Aristophanes and the Cloak of Comedy: Affect, Aesthetics, and the Canon

Aristophanes and the Cloak of Comedy

Aristophanes and the Cloak of Comedy

Affect, Aesthetics, and the Canon

Mario Telò

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO & LONDON

Mario Telò is associate professor of classics at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2016 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2016.

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-30969-9 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-30972-9 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226309729.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Telò, Mario, 1977–author.

Title: Aristophanes and the cloak of comedy : affect, aesthetics, and the canon / Mario Telò.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015036902 | ISBN 9780226309699 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226309729 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Aristophanes—Criticism and interpretation. | Greek drama (Comedy)—History and criticism.

Classification: LCC PA3879 .T43 2016 | DDC 882/.014c23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015036902

♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

To Alex

Contents

Acknowledgments

Note to the Reader

1 Delayed Applause: Competitive Aesthetics and the Construction of the Comic Canon

1. Triumphant Failure: Peace, Clouds, and the Poetics of Hierarchy

2. Parabasis, Plot, and the Directionality of the Text

3. Affecting the Audience: Knights, Clouds, and the Feel of Comedy

PART 1: Wasps

2 A Touch of Class: The Enduring Texture of Aristophanic Comedy

1. Converging Identities: Bdelycleon and Aristophanes between Parabasis and Plot

2. Contest of Cloaks: Restaging the First Clouds

3. The Daemons in the Details: Sensing the Cratinean Fashion

4. Aristophanic Fabric and Comic Canonicity

5. Conclusions

3 Emotional Rescue and Generic Demotion: Old Comedians and Tragedy’s Ragged Audience

1. Intersecting Affects: Tragic Love as Comic Disease

2. Anger and the Aesthetics of Alienation

3. Wrapping Walls: Affective Mimesis and Proto-Canonical Therapy

4. Ragged Feelings: The Comic Audience as a Tragic Parent

5. Conclusions

4 The Broken Net: Comic Failure and Its Consequences

1. An Iambic Erinys: Cratinus, Affect, and Tragic Havoc

2. Aesopic Agonistics: Fables and Comic Redress

3. Undoing Failure: Dire Dancing and Ersatz Liberation

4. Conclusions

PART 2: Clouds

5 Aristophanes’ Electra Complex and the Future of Comedy

1. Aristophanes’ Oresteia

2. The Comic Stage as Tragic Classroom: The Audience Meets Socrates (and Eupolis)

3. Stripping Strepsiades: Socrates, Eupolis, Clytemnestra

4. Revision as Revenge: Stolen Cloaks and Suffocating Sons

5. Conclusions

Epilogue

1. Fail Better

2. Canonicity: Reenactment, Literary Affections, Enduring Objects

3. Affect: Touch, Vibrant Objects, Intertextuality

Synopses

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

This book has been through a long journey, not unlike my own. It started in Italy with a nebulous, pseudo-Bloomian interest in parental bonds and literary affiliation throughout Greek drama. By the time of my trans-Atlantic passage, to Southern California, I envisioned a series of case studies on the metapoetics of fatherhood drawn from Aristophanes. When I began writing the book, I was serendipitously intrigued by the prominence of two similar pieces of clothing in Wasps and the second version of Clouds, both of them plays that concern father-son relationships and spring from a competitive setback. With the forensic attitude of a philologist, I took it upon myself to piece together things that seemed unconnected: not just father-son relationships but textiles and an ultimately canonical poet’s artistic failure. My original interest in poetic self-reflexivity had come to include aesthetics, materiality, and canonicity. I soon realized that the resolution of the puzzle I was investigating could occupy a whole book. Instead of collecting multiple case studies, I would apply my close readings to the reconstruction of a narrative that, though centered in two plays, stretches into their afterlife, with ramifications for Aristophanes’ authorial survival.

My journey would not have happened in the first place without the generous support and encouragement of Joseph Farrell, Donald Mastronarde, Glenn Most, and Seth Schein, with special thanks to Ralph Rosen, who warmly and selflessly shepherded me toward employment in American academia. Thanks are also due to my wonderful UCLA colleagues, who welcomed me and have provided a fertile intellectual environment for these past seven years, including Catherine Atherton, Ann Bergren, David Blank, Shane Butler, Sander Goldberg, Robert Gurval, Chris Johanson, Francesca Martelli, Kathryn Morgan, Sarah Morris, John Papadopoulos, Alex Purves, Amy Richlin, Giulia Sissa, and Brent Vine. They all, in various ways, have supported me and helped me bring this project to fruition.

The core argument in this book had its first public airing in a talk at Berkeley in April 2012. I thank my UC colleagues Mark Griffith, Leslie Kurke, and Donald Mastronarde for their warm reception and invaluable feedback, which gave me the strength to continue. Donald, to whom I owe a major debt of gratitude dating back to my first visit to Berkeley, as an undergraduate in 1999, has been a source of support throughout the completion of this book. He read the first chapter, offering insightful comments from which I benefited enormously. So did Karen Bassi, Lucia Prauscello, and Ralph Rosen. In particular, Karen helped me work through the theoretical implications of the argument, while Ralph gently yet firmly urged me to think big and to clarify structure and organization. Seth Schein and Kathryn Morgan both helped with the book’s abstract. Emily Gowers read the epilogue, improving form and substance with her distinctive wit and kindness. The participants in the June 2014 Cambridge conference Recontextualizing Occasion: Reperformance in Ancient Greece, organized by Anna Uhlig and Richard Hunter, lent an attentive and sympathetic ear to some of the contents of the book. I also want to thank Jim Porter for conversations through the years that, together with his writings, have deeply influenced my thinking.

Deepest thanks go to Alex Purves for her advice and support, and the inspiration she provides. Alex read the manuscript twice, showing enthusiasm for the project—even when I had none left—and changed my perspective on a number of key issues. She made me realize that ultimately my project was about the affect of genre and prodded me to read in affect theory and the new materialism. I am grateful for her inexhaustibly stimulating presence, which has profoundly enriched me as a scholar.

At the University of Chicago Press I found in Susan Bielstein the ideal editor: visionary, perceptive, and generous—an author’s dream. James Whitman Toftness was an unrivaled example of efficiency, kindness, and responsiveness. Thanks are also due to Susan Karani, my copy editor, for her patience and attention.

I am grateful for the insights of my two no-longer-anonymous readers. Charles Platter, whose work on Aristophanes has greatly informed my own, provided much-needed encouragement and innumerable astute observations. Melissa Mueller offered essential guidance and contributed to making the manuscript clearer, tighter, and stronger. Her groundbreaking work on objects in tragedy infuses me with energy and excitement. I am also grateful to Leslie Kurke for reading the manuscript at a late stage and promptly supplying fantastic comments, additions, and corrections with characteristic generosity and acuity. Her extraordinary example of adventurous and rigorous scholarship continually inspires me.

This book would have never seen the light of day without the unceasing, painstaking help of Alex Press, my life partner. Alex taught me how to write in English, reinforcing for me the value of clear prose, free from flowery embellishments and jargon. He never tired of correcting sentences, streamlining paragraphs, and reconceptualizing whole pages. He read the manuscript multiple times, improving it at every round in wonderful ways. He was also a constant intellectual interlocutor, talking me through ideas and helping me overcome doubts and hesitations with patience and commitment. This book owes to him much more than can be measured in words. The dedication to him is a minimal compensation for the Heraclean efforts he has put into this project.

Santa Monica, 2015

Note to the Reader

Several of the features of this book are designed to make it more accessible to non-classicists. All Greek is translated or closely paraphrased, and the Greek words and phrases I discuss are all transliterated. (In general, inflectional endings are preserved in quotations.) Readers who forget what a particular Greek term means can refer to the index for the first occurrence. Because of my programmatically nonlinear reading of Wasps and Clouds, I have provided, before the endnotes, synopses that map out, in a linear manner, the scenes that I discuss.

The plays of Aristophanes are cited according to the edition of N. G. Wilson, OCT (2007). Divergences are noted when necessary. Unless otherwise stated, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides are also cited according to their most recent OCT editions. Citations of the comic fragments are based on the standard edition of R. Kassel and C. Austin (Berlin 1983–2001), referred to as KA. All translations are mine, unless otherwise indicated.

For ancient authors and works cited in the endnotes, I follow the abbreviations of the Oxford Classical Dictionary (4th edition, 2012) where possible; in other cases, those of Liddell, Scott, and Jones, A Greek-English Lexicon (9th edition, Oxford 1996). For the works of Galen (cited according to the volume and the page number of the edition of Kühn), I follow the abbreviations of S. P. Mattern in Galen and the Rhetoric of Healing, 163–71 (Baltimore 2008).

1

Delayed Applause: Competitive Aesthetics and the Construction of the Comic Canon

Since Socrates was an uncommon subject and an unexpected spectacle on the stage and in a comedy, at first the play astonished the Athenians because of its oddity. Later, as they were jealous by nature and had taken to reproaching the best (aristois) men, not only those in politics and in public offices but even more harshly those highly respected for their good speeches or the dignity (semnotēti) of their life, this play, Clouds, seemed to be very pleasant to hear. They applauded the poet as they never did on any other occasion, shouted that he should win, and urged the judges in the front row to write the name of Aristophanes [as the winner] and nobody else.

AELIAN, Historical Miscellany 2.13

This anecdote fancifully rewrites a famous chapter of Athenian theatrical history.¹ After defeating Cratinus with Knights at the Lenaia of 424 BCE, Aristophanes suffered a humiliating loss a year later at the Great Dionysia with Clouds, placing third behind that veteran of the comic stage and Ameipsias, who is barely known to us.² However, in the account of Aelian—a third-century CE miscellanist—Clouds managed to transform the audience’s attitude from bewilderment to unconditional approval. Aelian emphasizes the force of the spectators’ change of mind not only by interpreting their final applause as a roaring recommendation to the judges of the dramatic competition, but also by eliding the outcome. Aelian’s omission implicitly converts the Athenian audience’s second thoughts about Clouds into a victory.³ This revision is, in a sense, emblematic of the larger story of Aristophanic reception, in which this momentarily defeated comic poet would rise to dominance over the other representatives of Old Comedy. In other words, the audience’s recommendation in Aelian’s account seems to retroject to the moment of the play’s original performance the verdict of later judges, first and foremost the Hellenistic scholars who relegated Aristophanes’ chief rivals, Cratinus and Eupolis, to a secondary position, which would ultimately contribute to their merely fragmentary survival. Posterity indeed preserved the work of Aristophanes and of nobody else.⁴ In implicitly merging two distant moments in the life and afterlife of Aristophanic comedy (the loss to Cratinus in 423 and the poet’s triumph in ancient literary-critical history), Aelian’s anecdote provides a fitting point of entry into the broad, interrelated themes of this book: dramatic reception, canonicity, and aesthetics.

But before we get to these matters, let us pause to lay down a few facts about the dramatis personae and the places involved in this story. The annual Great Dionysia—the most important Athenian civic festival, attended by the whole Attic community as well as foreigners—included dramatic contests for the star playwrights of tragedy and comedy. The tragic contest featured a trio of competitors, the comic one a group of five, possibly reduced to three during the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE). Tragedians were each responsible for three tragedies and a satyr drama, comic contestants for only one play. At the Great Dionysia and the Lenaia, a less prestigious festival, Aristophanes repeatedly competed against Cratinus and Eupolis, with varying outcomes.⁵ Aristophanes and Eupolis belonged to the same generation, occupying the comic scene in the last three decades of the fifth century BCE (the former debuting in 427, the latter in 429), while Cratinus, their predecessor, was active from the mid-450s to the late 420s. At the Great Dionysia of 423, Cratinus victoriously performed one of his last plays, Pytinē (The Wine Flask), in which, responding to Aristophanes’ ridicule of him in Knights, he put himself onstage as a drunken, yet vigorous, old husband of Komoidia (the personification of comedy).⁶ About two hundred years later, in the Hellenistic period, this fluid competitive milieu would become fixed by a set of critics and grammarians based in Alexandria, in the Egypt of the Ptolemies, whose mission of preserving and commenting on the patrimony of archaic and classical Greek literature entailed standardizing canonical rankings for each poetic genre.⁷ The canonical triad of tragedy (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides), which had already emerged by the fourth century, came to be matched by a comic triad (Cratinus, Aristophanes, Eupolis), with lasting repercussions for the later history of ancient drama.⁸

The canon looms large here, as several of Aristophanes’ works following the negative reception of Clouds display an aesthetic discourse that I will call proto-canonical. I use the term because this discourse establishes a self-serving axiology within Old Comedy that implies the generic demotion or even expulsion of rivals. Regardless of Aristophanes’ specific intentions, this discourse helped raise him to the top of the comic canonical hierarchy. Focusing on two plays programmatically reflecting on Aristophanes’ defeat—Wasps (422, Lenaia) and the second Clouds (419–417?), whose original version does not survive—this book examines the contours of this discourse, which served to turn a failure into the lasting applause depicted in the Aelian episode.⁹ It complements recent work on Aristophanic self-construction by exploring how a central moment in the poet’s career directs future perceptions of his oeuvre and of Old Comedy’s generic identity. The interconnected actions of Wasps and Clouds suggestively plot the relationship between Aristophanes, his audience, and his two major rivals by offering an ongoing commentary on the setback of 423 through a complex and coherent process of reimagining, reinvention, and restaging, which sets the terms of the critical evaluation and survival of Old Comedy. This is the story of how a revisionary narrative of dramatic failure creates the enduring illusion of Aristophanic comedy as a prestigious aesthetic object by presenting it as a vehicle of ostensibly transhistorical values: dignity, self-control, health, paternal authority.¹⁰

Aesthetics are at the center of my analysis. By aesthetics I mean the specific character (including psychological and even physical effects) of the connection between the dramatic form and an audience—or, more precisely, the way this connection is constructed.¹¹ I begin in this chapter with the payoff of this construction, namely critical elevation culminating in canonical hegemony. I then lay out the methodology, grounded in intra-and intertextual readings, by which I reconstruct Aristophanes’ aesthetic discourse. I conclude with a preliminary examination of this discourse, showing how Knights previews themes of the narrative mapped out in Wasps and the second Clouds, a narrative which I proceed to analyze in chapters 2 through 5.

1. Triumphant Failure: Peace, Clouds, and the Poetics of Hierarchy

The parabasis, a standard feature of Old Comedy, was the moment in which the Chorus, breaking the fourth wall, addressed the audience, ostensibly offering the poet’s perspective. Surveying the continuities between the ancient literary-critical account of Old Comedy and the parabasis of Peace will help illustrate the place of proto-canonical discourse in Aristophanic self-fashioning and outline my argument.

From the Hellenistic period onward, Aristophanes was the favored poet of Old Comedy, eclipsing all others. The Hellenistic canon of Old Comedy is famously formulated in the opening line of one of Horace’s satires (1.4): Eupolis atque Cratinus Aristophanesque poetae. But this is not an equal triumvirate.¹² The Hellenistic tripartite canonization of tragedy, already visible in Frogs and formalized in the fourth century, implied no clear-cut, stable internal hierarchy—at least not one that foreclosed the survival of any member.¹³ The axiology of the comedic triad, however, engendered a de facto monad.¹⁴ In one text of the so-called Comic Prolegomena, a twentieth-century edition of late-antique treatises that probably preserve Alexandrian material, the entry Aristophanes opens with a hyperbolic verdict presented as a statement of fact:¹⁵ By far the most skilled in words among the Athenians and surpassing all in natural talent. This judgment presupposes a larger evaluative schema evident in the anonymous critic’s much less enthusiastic view of Eupolis in the preceding entry: He became powerful in diction and imitated Cratinus; indeed he displays much slander and crude outspokenness.¹⁶ Not only is Eupolis dismissively treated as an imitator of Cratinus, but two qualities that may be perceived as ingredients of satiric discourse as such—slander (loidoron) and crude outspokenness (skaion)—become signs of literary second-ratedness if read against the description of Aristophanes as more subtle and elegant (leptoteros).¹⁷ Collected in the same edition, the critic Platonius pits the vulgar humor (phortikon) of Cratinus, Eupolis’s alleged model, against Aristophanic gracious wit (charis).¹⁸ Another treatise in the Comic Prolegomena ranks Aristophanes as the shining star in the comic canon for "having practiced comedy more skillfully (technikōteron) than his contemporaries" and having rescued the genre from the archaiotēs (archaic style) and ataxia (disorder, lack of direction) still manifest in its Cratinean form.¹⁹ In Satires 1.123–24 Persius reconnects his satiric self with the Old Comic triad and replays this schema by spelling out the climax implicit in the Horace passage, in which Aristophanes’ final position discreetly hinted at his role as generic telos.²⁰ He pairs Cratinean boldness (audaci . . . Cratino) with Eupolidean anger (iratum Eupolidem) and singles out Aristophanes as the only comedian whose distinctive poetic and emotional qualities coincide with superlative (praegrandi) artistic value.²¹

The correspondence between this verdict and Aristophanes’ humorous self-fashioning is well illustrated in the parabasis of Peace—a play performed at the Great Dionysia two years after the fiasco of the first Clouds. It is here that Aristophanes claims through the Chorus to have turned comedy into a technē (craft), as robust and grandiose as a towering building, by safeguarding the genre from the destabilizing effects of cheap and vulgar humor (748–50):

τοιαῦτ’ ἀφελὼν κακὰ καὶ φόρτον καὶ βωμολοχεύματ’ ἀγεννῆ

ἐποίησε τέχνην μεγάλην ὑμῖν κἀπύργωσ’ οἰκοδομήσας

ἔπεσιν μεγάλοις καὶ διανοίαις καὶ σκώμμασιν οὐκ ἀγοραίοις

Having removed (aphelōn) such evils, vulgarity (phorton), and sordid, buffoonish acts (bōmolocheumata), he (= the poet) has devised a great craft (technēn) for you and built it up to a towering height (epurgōse oikodomēsas) with grandiose verses and ideas, and jokes you won’t hear in the marketplace (agoraiois).

Leucon and, in particular, Eupolis—Aristophanes’ competitors in the Great Dionysia of 421—are probably the immediate targets of these lines.²² The architectural imagery together with the evocation of the agora (agoraiois 750) constructs this rivalry around multiple sets of opposites: sophistication and vulgarity (phorton 748), order and disorder, craft and amateurish improvisation, symbolic capital and debased monetary exchange, monumental stability and performative ephemerality—and, by extension, writtenness and orality.²³ The parabatic statement resonates with Platonius’s account of Aristophanes’ refusal of phortikon, but especially with the contrast between the Aristophanic technical (technikōteron) approach to comedy writing and the ataxia of Cratinus (Eupolis’s putative model) that is drawn in one of the treatises analyzed above.²⁴ This resonance signals the convergence of the values that Aristophanes attaches to his comic mode with the Alexandrians’ own notion of poetry as fine craftmanship (technē),²⁵ their critical selectivity (krisis), and, above all, their organization and monumentalization of the literary past.²⁶ Significantly, Aristophanes also declares his hostility toward the debased poetic products of the agora (τοὺς νοῦς δ’ ἀγοραίους fr. 488.2 KA) in his response to Cratinus’s mockery of his alleged cultivation of (Euripidean) leptotēs (subtle elegance)—an important category of Hellenistic aesthetics, which, as we have observed, one of the comic treatises assigns to Aristophanic comedy.²⁷ It has been argued that in looking for an author’s or a genre’s literary identity, we are, always, to some extent, looking at ourselves (Houghton and Wyke 2009, 5).²⁸ The Alexandrian scholars may well have seen their technical, taxonomical attitude reflected in the comedian’s self-fashioning.

The proto-canonical valence of the Aristophanic edifice, which resembles Horace’s bronze-outlasting monumentum, is heightened by the semantics of phortos. The language of building ([he] built it up to a towering height [epurgōse oikodomēsas]) activates the materiality of phortos, setting the immobile, permanent, grand structure conceived for public display against the movable, perishable, petty goods shipped—and thus exposed to constant danger—by seafaring merchants (phortēgoi) or carried by porters (phortakes).²⁹ The participle aphelōn, which expresses Aristophanes’ proud removal of the shoddy stuff of phortikē kōmōidia (vulgar, ephemeral comedy) from his generic blueprint, adds to this opposition. Five lines earlier, the verb exelaunō (to ban) indicates Aristophanes’ alleged expulsion of low-value devices from the comic repertoire (ἐξήλασ’ ἀτιμώσας 743).³⁰ This verb, in fact, brings to mind the rhetoric of devaluation and exclusion that ancient literary criticism employs to justify the arbitrary axiologies of canonical listings. Though Eupolis and his predecessor Cratinus are not ostracized from the Hellenistic comic canon and their works continued to be read through antiquity, their brand of comedy, dismissed as slipshod merchandise, is marked for literary history’s clearance bin.³¹

Intertextuality in this passage assimilates Aristophanes to a tragic dramatist, Aeschylus, who at the time of the performance of Peace had already acquired canonical or semi-canonical status. The description of Aristophanes’ comic edifice is modeled upon a self-proclamation of poetic grandiosity assigned to Aeschylus in Pherecrates’ Crapataloi—a play that was probably set in the underworld and featured the dead tragedian as a character: "I who have built (exoikodomēsas) a great craft (technēn) and handed it down" (ὅστις <γ’> . . . παρέδωκα τέχνην μεγάλην ἐξοικοδομήσας [fr. 100 KA]).³² In turning Aeschylus’s tragic art into a craft that he has built and handed down to future generations, this statement presents him as an already canonized tragedian, whose plays, if not revived at the major dramatic festival through reperformance by public decree,³³ were at least restaged at the Rural Dionysia (another Attic festival) and were probably incorporated within the canon of literature that formed part of a typical curriculum (Biles 2006–2007, 230).³⁴ One of the icons of this canonization is the poet’s memorial in Sicily—a magical site for the reperformance of his plays—which supplied aspiring tragedians and tragic actors with the illusion of materially recapturing his dramatic legacy.³⁵ The Pherecratean Aeschylus evoked by Aristophanes is similar to the character in Frogs, who, in the atmosphere of the play—retrospective, tinged with nostalgia, venerating, canonizing (Porter 2006b, 301)—advertises his poetic afterlife and receives praise for the monumental dignity (semnotēs) of his tragic products, which is conducive to generic orderliness: "But you first among the Greeks built up towers (purgōsas) of dignified (semna) words and adorned tragic chatter" (1004–5).³⁶ I do not mean to suggest that Aristophanes posits a connection between his comic persona and Aeschylus’s tragic one, but rather that the parabasis of Peace toys with the discourse of dramatic canonicity, framing the comic poet’s self-presentation as an elevation of his particular mode to a generic norm and thus imposing a self-serving hierarchy of value.³⁷ This proto-canonical gesture establishes the Aristophanic mode’s legitimacy by denouncing rivals’ lack of conformity to an imagined, self-constructed ideal of comedy deceptively offered as generic orthodoxy.

The onomastic play in an earlier part of the parabasis can also be seen to participate in this proto-canonical maneuvering. The adjective aristos, which closes the first line of a typically self-promoting parabatic statement (736–38), punningly exploits the talking potential of Aristophanes’ name by presenting him as the aristos kōmōidodidaskalos (the best comic poet).³⁸ Combined with the image of the monument introduced in the following lines, this trope amounts to an inscriptional gesture, mimicking the way epitaphs engraved on poets’ tombstones (like that of Aeschylus in Sicily) extend and immortalize their physical and textual bodies through the creation of a perpetual presence.³⁹ Not just the covert embedding of the poet’s name within the verbal texture, but also the meaning of the word aristos contributes to the epigraphic, commemorative register of these lines.⁴⁰ The status of aristos comedian, which Hellenistic and post-Hellenistic critics in effect assign to Aristophanes, may partly reflect the reception of this parabatic pun as an authorial signature, defining for future readers not just an individual but his oeuvre and constructing it as the expression of objective aesthetic value.⁴¹ The comic poet’s name predisposes him, as it were, for canonicity. In the literary-critical reception of his name, the self-ironical coloring of Aristophanes’ onomastic play is suppressed by the authoritative force of its self-aggrandizement.

It has been suggested that Aristophanes seems to be anxious about [his] place in the literary and dramatic canon (Torrance 2013, 291), but scholars have not tackled Aristophanic proto-canonical discourse as it affects the comedian’s plots and the actual construction of the ancient comic canon.⁴² Though the proto-canonical narrative that permeates the parabasis of Peace has its roots in Knights, it is fully developed in the plots and parabases of Wasps and the revised Clouds, two plays that programmatically respond to Aristophanes’ defeat in 423.⁴³ Analyzing the complex strategies by which the plots of the two plays evoke the defeat of the first Clouds, making characters and actions participate in and expand on parabatic themes, is essential to understanding how these texts shore up the generic edifice described in Peace and shape the later history of Old Comedy from antiquity onward. And it is ultimately the texts that are my concern. Although for argumentative purposes I often refer to Aristophanes as the agent behind the discourse I recover, I do not aspire to a definitive reconstruction of Aristophanes’ authorial intentions and do not see these intentions as stable or reducible to a univocal interpretive effort. I am, however, interested in locating in the textual constructions of Aristophanes’ plays self-fashioning gestures with potential canonical relevance—namely, those that to an ancient and modern spectator or reader may seem to act out the self-monumentalizing ambition advertised in the parabasis of Peace.

Since the proto-canonical discourse of Wasps and the second Clouds figures in a narrative of failure, we can see how ancient literary critics—prone to second-guess the original audiences’ artistic judgments—might seize on it.⁴⁴ A narrative of failure is a privileged site of authorial self-construction because it entails coping, accommodation, and repair, and the continuation of the event (Bailes 2011, 5).⁴⁵ The reimagining of failure grants authors an opportunity for self-extension, for projecting their constructed literary identities into the future.⁴⁶ As I contend, the self-justifying, proto-canonical narrative of Wasps and the second Clouds amounts to a tale of poetic semnotēs (dignity) and sōphrosunē (self-control, restraint) misunderstood and unfairly condemned by the audience of 423. There is a sense of the visionary, of lofty aspirations unrecognized because they are ahead of their time—something similar to the aesthetic titanism of those who nobly fall while pursuing the sublime, as discussed by pseudo-Longinus.⁴⁷ In the act of failure through selfless overreaching, one can detect a seed of redemption, the promise of recognition by later, less blinkered, observers. Such a story—decisive in the later perception of Aristophanes as the praegrandis comedian—is, to a degree, inverted in Aelian’s outraged report of the Athenian public’s customary reproach of "the best (aristois) men and its schadenfreude over the Aristophanic lampooning of Socrates’ dignity (semnotēti) of life."⁴⁸

Recent studies have shown how the agonistic context of the performance of Knights in 424 is pervasively reflected in the thematics of this play,⁴⁹ but in Wasps and the second Clouds Aristophanes raises the stakes by conceptualizing the comic competition as a struggle for comic legitimacy itself. This struggle is waged through a series of competing generic associations: Aesopic fable, iambic poetry, and especially tragedy, which is reduced to a violent unleashing of dangerous emotions and stereotyped as a channel of physical and psychological enervation for the audience. As I will suggest, Wasps capitalizes on Cratinus’s self-styled generic affiliation with tragedy, which scholarship has recently elucidated, to characterize the affective impact of his comic mode as somehow tragic—specifically, enervating and infantilizing.⁵⁰ In the second Clouds, the same aesthetic force, expressive of a pathological lack of sōphrosunē, is imputed to Eupolis. In contrast with the paradoxically tragic quality of his rivals’ phortikē kōmōidia, Aristophanes’ comedy emerges from the two plays’ proto-canonical discourse as presenting and tending to induce in its audience a dignified stance, mature deportment, and healthy composure. In a twist of generic reversal, the semnotēs usually ascribed to tragedy and assigned to the canonized Aeschylus in Frogs is thus tendentiously imported into the domain of Aristophanic comedy.⁵¹

Aristophanes was not the only comic poet to exhort or find fault with an audience.⁵² In Maricas, Eupolis urged the spectators to wake up and wash away from their eyes the chatter of other poets—comic or tragic—who performed earlier on the same day (fr. 205 KA).⁵³ According to Aelius Aristides’ gloss (Orations 28.91), Eupolis offered the sentiment "as though, on that day, he had been about to make all [spectators] wise and serious (sophous te kai spoudaious). In an unknown play, Cratinus reproaches the audience for its erratic judgment: Greetings, you crowd with laughter ill-timed and loud, the best judge of all of our wisdom (sophias)—days after the performance (fr. 360.1–2 KA).⁵⁴ In another fragment (fr. 395 KA), captured by Aelian in the same passage mentioned at the start of this chapter, Cratinus goes so far as to accuse an audience of having lost its wits" (νοσῆσαι τὰς φρένας). (In contextualizing this quote as a response to the reception of the first Clouds, Aelian strikingly furthers the erroneous notion that Aristophanes won the contest.)

Though these examples show that Aristophanes was clearly not the only comic poet to question his audience’s critical acumen (Wright 2012, 52), the fact remains that his reading of the terms of critical difference proved decisive. The discreetly manipulative gesture of self-affirmation hidden in the restaging of the audience’s rejection evidently carried more weight, for example, than Cratinus’s onstage boasts of drunken vitality in Pytine after his loss to Knights.⁵⁵ A reason could well be that Aristophanes’ disingenuous discourse included generic delegitimation and exclusion in an all-encompassing, coherent narrative of undeserved failure that, as I noted, would appeal to Hellenistic critics’ mistrust of agonistic verdicts.

Barbara Herrnstein Smith has observed that canons are typically created by privileging absolutely—that is, ‘standard’-izing—particular, contingent interests and functions, while "pathologizing others. In addition, as Smith remarks, the privileging of a particular set of functions for artworks or works of literature may be (and often is) justified on the grounds that the performance of such functions serves some higher individual, social, or transcendent good, such as the psychic health of the reader" (1984, 22–23).⁵⁶ I will contend that, by casting the first Clouds as an attempt to cure and protect a debilitated audience, the revisionary narrative of Wasps and the second Clouds imbues Aristophanes’ comic mode with canonical potential, converting it, as it were, into generic orthodoxy. An accusation that an audience has lost its wits will seem less compelling from someone like Cratinus, who programmatically characterizes himself as drunk, manic, and capable of flooding (kataklusei) his spectators with his poetry (fr. 198.5 KA)—a self-portrait incompatible with Hellenistic scholars’ notorious predilection for water-drinking poets.⁵⁷ In Wasps and the second Clouds, this proto-canonical discourse frames the contrast between the ultimately winning Aristophanes and the other two major poets