Alfred Bates in The Drama:
Its History, Literature and Influence on Civilization commenting on
Aristophanic comedy says, “The shafts of his wit, though dipped in wine-lees
and at times feathered from a very obscene fowl, flew at high game” (7). In
this sense the Attic Comedy has an overt as well as a covert text. The overt text
is generally a somewhat distorted mimesis of the contemporary world. The
surrealism created by masks, costumes, language, props, and the physical
setting distances the audience from the stage and creates the laughter, i.e. in
The Birds most of the actors and the chorus are dressed as birds and the
setting is the land of the birds – The Cloud-Cuckoo Land. The sub text, in
contrast, deals with issues that are often left undiscussed in other genres due
to the fear of persecution.
Aristophanes’ plays are the
greatest example of the Attic Comedy that is still in existence and all of them
depict the duality of text discussed above. Thus, one should be careful not to
allow the ever-present sense of hilarity to blind oneself to the fact that the
plays also give the reader/ spectator “a sense of occasion, of urgency, of an
intense seriousness underlying all the fun and the bawdry and the wit; a
feeling that the author, singer, actor, and the audience are sharing in an act
of celebration, a resurrection of the values which they, as a community, are
determined to defend” (Barrett 29).
Aristophanes, according to
Bates, was a comic poet “who was unquestionably at the head of the fraternity,
and in sentiment was intensely patriotic, the consciousness of his recognized
power and desire to use it for the good of his native city must ever have been
the prevailing motives” (7). Bates goes
on to add that in Athens
“such a man held influence resembling rather that of a modern journalist than
the modern dramatist” (7). The only limitation Athens put on her comic poets was that they
could not ‘wrong the people’; Aristophanes only had to make sure that his plays
did not carry any seditious statements. However, going through what is left of the
hundred or so plays written by Aristophanes, it is obvious that what
constituted to ‘treasonable’ in the 5th century Athens must have
been very much open to interpretation. Some of the remarks allocated to
Procleon in The Wasps which carried bitter criticism of both people and
institutions would undoubtedly have been impossible in many modern democracies.
This paper attempts to
present an analysis of the socio-political context of The Wasps under
the following topics:
01. The Background
02. The Generation Gap and Changes in Values
03. The Athenian Society
04. The Assembly and the Courts of Law
05. Rhetoric and Sophistry
01. The Background:
The Wasps was staged in the Lenaea of
422 B.C. By that time the Peloponnesian War had already been fought for nearly
nine years. The death of Pericles at the very beginning of the war had left Athens without an able
and charismatic leadership that appealed to all layers of Athenian society.
Pericles, unlike many politicians of both past and present, was able to inspire
his fellow Athenians and infuse them with a fierce pride in being the
custodians of socio-political institutions that had no parallels in the then
known world. Consequently, it is ironic that within a few years of Pericles’
death, the very institutions that made Athens
unique among her allies and foes alike should show their unseemly aspects.
The citizens still had the
greater say in the Assembly and the courts. But those who were hungry for power
and wealth invariably found ways and means to influence these citizen-bodies. Cleon,
who came to power after the demise of Pericles, was such a manipulator, and
Aristophanes, for one, was surely repulsed by the unsavoury methods used by the
demagogue to secure and maintain power. This loathing is indisputably the
reason behind the heated denouncement of Cleon made by the leader of the chorus
in the Parabasis of The Wasps:
Jag-toothed it was, and from its staring eyes
Shot rays more
terrible than Cynna's smile;
And in a grisly circle round its head
Flickered the tongues of servile flatterers,
Foredoomed to groan; its voice was like the roar
Of mighty floods descending from the hills,
Bearing destruction: noisome was the stench
That issued from the brute as it slid forth,
With camel's rump and monstrous unwashed balls. (76)
And in a grisly circle round its head
Flickered the tongues of servile flatterers,
Foredoomed to groan; its voice was like the roar
Of mighty floods descending from the hills,
Bearing destruction: noisome was the stench
That issued from the brute as it slid forth,
With camel's rump and monstrous unwashed balls. (76)
What’s more, Aristophanes allows the fierce assault on his city’s corrupt
demagogue to go beyond the Parabasis and turns it into the unifying factor of
the entire play.
The Wasps does not
advocate democracy as it stood in the latter half of the 5th century
B.C in Athens. Athens’ pride in its
democratic institutions, according to Aristophanes, has proved to be its
Achilles’ heel by being easily susceptible to corruption. Being a member of the
old school, the dramatist is critical of the behaviour of Cleon and his
spongers towards the members of the Deleon League. Young as he was,
Aristophanes seemed to have foreseen the danger of exposing Athens to the jealousy of her friends and
foes by flaunting its wealth and power.
The poet, as a freeborn son
of Athens, had no choice but to use the single
weapon at his disposal to “vindicate the duty of Athens to herself and her allies with
stinging scorn and fierce patriotic indignation which makes the poet almost
forgotten in the citizen” (Bates 7-16).
Aristophanic plays such as The
Wasps (422), Peace (421), The Birds (414),Lysistrata (411),The
Frogs (405), and Ecclesiazusae (391) are either direct or indirect
appeals to the Athenians to see that their city was on a path leading to self-
annihilation. Aristophanes makes use of the comic muse to appeal his fellow
citizens to take the necessary measures to put their beloved city-state back on
the right course. In this sense, Aristophanes can be considered a nostalgic
conservative who considered the Post-Persian War era of Athens to be its golden age, and thereby,
looked on all forms of changes as threatening to the wellbeing of his polis.
02. The Generation Gap and Changes
in Values:
The Athenian society of the 5th
century B.C. was still functioning along the order of family, clan and the
polis. The Wasps looks at the changes in these entities within the fifty
year period that separated the Persian War and the Peloponnesian War. The two
main characters, Procleon and Anticleon, represent two generations. Procleon
has fought at Marathon in 490 B.C. when the “barbarian came/And tried to smoke …
[them] from … [their] nest, and filled the streets with flame,” and thereafter,
in Salamis in
480 B.C. “[their] gallant three-tired ships… [they] manned/ And, closing in on
every hand/ … [They] walloped them at sea” (78).
It was the sacrifices of men
like Procleon and the jurors, according to Pericles, that had made Athens a power unparalleled in the Mediterranean.
In 422 B.C. Athens
was still at its height of power and wealth; yet, the jurors in The Wasps
are depicted as persistently clinging to the memories of their glorious military
victories and continuing to live the frugal lifestyle of Pre-Deleon League
days. It is almost as they were using the memories and the lifestyle as a warm
blanket against the cold realities of the contemporary society.
Anticleon, to an extent, represents
those who have reaped the benefits of the blood and sweat of the older
generation. These plutocrats lived in the lap of luxury out of the tribute sent
by the Deleon League. In addition, this generation seemed to have thought of
the men of jurors’ generation, the very people who have made such luxurious
lifestyle possible, as uncouth and treat them with utter disrespect.
The values upheld by the
jurors and Procleon are identical despite the latter being the father of a
well-off son. Procleon does not seem to believe that he himself has a claim on
his son’s wealth. The very fact that he finds it difficult to enjoy the
lifestyle proposed by Anticleon is a testimony to this fact. It appears that
Procleon’s generation is unable to “make speeches/ Denounce, arraign, inform,
impeach, / Nor yearned such arts to master” (78). On the contrary, these men have
been more concerned about “how to ply a lusty oar/ And make the ship go faster”
to spend time on what they termed frivolous exercises (78). In a nutshell,
Procleon seems to be denouncing the Sophist-educated younger generation who
spent a greater portion of their time on making speeches, denouncing,
impeaching, etc. He seems to consider them as emasculated and corrupted by their
Sophist tendencies. For that reason, Procleon is proud of his white locks and
goes as far as to denounce the “ringlets and fashions/ And the pederastic
passions/ Of the namby-pamby youngsters of” of 422 B.C. Athens (78). These heated denunciations are
undoubtedly reflections of the poet’s attitude towards the younger generation
of his day. In The Wasps, Aristophanes appears to be using the character
of Procleon to advocate to the Athenians a sober lifestyle that befitted the
troubled period.
When his son offers to take
him “to all kinds of places…to dinners, drinking parties, and shows” where he
would be able to “have a really good time,” Procleon turns down the offer by
stating that he “didn’t approve of drinking” for he knew that wine led to
“breaches of peace, assault and battles, and a fine to pay before you’ve got
rid of the hangover” (74, 85). This exchange shows that despite being engaged
in a costly war, some of the contemporaries of Aristophanes were leading a ‘party-hopping’
lifestyle which men of more austere times/outlooks like the poet had found
objectionable.
Furthermore, the majority of
Athenians of the older generations seemed to have preferred to earn their
bread. When his son pleads with him to stay at home, Procleon retorts thus: “I
haven’t yet mentioned the best thing of all: when I get home with my pay-ho,
ho! They are all over me. Because of the money, you see…I don’t want to have to
depend on you and that steward of yours, and wait for him to bring me my lunch
muttering curses under his breath” ( 59).
The above section of the play
also points to the fact that the values of the Athenian society praised by
Pericles have changed, and as a result the ties that bound the oikos have become loose to the extent
that sons would consider their aged fathers a burden. Yet, the chorus finds
Anticleon to be an exception: “He,” according to them, “seems to treat People
with deep consideration, / Not often found in the younger generation” (70). But
Anticleon is the exception, not the norm.
Anticleon regards Procleon’s
loyalty to Cleon and his craving for jury work as abnormal and disgraceful; he,
therefore, tries to wean his father out of these habits by offering him a
home-made court which included many fringe benefits. Later he even manages to
entice Procleon to lead “a life of refinement and pleasure” (85). Ultimately,
all efforts of Anticleon to ‘civilize’ his father fail abysmally. And in the
end, Procleon himself would have to appear as a defendant in the same court he
used to serve as a juror.
03. The Athenian Society:
The Athenian society in the 9th
year of the Peloponnesian War was on a sharp downward- curve. Social vices and
inequality plagued the young Democracy from all sides. The audience of The
Wasps, according to Aristophanes, suffered from cubomania, dipsomania, and
xenophelia. While the rich were leading luxurious lifestyles, the heroes of
Marathon and Salamis
had to line up for jury work in order to earn their daily bread. The extent of
their poverty is captured by the exchange between the leader of the chorus and
his son:
Boy: Dad, suppose they didn’t summon a jury today, how are we going to
buy our dinner?
Leader: oh goodness me, what dreadful things you do think of. I’m sure I
don’t know where our dinner would come from (49).
Once browbeaten into changing his lifestyle,
Procleon changes his attire to a “full-waister” of “extremely expensive Persian
weave” and “Spartan” footwear (80, 81). This is an indication of the
sophisticated dress code of the time. It also pointes the fact that Athens was a thriving
centre of trade. The playwright creates ironic humour by making Procleon wear
things from two enemy nations, Persia
and Sparta, out
of all the available goods. Anticleon’s initial refusal to wear Spartan
footwear is an indication of the intense patriotism of the older generation of
Athenians. Obviously the poet has not seen such scruples in the luxury-loving younger
generation. Aristophanes also seems to be laughing at the affectations of the
bourgeois capitalistic Athenians of the Post-Persian War generation when
Anticleon invites his father to imitate an “elegant plutocratic swagger” (81).
These wealthy men of fashion met at symposia and exchanged hyperbolic anecdotes
while the jurors had to refuse their children something as inexpensive as a
fig. The entire exchange, in this light, is a bitter criticism on the decline
of the standards of the Athenian society. Men have become soft due to the
wealth of the Post-Persian War Athens and as a result they have lost much of
the qualities praised by Pericles in
his Funeral Oration in the second book of The Peloponnesian War.
Pericles, according to
Thucydides, had praised the following qualities of the Athenian constitution
and lifestyle as the ingredients of their greatness:
o
In
settling private disputes, everyone was equal before the law
o
When
electing a person to a position of public responsibility what counted was the actual
ability of the candidate, not his class
o
Obedience
to those who we put on position of authority and the laws themselves
o
Love
of beautiful that did not lead to extravagance
o
Love
of things of mind that did not make them soft
o
Regard
wealth as something to be properly used
o
Poverty
was nothing to be ashamed of: the shame was “not taking practical measures to escape
from it” (Thucydides 147).
o
Each
individual was interested in the affairs of the state
o
Each
citizen was the “rightful lord and owner of his own person” (Thucydides 147).
These qualities, according to the great demagogue, enabled Athens to face “her testing
times in a greatness that surpasses what was imagined of her” (Thucydides 148).
Pericles, the man who almost single-handedly spearheaded the Golden Age of
Athens, seemed to have considered that Athens
was made great by “men with spirit of adventure, men who knew their duty, men
who were ashamed to fall below a certain standard” (Thucydides 149).
By the Spring of 422 B.C. the Peloponnesian
War had begun to threaten the very existence of Athens and Cleon’s stubborn refusal of
several offers of peace by the Spartans had created dissatisfaction in some
quarters. According to Thucydides, Cleon was against peace “because he thought
that in times of peace and quiet people would be more likely to notice his
evildoings and less likely to believe his slanders of others” (357). Lather in
the summer Cleon would fall at Amphipolis, but that was yet to come.
Aristophanes, beyond any
trace of doubt, shared the views of the Athenian general Thucydides regarding
their demagogue and used The Wasps to draw attention to the stark
difference between Athens of the Persian War
period and Athens
of 422 B.C under Cleon. The poet goes as far as to imply that the hangers-on of
the demagogue were not really of Athenians when he says people who have been
persecuted by the henchmen of Cleon lined up outside “the office of the Polemarch,”
the official in charge of the resident aliens. Through this Aristophanes points
to the fact that the Cleon has become alienated from the state and its
citizens.
David Barrett in his
illuminating introduction to the play states:
The bulk of the audience consisted of the male Athenian citizens, drawn
from all classes, but perhaps with a preponderance of the literate upper and
middle classes. The riff-raff … on whom demagogues like Cleon relied for support
in the Assembly and the courts cannot all have been so hungry for culture that
they were prepared to spend a public holiday …watching three tragedies, a satyr
play, and a comedy one after the other…It was possible for comedies containing
violent attacks on such demagogues to win first prize at the festival. (25)
The riff-raff referred to here could be no
other than the poverty stricken jurors who spent most of their time worrying
about how to put food on the table for their families. Such men obviously would
not have been able to visit the theatre very often once the Periclean theatre
subsidy had dried up. In this light, Aristophanes could not have expected a
real change in the attitudes of the lower rungs of the Athenian society. Therefore,
the didactic element of the play could only have been directed at the Sophist
educated upper and the middle class young men who had the time, wealth, and the
inclination to attend the Lenaea.
The hypothesis, that the didactic element of
the play was directed at the upper and the middle classes of the Athenian
society, is supported by the fact that despite his initial success of
convincing Procleon and his fellow jurors of the reality of the system they
were serving, Anticleon’s effort to break Procleon away from his unhealthy
habit ends in a total disaster. Therefore, it was up to men like Anticleon who
were aware of the way Cleon and his follower were “dividing up the body
politics” to rise against them despite the possibility of being branded an
“enemy of the people, a monarchist, a long-haired, tassel-fringed, pro-Spartan,
hand-in-glove with Brasidas” (41, 55). S. Douglas Olsen in his web article
“Politics and Poetry in Aristophanes’ Wasps”
states that according to David Konstan the play “valorizes a view of the world
which is fundamentally aristocratic.” Thus, it is up to Anticleon to voice a
strident opposition to the existing situation and he does just that when he
points out to the way people have been short-changed by the state:
And for a start, just recon up, roughly…how much we get altogether from
the subject cities. Add to that the revenue from the taxes, percentages, deposits,
and confiscations. Add these up, and we get a total of nearly twelve million
drachmas a year. Well, now work out how much of that annual sum goes to the
jurors…nine hundred thousand. (61)
Athens
by 422 B.C. ruled cities from the Black Sea to Sardinia
and these subject cities, according to Aristophanes, were made to pay “three
hundred thousand drachmas at a time, extorted by threats and intimidation”
(62). Moreover, these states sent gifts/bribes/tributes of “every conceivable
luxury” (62). Had the demagogue wanted to “give the people a decent standard of
living, they could… [have had] common folk feasting and banqueting … Leading a
life worthy of the victors of Marathon.
Instead … [they] have to queue up for … [their] pay like a lot of olive pickers”
(63). In addition, the easily led old-timers represented by jurors and Procleon
have been swindled out of their reward for heroism at Marathon and Salamis;
instead of the annual reward of five bushels of wheat, they have been given a
single allotment of five bushels of barley, a pint at a time- that too after
proving that they were of Athenian stock.
04. The Assembly and the Courts of
Law:
Aeschylus, in the Oresteian
Trilogy, had glorified the legal institutions of Athens. But corrupt leadership and nine years
of war had turned these once august institutions into devices through which unscrupulous
men like Cleon realized their ambitions. Alfred Bates in The drama
states that “the purpose of The Wasps was to satirize the love of
litigation common to the Athenians, whose delight it was to spend their time in
the law-courts and to live on the judicial fees which Pericles had established,
which Cleon was pledged to maintain” (29 -30).
First of all, the poet could
not have been overly impresses by the Athenian jurors themselves. The jurors of
The Wasps are not above misusing the little power they had. According to
their own words, the crusty jurors have often convicted the accused and given
them maximum punishment despite the evidence to the contrary. They, according
to Procleon, have relished these opportunities to flex their withered muscles
in front of the young, the rich and the powerful.
At the time The Wasps was
staged the membership of the “jury corps was open only to the citizens over
thirty…but no other qualifications were required” (Barrett 35). This particular
feature that emphasized on equality espoused by the Periclean Funeral Oration
had become its dominant weakness as well. “The pay was three obols a day – not
quite a living wage, but attractive to old people …and the very poor … All they
had to do was to listen to speeches, record their verdict – guilty or not
guilty – and pass sentence,” shown by a short or a long line scratched on a wax
tablet according to Procleon (Barrett 35). “The jury were given no legal
guidance beyond what the persecution and the defence saw fit to provide, and
they could be influenced, not only by orators in the court itself, but before
hand, by speeches in the Assembly” (Barrett 35).Under such circumstances, their
ignorance, extreme poverty, and ingrained readiness to follow orders made the
jurors extremely easy prey to those who stooped to exploit them.
In the play, Cleon uses the jurymen to take
revenge from Laches, one of the Athenian generals, for not sharing the Sicilian
plunder with him. At the Assembly Cleon has instructed the old men to go to the
courts “with three days’ ration of bad temper in … [their] knapsacks” (47).
Cleon has also convinced the jurors that Laches has wronged them, and
therefore, it was their duty and right to extract vengeance from the
‘wrongdoer’. Cleon seems to have threatened the jurors by indicating that they
would not be paid their three obols if they did not make sure that the state
coffers had enough. Therefore, it was imperative that the jurors fined the
defendant as heavily as possible. Thus the chorus declares, “There’s a juicy
case, / A conspirator from Thrace,
/ And we can’t afford to let him get away!” (58).
The jurors have also forced heiresses to be
married off to the highest bidder irrespective of “wills and solemn seals and
signatures” (58). Here, a faint unintended glimpse of the fate of the Athenian
women is offered. They were very much the second-class citizens and their
wishes were often immaterial in almost all aspects of life. All important
decisions concerning women were made by their male guardians, in their absence
the Assembly and the courts of law stepped in to take over the role of the
senior male relative.
Bribing, it seems, was a
common practice. The defendant, according to Procleon, may “come up with a
bribe, the two of them [the prosecutor and the defence] will share it, and
they’ll play up to each other in good earnest, like two men with a saw - one
gains a point, the other gives away” (62).
When Procleon exclaims,
“What’s more, we can’t be held to account afterwards as the magistrates are” he
points to the Athenian practice according to which at the end of each year the
magistrates who whished to be re-elected as an aeropagite had to present a report of the previous year’s
activities. This is evidence to the existence of faded traces of democracy in
the Athenian society despite the overwhelming tide of corruption and misuse of
power. Ultimately, it is apparent that Aristophanes considered the judiciary of
422 B.C. Athens
to be a travesty of what it meant to be. In a society in which the courts were
nothing but breading grounds for corruption, the weak were indeed left defenceless
with only playwrights such as Aristophanes to illuminate their plight.
05. Rhetoric and Sophistry:
Aristophanes also condemns
the “art of oratory …studied and cultivated intensively” in the Athenian
society with the intention of securing socio-political mobility (Barrett 35).
The up and coming Athenians studied rhetoric under Sophists like Protagoras and
Gorgias in order to become professional speakers who were “experts in wheedling
and deception” (Barrett 35). These men would later become demagogues themselves
or the satellites of such men and enjoyed the vast wealth of the post-Marathon Athens at the expense of
those whom they were supposed to serve. Anticleon, according to Barrett, does Athens a service by
pointing to the fact that even “in a democracy people … [were] not real rulers
if they allowed themselves to be led by the nose” (36).
There is no doubt that
Aristophanes’ intense patriotism had made him utterly conservative and his
plays were “mainly a matter of feeling” (Barrett 16). On the other hand, one
may argue that it is this intense conservatism that had given birth to the very
effective socio-political satire found in the Aristophanic comedy.
Aristophanes in The Wasps
laments over the deterioration of Athenian society which seemed to have seen
its heydays in the first half of the fifth century. Yet, it is clear that even
in its diluted form Athenian democracy was healthy enough to tolerate the Old
Comedy which according to Bates “exercised a satirical censorship unsparing of
public and private life, of statesmanship, of political usage, of education and
literature, in a word, of everything which concerned the city or could amuse
the citizens” (7-16).
Such freedom of expression as
the one enjoyed by the Attic Comedy, according to David Barrett in the
introduction to the play, is “something which could only have flourished where
it did and when it did, and yet, thanks to a writer of genius can give the
readers in a latter century the illusion of personal participation, a feeling
of familiarity with the whole spirit of an age” (28). The wasps by the
Attic playwright Aristophanes is undoubtedly a prime example of such talent
that defied time and space.
In conclusion, the play The
Wasps is undeniably a powerful depiction of the socio-political context of
the 5th century Athens.
The subtext of this comedy discusses the changes in the values in the major
institutions of the poets’ contemporary society and urges his fellow Athenians
to live up to the proud traditions they have inherited from their
predecessors.
Works Cited
Aristophanes.
The Frogs and Other Plays. Ed. David Barrett London: Penguin, 1964.
Bates, Alfred, ed. The Drama: Its History,
Literature and Influence on Civilization. Vol. 2 London:
Historical Publishing, 1906.
Olson, S. Douglas. “Politics and Poetry in
Aristophanes’ Wasps.” <http://www.jstor.org/pss/370173>
Thucydides. The
Peloponnesian War. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980.
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