked him if he would at least take a myrtle sprig and sing me something from the works of Aeschylus. And he right away said, ‘In my opinion, Aeschylus is chief among poets – chiefly full of noise, incoherent, a windbag, a maker of lofty locutions.’ Can you imagine how that jolted my heart? But I bit back my anger and said, ‘All right then, recite something from these modern poets, that brainy stuff, whatever it is.’ And he right away tossed off some speech by Euripides about how a brother, god save me, used to screw his sister by the same mother! (1364–72)

By the time of Frogs (Lenaea 405), Aristophanes still assumes that poets are society’s teachers and that the mythical past is the touch-stone for evaluating human events, but now he concedes that not everything to be found in mythology is benign, and he anticipates Plato by enjoining poets to adopt a critical and self-censoring function, concealing what is bad for society and for individuals, and revealing only what is good:

(Euripides) And what harm, you bastard, did my Stheneboeas do to the community?

(Aeschylus) You motivated respectable women, the spouses of respectable men, to take hemlock in their shame over your Bellerophons.

(Euripides) But the story I told about Phaedra was already established, wasn’t it?

(Aeschylus) Of course it was. But the poet has a special duty to conceal what’s wicked, not stage it or teach it. For children the teacher is the one who instructs, but grownups have the poet. It’s very important that we tell them things that are good. (1049–55)

To changes in the forensic arena, where the post-mythological past was most in evidence, Aristophanes was more adaptive: here, after all, was an arena in which he chose to involve himself. In Knights (Lenaea 424) he inaugurated the genre of demagogue-comedy in order to satirise the changed complexion of forensic competition and to enter the fray on its own terms. Knights was the first comedy devoted entirely to the ridicule of a single politician, Cleon, and apparently the first to abandon mythological allegory as the vehicle for sustained (as distinct from incidental, one-liner) political satire. To an extent this adaptation was forced: the Olympian and mythic caricatures of Pericles did not suit the new politicians who emerged after his death in 429; for down-to-earth novi homines like Cleon and for young, sophistically trained orators like Alcibiades, new caricatures were needed.25 In Cleon’s case, the winning caricature was furnished by Cleon himself: all Aristophanes needed to do was exaggerate Cleon’s own qualities, in particular his novel argumentative and rhetorical style.

Knights makes clear that in the sharply competitive political environment of the 420s, appeals to historical events were becoming more prominent in oratory. An example of Aristophanes’ take on this development is the exchange in Knights 810–19, responding to Cleon’s self-comparison with Themistocles:

(Paphlagon) Isn’t it really awful that you presume to say such things and to slander me before the Athenians and Demos, after my many fine services – many more, by Demeter, than Themistocles ever did for the city?

(Sausage Seller) ‘City of Argos, hearken to his words!’26 Are you matching yourself with Themistocles? He found our city’s cup half-full and filled it the rest of the way, and he baked the Piraeus as dessert for her lunch, and added new seafood dishes to her menu while taking away none of the old; whereas you’ve tried to turn the Athenians into tiny-townies by building partitions (διατειχίζων)²⁷ and chanting oracles. Themistocles’ match! And he’s exiled from the country, while you wipe your fingers on ‘peerless Achilles’ baguettes!

Past heroes are no longer beyond compare, but this particular self-comparison can be discredited by citing historical facts that did not need to be elaborated for the spectators. Clearly Themistocles had been in the news, and not only in political speeches. In Acharnians there are many evocations of Aeschylus’Persians, our only extant (and apparently the last) topical tragedy, among them the assimilation of the final lament of Dicaeopolis/Telephus’ rival Lamachus to that of Aeschylus’ Xerxes, and they suggest that Persians had recently been revived,²⁸ and with it a reminder of Themistocles’ heroic role, and credit for the victory, at Salamis.

Positive memories of Themistocles may have been connected with Euripides’Telephus as well, and this would explain the otherwise mysterious quotation of a line from that play in our passage from Knights: ‘City of Argos, hearken to his words!’ This quotation would make sense if Euripides had played up the similarities between Telephus and Themistocles, who in exile had gone to the court of the Molossian king Admetus, and on the advice of Admetus’ wife had held their son at an altar as a suppliant, a story that even Thucydides saw fit to mention (1.136–7). It could well be that Aeschylus had already drawn a comparison between Themistocles and Telephus in his own Telephus, or even invented the hostage motif itself on the model of Themistocles.²⁹

In any event, a connection of Themistocles with Telephus would further deepen the resonance of Dicaeopolis’ mythic persona, adding another legendary patriot unjustly condemned, and this resonance would need only brief signalling in the Knights passage. The passage differs in not being conducted through the medium of myth but rather in the light of knowable history and citable facts, and the contrast made by the Sausage Seller between Themistocles’ continuing exile and Cleon’s undeserved privileges in the Prytaneum suggests current debate about Themistocles’ rehabilitation, which was indeed to occur after the war, when he was reinterred in a splendid tomb in Piraeus.30

It would seem that from the 420s onward, references in oratory and comedy to historical events as such followed a path that began to intersect with the path being taken at the same time by the first historians. In this regard Lysistrata of 411 is interesting in that it tries systematically to correct popular misconceptions about the past, indeed about Athens’ entire democratic past, from the fall of the tyrants to the Persian invasions to the subsequent tensions with Sparta to the current war. On the one side are the heroine’s chief antagonists, the Chorus of Old Men, fervid patriots and Spartan-haters who champion the current popular view of the democratic past as a justification for continued war, appealing not only to personal memory but also to official depictions of civic mythology. They proclaim themselves veterans of the occupation of Leipsydrium against the forces of the tyrant Hippias in 513; of the expulsion of Cleomenes and his Spartan allies in 508/7, which effectively ended the tyranny; of Marathon in 490; of Salamis in 480; of the campaigns of Myronides in the 470s to the 460s; and of the generalship of Phormio in the early years of the present war – a history that in actuality would make them about a hundred and thirty years old.³¹ The Old Men see the women’s peace initiative as an antidemocratic conspiracy to undo the accomplishments enshrined in this history: the women would conspire with the Spartans and restore the tyranny of Hippias, and their occupation of the Acropolis recalls barbarian invaders. And so the Old Men compare themselves to Harmodius and Aristogeiton, assuming the very posture of the bronze statues of the young tyrannicides that stood in the Agora (631–5), and they compare the women to Artemisia at Salamis and to the invading Amazons battled by Theseus, as depicted in Micon’s paintings in the Peisianacteum (672–9).

After Lysistrata has made both the Athenians and the Spartans her captive audience and proceeds to broker a peace negotiation, she systematically corrects the Old Men’s recollections in order to discredit the historical case for continuing the war. Her own credentials for speaking about the past, like the Old Men’s, are based on personal recollection and tradition:

ἐγὼ γυνὴ μέν εἱμι, νοῦς δ’ἕἔνεστί μοι.

αὐτὴ δ’ ἐμαυτῆς οὐ κακῶς γνώμης ἔχω,

τοὺς δ’ ἐκ πατρός τε καὶ γεραιτέρων λόγους

πολλοὺς ἀκούσασ’ οὐ μεμοὐσωμαι κακῶς. (1124–7)

It’s true I’m a woman, but still I’ve got a mind: I’m pretty intelligent in my own right, and because I’ve listened many a time to the conversations of my father and other elders I’m pretty well educated too.

Here Lysistrata echoes but significantly alters a speech by the heroine of Euripides’Wise Melanippe, who had claimed knowledge from her mother, the priestess Hippo (fr. 484); Lysistrata, who has temporarily usurped male authority and is challenging male recollections, needs the authority and recollections of men. The historical facts that Lysistrata goes on to relate are, as in deliberative oratory, no mere history lesson, or mere corrections for the record, but selectively chosen to support her main argument: that Athens and Sparta are old and natural allies who have no good reasons for fighting one another but instead, as in the good old days, should jointly lead Greece in a spirit of panhellenic unity against the barbarians. There is nothing outrageous or ludicrous about this argument: since 431 it had been familiar to the spectators from actual debates about the war, and it would continue to be urged by orators in similar situations well into the fourth century.32

At the same time, and again as in oratory, Lysistrata’s version of historical facts is tendentious, for example her evidence of mutual benefactions:

Next, Spartans, I’m going to turn to you. Don’t you remember when Pericleidas the Spartan came here once and sat at the altars as a suppliant of the Athenians, pale in his scarlet uniform, begging for troops? That time when Messenia was up in arms against you and the god was shaking you with an earthquake? And Cimon went with four thousand infantrymen and rescued all Sparta? After being treated that way by the Athenians, you’re now out to ravage the country that’s treated you well? (1137–46)

And do you think I’m going to let you Athenians off? Don’t you remember how the Spartans in turn, when you were dressed in slaves’ rags, came with their spears and wiped out many Thessalian fighters, many friends and allies of Hippias? That day when they were the only ones helping you to drive him out? And how they liberated you, and replaced your slaves’ rags with a warm cloak, as suits a free people? (1149–56)

It is true that Cimon had joined an allied expedition to help Sparta put down the serf rebellion in 462, but to say that Cimon had ‘rescued all Sparta’ is a stretch: the allied action did not end the rebellion, and the Athenians did little or no actual fighting, the Spartans having suspected them of being rebel sympathisers and sent them home ‘alone among the allies’, an insult that got Cimon ostracised, broke the Athenian–Spartan alliance, and led in a few years to war between Athens and the Peloponnesian League. Did Aristophanes expect the audience to be taken in by Lysistrata’s edited account? Or did he expect them to laugh knowingly? The spectators could not have been aware of the later, fuller accounts written by Herodotus and Thucydides, so their sources would have been the same as Lysistrata’s: fathers and other elders recollecting political debates.33 But it is telling that just ten years earlier, by the terms of the Peace of Nicias of 421 (Th. 5.23), Athens had sworn to send Sparta as many troops as possible in case of future rebellions; so apparently Lysistrata was not the only one prepared to downplay Cimon’s dismissal.

Similarly tendentious is Lysistrata’s proffered Spartan benefaction: how the Spartans drove out the tyrant Hippias and his allies and ‘liberated’ the Athenians from virtual slavery. Again, slavery is a stretch, and again Lysistrata omits the sequel: a Spartan army under King Cleomenes came back three years later to stifle the nascent democracy by supporting the archon Isagoras against Cleisthenes’ popular faction, who won a resounding victory and thus cleared the way for democracy. Earlier in the play (271–80) the Old Men of the chorus had boasted in detail, and with gross exaggeration,34 about their victory in this very action, so Lysistrata’s omission of it here amounts to trumping the expulsion of Cleomenes with the far more important removal of Hippias, which also trumps the Old Men’s earlier equation of the Spartans with tyranny. Again, this was evidently a live issue in 411 and later: Thucydides was to comment that at this time ‘the Athenians knew that it was not they and Harmodius who had put an end to the tyranny but the Spartans’ (6.53.3), while Herodotus, the Atthidographers, and the orators would play down the role of the Spartans and stress that it was the Alcmaeonids who led the exiled democrats and who sought Delphic help in pressuring the Spartans to come to their aid.

The amount of historical recollection and debate in Lysistrata attests to the growing importance, in public deliberation, of facts about the past and their interpretation; a topical comic poet could not afford to neglect such facts in grinding his own axes. Not quite yet do we have to reckon with the influence of historians, who claimed to establish facts and chronologies accurately and disinterestedly, and to distinguish them from mere myth and hearsay, from ‘the conversations of my father and other elders’. But to judge from many of the facts served up by later orators, and even by historians, we must wonder whether the availability of historiography would have made much of a difference to Aristophanes and his audiences.

1		In a nutshell, comic poets criticised democratic culture and politics as shaped by Pericles and his ‘demagogic’ successors and maintained a Cimonian view of foreign affairs; for an overview see J. Henderson, Aristophanes Acharnians. Knights (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 12–23.
2		Many, perhaps most, fifth-century comedies were domestic, mythological or otherwise unengaged with public issues, which is probably why so little information about them is preserved.
3		These are summarily described by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Thuc. 5, as for the most part collections of public traditions, written records, myths and legends presented more or less as the writers had found them; cf. D. Toye, ‘Dionysius of Halicarnassus on the first Greek historians’, AJP 116 (1995), pp. 279–302.
4		All translations in this chapter are my own.
5		Fr. 342 (play unknown): τίς δὲ σύ κομψός τις ἔροιτο θεατής. ὑπολεπτολόγος, γνωμιδιώτης, εὐριπιδαριστοφανίζων (‘“And who are you?” a hip spectator might ask, a subtle word-mincer, a conceit-chaser, a Euripidaristophaniser’); for discussion see E. Bakola, Cratinus and the Art of Comedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 24–9. Aristophanes himself often boasts of the intellectual sophistication of his plays, e.g. in the parabasis of Clouds, cf. Wasps 1043–50.
6		For B. Bravo and M. Wȩcowski, ‘The hedgehog and the fox: Form and meaning in the prologue of Herodotus’, JHS 124 (2004), pp. 143–64, Herodotus offers the reciprocal abductions only to ridicule, indeed to parody, the sort of uncritical explanation of the origins of great wars then common in Greek poets and prose-writers.
7		C. Pelling, Literary Texts and the Greek Historian (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 155.
8		So D. M. MacDowell, Aristophanes and Athens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 61–7; T. Braun, ‘The choice of dead politicians in Eupolis’Demoi: Themistocles’ exile, hero-cult and delayed rehabilitation; Pericles and the origins of the Peloponnesian War’, in D. Harvey and J. Wilkins (eds), The Rivals of Aristophanes: Studies in Athenian Old Comedy (London and Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 2000), pp. 213–14; A. H. Sommerstein, Aristophanes Wealth (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 2001), p. 233.
9		Th. 1.67.4 and 1.139.2: ‘Among others who came forward with various complaints of their own were the Megarians, who pointed to a great many disagreements . . . But the Athenians neither accepted the other demands nor annulled the decree, accusing the Megarians of cultivating sacred and unowned land and of receiving runaway slaves.’
10		The scholia state (without citing a source) that Simaetha was a lover of Alcibiades.
11		In connection with Pericles’ trial in 430 (Th. 2.65.3–4); Thucydides does not record the charge but Plato, Gorgias 516a, says that it was embezzlement of public funds (κλοπή). As Bakola, Cratinus, pp. 216–17, 309–10, points out, the indictment could well have been brought many months before the actual trial, when the debate about Megara was still under way.
12		Pheidias was convicted of embezzling gold and/or ivory from the chryselephantine statue of Athena, which he had created for the Parthenon as an element of Pericles’ controversial building programme, and also of religious impropriety for depicting Pericles fighting an Amazon on the goddess’ shield.
13		Playing on the double sense of προσήκειν ‘connected/related to’; the phrase ‘Pheidias connected to Peace’ became proverbial (Suda φ 246).
14		Pelling, Literary Texts, p. 286 n. 38.
15		As recently argued by Bakola, Cratinus, pp. 213–20, in connection with Cratinus’Ploutoi, which in the aftermath of Pericles’ trial (the play is generally dated to 429) seems to have ‘dramatized a fictional trial where Hagnon and perhaps other friends of Pericles were tried for their handling of public money’ (p. 218).
16		Altering ‘in the archonship of Pythodorus’ (432/1) to ‘in the archonship of Theodorus’ (438/7) to make the date of Pheidias’ indictment and trial coincide with the accepted (but itself uncertain) date of the dedication of the Athena Parthenos statue, which the scholia also mention. But the scholia, which seem to conflate and somewhat jumble different sources, do not state that the dedication and the trial were contemporaneous, only that the trial took place ‘after’ the statue had been completed; the indictment could of course have been lodged at any time thereafter. For detailed analysis see Bakola, Cratinus, pp. 305–12.
17		‘The absurdity of these accounts of the war in no way proves that Ar. did not intend or expect them to be taken seriously as arguments against the justice and expediency of beginning or continuing it’ (Sommerstein, Knights, p. 233).
18		Cf. fr. 722, where Agamemnon apparently declines to risk his life simply to help Menelaus recover Helen.
19		S. Hornblower, A Commentary on Thucydides. Volume I: Books I–III (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 111, argues that Thucydides took practically no account of the popular tradition connecting personal scandals with the Megarian decree(s) because ‘he found the personal aspect of the vulgar story distasteful, perhaps; Pericles’ mistress Aspasia was supposedly behind it, and it would be out of character for Th. to give prominence to this Herodotean female angle’.
20		Cf. the papyrus hypothesis to Cratinus’Dionysalexander (I 44–8) κωμωιδεῖται δ’ ἐν τῶι δράματι Περικλῆς μάλα πιθανῶς δι’ἐμφάσεως ὡς ἐπαγηοχὼς τοῖς Ἀθηναίοις τὸν πόλεμον (‘in the play Pericles is very convincingly ridiculed by innuendo as having brought the war on the Athenians’).
21		It is noteworthy that neither tragic nor comic dramatists took much interest in Attic myths and legends, given their thin coverage by the panhellenic poetic tradition; cf. A. M. Bowie, ‘Myth and ritual in the rivals of Aristophanes’, in Harvey and Wilkins, Rivals of Aristophanes, p. 321.
22		Recall that the insertion of a figure resembling Pericles in a public depiction of the Amazonomachy could be considered an actionable offence: n. 12, above.
23		But note that inscribed decrees were not necessarily permanent records: they could be altered, cancelled or effaced if they were deemed incompatible with current interests, for example Th. 5.11 (when constituting Brasidas as their founder after his death in 422, the Amphipolitans destroyed all record of the previous founder, Hagnon); 5.56 (the footnote to the peace treaty of 421 inserted by the Athenians in winter 419/8 and criticised in 411 in Lysistrata 513);IG i² 43 (378/7), the decree moved by Aristoteles for the second Athenian league, prescribing that the Athenian council be empowered to destroy any stelai in Athens that member cities might consider objectionable thereafter.
24		V. Frangeskou, ‘Tradition and originality in some Attic funeral orations’, CW 92 (1999), pp. 315–36, at p. 320 n. 23.
25		For details and analysis see J. Henderson, ‘Demos, demagogue, tyrant in Attic Old Comedy’, in K. Morgan (ed.), Popular Tyranny: Sovereignty and its Discontents in Classical Greece (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), pp. 155–79.
26		From Euripides’ Telephus.
27		‘Building partitions’ (which are otherwise unattested) seems (with the scholia) to refer to proposed (‘you tried’) physical structures rather than being metaphorical for political divisions; if they were defensive it may be that after the Pylos victory, when the Spartans abandoned their investment of Attica, they were no longer considered necessary.
28		For detailed discussion see C. Brockmann, Aristophanes und die Freiheit der Komödie (Munich and Leipzig: Saur, 2003), pp. 42–141. Familiarity with Aeschylus’ works would also be enhanced if, as seems likely from Plato, Rep. 376c–398b, they had already become school texts in the fifth century.
29		That the hostage scene featured in Aeschylus’ play is stated by the scholiast on Acharnians 332, and the iconographic record suggests that it was indeed introduced into the Telephus myth c. the 460s (E. Csapo, ‘Hikesia in the Telephus of Aeschylus’, QUCC 63 (1990), pp. 41–52; cf. C. Preiser, Euripides: Telephos (Spudasmata 78; Zurich and New York: Olms, 2001), pp. 51–9).
30		In this regard the absence of Themistocles among the resurrected politicians in Eupolis’Demes is probably significant; cf. I. C. Storey, Eupolis: Poet of Old Comedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 132–3.
31		We can imagine Thucydides’ response to such claims! All the same, these Old Men may well echo their actual counterparts: A. H. Sommerstein, Aristophanes Lysistrata (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1990), pp. 168–9, notes that Lysistrata ‘is the last Aristophanic play in which the chorus have recollections of the period 514–480, and in Eccl. (304) the (pretended) old men’s memories of their youth are of the days of Myronides (i.e. in the 450s)’.
32		For example, Thucydides 4.20.4 (424), 5.29.3 (421, cf. Aristophanes Peace 107–8, 406ff, 1082), Andocides 3.21, Isocrates Panegyricus passim, Xenophon, Hellenica 6.5.33ff, Demosthenes 9.30–1.
33		Even a century later an orator could appeal to family stories to enhance the authority of a historical fact, e.g. Aeschines, On the Embassy 77–8: οὐ γὰρ παρὰ τῶν ἀλλοτρίων ἀλλὰ παρὰ τοῦ πάντων οἰκειοτάτου ταῦτα ἐπυθανόμην . . . ὥστε οἰκεῖά μοι καὶ συνήθη τὰ τῆς πόλεως ἀτυχήματα εἶναι τοῖς ὠσὶν ἀκούειν (‘for I learned of these events not from outsiders but from my very closest relative . . . and so the city’s misfortunes are family stories that I am accustomed to hearing’).
34		See Sommerstein, Aristophanes Lysistrata, p. 168.