And then the play began.
The main set was a large cube that represented the Thinkery in the play. It was an ingenious construction; various panels could open or close or be reconfigured into catwalks and platforms. Near the beginning of the play, when Strepsiades approaches the Thinkery, panels opened to reveal a trio of naked buttocks pointed out at the audience. Strepsiades asks one of the Thinkery’s students what they are doing. The student exclaimed, “They’re trying to see what’s underneath hell.”
Strepsiades scratched his head. “With bottoms gazing at the heavens?”
“Yes, independently studying the stars.”
There’s a lot of classic setup–punch line joke structure in Aristophanes’s work. And the cast was superb, getting maximum comic effect out of the dialogue and situations without resorting to mugging. When slapstick was called for, it felt natural, and that’s not such an easy thing to pull off.
And then the part of the play called the parabasis kicked into gear. Halliwell translates parabasis as “stepping forward,” the point in the play where the main action stops and the chorus speaks directly to the audience. As discussed in previous chapters, this is the section where Aristophanes typically unloads his list of grievances, boasts relentlessly, and singles out prominent Athenians for mockery. In this excerpt he berates the audience for not giving the tripod to Clouds when it was first performed.
It was because I believed you sophisticated spectators And took this comedy to be the cleverest of all my plays That I deemed it right for you to be the first to savour a work That caused me so much effort. Yet I left the theatre defeated By vulgar rivals, an ignominious fate! That’s why I blame you, You “clever” spectators, for all the trouble this caused me.3
I feel for Aristophanes, and I can relate—who hasn’t felt misunderstood and underappreciated? But can you imagine Martin Scorsese having an actor stop in the middle of his new film to lambaste the audience because the director didn’t win the Oscar for his last film? No. You cannot. But that is exactly what Aristophanes is doing.
When you read the parabasis on the page, it feels like a list of demands, the affect somewhat flat, like a video made by a kidnapper. But in the unhinged and brilliant parabasis of Clouds as directed by Karantzas, the chorus—the plushies, drag queens, supermodels, etcetera—careen and cavort around the stage at maximum volume, like escaped circus performers, turning Aristophanes’s complaints into a ferocious and highly entertaining rant and rumble. Karantzas had added some in-jokes for the audience, including a hilarious moment when one of the chorus removed a coin from her purse and silenced the crowd so we could hear “the legend of Epidaurus.” More than nine thousand people became weirdly silent, and then she dropped the coin on the marble disk at the center of the stage. If the subsequent cheer was anything to go by, you really could hear it all the way at the top of the theater.
The parabasis was, for me anyway, the highlight of the production.
Karyofyllia Karabeti as Good Reason (courtesy of the Athens & Epidaurus Festival).
The other was when the actress Karyofyllia Karabeti, playing the character Good Reason, ran into the audience and planted a kiss on the top of my head.
The kiss of Good Reason (selfie courtesy of the author).
Clouds is dedicated to mocking Socrates, and some historians have suggested that this comedy may have turned the people of Athens against him, leading to his eventual conviction and death. Personally, I doubt it. The timeline doesn’t hold up—there were twenty-four years between the performance of Clouds in 423 BCE and Socrates’s trial in 399 BCE. That said, Socrates’s style of questioning every person he encountered and challenging his unexamined beliefs could have become annoying. Imagine going to the grocery store and having a very smart philosopher follow you around, asking you what you thought about the morality of using a plastic bag to hold your avocados, and why do you assume that everything in the store is there for your convenience, and have you actually thought through your motivations for making guacamole in the first place? Socrates taught this method of critical thinking—the questioning of everything—to his students. It sounds exhausting, but it’s what we need more of in the world today. A social media disinformation campaign can only be successful if it’s accepted at face value and not examined with a critical eye. People in power never like critical thinkers, and no one likes to have to explain themselves, and that’s probably all the motivation the city needed to condemn the philosopher.
Aristophanes was clever about choosing the targets for his japes. Socrates was well known in Athens, somewhat controversial, and definitely a person who didn’t conform to the standards of the time. In other words, he was an easy target for parody. But that was part of Aristophanes’s comedic strategy—if you want your jokes to land, you need to make sure your audience knows whom you’re talking about, that they are prominent enough figures to knock off their pedestal. To quote from Halliwell’s excellent introduction to his translation of Clouds,
In the case of many “victims” of satire, comic prominence should be taken as a reflection less of scandalous notoriety than of the achievement of status and power within the city. This is most obviously true of leading politicians, generals, and office-holders (Perikles, Kleon, Hyperbolos, Lamachos, etc.), and while our evidence is often inadequate for certainty, we can be confident that this was true of many of the lesser targets as well.4
Was Ariphrades as talented as Euripides and Aeschylus? Was he as important an Athenian as Pericles and Kleon? We’ll never know. But chances are he was, and if he was, why has history worked so diligently to erase him?
It’s not really something I put on my résumé, not something I mention, like, ever, but I have been an actor in an acclaimed, tripod-winning Greek play. This wasn’t a nonspeaking part, I didn’t just bring a message from the king or stand around holding a spear; I performed the role of Aegisthus in a production of Agamemnon—part of a trilogy called the Oresteia written by the famed tragedian Aeschylus. It’s a great trilogy, with all the backstabbing and reversals you’d expect from a good telenovela or a Game of Thrones spinoff. Written twenty-five years before Clouds, the Oresteia won first prize at the Dionysia festival in 458 BCE, so this was a play with pedigree. The version I was in was an experimental adaptation directed by an affable, loose-limbed young man named Mark Anderson and performed at the Odd Fellows Hall in Seattle, Washington. This happened in 1983 CE.
I can’t credibly claim that I was acting, since I don’t know how to act, and so why I was cast is a bit of a mystery. At the time I was in a locally popular alt rock band called 3 Swimmers, and I suppose Mark might’ve thought that I was a juicy bit of stunt casting. You know, good for box office. Like putting Madonna in a production of David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow.* Mark is now the co–artistic director of Theatre Gigante in Milwaukee and a well-respected monologist. I can only hope he learned from his mistake and never casts a nonacting guitarist in a lead role again. Despite my limited abilities, I’m always up for a challenge, and it was fun to attempt to play Clytemnestra’s scheming lover, a louche and debauched man-about-town. Now that I think about it, given my lifestyle at the time, it may have been a clever bit of typecasting.
For those of you not familiar with the story, here’s a brief description:
Clytemnestra, King Agamemnon’s wife, is pissed because Agamemnon sacrificed their daughter to ensure good sailing when he went off to battle. Aegisthus—that’s who I played—is holding a grudge because Agamemnon’s father boiled Aegisthus’s brothers and served them for dinner. Because of these murders, both Aegisthus and Clytemnestra understandably have a lot of issues and emotional baggage. Their conflicted feelings about Agamemnon bring them together and they embark on a torrid affair, getting it on while they plot revenge. I can’t say it’s the best foundation for a healthy relationship, but love is strange.
As I said, the production was experimental—influenced by interdisciplinary theater artist Ping Chong—with lots of multime
dia bells and whistles. There were drawings by artist Lynda Barry projected on the set, videos filmed on the Puget Sound ferry, and cool sound effects. I know I wore tennis whites and carried a wooden tennis racket instead of a sword. When I asked Mark what he recalled about the production he said, “One thing I remember clearly was your decision—in some scene, don’t remember—to stand in the posture that a wide receiver might stand in at the line of scrimmage—upright, one foot slightly back, leg bent, toe resting on the turf/stage, arms akimbo. Remember?”
I do remember doing that. Why I did it, why Aeschylus somehow inspired me to stand like Otis Taylor, I cannot explain.
Stickin’ it to the Man (Wikimedia Commons).
One thing I can safely say about the experience: I am a terrible actor.
Although now that I reflect on it, my life in Seattle did have an Aegisthus-like quality. A debauched pretender to the throne involved with a powerful and Machiavellian queen (or two), Aegisthus was riding a one-man rager until Agamemnon’s son, Orestes, came to town and dispatched him without hesitation.
My downfall was less dramatic. The band broke up. The relationship(s) fizzled. I got fired from my restaurant job. Everything ended in failure. Although I will say that I became quite good at waiting tables, and that’s a transferable skill. But I don’t look at any of this as tragic. And, in all fairness, failure is in the eye of the beholder, some people might think I was successful. But I don’t mind calling it a failure. Being involved in the arts requires a willingness to fail, to flash and crash and burn. A creative life is full of risks, mistakes, and brushes with stupidity. Hopefully no one dies and you learn some things about yourself and maybe even have fun while you’re doing it. But you have to take a step into the unknown and be prepared to fall flat on your face. Samuel Beckett famously said, “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”5 Which is the best advice for writers ever given.
I bring up all this to give some kind of context for thinking about Ariphrades.* We know he was a writer and yet there is no record of him winning, or even placing, in the theatrical competitions. Does that make him a failure? I have a hunch he was probably a hit at the box office, which is why Aristotle knew of him ninety years later. You don’t see James Patterson or J. K. Rowling winning the Pulitzer Prize or the National Book Award, but their books are going to be around for a while.
It’s impossible to make a case for Ariphrades’s writing. The last person who might have seen one of his plays has been dead for two thousand years. And yet he lives on in the work of Aristophanes. Although perhaps not in the way Aristophanes originally intended.
* A big thank you to the Athens & Epidaurus Festival for providing me with such good seats!
* I actually saw this production on Broadway. Imagine a play where people hold up their lighters at the curtain call.
* And perhaps this book.
The Arc of Comedy Bends
Not many tourists visit the Pnyx. Maybe because they have trouble saying the name. But more likely they’re doing what tourists typically do when they come to Athens: going to the Acropolis, maybe taking in the Acropolis Museum and the Agora, and then jumping on a ferry to the islands. They skip the Kerameikos Museum and the Pnyx, my favorite archaeological sites.
The Pnyx is a rocky outcropping on a hilltop about a kilometer from the Acropolis. And, to be honest, there’s not a lot to see on the Pnyx hill. There are some trees and some scruffy shrubs, a few benches, and the Pnyx itself. It’s not to be confused with the Sphinx or any other majestic ancient structure. When I first walked up to it, I burst out laughing. It was two stone steps leading to a small platform carved out of the rock. No ruins. No columns. Just a stage about three feet high and the size you’d find in an average karaoke bar. A chain, like the kind of thing you see at a movie theater, was strung between a few stanchions and positioned to discourage people from standing on it. But for me that’s part of its charm. The Pnyx is humble. It’s not trying to blow you away with soaring architecture or amazing design. It’s made out of rock, but Machu Picchu it is not. Its power is not in any columns or statues or archaeological remains; this was a place for ideas. The Pnyx is where Athenian democracy was put into practice.
It was incredibly windy at the top of Pnyx hill. The trees were shaking and dust devils erupted from bare patches of dirt, spinning up in the air, forcing me to close my eyes to protect them from grit. I stood on the other side of the chain, looking at the bare stone steps, smaller than a typical American front porch, and I couldn’t help but be impressed. It may not look like much, but here was where regular people decided they could figure out how to organize their city and live their lives. They didn’t need to take orders from anyone, thank you very much.
The Pynx and the Acropolis (photograph courtesy of the author).
Nowadays we take the concept—though perhaps not the reality—of representative democracy for granted, but in the fifth and sixth centuries BCE it was a radical idea. Classicists don’t agree on who is responsible for this innovation. Some credit Cleisthenes for flipping the script on the ruling aristocrats of the city and devising a way for the various tribes of Athens to share power; others say Solon brought about the fundamental, egalitarian form of democracy. History has a way of crediting innovative individuals with changing the world, but in my experience it’s never just one person. Because Cleisthenes could’ve said, “Hey, I’ve got this cool idea where we all share power, dispense justice, and run the city together as equals.” And the response might have easily been: “That sounds dumb.” Or, if my neighbors in Los Angeles are a reliable metric when they discuss, for example, putting in bike lanes: “No way! You can’t repaint the streets! Traffic is already too slow! It will ruin our neighborhood!” Thankfully, the citizens of Athens were more adventurous than your average neighborhood council and agreed that it might be a good idea to administer the city that way. More important, they would each actively take part in running the local government and courts. Archaeologists believe that about six thousand citizens—remember these were all men—would gather on the Pnyx hill and discuss and debate various ideas, the speakers standing on the little stone patio, and then decide on laws or whether to go to war or to fix the price at the local brothels, etcetera, in a public vote. I don’t want to idealize it too much—it was still a slave-holding patriarchy—but it was democracy undiluted by special interests; there were no smoky backroom deals, no convention wheeling and dealing, no primary rigging. There was transparency in their democracy because most of the people were engaged in it. It’s interesting to note that this kind of democracy was performative—people stood up and gave speeches—and interactive, with a response coming from the crowd. It required participation and a give-and-take that was similar to the theater. Perhaps that’s why the men who spoke at the Pnyx, like Kleon and Hyperbolus, were so often mocked in the comedies of the time.
Aside from the main framework for representative democracy, two important and related concepts came out of this. The first is called parrhêsia—translated as “unbridled tongue”—which gave every citizen the right to say whatever he wanted, to freely express his thoughts and ideas and opinions without fear. As historian Arlene W. Saxonhouse says in her excellent book Free Speech and Democracy in Ancient Athens, “It affirmed the rejection of an awestruck reverence for hier archical ordering of a society and the ancient traditions that supported it.”1
Socrates famously practiced parrhêsia, dispensing a kind of tough love on his fellow Athenians, challenging them relentlessly about their thoughts and feelings and beliefs. He wasn’t afraid to question traditions, the status quo, the way things worked. Socrates did not give a fuck. Or as Saxonhouse writes, “Socrates’ failure to blush—to care what others think of him, to be ashamed were he to stand openly with his vulnerabilities revealed—lies behind the decision for the Athenians to execute him.” That’s because he refused to be affected by the bookend to parrhêsia, which is aidôs. If people are going to say w
hatever they want, then society will have to figure out some kind of control for that. For the Athenians it was aidôs, or what we now call shame. To speak out and cause another individual shame was considered an act of hubris, which was believed to be against the gods and society and all the codes of conduct that keep people from being bigmouthed barbarians. Hubris was a crime. If you insulted someone or degraded his honor, you could be dragged into court and punished. Which put the brakes on too much parrhêsia. Kind of like our current libel laws or the unrestrained public shaming that takes place on social media sites like Twitter. You can say what you want, but watch what you say or you could get canceled.
Naturally writers like Cratinus, Aristophanes, and Eupolis were free to say whatever they wanted in their plays—an unbridled tongue was crucial in comedy; the audience expected their plays to push the boundaries of decorum, to ridicule prominent citizens, and to trade in gossip and innuendo. And yet there is evidence that even the most uninhibited tongue sometimes pumped the brakes. Even a writer who spoke as freely as Aristophanes recognized that not all free speech was necessarily the truth. As the desperate debtor Strepsiades says as he tries to convince his dimwitted son to study with Socrates:
They say that in there are a couple of Reasons,
the Good—whatever that may be—and the Bad.
And one of those, the Bad—so I am told—the Bad
can plead the Wrong and make it Right.
So all you have to do for me
is learn the Bad Reason
and I won’t have to pay a penny
Rude Talk in Athens Page 9