Law in the Court of Aristophanes: Shifting Legal Terminology in Aristophanic Comedy

While there has been some influential scholarship on the relationship between law and comedy (Carey 2000, MacDowell 2013, and Buis 2019), the remit of these studies has been limited to Aristophanes’ earlier plays. By expanding our study of law in Aristophanic comedy, however, to include the entire extant corpus, we can begin to track the playwright’s shifting use of legal language emphasizing the significant role that Athenian law played in the daily life of 5^th-century Athenians. In this paper, I argue that Aristophanes’ use of legal language demonstrates the playwright’s attention to changes in legal terminology and his audience’s understanding of Athenian law and the development of legal terminology during the late-5^th century. Of particular interest are Aristophanes’ lexical choices, mainly the difference in usage of the terms nomos and psephisma and dikē and graphē. Finally, I suggest that Aristophanes’ attention to these details demonstrates the intimate relationship between law and daily life during the late-5th century.

For a majority of his corpus Aristophanes uses the terms nomos and psephisma interchangeably (e.g., there is obvious slippage between the terms at Ar. Ach. 532 and Av. 1037-38). However, after the 5^th century there was a sharp distinction between nomos and psephisma, the former being used to describe laws more fundamental and permanent than the latter (MacDowell 1995). Most interestingly, Aristophanes attends to the difference between nomos and psephisma in his Ecclesiazusae, which was produced in the first decade of the 4^th century. When Praxagora discusses her proposed law (Ar. Ecc. 649-650), and when the First Old Woman explains the law (Ar. Ecc. 1011-1014), the playwright uses the term psephisma. Yet when the Neighbor (Ar. Ecc. 762-764) and the First Old Woman (Ar. Ecc. 1022) suggests obeying the law, or the Second Old Woman discusses the force of the law (Ar. Ecc. 1054-1056), he employs the word nomos. Aristophanes’ Ecclesiazusae serves as one of our earliest extant examples of this contrast, while also demonstrating an expectation that his audience would have understood recent changes in the distinction between nomos and psephisma.

In the second part of my paper, I will address Aristophanes’ use of the terms graphē and dikē. These terms were both forms of prosecution available to would-be litigants, but their degree of specificity is different. While the term dikē is ambiguous and was largely used to refer to private prosecutions initiated by the victim or to suits whose procedure was dikē, the term graphē refers to a public prosecution that could be initiated by the victim or a third party (Todd 2003). In the corpus of Aristophanes, we see the playwright utilize both of these terms and attend to the differences between them. I conclude by suggesting that the playwright’s frequent usage of these terms and his attention to their semantic difference points to an audience familiar with the prominent role of law in their daily lives.