Reproducing Athens by Lape Susan

Author:Lape, Susan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781400825912
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2008-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

5

The Politics of Sexuality in Drama and Democratic Athens

THE CASE OF MENANDER’S SAMIA

The Father-Son Romance

By the end of the first act in Menander’s Samia, everything seems to be set for the marriage plot to proceed to its predestined end. In the opening monologue, Moschion, the wealthy young hero, confesses to having fathered a child with the girl next door and to desiring to marry her. The only thing standing in his way is the small matter of gaining his father’s consent. For nine months at least, Moschion’s deep shame before his adoptive father Demeas has prevented him from owning up to his behavior. Nevertheless, he resolves to confront his father about the marriage—or to act like a man, as his slave puts it—as soon as his father returns from abroad. This anticipated father–son confrontation never materializes, however, because unbeknownst to Moschion, Demeas has taken it upon himself to arrange his son’s marriage with his friend Nikeratos’s daughter: the very young woman who has already borne Moschion a child. Thus, in the space of the first act the problem seems to be solved, all obstacles removed.

To a certain extent, this scenario resembles the opening of the , another work that begins after a wealthy young man has raped and impregnated an impoverished female citizen. Although the hero’s father in that play also arranges and prepares his son’s wedding in the first act, the intended bride-to-be is not the rape victim but rather the hero’s homo-patric half-sister. According to the conventions of comedy, the planned marriage is wrong for two reasons: comedy neither allows its violated heroines to avoid marrying their rapists nor tolerates half-sibling marriage.1 In all probability, the protagonist’s father planned a half-sibling marriage specifically to preserve the household wealth. Accordingly, we can assume that the successful resolution of the plot with the marriage of wealthy rapist and the impoverished victim involved neutralizing the perceived economic barrier to the marriage.

In the Samia, by contrast, the anticipated economic impediment to interclass marriage has been neutralized in advance. Although we never learn in the play as it is now preserved exactly why Demeas is so keen to marry his son to the dowryless daughter of his poor neighbor, it is clear that his friendship with Nikeratos counteracts the traditional bias against marriage between the rich and the poor. Nikeratos may have been less enthusiastic at first because he is “poor but proud,” as Eva Keuls describes him,2 but he quickly agrees to the marriage. While the use of male friendship as a kind of social solvent to dismantle the stratifying effects of economic difference is also the strategy underlying the homo-social romance plot in the Dyskolos (discussed in the previous chapter), again, there is a crucial difference in Samia that underscores how exceptional its seemingly problemless plot is.

The Dyskolos vividly depicts the vast sociocultural gulf separating the wealthy city sophisticate protagonist and the impoverished rustic who eventually becomes the heroine’s guardian (kurios). In order for marriage to be an effective means of

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