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Aristophanes and Male Anxiety – The Defence of the Oikos*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2009

Jane F. Gardner
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Extract

The therapeutic value of laughter is a commonplace of psychology; it is recognized that one of the functions of comedy is to exorcize our fears by causing us to laugh at them. This is one possible meaning of Aristotle's generalization, with ‘many more than one facet’, that comedy represented people as ‘inferior’ to ‘men as they are now’ (Poetics 1448a 18). So, in comedy, we should not expect to find realistic portrayals of people as they actually are, but rather stereotypes, embodying the fears and anxieties, the mild, underlying paranoia about what might happen, of the audience for whom the author is writing. Aristophanes was writing for an Athenian male audience, and he had to strike a chord in them, if his plays were to be successful and win prizes. What, on the evidence of Aristophanes’ plays, were Athenian men worried about?

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 36 , Issue 1 , April 1989 , pp. 51 - 62
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1989

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References

NOTES

1. Dover, K. J., Greek Popular Morality (Oxford, 1974), p. 19Google Scholar.

2. E.g., Lys. 107; Eccles. 225, 523–5; Thesm. 340–4, 395ff., 477–501, 812–13.

3. And later the key factor in one of the accounts of the blinding of Tiresias: Ovid, Met. 3.316Google Scholar.

4. Lys. 24–25, 107–35, 715–78; Eccles. 228, 256–7, 265.

5. Lys. 194ff.; Thesm. 347–8, 393, 556–7, 630ff., 733–59; Eccles. 132–46, 227, 1118–23.

6. The Family in Classical Greece (London, 1968), p. 115Google Scholar.

7. The progress of his argument is not entirely clear. In the first part (‘if an Athenian… claim for citizenship’) and towards the end (‘if she were detected’, etc.) he is envisaging a situation in which the affair and the parentage of the baby were known; but what is the situation in the central section (‘but the woman… foisted upon it’)? Presumably one in which an affair was suspected, but not known for certain; the family would become embroiled because a decision would have to be made on whether or not to accept the suspect baby.

8. In Clouds 41ff., Strepsiades' wife, who has married a bit beneath her, urges the values of her well-to-do, aristocratic family on her son.

9. Lysias 1.6.

10. ‘Presuming that we were now in perfect intimacy’ (Loeb translation, W. R. M. Lamb); ‘thinking that this was the strongest family tie’ (Fisher, N. R. E., Social Values in Classical Athens (London, 1976), p. 48Google Scholar).

11. Op. cit., p. 96.

12. And so there was a basic unity, rather than any structural opposition, between the supposed public (polis) interests of men and private (oikos) interests of women in Athens: Foley, H., CP 27 (1982), 1–21Google Scholar.

13. Discussed in Lacey, , op. cit., p. 161ff.Google Scholar, and Gould, J. P., JHS 100 (1980), p. 47CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See especially chapters 38, 58–60 of the speech.

14. Lysistrata 404–419 (Penguin translation, Alan H. Sommerstein).

15. The Penguin translation of Lysistrata line 139 is: ‘All we' re interested in is having our fun and then getting rid of the baby.’ The Greek, however, actually reads: ‘It's Poseidon and little boats' and this is probably a reference to Sophocles’ Tyro, the story of which, as the scholiast informs us, concerned the seduction of Tyro, daughter of Salmoneus, by Poseidon, disguised as her lover, the river-god Enipeus, and her subsequent abandonment of the babies, Pelias and Neleus, Moses-fashion, in little skaphai. This escapade is usually assumed to have taken place before she became the wife of Cretheus.

16. Plato, , Rep. 449b–464dGoogle Scholar.

17. Landels, J. G., Biology and Human Affairs 44 (1979), 94–113Google Scholar; Lloyd, G. E. R., Science, Folklore and Ideology (Cambridge, 1983), Part IIGoogle Scholar.

18. Humphreys, S., JHS 94 (1974), 93–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The scope of the law and various modern theories as to its purpose are discussed, with references to relevant literature, by Rhodes, P. J., A Commentary on the Aristotelian ‘Athenaion Politeia’ (Oxford, 1981), pp. 331–4Google Scholar.

19. Whitehead, D., The Ideology of the Athenian Metic (Cambridge, 1977), chapter 2Google Scholar.

20. Penguin translation, Alan H. Sommerstein; a more literal rendering would be ‘little villains, counterfeit coin, valueless (atima – probably intended to suggest also ‘without citizen rights'), wrongly stamped.’

21. A point well brought out by Osborne, R., Classical Landscape with Figures (London, 1987)Google Scholar; see specially pp. 23 and 96–97.

22. MacDowell, D. M., The Law in Classical Athens (London, 1978), pp. 92–93Google Scholar.

23. MacDowell, , op cit., p. 92Google Scholar. See also p. 174: of the grounds on which someone could be challenged as unfit to speak in the Ecclesia, and disfranchised if convicted on dokimasia, two relate to service to the state (refusal of military service, or ‘throwing away one's shield’), two (maltreatment of parents and wasting of one's inheritance) to obligations within the oikos, and one (being a male prostitute) can be seen as an abrogation of one's role both as a citizen and as potential head of an oikos (see below).

24. Birds 1347–59; Frogs 149–50; Ecclesiazusae 638–40; Clouds 1321–436 (cf. also 911).

25. For such connoisseurship of speeches, represented as usurping the place of a serious concern for political issues and the welfare of Athens, see Thucydides 3.37.3. See also Carter, L. B., The Quiet Athenian (Oxford, 1986), pp. 119–25Google Scholar.

26. Dover, , op. cit., pp. 213–6Google Scholar; MacDowell, , op. cit., pp. 125–6, 174. The laws are detailed in Aeschines 1, Against TimarchusGoogle Scholar.

27. Acharnians 79, 119; Knights 423–8, 878–80; Clouds 1022, 1084–95; Lysistrata 1092; Frogs 1069ff; Ecclesiazusae 112–3.

28. Whereas homosexuality was thought characteristic particularly of those institutions of Athens, such as the gymnasium and the symposium, which were the typical pursuits of aristocratic Athenians: Murray, O., Early Greece (Fontana, 1980) p. 207Google Scholar; Carter, op. cit., chapter 3.