Democratic Swarms: Ancient Comedy and the Politics of the People by Page duBois

Author:Page duBois [duBois, Page]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: DRA000000 DRAMA / General, DRA006000 DRAMA / Ancient & Classical, LIT004190 Literary Criticism / Ancient & Classical, HIS002010 History / Ancient / Greece
ISBN: 9780226815749
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2022-05-04T00:00:00+00:00

Utopian Comedies

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.

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