Politics and Parody in Old Comedy

Strattis’ comedy Phoenician Women was a spectacular Euripidean parody including Dionysus as a deus ex machina complaining of being dragged on stage yet again to solve other people’s problems, Jocaste simultaneously delivering cooking advice to her sons and encapsulating the art of Old Comic parody, obscene jokes about the Boeotian dialect, and the first extant use of the word “paratragedy.” In this paper I use Phoenician Women to explore the parodic practices of Strattis, a younger contemporary of Aristophanes who presented himself as an expert in Euripidean poetr

The idea that Aristophanes acted in his own plays has been accepted and rejected a number of times since it was first proposed over a century ago. Neither side, however, has offered an argument based on a full examination of the evidence. This paper seeks to fill that gap and ultimately rejects the theory.

This paper explores a new, historicizing reading of a major theme in Aristophanes’ Ecclesiazusae. The term soteria (broadly ‘deliverance’; for its semantic range: Faraone 1997:56-7) occurs more times in this play than anywhere else in Aristophanes, but the absence of a sufficiently heightened sense of crisis in the period of the play’s production (probably between 393 and 390: Ussher 1973:xx-xxv; Seager 1967:107n.110; cf. Sommerstein 1998:5-7) and the its vagueness about the reason for the need for soteria (cf.

Memorably described by Gilbert Murray in 1933 as the ‘literature of fatigue,’ Ecclesiazusae has commonly been presented as lacking the political cutting edge of its predecessors. Viewed as a product of Aristophanes’ declining powers and performed at a time when interest in political ‘Old Comedy’ was supposedly on the wane, Ecclesiazusae’s engagement with the political questions of post-war Athens has been largely ignored.

Explanations of the political success of Cleon and other demagogues in Peloponnesian War-era Athens tend to focus on demagogues’ utility: their charismatic speech, for instance (Arist. Pol. 1305a12-13; Henderson 1990; Rhodes 1995), their expertise in management (Andrewes 1962; Davies 1981), or their support of measures that tangibly benefited the impoverished majority (e.g., Thuc. 2.65.10; Ar. Eq. 773-776; Xen. Hell. 1.7.2; Finley 1962; Munn 2000).