In ancient Greek it looks like this: Ἀριφράδης.
Apart from the harangues in Aristophanes’s plays, the most telling reference to Ariphrades is in Aristotle’s Poetics, a collection of essays on literary theory that might be the first known Writing for Dummies. Circa 335 BCE, Aristotle wrote, “Again, Ariphrades satirised the tragedians for using phrases which no one would ever speak in ordinary discourse.”
There’s a break in the translation noted by the symbol […], which signals an omission of some quotations “whose relative points cannot be successfully rendered into English.”
Aristotle continues: “But he failed to realise that it is just because of their absence from ordinary language that all such things produce a heightened effect in poetic diction.”3
The Loeb Classical Library, a multivolume series of works written in ancient Greek and Latin, takes a crack at a translation of the same brief mention:
Ariphrades would make fun of the tragic poets because they employed the sort of language that no one would ever use in conversation, such as “the halls from out” (instead of “from the halls”) and “of thee” and “and I him” and “Achilles concerning” (instead of “concerning Achilles”) and other such expressions. Because they are not present in ordinary conversation, these sorts of things produce an unusual effect in speech, but Ariphrades did not realise this.4
I don’t think Aristotle got the joke. Or, if he did, it hit a little too close to home. Because there is a long history in the comedic arts, and theater in particular, of mocking elites: the know-it-alls, the chewers of scenery, the orators who are egregiously sesquipedalian. That’s how comedy works. We like to see people who think highly of themselves fall into a pile of shit. It’s the other shoe dropping, the pratfall, and the comeuppance that makes us laugh. Is there anything funnier than deflating a pretentious blowhard?
Perhaps Ariphrades was making a barbed political point, extending his middle finger to poetic pretentiousness and highborn aristocratic ways, revealing the renown poets of the day to be part of a self-aggrandizing echo chamber of ego inflation, logrolling, and back patting. Kind of like what Marcel Duchamp had in mind when he signed a urinal “R. Mutt” and put it in an art museum.
It is undeniable that Aristotle’s Poetics is a formidable piece of writing. He was one of the first philosophers to look at how narrative structure works and to unpack the emotional ways that stories—especially the catharsis of tragedy—affect us. Although it doesn’t appear he had much of a sense of humor. He believed that tragedy was the superior art, as it deals with issues of life, death, honor, and virtue in a serious way, where comedy is an inferior form concerning itself with the less virtuous, the scofflaws and scoundrels, the con artists and cowards, and focuses on human weaknesses. This kind of drama versus comedy snobbery is nothing new. For reasons that are unclear to me, comedy has always been treated as the slightly troublesome younger sibling. Just look at the films honored at award ceremonies or the books that win the Pulitzer Prize. It is rare to find an out-and-out comedy in the pantheon of Western civilization.* It may be self-serving of me to say so, but I think we ignore comedy at our peril. People who say laughs are cheap have never tried writing comedy, they have never paid full price.
Poetics was written almost ninety years after the golden age of Old Comedy; the playwrights like Ariphrades and Aristophanes who once enthralled Athens had died before Aristotle was born. What that means is that the comic plays of Ariphrades either had survived on papyrus or were still being performed almost one hundred years after they were written. Ariphrades must have been famous, or infamous, enough that an important scholar like Aristotle would include him in his Poetics along with other well-known writers from the same period like Euripides, Aeschylus, and Cleophon.**
Aristotle references Ariphrades in much the same way we might cite Smokey and the Bandit when discussing the important films of 1977. While it might not be high art—I can’t really imagine Aristotle enjoying it—Smokey and the Bandit was the second-highest-grossing film that year. Ariphrades’s work might not ascend to the poetic height of the great tragedians, but the locals needed a laugh. Which makes me think that the crude-speaking, muff-diving comic playwright might have been in on the joke himself. Perhaps that’s what made him popular with the demos, the common people.
We don’t know much about Ariphrades’s family life or background. In the Loeb Classical Library entry about Ariphrades, it says, “The name is rare at Athens, at this or at any other period, and is known principally for one of Aristophanes’ targets.” The other information comes from Aristophanes’s plays, which we’ve already looked at. All we know about his father is that he was named Automenes. We know Ariphrades had a brother, Arignotus, who was a musician and another who was an actor. He was, apparently, from a family that put an importance on arts education.
In his book Fathers and Sons in Athens: Ideology and Society in the Era of the Peloponnesian War, historian Barry S. Strauss writes,
Aristophanes takes the low road by emphasizing Automenes’ role in begetting these sons with their peculiar talents and by having him swear that Ariphrades acquired his talent “without any teaching from anyone”—in other words, like son, like father. Comic exaggeration, but it probably paints a realistic picture of Athenian fathers calling their sons “chips off the old block.” Ariphrades may have been a comic poet, and perhaps Automenes (of whom nothing is known) really did brag about his natural poetic skill.5
Other than being from a family in show business, we can assume that Ariphrades lived the relatively straightforward and privileged life of an Athenian citizen.
When young men turned eighteen they took the Ephebic Oath, in which they swore not to dishonor their city or abandon a comrade and to honor the gods of their fathers, etcetera. A lot like the Boy Scout oath, it was essentially a promise to obey the rules of the society without asking a lot of questions. As classical scholar Joseph Roisman says in his book The Rhetoric of Manhood, masculinity in Athens was defined as being “willing to rank public interest over personal needs, courageous in war and politics, competitive within approved boundaries.” It goes on for a bit, extolling citizens to be “truthful, hardworking, careful, practical, intelligent, guided by reason,” and, in my favorite part, requires that a young Athenian should be “able to control his appetites.”6
Protecting your family honor and guarding against embarrassment was a big deal for Athenians, and the threat of shaming someone was used to enforce the norms of the day. As Demosthenes said, “Ordinary men are deterred from wrongdoing by their fear of shame and public opinion; and wicked men are corrected by punishment.”7 In his plays, Aristophanes refers to Ariphrades as “wicked” for performing cunnilingus. In fifth-century BCE Athens, this would be seen as submitting to women, and that could be construed as a betrayal of the Athenian ideals.
I find it strange that the author of Lysistrata—a play about the women of Athens going on a sex strike until the Peloponnesian War is ended—would be such a prude. Like most great comedy, there is always a political nucleus embedded in the joke. At the time, the aristocracy was under attack from the rampant populism on the streets—led by Kleon and others—and shaming Ariphrades was a way to remind the public that the male citizens were in charge and anyone who stepped outside the lines of proud Athenian manhood, even by pleasuring flute girls, deserved reproach. That Ariphrades seemed to own his actions—because why else would Aristophanes continue to attack him?—would’ve been seen as a big fuck you to the noble families.
We can hear echoes of the ancient patriarchy nowadays in the handwringing of conservatives over gay marriage; to quote Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association, “the homosexual agenda” is “the greatest immediate threat to every freedom and right that is enshrined in the First Amendment.”8 Sex that questions what it means to be a man in society threatens the status quo, causing the patriarchy to panic. Just look at the bizarre hullabaloo over transgender rights. Are conse
rvative Americans really so terrified that they might find themselves urinating next to someone who may or may not be of some indeterminate sex that they have to pass laws against it? Have they never been to Europe? Are they really obsessed with bathrooms, or are they, like the ruling aristocracy of Athens, trying to disempower people who don’t fit their idea of American manhood?
These ancient comedies had political bite. They influenced public opinion; they affected how a person was received and if he was respected in society. A joke had the potential to ruin you or worse. A well-known orator named Hyperbolus—yes, that’s where we get the word—was often the target of satire on the Athenian stage; he was mocked for being dumb, corrupt, a pervert, and, in a nod to contemporary birther scandals, a bastard. And not just by Aristophanes. Apparently Hyper-bolus was also ridiculed by Eupolis, a leading writer of Old Comedy. Some historians believe the constant ridicule was the cause of his ostracism and subsequent murder.
With political change in the air—the aristocracy under attack from a burgeoning populism gaining power in the assembly—the comic stage, which had always had a bias toward the traditional hierarchy in Athens, turned out to be an excellent vehicle to take potshots at, humiliate, and mock the leaders of the new populist movement. Which is not to say that Aristophanes and Eupolis were right-wingers, although some scholars believe they were—but a successful comedian will always tailor material to the audience. A sexually forthright comedian like Nikki Glaser might kill at a club in New York but find her jokes falling flat at a comedy show in Branson, Missouri, for the same reason Christian comedian Pastor Ted Cunningham’s clean comedy might flop on the Sunset Strip. There is a confirmation bias between an audience and a comedian. If Ariphrades was more of a man of the street, a voice for the demos, then his public humiliation on the stages of Athens might very well have been an effort to keep the aristocracy in power.
I’m not really much of a conspiracy theorist; I don’t think 9/11 was an inside job or that the Illuminati secretly run the World Bank. And yet I have a suspicion that something’s not right.
In The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, author Stephen Greenblatt explores the history behind Roman poet Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things—an interpretation of the writings of Epicurus that promotes reason, science, and the pursuit of pleasure over obedience to any deity. Greenblatt finds enough evidence to allow him to speculate that the early Catholic Church had reason to suppress Lucretius’s document and that its eventual discovery in the fifteenth century inspired the Renaissance.9 Greenblatt won a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize for his work, but contemporary Christian scholars dumped all over it, giving The Swerve scathing reviews, which, to my mind, kinda proved his point.
There is a connection between Ariphrades, Epicurus, and Lucretius. They all promoted—or were accused of promoting—a kind of egalitarian pleasure seeking that would fly in the face of the strict rules of organized religion and an entrenched patriarchy. But maybe it goes deeper. It wasn’t just Ariphrades whose work disappeared. With the exception of Aristophanes, the other great comic writers of the golden era of Old Comedy—Cratinus, Eupolis, Crates, Aristomenes, Philonides, the list goes on—also had their work vanish. These were comedies that, from what we can tell by the fragments, were sexually risqué and politically outspoken. Was there some kind of organized destruction of the old comedies? Some humorless mage in a castle who demanded comedy vanquished from history? Maybe Aristophanes is the sole survivor simply because someone took it upon himself to preserve his plays.
* I’d never heard of it before either, but to quote Wikipedia: “Lemmatisation (or lem-matization) in linguistics is the process of grouping together the inflected forms of a word so they can be analysed as a single item, identified by the word’s lemma, or dictionary form.”
* Notable exceptions include Paul Beatty’s The Sellout and John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces.
** Another writer whose work has not survived.
Amazonon Street
The taxi met us at the ferry terminal in Piraeus, the driver managing to pick us out of the crowd of island hoppers disembarking from a massive ferry into a crowded parking lot. How he picked me out of a crowd using the picture from my WhatsApp profile I don’t know. Either I am distinctive looking or he should be a detective, but he didn’t hesitate. We loaded up his cab and began the drive into Athens. It was late, maybe ten at night, so traffic was light and the city was dark. My wife, Diana,* and I were being dropped off at an Airbnb while our friends were staying at a hotel.
The driver cruised down Pireos—it wasn’t long before the Acropolis came into view—then turned onto Plateon and into the neighborhood where the Airbnb was. We slowed as the road narrowed and streetlights became unreliable. It was dark, but it was hard to miss the collapsed buildings, the dilapidated streets, the broken sidewalks, and the fact that every wall was splattered with street art and graffiti—the streets greeting us with the distressed embrace of urban blight. Unlike other cities I’ve been in, where an area like this would be desolate, the streets were alive; it seemed like there was a bar or taverna on every corner packed with people, every table full, the insides overflowing, with clusters of young Athenians drinking beer in the street, smoking joints on corners, going walkabout in the alleys. We rolled past a partially demolished building where the empty courtyard had been converted into an open-air speakeasy with a crowded bar and a sound system pumping out chillwave techno. One of our friends said, “Are you sure this is the right address?” We nodded. We had been here before and we couldn’t wait to get out of the cab and go get a drink.
It’s easy to see why someone who didn’t know the scene might think we were being dropped into some kind of no-go zone for tourists, the kind of area Fox News warns you about, but we knew the street art here was mostly political and anti-fascist—we were friends with a few of the artists—and that the tavernas and bars served some of the best food in Athens. Metaxourgeio was our secret, even if it is impossible to pronounce.
The neighborhood has experienced the traditional trajectory of cool neighborhoods: formerly an industrial area with a predominantly immigrant population; then overrun by junkies and drug dealers; abandoned for a time; now home to artists and people looking for affordable housing. It reminds me of Brooklyn before it was hot, or maybe SoHo in the late ’70s, or the Arts District in Los Angeles in the ’80s—basically any urban area, pre-gentrification, where bombed-out buildings, modern apartments, cafés, tavernas, and abundant street life converge in dynamic and interesting ways. We discovered it during a street art tour two years before. It was one of those places where Diana and I looked at each other and said, “We could live here.”
When I tell people that I love Athens, how it is one of the few cities in the world where I would like to live, they invariably wrinkle their noses and start saying things like, “What about the crime? The traffic? The horrible pollution?” As if these things don’t exist in every big city. I’ve been to a lot of places and I have to tell you, Athens is fucking amazing. Which is not to say it’s some idealized, perfect urban place. It has the same multitude of problems any major urban area can have. But I dig it. I can only guess the bad rap comes from disgruntled tourists who expect every part of the city to be as magnificent as the Acropolis. It’s not a fair comparison—there aren’t many buildings in the world as magnificent as the Parthenon. I have friends who come to Athens and stay at fancy hotels on the beach outside of the city. They take a cab to see a couple of sights and then bounce to the airport or hop on a ferry to the islands. It’s their loss. Away from the tourist sector, Athens is dynamic, alive and fascinating and funky.
Outside our Airbnb we were greeted by graffiti stenciled on a building that read:
(Photograph courtesy of the author)
It’s perhaps hypocritical to agree with a sign telling you to fuck off, but that is exactly what I would tell an Airbnb tourist if I wasn’t, you know, an Airbnb tourist. For whatever reason, I felt
oddly comforted by it. Much like Henry Miller writing about Athens in The Colossus of Maroussi, the freewheeling travelogue of his adventures in Greece in 1939: “I had the strange feeling of being at home, of being in a spot so familiar, so altogether like home should be that from looking at it with such intense adoration it had become a new and strange place.”1
Athens has a long history of being open and welcoming to immigrants and visitors, and classical Athens was where that began. There were restrictions, naturally—the citizens of Athens didn’t want to cede voting rights or land ownership to noncitizens—but otherwise newcomers, called “metics,” were welcome and many of them became important members of society. For example Aristotle and Diogenes the Cynic were metics, as was noted speechwriter-for-hire Lysias and the philosopher Protagoras. There were other, less famous metics, people who came to the city for much the same reason people have always come to cities—displaced by war, drought, or famine or just looking for the opportunity to improve their lives. In the fifth century BCE, Athens was an economic power, a place where jobs could be had and money could be made.
What a difference a couple thousand years make. In 2021 Athens and Greece are still struggling to recover from a program of economic austerity imposed on them by the European Union and the European Central Bank after the 2008 worldwide financial collapse. In 2018 Mário Centeno, head of the Eurogroup, trumpeted, “Greece joins Ireland, Spain, Cyprus and my own country Portugal, in the ranks of euro area countries that turned around their economies and once again stand on their own feet. A success story of programme implementation.”2
That is a steaming pile of absolute bullshit, presented as if the Eurogroup’s abject cruelty did the Greek people a favor. As The World public radio program reported at the time of Centeno’s announcement:
Rude Talk in Athens Page 4