For a time, epitheorisi was wildly popular as a public entertainment. As Aliki Bacopoulou-Halls says in “The Theatre System of Greece,” “At its inception, Epitheorisi was a form supposedly intended to reflect the perpetual flow of things.”1 In other words it was the news of the day put under a spotlight and mocked a bit, like The Daily Show but with songs and skits. Or, as Dimitra says, “You have to be very clear with what happens now, this moment.”
Eventually, Bacopoulou-Halls writes, “direct or indirect imposition of censorship soon deprived epitheorisi of one of its most pungent elements, political satire, reducing the form, ironically, into a kind of theatre of escape, to which, as original Greek revue, it initially had developed as a reaction.”
That censorship came from the traditional funwreckers: a conservative government and the Church.
Sketch comedy, variety shows, commedia dell’arte, vaudeville, cabaret—call it what you want, all these kinds of entertain ments have been around for centuries. What made the original epitheorisi different was the unfiltered nature of the discourse, particularly around politics and sex. Tilemachos translated for Dimitra: “The spirit of this is from ancient Greece. Everything is political.”
Dimitra nodded approvingly. “Society is political.”
We started discussing American politics, which Diana had observed we were refreshingly out of touch with while in Athens. Another bottle of wine arrived as well as a cheese pie with a kadayif crust, which is like the best shredded wheat I’ve ever had. Less successful was an asparagus “soufflé,” which was really just a very dry frittata.
I found it funny that a fallen soufflé had arrived when we were discussing sketch comedy, because the rising and falling of this delicate egg dish figures prominently in comic sketches throughout history. A soufflé is the comedy equivalent of the truckload of nitroglycerin transported through the jungle in Wages of Fear,2 although a collapsed soufflé is merely funny, maybe slightly embarrassing to the chef, but nobody is blown to bits. Notable soufflé-as-comic-centerpiece bits have appeared in The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Golden Girls, The Brady Bunch; even Star Trek: Deep Space Nine used a soufflé as a gag. In the 1954 film Sabrina, Audrey Hepburn’s character learns that a soufflé is an accurate indicator of the state of the heart. In the scene, at a Parisian cooking school, Sabrina’s soufflé is a disaster. She forgot to turn on the oven. Which then leads one of the other students, a baron of course, to inform her that “a woman happily in love, she burns the soufflé. A woman unhappily in love, she forgets to turn on the oven.” Which made me think that the cook at the restaurant might be heartbroken.
There have been all kinds of comedy throughout human history. We enjoy laughter. A happy(ish) ending makes us feel good. Minor humiliations like a fallen soufflé, a good fart joke, watching pretentious know-it-alls fall on their asses, a simple misunderstanding that gets blown out of proportion, hubris, karma, sex, death, and a skewed kind of comeuppance are all things that have been the basis of comedy for as long as people have been laughing. They just get reworked and repackaged and repurposed. Even the raunchy scatological comedy that is common nowadays is just a recycling of the original Greek comedies.
In an interview in the Guardian, writer and director Taika Waititi* says it better than I can.
Comedy has always, for thousands and thousands of years, been a way of connecting audiences and delivering more profound messages by disarming them and opening them up to receive those messages. Comedy is a way more powerful tool than just straight drama, because with drama, people tend to switch off or feel a sense of guilt, or leave feeling depressed … Often it doesn’t sit with them as much as a comedy does.3
It’s funny how things go around. Dimitra explained to us that a producer in Athens had hired her to write a new show of epitheorisi. “He has already booked a very nice theater in central Athens.” The show, which she would also star in, was slated to open in June 2020, which, if you’ve ever tried to write and produce a play, is like yesterday.
Dimitra sighed. “It is almost impossible, but I will try to write something.”
I asked them if the Greek sense of humor helped them through the economic crisis.
Tilemachos said, “That’s a tough question to answer. Because the crisis did change our mood. The crisis has drained us from humor, has overcome us. Especially in Athens, the temper is very bad. It’s not easy when you are losing your job or your house. On the other hand, the past few years people started to go to the theater again, mostly to see comedies. Laughter liberates you and gives you courage and, most important, unites people.”
Dimitra added, “Greeks are ready to laugh with everything.”
* JoJo Rabbit, Thor: Ragnarok, etcetera.
Decorative Pottery
Deep Ellum is a lively, slightly divey section of downtown Dallas. There are lots of bars and restaurants, a smattering of art galleries, and an excellent independent bookstore named Deep Vellum. I was there to drink some cold beer in a dark bar and see the Austin-based feminist punk band Sailor Poon.1 With songs like “White Male Meltdown,” “Butt Gush,” and “The Dick,” it feels like Sailor Poon has a spiritual affinity to the raunchy political humor of the early Athenians. I imagine Ariphrades wouldn’t be able to resist a band of sex-positive women who proudly proclaim their motto is “Always Crude, Never Prude.”
Onstage they have a loose, garage-tinged sound, and like all good punk it’s chaotic and fun. The chorus of their song “Leather Daddy” is especially catchy with its demand for oral sex, new shoes, an orgasm, and then a polite request to be left alone. They have manners and an aggressive pro-cunnilingus stance.* This attitude would definitely have not been well received in ancient Greece or, I suppose, certain parts of the contemporary American South.
Why do I mention this feminist punk band? Because depictions and mentions of cunnilingus are still relatively rare in Western culture.
UC Berkeley professor of classics Leslie Kurke, in her book Coins, Bodies, Games, and Gold: The Politics of Meaning in Archaic Greece, writes about Greek art and the images presented on the coins and pottery of ancient Athens. The book is a coin collector’s wet dream, but I’m more interested in the images on the decorative pottery. Here she describes a very lively orgy depicted on a cup from circa 510 BCE: a woman is leading a man by his erection, someone is masturbating, a couple is fucking, and
perhaps most remarkably, the woman next to this couple raises her left leg high in dance while a young man reclining in front of her seems to be about to initiate cunnilingus. If this is indeed what the vase depicts (and there is some dispute on the matter), it is the only representation of cunnilingus in all of Greek art. For the protocols of Greek culture regarded oral sex as particularly demeaning for the partner who gave it, so that, while scenes of women fellating men are fairly common, depictions of cunnilingus are almost nonexistent.2
Cool trick, bro (British Museum, Wikimedia Commons).
Of course, just because an action is depicted on a piece of pottery doesn’t mean it’s based on fact or an accurate representation of an orgy. Ancient pottery is not a photograph or a selfie. It could be that the artist intended for the pottery to be outrageous and shocking, or perhaps it’s exaggerated to be funny, like something R. Crumb might draw if he were in the business of putting his art on ceramics. As classicist Holt N. Parker writes in “Vaseworld: Depiction and Description of Sex in Athens”:
That is, the decorations on pots are too often taken as both representations (as if the unmediated depiction of practices) and representative (as if offering an accurate cross-sample of what people actually did). This “snapshots of Athenian life” approach tends to ignore the facts that even our snapshots are controlled, selected, cropped, manipulated, intended to convey one picture of reality and not another.3
I think that they might’ve been tchotchkes, raunchy pottery for sale to tourists. Sex sells, as they say, and there was a robust trade in Athenian pottery all around the eastern Mediterranean, with t
itillating vases and erotic wine kraters found in Sicily and parts of southern Italy. You can see the T-shirt, can’t you? I TRAVELED ALL THE WAY TO ATHENS AND ALL I GOT WAS A PIECE OF RISQUÉ CROCKERY. Which might mean that—like those tapestries that people always seem to bring back from Peru that depict llamas fucking—there was some exaggeration for commercial effect.
But it seems strange that there are no depictions of cunnilingus. They showed everything else. A quick survey of the erotic pottery of the Athenian ceramicists reveals that, like the comedies, not a lot was considered off-limits. There are numerous depictions of sex: men engaged with sex workers in brothels; flute girls at symposia; people engaged in rear entry, fellatio; women leading men around by their erections; a woman hoisted into the air as someone fucks her and another figure holds what looks like a cup under her butt; and in one notable ceramic, a woman engaging three men at once. There are depictions of men having sex with boys, Greek men sodomizing Persian men, Minotaurs raping villagers, and Satyrs doing whatever the fuck they please. My favorite image is a Satyr balancing a large goblet on the tip of his erect penis while a friend fills his cup.* Satyrs are mythical nature spirits embodying male energy; they sport permanent erections and are typically depicted drunkenly frolicking and doing tricks with their dicks.
OG party rockers, Satyrs will do most anything, but you won’t find them using their tongues to pleasure a woman. The absence of images of cunnilingus gives us a clue as to how transgressive it really must have been and how shocking for Ariphrades to become known for doing it.
What we know about ancient Athens, what we glean from these snapshots, is incomplete. It’s all shards and fragments—not just the pottery, but scholars and historians use fragments of ancient plays and the existent comedies of Aristophanes to create another kind of snapshot of Athenian life. Combined with the images on the pottery, these provide historians with just enough information to be dangerous to themselves, susceptible to a variety of theories and hypotheses that arise around what it was like to live in that world. One school of thought, proposed by French philosopher Michel Foucault, looks at the power dynamic in sexual relations, with penetration and aggression seen as a positive—the winner!—and being sub missive or penetrated during sex as a negative—the loser!—as a defining characteristic of ancient Athenian relations. For sure there were some power and gender dynamics at play; sex can be a complex web of interconnected social, political, and economic exchanges, or it can be a simple cash transaction. In the competitive culture of Athenian patriarchy, dominating your sexual partner might provide some social uplift; you could, I suppose, earn some props for delivering a proper pounding. But I find that kind of analysis detached from lived experience. For one, the submissive partner might be enjoying him- or herself. Maybe that’s just what he or she is into. And if you’re into it, isn’t it possible to be submissive and still in control of the power dynamic? Because inside the dynamic, power is in the head of the beholder.
In our current political culture, with leaders who grab and grope women, with business CEOs and celebrities who abuse their power and influence for sexual favors, isn’t it time for women to take a cue for Karl Marx and seize the means of production? It feels long overdue. Maybe that’s what the #metoo movement can accomplish. That’s what feminist punk rockers like Sailor Poon do. They take ownership of their sexuality. Of course in ancient times the trope of a sexually aggressive woman was used for jokes or to create horror and revulsion in plays and poetry. I wish I could say things have changed.
It could be that Ariphrades found enjoyment in pleasuring women and that flipped the penetrator-as-winner power dynamic on its head. It showed that you didn’t have to dominate to experience pleasure. It questioned the foundation of the patriarchy. What if the obsession with penetration was a sign of insecurity, a flaw, a weakness? The Greeks were obsessed with impotence. As Philodemus writes in a poem to Aphrodite:
I, who in earlier times could manage between five
and nine in a session, now, Aphrodite, can scarcely
achieve one from dusk till dawn.
And, unfortunately, the “thing” itself has, of late,
been more often than not semi-lifeless, and right now
is on the verge of “death.” This is the Termerion.
Old age, old age, what do you have to offer later on,
if you do come, when even now I am wasted away?4
The reference to Termerion is a funny pun. It refers to a bandit named Termerus who would kill his victims by smashing their head in with his head. Get it? Your head—the tip of your penis—goes soft and you die. Which seems appropriate given the author’s lament. What is the use of living if you can’t get it up? What is the purpose of life if you can’t dominate? Would you then become submissive? Isn’t it better to die? You can see where this is going. This is what they’re afraid of. Take their erection away and they become crybabies. Remove their ability to dominate and what are you left with? Equality?
* Also check out Underhairz, a female trip-hop trio from Osaka, and their song “CunnilinguSmile.”
* And people brag about being good at beer pong …
Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game
The concept is simple. A writer sits down with a producer or studio executive and tells a story. This is called a “pitch.” If the producer or studio executive likes the pitch, then a sequence of events unfolds that hopefully leads to the writer getting some money to go write the script. If it goes really well, then the producer or studio executive takes the script to a director, who then casts it with actors and a movie or television show is produced. It seems pretty straightforward, and yet 99 percent of the time a pitch is a futile endeavor; the writer tells her story and the producer or studio executive says thanks for coming in. The writer might have worked for months honing the pitch, rehearsing her delivery, making the story as airtight as possible. And then that’s it. There’s nothing to show for all that work. Although they typically give the writer a bottle of mineral water and validate her parking.
It is a very weird way to make a living, spending sixty minutes in front of a roomful of executives, doing the old dog and pony show, shucking and jiving, hoping you interest them enough for them to put down their smartphones. It’s a system that forces introverts and nerds—writers—to become extroverts, to perform, to enthrall the room with a little razzle-dazzle. It’s not enough to say, “It’s called Teenage Bounty Hunters and it’s about twin sisters who become bounty hunters.”* You have to wow them. How pitches are received changes from executive to executive. Some want a detailed three-act structure with every little beat of the story accounted for; others start checking their text messages as soon as you say, “Act two starts with …” It’s a crapshoot, a mild indignity writers are put through because our job requires us to do the work and then get paid. Which I guess is like a baker or a furniture maker or any other artist. But the baker doesn’t have to pitch, she just lets the aroma of a freshly baked croissant do the talking.
The Athenian playwrights were no different from Hollywood hucksters in this regard, although the Athenians didn’t wear sneakers, jeans, and an old Danzig T-shirt under their Rag & Bone blazer.
Let’s go back in time—do the special F/X where the text begins spinning and lap dissolve to 420 BCE—and check out Ariphrades on his way to pitch his play.
Ariphrades walked through the Plaka, winding down narrow streets, past houses tightly stacked along the slope, buildings that looked impressive from the outside but were warrens of cramped spaces inside. He felt beads of sweat forming on his forehead and wiped his brow with the back of his hand. It wasn’t hot. He was nervous, on his way to pitch his new play to someone Gorgias had recommended, a wealthy wine importer who he hoped would provide the funding he needed to put on a show that might, once and for all, win a prize. At the very least he hoped it might shut Aristophanes up.
He saw a young woman leaving a house. She didn’t look like a slave but was definitely not
one of the citizens who lived in the area; what he did notice was the way her chiton clung to her hips. He turned to watch her and almost collided with a muscular young man hurrying down the hill. It was his friend Kosmas.
“Kosmas! Off to the palaestra?”
Kosmas smiled and gave Ariphrades an embrace. “We were just talking about you.”
“Something good, I hope?”
Kosmas looked down at the ground.
Ariphrades sighed. “Or not?”
Kosmas shook his head. “I’m being punished.”
“Why?”
“Last night I was reading your play, which I was very much enjoying. Too much, it seems. I woke up the house with my laughter.”
Ariphrades did a mock bow. “The poet thanks you.” Ariphrades saw his friend’s expression change.
“My father was pissed. He read some of it and thought it was nasty. He took the scroll away.”
“What?”
“He said I shouldn’t be wasting my time reading trash.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You should be. You are too funny.”
Ariphrades nodded. “Should I get my scroll from him and apologize?”
Kosmas laughed. “I’ll see that it’s returned. But you might want to rein it in!”
Ariphrades smiled and spread his hands out with a shrug. “I will endeavor to bore the shit out of everyone with my next play.”
Kosmas laughed and started off down the street. “Good man! It will give my father something to talk about.”
Ariphrades turned and continued up the hill. He tried not to feel resentful. He came from a family of performers—his brothers were lyre players and actors—and many times the conversation at family meals revolved around the fact that artists and performers had to rely on the wealthy to bankroll their shows. He remembered his brother, Arignotus, drunkenly lamenting a meddlesome patron who had demanded the musicians change a song. His brother had slammed his cup down, cracking the base, and shouted, “I will only play what I want to hear!”
Rude Talk in Athens Page 11