Ariphrades, the moth (from Heterocera no. 40, Biologia Centrali-Americana, vol. 4).
I wanted to know more about how insects are named, so I arranged to meet Brian V. Brown, the curator of entomology at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.
I stood in the central foyer, waiting in the shadow of a massive dinosaur skeleton, when Brian came bounding down the stairs to meet me. He looked younger than you’d expect for someone with his impressive credentials, and he had an easygoing, Hawaiian-shirt-wearing way about him.
“It’s a busy day,” he declared. “Everybody wants to talk about the painted lady migration.”
I wasn’t surprised. A billion butterflies were flitting through Los Angeles en masse, something the city that has seen it all had never seen before. The air was so thick with painted ladies that traffic on freeways slowed. It turned out that a combination of unusually heavy rainfall, a super bloom in the desert, and storms near the Mexican border had driven this bumper crop of butterflies off their traditional migration path. It was beautiful. The painted ladies live up to their name: they look a bit like small monarch butterflies, with similar orange-and-black wings. At one point I looked out my window and saw hundreds of thousands of butterflies blowing past my house. It looked like magic.
I followed Brian onto the elevator and we ascended a few floors. He flashed his key card and we got off, into part of the museum where the behind-the-scenes natural history stuff gets done. I wish I could say it was glamorous or high-tech looking, like something Elihas Star* might run crazy experiments in, but mostly it reminded me of an old college office building, complete with wooden doors and frosted-glass windows.
Brian opened a door and stopped to flick on the lights before leading me into a large room filled with ten- or twelve-foot-tall towers of drawers. It turned out to be an insect library. Brian pulled a worn guidebook off a shelf and said, “Let’s see if we can find your moth.”
He flipped through an index and asked, “Do you know the genus or family name?”3
I sighed. The one simple thing I should’ve brought was the one thing that I had forgotten. “Sorry.”
Ariphrades wasn’t in the book. Although it turned out to be a book of South American moths and Panama is in Central America, so it wasn’t surprising that Druce’s moth wasn’t there.
We then tried to find the person in charge of the museum’s database, but he was out to lunch, and Brian didn’t have the password for the database login. If Ariphrades was there, stuck to a pin in a drawer, we wouldn’t know.
As a kind of consolation prize, Brian began opening drawers in the stacks. It was astonishing. Hundreds of moths, rows of butterflies of the same species, arranged by the California counties where they were collected. I couldn’t tell the difference between a Humboldt County specimen and a Tulare County specimen, they looked exactly the same. I turned to Brian: “Why do they sort them by county?”
He smiled. “The lepidopterists are really into minutiae.”
Brian is a specialist in phorids, or very small flies. It’s his jam and he gets visibly energized when he talks about the tiny creatures. He showed me some of the flies he’d collected, drawers with hundreds and hundreds of insects so small you can’t stick a pin through them, the pin is bigger than the phorid, so they are glued to the side of pins. I needed to take my glasses off and put my face next to the drawer to even see some of them.
“Pretty cool, huh?” He beamed.
I had to admit they were pretty cool.
I followed Brian to a room in the back of the building and we sat around a large wood conference table. He settled into a chair and began to describe the art of naming new species. Unsurprisingly, the first thing you have to do is figure out if you have a new species or not.
“You have to establish some characters that you can use to recognize these things, stable characters that don’t vary too much among species. Basically species recognition is by morphology, which you can see, and we look for gaps between individuals. Like one species might be black, one might be red, so that’s a morphological gap. These days we’re also using DNA a lot for recognizing species, because what looks at first glance like highly variable species is often two or more lineages that are only recognizable retrospectively.”
That was step one.
Brian continued, ticking things off with his fingers. “You prepare a scientific paper describing it. You describe all the salient features, list your material, specimens examined; you put it in the context of the rest of the fauna. You write it up and submit it to a journal for publication.” He leaned forward and added, “To be officially recognized, a species name has to be published.”
Brian made it sound easy, but I suspect it is not that simple. The science has to be on point. Before they can be published, the papers are peer-reviewed, but discovering a new species seems fairly straightforward.
“Are there any rules for deciding on the name?” I asked.
Brian nodded. “The name has to follow certain guidelines from the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature. You’ve seen the code?”
I shook my head. “I have not.”
He got up from his chair and took a worn green book off a shelf and slid it in front of me. It was titled International Code of Zoological Nomenclature. Opening it and glancing at the pages was like staring into a world where everyone spoke backward. I looked up at him, hopeful that he didn’t expect me to read it.
“The code gives guidelines for names. For instance I wanted to name a new species I had a couple years ago. It’s the world’s smallest fly. I called it Megapropodiphora arnoldi. I named it after Arnold Schwarzenegger because it has these giant forelegs. I had a great picture of Arnold doing his most muscular pose, the biceps pose, and my fly posed the same way.”
He showed me a picture of the tiny fly, and I had to admit that the Megapropodiphora arnoldi did look a bit like Schwarzenegger, only cuter.
“There are other ways to derive names, depending on what you want to do. If you want to do descriptive things, like albitarse, which is ‘white legged’ or ‘white footed,’ that kind of stuff, you have to know a little bit of Latin to get the derivation of your names. But naming things after people is pretty well accepted. Sometimes people buy names, or they give a researcher a donation and out of gratitude the researcher will name a species for somebody. Some people don’t like that, they think it upsets the purity of science.”
“Does it?” I asked.
“I think that there are so many species that need names, if someone wants to pay me for one of them I’m happy to name one after them.”
“So you can pretty much pull a name out of a hat?”
He nodded. “People have named things after Star Wars characters, famous actors and actresses. It’s kind of desperation. I’ve described about six hundred species in my career so far and it gets hard after a while, especially within a genus where you’ve got to have a different name for every species.”
It occurred to me that I had been living with the impression that the majority of life on this planet had already been mapped out, collected, and categorized. “Haven’t we discovered all the animals and insects already?”
He smiled. “Obviously not. If we’re talking about mammals, there’s still a dozen or so unknown species discovered every year. Insects, there’s thousands discovered every year. I could discover a thousand species every year for the rest of my life and not run out of species to describe.”
The only thing holding him back was funding and a shortage of scientists.
“There’s not enough experts in the whole world to cover every animal. There are groups that we call ‘orphan groups.’ Nobody works on them.”
The idea that there are orphan groups—living creatures that no one is interested in studying—felt deeply disconcerting to me. Are people so busy looking at their Instagram feeds that they can’t muster the enthusiasm to study living creatures? Natural phenomena that exist on this planet? No takers?
Really? I would rather look at bacteria growing inside worms that live in a geothermal geyser or study the sex life of a geoduck than watch Instagram “influencers” try to sell me crap or follow the latest nitwit exploits of a YouTuber.
“That’s sad,” I said.
Brian agreed. “It is sad. When I started working on the flies that I work on there was only one other person working on them really. I had to learn everything from the literature. I never really had a mentor who would teach me this stuff. But there’s always somebody who wants to study these little things, you know, there’s always interest if you can provide the funding for it. That’s the main limitation … what is apparently not economically important or directly important to humans. But the thing is we never know when we’re going to need basic scientific knowledge. We never know when your moth from Central America is going to provide some scientific information that is desperately needed.”
I liked the idea of Ariphrades, the moth, making a name for itself by saving the world from some kind of Chiriquí fever. Because otherwise naming an obscure brown moth from Panama after an even more obscure comic writer from ancient Athens seems completely random.
Brian had to get back to work, the media fascination with the painted lady migration was not going to wait—and how often does the curator of entomology get to hold a press conference?—so we ended the interview. Brian escorted me out of the backstage area, and, as he walked me into the main hall of the museum, he stopped and said, “You know those old entomologists were probably just showing off with the Greek names.”
And then he smiled and walked off.
* Aka Egghead, a Marvel Comic character who helped form the Emissaries of Evil.
The Antagonist of the Piece
Ariphrades can’t defend himself in the debate with Aristophanes. His work is gone. So maybe the best way to understand him is to take a look at the man who singled him out for public humiliation: Aristophanes, the big swinging cock of Athenian comedy. There have been several excellent books written about Aristophanes, but for our purposes, here is a kind of capsule biography of Aristophanes to help us get an idea of what Ariphrades was up against.
Like most of the information we have about ancient Athens, it is sketchy at best, with much of Aristophanes’s biography conjectured and freestyled by scholars and historians who have scoured his plays for clues of who he was and where he came from.
Aristophanes was, by any measure, a very successful playwright. His career lasted forty-seven years or so, from 427 BCE to around 380 BCE, and he is credited with writing approximately forty plays. As I said earlier, only eleven survived.
Most encyclopedias say something like: “Aristophanes was the greatest of all Greek comic writers, and the only one whose plays survived.” Which, I mean, come on, we have no idea who was the greatest, we know the plays of Aristophanes only because, for whatever reason, his are still around. Surviving does not necessarily make you the greatest of all time. Just ask Charles Darwin. However, to his credit, Aristophanes posted some impressive stats. He racked up eight wins and five second-place showings at festivals. By comparison, his nearest competitors over the same period were Cratinus, with one win and three second-place finishes, and Eupolis, four wins and one second place.
You could say that Aristophanes disliked Cratinus as much as he appears to have disliked Ariphrades. Cratinus was older than Aristophanes and apparently had a taste for wine in much the same way Ariphrades had a taste for pussy. Cratinus’s big hit was a semiautobiographical play called Wine Flask, in which Comedy herself implores a drunk writer to sober up. Wine Flask beat Aristophanes’s Clouds at the Dionysia competition in 423 BCE, which must have been sweet for Cratinus, because just two years earlier, at the Lenaia competition, Aristophanes placed first with Acharnians, while Cratinus’s Storm-Tossed was second. Of course Aristophanes couldn’t resist dumping on Cratinus in Acharnians, describing an attempted mugging that ends with the character defending himself by hurling what he thinks is a stone, only to nail Cratinus in the face with a fresh turd.
When he wants to throw
A stone at him, may he grab instead
Some just-fresh shit in his hand in the dark:
Then run at him
With a rock, and miss,
And hit Cratinus.1
Later, in Peace, Aristophanes attributes the death of Cratinus to the Spartan invasion and how he “couldn’t survive seeing a pitcher of wine smashed.”2 Of course, Cratinus is quoted as saying, “You will never create anything great by drinking water.” Which is a) true, and b) evidence that maybe he did enjoy his wine, and c) maybe a sign I’m reading Aristophanes all wrong and he was simply trying a kind of intervention out of concern for the health of his friend and competitor.
We don’t have to read academic studies to get an idea of what Aristophanes was like as a person; we can hear from the artist himself, because much like Muhammad Ali and Eminem, Aristophanes was not shy about proclaiming his greatness. In almost all his surviving comedies, there are sections called the “parabasis” that have no connection to the plot or anything that has happened or will happen; they’re bizarre time-outs where the chorus brags about the playwright’s awesomeness and reassures the audience that they are in the hands of the best writer in the world. Sometimes they speak directly to the audience in the voice of the playwright. Aristophanes likes a humblebrag, he doesn’t let his brilliance go to his head: “And when he was raised to greatness, and honored as nobody has ever been among you, he says he didn’t end up getting above himself, nor did he puff up with pride, nor did he gallivant around the wrestling-schools, making passes.”3 That’s right, he’s a genius with a street full of tripods, but he’s no pedo.
He gets his inspiration from “holding the reins of a team of Muses that were his, not someone else’s.”4 You see, Aristophanes doesn’t use your common, everyday Muses. Thalia wasn’t whispering in his ear. He’s got his own muses, because in his world, everything is top shelf.
When he’s not bragging, he’s dumping on his rivals. In his play Frogs, the character of Dionysus goes to Hades on a mission to bring back Euripides because the remaining writers in Athens aren’t quite up to the level the dramatic arts demand. Kind of like Bill Murray going into the afterlife to find Lenny Bruce and Sam Kinison because comedy is getting stale. What transpires is a kind of slanging duel between Euripides and Aeschylus in the afterlife, and both of the tragedians are shown to be fusty old hacks. Some of the other playwrights Aristophanes takes down along the way are Eupolis, Phrynichus, and Hermippos. Aristophanes mocks these writers as “boring and crude,” whose works cannot compare with “such masterpieces of his own as Banqueters.”5
It is not dissimilar from modern-day rappers who put down their competitors while boasting about their skills, as in Lil Wayne’s classic line “I’m fly as fuck, you ain’t even next to depart.”6
I think we can assume that Cratinus, Eupolis, and the other writers at the time gave as good as they got and insulted Aristophanes as robustly as he insulted them. There are surviving fragments that give us some insight into what the other writers said. For example this excellent fragment from Toadies, in which Eupolis comments on someone with a fondness for the good life:
Who smells of the fine things in life,
walks with cheeks spread wide,
shits out sesame cakes,
and coughs up apples.7
And as Lucian, our first-century CE satirist, wrote in Fishermen: “For so it is with the great public; it loves a master of flouts and jeers, and loves him in proportion to the grandeur of what he assails; you know how it delighted long ago in Aristophanes and Eupolis, when they caricatured our Socrates on the stage and wove farcical comedies around him.”8
There is no accounting for taste. But still, boasting and slinging insults seem like a weird way to entertain the masses. Horace, another Roman, wrote, “Eupolis, Cratinus, and Aristophanes and indeed any of the other poets of Old Comedy would single out with great free
dom anyone who was worthy of being pointed out, for being a wicked man or a thief, an adulterer or a cutthroat or notorious for any other reason.”9
I like the “notorious for any other reason,” because you could become notorious for whatever reason one of these writers decided to make you notorious for when they called you out. You didn’t have to do anything.
It was weaponized comedy. Throwing jokes like Bruce Lee threw punches.
Aristophanes saved some of his most savage roasts for a prominent Athenian politician and theater producer named Kleon.
Even though Athens was a democracy, the affairs of the city were by and large run by a group of aristocratic families. Kleon was not an aristocrat. He came from a family of merchants, apparently in the business of the manufacture and sale of leather goods, and found his way into politics. Conservative Athenians didn’t appreciate his style. According to Aristotle, “Cleon son of Cleaenetus who is thought to have done the most to corrupt the people by his impetuous outbursts, and was the first person to use bawling and abuse on the platform, and to gird up his cloak before making a public speech, all other persons speaking in orderly fashion.”10 He was, by all accounts, something of a dick-swinging hothead, a warmonger, and a first-class rabble-rouser who once suggested putting down an uprising on Lesbos by killing all the men and selling the wives and children.*
Like a lot of tough-talking politicians, Kleon was thinskinned and humorless, especially when it came to jokes at his expense. He sued Aristophanes several times, dragging him into court for making jokes about the city and for slander. The verdict must have gone in his favor too: for a while Aristophanes was banned from presenting plays at the Dionysia. Which didn’t stop the playwright from continuing to mock and ridicule the politician in subsequent plays at the Lenaia festival.
Rude Talk in Athens Page 7