Rude Talk in Athens

by Mark Haskell Smith

  Kleon challenged the status quo with a street-savvy style that was apparently popular with the poorer citizens of Athens. His popularity—much like the popularity of former reality television hosts who enter the political arena—became a threat to the aristocracy. That meant Aristophanes. He was the son of wealthy landowners, a member of the aristocracy who had been educated and supported by the aristocracy. In Athens, like everywhere throughout history, aristocrats thought they were smarter than everyone else and deserved to boss things. It’s the same tension that animates our politics today, when aristocrats and oligarchs get together at Davos and try to figure out what’s best for the billions of people who don’t have private jets.

  At the time he was growing up, Athens was the center of learning and Aristophanes would’ve been well versed in philosophy, literature—particularly the works of Homer—and the natural sciences. He would’ve received the best education available. Pampered, protected, and smarter than everyone else; he seems like one of those kids whose parents tell them they’re geniuses when they’re really just precocious.

  One thing for sure, he was a fan of the old-school way of doing things. In Clouds he stages a debate between a character named Mr. Good Reason and a character named Mr. Bad Reason. At one point, Good Reason describes a proper Athenian education: “I’ll tell you then the kind of education that once prevailed. When I flourished for holding upright views and self-control was a virtue.”11

  The writer and philosopher Plato backs this up with his description of the Athenian education system in Protagoras: “that the child may excel, and as each act and word occurs they teach and impress upon him that this is just, and that unjust, one thing noble, another base, one holy, another unholy, and that he is to do this, and not do that. If he readily obeys,—so; but if not, they treat him as a bent and twisted piece of wood and straighten him with threats and blows.”12

  Yet for a playwright who was happy to make obscene jokes about sex and sodomy, about masturbation and having radishes shoved up your ass, Aristophanes is sometimes really prudish. As Good Reason continues in Clouds:

  At the trainers13 a boy had to sit with his legs crossed so’s not to torment any viewer with lust, and when he stood up he had to smooth down the sand so’s to erase the imprint of his young virility from the gaze of any gloaters. In those days no boy would anoint himself with oil below the navel, and his genitals were a marvel in their downy, dewy bloom—like ripe apricots.14

  Maybe “prudish” isn’t the right word. But have you ever known anyone to be turned on by a dick print in the sand? Or was Aristophanes worried that he didn’t measure up?

  It makes me think that, for all his braggadocio, Aristophanes was shy when it came to sexual matters. It’s one thing to make jokes about it, another to worry that someone is going to stare at your skid marks. It’s reasonable to assume that since his attacks on Cratinus and his wineaholism were based in fact, his accusations about Ariphrades were also rooted in reality. I guess seeing someone gleefully put his tongue in a lady’s hot spot must’ve gotten his apricots in a twist.

  Or it could be that Aristophanes disliked Ariphrades because his plays were street. Was Ariphrades, like Kleon, speaking for the common Athenian? The hoi polloi? Why was Ariphrades the target of so many of Aristophanes’s attacks? What if Ariphrades’s plays, like Kleon and others in the assembly, spoke against the aristocracy? What if his comedy attacked the patriarchy? Why else would Aristophanes try to humiliate him for what was then considered transgressive sexual activity? Maybe it was personal, maybe it was political. I can only speculate. We know from Aristotle’s Poetics that Ariphrades mocked the pretentious. This might account for his lack of wins in the theater competitions: if the judges were all members of the aristocracy and his work made them squirm, well, he wasn’t going to be taking home any tripods.

  And a tripod was no small thing. Literally.

  The base of a tripod in a backyard in the Plaka (photograph courtesy of the author).

  The ancient Greeks were extremely competitive. They liked contests. I mean, seriously, they invented the Olympic Games. Footraces, chariot races, wrestling, swimming, warfare, drinking, debating—anything that could be turned into a competitive event was. It’s not a big leap from the courts of Athens, where cases were more often than not won on the basis of an orator’s performance rather than the actual facts, to lawyers of today persuading a jury. This desire to dominate and win, to increase your standing in the community, to avoid the humiliation of submission or subservience, to be the penetrator not the penetrated, extended to almost every aspect of life.

  Much like today’s Academy Awards—although much bigger and more impressive than the Oscar statuette—a tripod was the trophy for the winning play at the festivals. Credits were inscribed on the base of the tripod, like a credit roll at the end of a film, and included the choragus as well as the playwright, the musicians, and sometimes the local magistrates. Being a choragus was considered a civic duty by Athenians, and it was an honor for a wealthy citizen to fund a production and give something back to the community. Which is not exactly how producers work nowadays. I’m tempted to make a joke about producers not giving much back to the community except STDs. But I would never do that. That’s too easy.

  It shows how important theater was to the ancient Athenians that these trophies were sometimes very big, like the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates, which looks to be about thirty feet tall and stands in a little park near the base of the Acropolis.

  The Choragic Monument of Lysicrates (Wikimedia Commons).

  I’d walked past this monument many times, even sat in the park and rested my feet under it, before realizing it was a literary prize. It’s a monument that the wealthy patron Lysicrates erected to himself for funding the winning play at the Dionysus festival in 335/334 BCE. It’s an impressive piece of gloatery, a magnificent tribute to the ego of the choragus, kind of like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas putting their names on buildings at the University of Southern California. One thing that hasn’t changed throughout the course of history: big shots and high rollers still like to remind everyone that they’re big shots and high rollers.

  Not far from the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates was the Street of Tripods, a path that led from the Temple of Dionysus around to the northeast side of the Acropolis. As you might imagine, the Street of Tripods was lined with various tripods from past festivals. It must have been very impressive. A tribute to the performing arts in the city at the center of the world, the Street of Tripods was kind of like Hollywood Boulevard and the legendary Walk of Fame. But as someone who used to live a few blocks away from this famous part of Los Angeles, I’ve always thought of Hollywood Boulevard as the “street of disappointed tourists” more than a tribute to the people named in the sidewalk. Although now that I think of it, Aristophanes deserves a star right in front of the Pantages Theatre.

  The past couple thousand years have seen a variety of academics trying to make sense of Aristophanes’s plays. Naturally there is a tendency among scholars to bend their interpretation of his impact and importance to fit their political and philosophical beliefs. If you were, for example, a nineteenth-century pro-ruling-class monarchist scholar, you might interpret Aristophanes as a raunchy rapscallion who was ultimately an upholder of the ruling class. Likewise, more modern scholars have thought him to be a voice of the Athenian people—a well-educated aristocrat, for sure, but someone who was in touch with what was happening on the streets. Other academics write him off as simply an “entertainer,” an unimportant jokester who wrote obscene and offensive comedies to entertain the masses. Philip Walsh, the editor of Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Aristophanes, writes,

  On the one side is Grote, for whom Aristophanes is “an indecent parasite pandering to the worst inclinations of the Athenian rabble”; on the other are Ranke, Bergk and Meineke (the German scholars whom Grote lists in his history), for whom Aristophanes is “a profound philosopher and sober patriot.” Symond
s rejects both views, preferring instead “a middle course” when reading the plays.15

  I find all this academic squabbling and freewheeling bias boosting fascinating, but it’s also enough to make your head explode, because comedy writing can be both profound and indecent, it can pander and be sober. A joke can be philosophical and rude simultaneously. That’s pretty much what comedy does. That’s the pleasure of it. As the first-century BCE historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus wrote in Art of Rhetoric, “It is hardly necessary to state that comedy in the time of Cratinus and Aristophanes and Eupolis engaged with politics and philosophy. For in fact comedy is philosophical when it evokes laughter.”16

  Some sources have mentioned that Aristophanes suffered from early-onset male pattern baldness and was acutely embarrassed by this. Most busts portray him with a full head of hair, but this one, I believe, is more accurate:

  Not the singer of “Sussudio” (Illustration by Jaya Nicely).

  Don’t misunderstand me, he might look like Phil Collins, but I’m a fan of Aristophanes. I think the way he imagined and invented a theatrical universe is brilliant; his work has everything I like: it’s conceptually daring, raunchy, and filled with clever wordplay. And his plays still resonate—the jokes still make me laugh, punch lines landing more than two thousand years after they were written. That says a lot about the power of his writing.

  There’s not a lot of information about the costumes and masks of the ancient comedies. The props and wardrobe disintegrated long ago. We only know a little about the staging and the set design. Classicists have tried to fill in these gaps by speculating how they think the plays would’ve been staged, but these are mostly educated guesses. We do know performers wore masks and that some of the costumes were vibrant and outlandish. There are images on ancient pottery depicting men dressed as birds with giant erections dancing around an aulos player, and the speculation is that this represents a “production still” from Aristophanes’s Birds. But who knows? It could simply be that dressing up like sexually aroused fowl was a fun thing people did.

  The comedies typically featured song and dance numbers, and it would be wonderful to see what these might’ve looked like. Would they be choreographed like a Bob Fosse musical, all sharp and jazzy? Or would they be free-form mayhem, like the Sahara Tent at Coachella? Maybe one of these days I’ll get dressed up in a frog costume with a huge phallus and dance through the streets of Los Angeles. Perhaps then—right before my arrest—I’ll have an idea of how these ancient performers felt. Otherwise, we just don’t know.

  I imagine the wardrobe, scenery, and staging of Ariphrades’s plays followed the style of the day and he would have used the same basic story structure as well. Perhaps the main difference was that his humor was raunchier, cruder, and more street than that of Cratinus or Aristophanes, tinged with a disdain for the aristocracy, a mocking eye roll toward the habits and beliefs of the ruling class and academia. Maybe, like me, he had a problem with authority figures.

  * Ultimately cooler heads prevailed, and a compromise was reached where only about a thousand men were executed.

  Clouds

  There are not a lot of productions of Aristophanes’s plays these days. It’s more likely that you’d see one of the famous tragedies by Euripides or Aeschylus produced. So when I learned that the Athens & Epidaurus Festival was presenting a production of Clouds, directed by the up-and-coming theater visionary Dimitris Karantzas and performed in the ancient Greek amphitheater of Epidaurus, I secured tickets.

  The ancient theater of Epidaurus was built sometime during the fourth century BCE and was part of the Sanctuary of Asklepios of Epidaurus, an area that was thought to have healing waters and other health-enhancing qualities. It’s about a two-hour drive from central Athens along a new freeway. It’s on the Peloponnesian side, so you have to go around the Saronic Gulf in a kind of horseshoe shape. Once you leave the sagging industrial outskirts of Athens and drive through the scruffy hills leading to the Corinth Canal, you enter a rich agricultural area with rolling hills of olive trees and citrus, vineyards and views of the ocean. Closer to the theater, you find yourself in a pine-filled forest, not unlike something you’d see in Central California.

  Henry Miller describes an epiphany he had there: “At Epidaurus I felt a stillness so intense that for a fraction of a second I heard the great heart of the world beat and I understood the meaning of pain and sorrow.”1

  It sounds nice, but that kind of stillness is in short supply when a play is on. The roads are clogged with buses, taxis, and cars bringing more than eight thousand people to the theater. And even if all that traffic wasn’t there, I doubt I would’ve heard the heart of the world beating over the raucous buzzing of cicadas blasting from the trees.

  We were dropped at the entrance and followed the stream of people heading up toward the theater. They were predominantly Athenians, and even though it was hot and buggy in the humid air, people had made an effort; they were dressed for a night out, even if it took a few hours in a chartered bus to get there.

  The outdoor theater is tucked into the curve of the hillside at the base of Mount Kynortio, and you kind of wind your way up to it. When we finally came around a bend in the path and could see the amphitheater, I gasped. It is a jaw-dropping piece of architecture, much bigger and more impressive than I expected. And it’s not like I hadn’t read that it seats fourteen thousand people or seen the pictures, but in person it really is something.

  The entry of the chorus (courtesy of the Athens & Epidaurus Festival).

  This particular amphitheater is known for its acoustics. As legend has it, you can drop a coin on the marble disk in the center of the stage and hear it clearly in the top rows. I knew that the ancient Greeks took theater seriously, that it was an important art form in their society, and when you see this massive work of architecture in person, it underlines all that. Maybe Henry Miller really did hear the heartbeat of the world in Epidaurus.

  Clouds was first produced in 423 BCE. It didn’t win the prize that year and was considered something of a flop for Aristophanes. After his setback at the festival, Aristophanes did an extensive revision of the play. Since the original version no longer exists, it’s hard to know what, exactly, he changed with his rewrite.

  The logline for the play goes something like this: Strepsiades is suffering from panic attacks because he’s gone deeply in debt to support his son’s horse-racing habit. He gets the idea that if he can learn to talk like Socrates and other philosophers, people who can change up from down and down from up, then he can talk his way out of the debts. So Strepsiades goes to the “Thinkery,” a school run by Socrates, to learn the ways of slippery rhetoric. Aristophanes mercilessly mocks the nerds who study there.

  The play was a response to the rising use of lawsuits to settle differences in Athens and, with it, the engagement of what we nowadays call lawyers. Athenians litigated everything from murder to adultery, inheritances to paternity, and various business squabbles; in other words, pretty much exactly the same kind of thing we litigate now. And much like the bellicose lawyers strutting in front of a jury today, a trial in ancient Athens was a performance. There were typically five hundred or more jurors hearing the case and, just like at the theater, heckling and shouting at the speakers was common. A wealthy litigant would often hire an orator with a beautiful voice and a quick wit to represent him, to play to the jury much like an actor in the Theater of Dionysus. If the orator was entertaining or clever, he would often win the case despite whatever facts might be presented.

  Of course in Clouds the plan backfires spectacularly, as Strepsiades is too dumb to really learn anything. So he sends his son to try and he succeeds, learning everything he needs to know from Socrates and returning home from the Thinkery a bloviating asshole. Now he wants nothing to do with his father, whom he considers inferior. In the final scene, angry at being duped by the intellectuals who turned his son against him, Strepsiades sets fire to the Thinkery.

  The play is v
ery funny, the jokes from ancient times still pack some sting, and the critique of the legal system—with “Right Logic,” a kind of stuffy appeal to all that is wholesome and good, versus “Wrong Logic,” everything that is sexy and fun—is as apt today as it was in the fifth century BCE. It makes me wonder how good Cratinus’s Wine Flask was that it took first place.

  We settled into our seats—I was grateful to see the slabs of timeworn and pocked stone were covered by thick foam cushions—and chatted with a few other journalists in the press section.* The sky began to darken and the theater filled. Occasionally there would be bursts of applause from the audience. A few times I thought the chorus was entering and clapped along, but was quickly admonished by a reviewer from an Athens newspaper, a smartly dressed man with blue-framed spectacles, who shook his head sadly and told me that was “something people in the cheap seats did to get the show going.” Fortunately the play began before I could make any other faux pas.

  Just like this book, classic Greek comedies start with the entrance of the chorus, or parodos, as it’s called. The light shifted, the crowd hushed, and a troupe of actors dressed as drag queens, plushies, supermodels, and steampunk hipsters entered the theater in a straight line, walking in step, arms swinging in unison, their serious expressions at odds with their extravagant costumes. The line moved in a serpentine fashion around the stage, sometimes performing a stutter step or stopping suddenly and swaying backward. It was a kind of sanctification of the comedic space, farcical and yet ritualistic—as if they were giving us a heads-up that something important, sacred, and weird was about to take place. As Stephen Halliwell writes, “Aristophanes always treats it as a theatrical event in its own right: he organizes the parodos, which was clearly a formal convention long before his time, in such a way as to create a specific and usually extravagant effect on the situation in hand.”2