Aristophanes and Greek Comedy Lecture

[00:00:05]Hello everybody and welcome to the Riverhouse Barn. My name is Tim and I study ancient history. Today I'm going to be talking to you about comedy in ancient Greece.

[00:00:15]People have always liked to laugh. It's a great unifying human trait. We've all got a sense of humor somewhere deep down supposedly.

[00:00:26]Today we're going to be exploring some of the things that made the ancient Greeks laugh. Specifically, I'm going to be talking to you about the life and works of one man, Aristophanes, sometimes called the father of the uh the father of comedy. But before we begin, just a quick note on dates. All of the dates that I'm going to mention over the course of this talk are BCE or BC before the start of our modern calendar. I might not always mention that so I don't want anyone to get confused.

[00:00:57]So Aristophanes was a comedian from the late fifth century and early 4th century BCE. Specifically he was a comedic playwright. He wrote plays designed to be performed in the theatrical competitions of ancient Athens. In ancient Greece plays, whether they were comedies or tragedies, were always performed competitively. It's one of the many ways in which ancient theater is very different to our own. It was a competition. Every performance in the theaters of Athens was done with the hope of winning a cash prize and being named the best playright of the year.

[00:01:37]And Aristophanes absolutely dominated these awards. He won so often and was so good that he is the only comic poet from this entire century of Greek history from whom any work survives to the modern day. He was the man so good that future generations considered him worth preserving.

[00:02:01]Throughout his lifetime he wrote at least 40 plays of which 11 survived through two and a half millennia of history to the modern day. But before we talk about Aristophanes and to talk about comedy and ancient theater generally, we first have to discuss the ancient Greek gods and their festivals because the two things are very closely linked. The ancient Greeks didn't have weekends like we do today. That's not how they divided up their work and leisure time. They were agriculturalists. It wouldn't have made sense to them. Instead, they divided up their calendar with huge citywide religious festivals, usually done to honor a particular deity or god from their pantheon. There's at least one of these large Greek festivals that I'm sure everyone in this room is familiar with. Once every four years, the Greeks would honor their chief god, Zeus, with a festival that involved athletic competitions and sporting events. This particular festival was hosted by the small Greek town of Olympia in the Pelpeneian Peninsula and hence it became known as the Olympic festival or the Olympic Games. But when it comes to theater and comedy, there is only one Greek god worth celebrating.

[00:03:22]Dionis, the Greek god of wine, celebration, ritual madness, and ecstasy.

[00:03:30]Dionis has had several festivals dedicated to him across the Greek calendar, but there are two big important ones for our purposes today.

[00:03:38]He had a small one in January called the Lana Festival and then another much larger one in late March called the city Dionia. And at the center of all of these festivals were dramatic competitions in which several poets would be selected by the city officials and told to perform. They would stage four plays one after the other and then they would be judged with a winner coming out on top.

[00:04:06]All of this is worth noting early on before we dive into the details because it highlights yet another key difference between ancient theater and modern theater. The ancient Greeks did not perform plays or watch them for the same reason that you and I do. They weren't art for its own sake. They weren't entertainment. Not really. They were designed to be entertaining, but that wasn't their primary purpose, and they certainly weren't a business designed to make money. Quite the opposite, they usually cost more money than they made.

[00:04:38]It was a religious event. Greek theater was primarily done to honor the gods, specifically Dionis.

[00:04:47]Deep deep in the Greek past, long before Aristophanes was born and the classical Greek era came along, these performances had been little more than poetry recital. A poet would take to the stage and sing the song of a Greek myth, a Greek story. He would be aided in this by about 15 to 24 dancers called a chorus. This chorus would perform a choreographed routine helping him to tell the story.

[00:05:16]But as time went on, things developed throughout the late sixth and early fifth centuries B.C.E. more and more elements were added to the Greek stage.

[00:05:27]The poet and the chorus were joined on stage by a character called the actor.

[00:05:32]The Greek word for actor is hypocrite.

[00:05:34]It means pretender. The cab uh the costumes became more elaborate. The scenery became more complicated and props were added until by about the midf century B.CE. Greek theater looked very much like the kind of thing that we would recognize today. And it developed according to two main genres. There was tragedy and there was comedy. Both of which had roots in different elements of traditional Greek religious worship.

[00:06:03]Tragedy comes from the Greek meaning a goat song, the song of a goat. And this might be because it has its origins in the songs the Greek would si the Greeks would sing when they performed sacrifices in a very serious part of any Greek festival. They would lead an animal through the city up to an altar and when it was there they would ritually cut its throat as an offering to the divine.

[00:06:29]But comedy is quite different. It comes from the Greek commodia meaning a drinking sun.

[00:06:38]And it probably derives from a very different element of traditional Greek religious worship. Once all of the serious stuff was done, you know, the prayers, the blood sacrifices, things like that, the mundane things, the Greeks would celebrate their god of wine in a very fitting way. They would get very, very drunk.

[00:06:59]During this phase of the festival, the Greeks would participate in something called the phallic procession, which is precisely what it sounds like. The ancient Greeks would parade a giant fake fallus throughout their city. And as they did, they would drink and sing the comedies, the drinking songs.

[00:07:19]Now, unlike the tragedies, these were not carefully planned, rehearsed, and choreographed events. quite the opposite. They were highly improvisational.

[00:07:29]They were also absolutely filthy. The idea The idea was to be as crude, as offensive, and as shocking and disgusting as you possibly could be. I wanted to mention this early on because it really sets the mood for Greek comedy and the kinds of things that the Greeks laugh at, especially this phallic procession bit. I don't know if any of you have ever perused the artworks of the Greeks on their vasees and things, but if so, you'd know that they were absolutely obsessed with male genitalia.

[00:08:01]They put them on everything. Even their road signs had them. Here on the left of the screen, you can see Herma. These are Greek road signs used to tell directions. Which way to Athens, you might ask? And a Greek would simply say, "Well, what direction is the fallus pointing in?" You laugh. The Greeks took this seriously. to graffiti. One of these signs came with the death penalty.

[00:08:22]That's how sacred these things were.

[00:08:25]Basically, the Greeks were a very val phallic people. They lived by the fallus. And given that their main weapon of war in cho their weapon of choice in war was the spear. If you buy into the symbolism of all of that, many of them died by the fallus as well. Look out for the fallus. It will be back.

[00:08:44]This is all obviously very lowbrow stuff, and that's what Greek comedy is.

[00:08:48]It's lots of toilet humor. It's very scatological. Lots of fart jokes, endless fart jokes, lots of very explicit sex jokes, euphemisms, and innuendo, things like that. It's generally disgusting. Drinking songs, the kinds of things you expect drunk people to sing about on their way home.

[00:09:08]But there was also another aspect to it by Aristophanes's day that might shock you. It was also deeply, deeply political. In the theater, in the comedies in the theater, the Greeks didn't write lighthearted humor.

[00:09:23]Instead, Aristophanes and his peers derived all of their material from the world around them, the issues facing their specific time and place. Today, we would call it social and political satire.

[00:09:37]He made fun of Greek culture. He pointed out its absurdities and its inconsistencies and he exaggerated them to the point that they were ridiculous and hilarious. He lampuned named politicians and he made caricatures of famous people and stereotypes of the type of people you'd meet in ancient Greece, isolated them and mocked them.

[00:10:00]Everything in an Aristophanes play is some kind of humorous metaphor for some weird aspect of Greek life.

[00:10:08]And this makes him absolutely fascinating to people like me because through Aristophanes and through his comedy, we get a window into what life was like back then. We can learn about things that aren't really talked about in other Greek literature. Through Aristophanes, we can see the ancient Greek world through the eyes of a man who saw it all as just one big joke.

[00:10:32]So before we dive into his life and works in detail, we need a bit of context. Aristophanes derived his humor from the world around him. So we need to know a few things about that world. So let's start with the very basics. Who were these ancient Greek people? Well, I'll start with who they were not. The ancient Greeks at this point are not a unified state or country in the way that the modern nation of Greece is. To be Greek in this era is to share in a broad culture, a pantheon of gods and some loosely connected religious practices and a mutually intelligible language, albeit with massively differing dialects according to region. But it is not yet a political identity.

[00:11:16]The ancient Greek world, which spanned much of the Mediterranean and Black seas, was made up of literally thousands of small independently operating citystates called police. All of these police valued above all else their autonomy and their eleria. Those are Greek words meaning independence and freedom.

[00:11:40]Some of them were really, really small, little more than villages in the Greek mountains with populations of maybe only a few thousand people, whilst others were huge, sprawling metropolis with huge populations.

[00:11:55]Aristophanes, our comedian, was born in the year 446 in one of the largest of these Greek citystates, a place called Athens. Now, Athens was not only a large and powerful state by Greek standards, it was also unique in the way that it governed itself.

[00:12:15]61 years before Aristophanes was born, in the year 507, Athens had undergone a violent political revolution. The people of Athens had risen up and kicked out their tyrannical rulers. And in their place they had installed a new system of government in which the people would hold power. The Greek word for people is deemos. And the Greek word for power is catos. Democratia. Democracy was born in ancient Athens.

[00:12:47]Now this is where we get our English word democracy from. But it is worth noting that the ancient Athenian democracy was really quite different to ours. To start with, we would not consider them especially democratic. No women were allowed to participate. If you had a female body in ancient Athens, you could not vote and you could not stand for office. Neither could any of the slaves of which there was a substantial population in ancient Athens. And on top of that, many free men, if they didn't meet certain requirements, also couldn't participate.

[00:13:23]But that wasn't the only way in which Athenian democracy was very different to the kind that we might recognize today.

[00:13:30]Most modern democracies are representative. People like you and I, we don't go to parliament ourselves. We vote for somebody to go and do that for us, to go there and represent our interests on our behalf. And if they don't, we vote them out and elect someone who will. That's the idea.

[00:13:48]Athens was different. The Athenians participated very directly in their government. 40 times a year, the Athenian citizenry would gather on the Nyx, a hill on the outskirts of the city. And once they had all gathered, they would participate in the ecclesia or the general meeting, the general assembly of citizens.

[00:14:11]Once everybody had gathered, they would discuss and they would debate policy.

[00:14:17]When the debate was done, those in favor of a proposal would show their support through a process called chyroonia.

[00:14:25]Chyroonia is Greek for arm stretching.

[00:14:29]They would vote by a show of hands.

[00:14:32]If the majority of people, more than 50% showed their support for a motion, it went ahead. Now, theoretically, everybody had the right to speak in the Athenian ecclesia. Everybody except the women and slaves, of course. Although there was a rule as well that older citizens should always be allowed to speak first. But final authority always lay with a people's vote. There was no equivalent in ancient Athens of a prime minister or president or any single person who could claim to lead the city.

[00:15:03]There was no magistrate so powerful that they could act against or without the direct support of the general people. If the ecclesia voted to do something, the pe the officials of the city had absolutely no choice but to go ahead and do it.

[00:15:21]Very soon after it was founded, this new Athenian democracy was put to the test.

[00:15:26]The Athenian people voted to provoke their eastern neighbor by supporting a rebellion within this neighbor's territory. Unfortunately for the Athenians, this eastern neighbor of theirs wasn't another puny little Greek city like they were. It was the enormous Persian Empire, an empire that stretched from what is today Bulgaria to the border of India and Pakistan, the largest state on earth.

[00:15:54]Persia responded to this Athenian provocation with two massive invasions of Greece. One in 490 and another one in 480. And completely against the odds, a small alliance of Greek cities led by Athens and Sparta managed to defeat the Persians and send them running home.

[00:16:14]Greece had been saved and the Athenians had maintained their precious independence.

[00:16:21]Now, this unlikely victory filled the newly democratic Athenians with this new sense of confidence and self-righteousness.

[00:16:30]"We are the liberators of Greece," they told themselves, and anybody else who would listen. Across the whole Greek world, something new had begun happening. Something that would be central to Aristophanes's life and works. The divided and squabbbling Greeks had for the first time in their history come together to face a threat from outside the Greek world. And there was this growing sense that despite their differences and their numerous petty rivalries with each other, at the end of the day, they were all Greeks and they ought to stick together.

[00:17:05]Now, nobody suggested that they should formally unify and create a nation of Greece or anything like that. That idea would have been regarded as extreme and unrealistic as well as being deeply offensive to these people's sensibilities. But there was this vague sense that Greeks ought to work together.

[00:17:26]The Athenians were leaders of this new movement. They formed something called the Dian League, a great alliance of Greek cities centered on the Aian island of Dos, symbolically located right in the middle of them.

[00:17:42]The idea was that every year the cities of this great league of allies would pay a tax, a foros, a tribute to a central treasury that was kept on the island.

[00:17:53]This treasury would then be used to fund a standing navy, a great Greek fleet to ensure that if the Persians ever dared come back, the Greeks would be ready to meet them.

[00:18:06]But the Persians never did come back.

[00:18:08]Years went by, then decades. This generation definfining war faded into memory and it soon became clear to everybody that the great eastern empire wasn't going to invade them again anytime soon.

[00:18:23]And as time went on, Athens began assuming more and more power within this league. The treasury, which they all shared, was discreetly moved from the temple of Apollo on Dos to the Acropolis in Athens. The fleet that was there to protect all of them started really only looking out for Athenian interests. And the Athenians began exercising more and more control over their so-called allies.

[00:18:53]Some cities tried to peacefully leave this league. After all, they had all joined consensually. Nobody had been forced. And now that it no longer served its purpose and it was costing them all a lot of money, surely they could peacefully and easily just back out.

[00:19:09]Athens disagreed and they responded with incredible violence. In a deeply ironic twist, the very navy that these cities had spent years paying for with their taxes was now turned against them. The Athenians sailed against anybody who defied their rule. They tore down walls and they subjugated populations. The Dian League had turned into the Athenian Empire and the friends and allies of Athens were now little more than its subjects.

[00:19:42]This is the world that Aristophanes was born into. Athens, his home city, was at the height of its power and wealth, the most powerful city in the whole Greek world.

[00:19:54]One of Aristophanes's earliest memories may have been when he was only a small boy looking up at the great rock in the center of his city called the Acropolis and seeing the construction of a grand new temple of Athena, a temple called the Pathanon.

[00:20:11]Today the Pathonon is maybe the most enduring symbol of ancient Greece. Think of ancient Greece and the image that comes to your mind is probably one of the Pathonon. But in Aristophanes's lifetime, this was a symbol of Athenian power and Athenian imperialism. It had been paid for with the loot that they had extorted from their so-called allies. And it was used not only as a place of religious ritual, but also as a great fortress in which they could guard their illgotten gains.

[00:20:45]We know that Aristophanes grew up during this era, during this so-called golden age of the Athenian Empire, but outside of that, we really know very little about his early life. We have very few biographical details.

[00:21:00]He was probably from a very rich family because he was clearly very well educated. He had the kind of top rate schooling that was only available to the very very rich. and later in life he seems to have moved in wealthy social circles suggesting that you know he was one of them. His family also already probably had some involvement in the Athenian theater. We have lots of examples from this era of theatrical dynasties single Athenian families that would produce generation after generation of talented actors and playwrights. One of the reasons we assume this is that Aristophanes began his career very young. He was only about 19 or 20 when he started writing plays.

[00:21:44]That is incredibly young to be an Athenian playwright, suggesting that somebody, probably a family member, helped him get his foot in the door of the industry early on.

[00:21:56]Aristophanes wrote and performed his first play in the year 427 when he was about 19 or 20. But sadly his first play and his second are both lost to us. But his third play survives. It's called The Accanians and it is the earliest surviving Greek comedy.

[00:22:17]The plot of The Accanians follows a main character called Dickiopoulos as he navigates life in the Athenian democracy. And it's a classic sane man in the world of the mad type of comedy.

[00:22:30]It's also, to be frank, a deeply unflattering portrayal of ancient Athens and its people.

[00:22:38]Aristophanes begins this play with a scene set during the ecclesia, the most important part of the Athenian democracy, the general meeting where they would discuss and debate policy.

[00:22:49]But Aristophanes portrays this as being an absolutely farcical affair. The politicians are all openly dishonest, corrupt, and power- hungry. And to symbolize this, Aristophanes had great fun with the costumes he dressed his actors in. Those who played the politicians were equipped with giant fake pot bellies, grotesque dramatic masks, and of course, the ubiquitous symbol in Greek theater of a character that you're not supposed to like, the giant fake fallus dangling out from underneath their tunic, usually made of leather and held in place with straps.

[00:23:28]You see, I told you to look out for the fallus.

[00:23:32]The people of Athens are portrayed in this play across the board as being stupid, small-minded, and gullible. The Aanians reminds me most of all, if I were to compare it to anything else, of the uh British puppet show satirical show Spitting Image. Did anyone ever see that? It's a very similar type of comedy. And much like with Spitting Image, everyone in Athens was praying they would never be in an Aristophanes play because nobody looks good in it.

[00:24:01]And like all of his comedies, the Accanians comes with an overt political message. Aristophanes, as we'll see, was a very opinionated man. And he wasn't subtle in how he um in how these opinions come across in his works. His point in the Accanians is this. The war that Athens is waging should be brought to an end. The entire plot surrounds uh is around Dickyopoulos, this main character, as he navigates life in Athens and tries to bring peace to the city or at least to his own household.

[00:24:36]And the humor largely comes from the ways that he outsmarts his fellow citizens who are all hawkish and want war to continue.

[00:24:45]So what war is this? Well, when the Aanians was performed in 425, Athens was already seven years or six years rather into a brutal conflict with its rival city, the Spartans.

[00:25:00]As Aristophanes was growing up, the Greek world was becoming an increasingly tense place as a result of this Athenian imperialism and the growth of one city's power. Remember, these are Greeks. They value their independence incredibly highly and that includes independence from other Greeks. So the growth of Athens to a position where it could exert its influence on other cities made people nervous.

[00:25:27]Consequently, many Greeks ran to the protection of the second most powerful city in Greece, a place called Sparta.

[00:25:36]Sparta formed an alliance block of its own, the Pelpeneian League, to counter Athenian power. The idea is that this would be a certain recipe for peace. Two great alliance blocks, each so powerful they surely canceled each other out.

[00:25:52]Mutually assured destruction.

[00:25:56]Something very similar was tried in Europe in the early 20th century. Um as a response to the growth of German power, Europe divided itself into two great alliance blocks. The onant with Britain, France and Russia and the central powers with Germany and AustriaHungary. And the idea is this would prevent a war. And it worked wonderfully. In 1914 something called the first world peace happened. And it was a wonderful time. I'm joking obviously. All this meant is that when conflict finally inevitably broke out, it would be on a scale previously considered unimaginable.

[00:26:30]And in 431, a small dispute between the allies of Athens and the allies of Sparta ended up dragging the entire Greek world into an enormous and bloody conflict called the Pelpeneian War that would last for nearly three decades.

[00:26:49]Aristophanes hated this conflict. His first surviving play, The Accians, is a theatrical appeal for peace. And throughout his life, he would constantly assert that the war with Sparta should be brought to an end. And specifically, he blames the greed of politicians and the ignorance of the regular people for allowing it to continue. Feel free to start drawing historical parallels with the modern day if that's your thing.

[00:27:18]And this brings us to an interesting point. Aristophanes was utterly ruthless and deeply insensitive with his mockery.

[00:27:26]In front of an audience of Athenians, he ridiculed Athens, its people, its leaders, its most sacred democratic institutions. And he was incredibly popular. So obviously there was an appetite for this kind of thing. The Athenians didn't mind a bit of self-deprecating humor. Comic poets obviously had a certain degree of freedom, a certain amount of license when it came to criticizing their city.

[00:27:54]But at the same time, we know for a fact that literary censorship absolutely existed in ancient Athens. You couldn't just say anything. Long before Aristophanes was born, play uh playwrights would find themselves prosecuted, fined, even banned from the theater for writing about inappropriate subject matter or sensitive material.

[00:28:17]So what kinds of things in ancient Athens resulted in censorship? Was it something that Aristophanes himself ever experienced? And if so, how did he react?

[00:28:28]Well, yes, it is something he experienced very early in his career.

[00:28:33]his second ever play, the second play he ever wrote was called The Babylonians.

[00:28:38]It's now lost to us, but we know about one scene because it landed him in some serious hot water. There is a scene in this play in which a slave master is brutally abusing his slaves. It's obvious that the slave master is supposed to represent Athens and its people. And the slaves are all named after the different cities in the Dian League or Athenian Empire, still officially speaking allies of Athens.

[00:29:09]To make matters worse, when this play was performed at the city Dionia of 426, ambassadors from those very cities were present in the audience and they were deeply deeply offended by this.

[00:29:24]Consequently, Aristophanes was dragged through the Athenian courts and successfully prosecuted for the crime of slandering the Athenian people in the presence of foreigners.

[00:29:38]Evidently, these Athenian people who otherwise didn't mind being made fun of a little bit and really did unironically consider themselves the liberators of all Greece were a little bit sensitive when it came to the reality of their empire, especially when people from that empire were present in the audience.

[00:30:00]The lead prosecutor in this trial was a man called Cleon. Cleon is a very interesting figure. He was a leading politician in Athens in the 420s, the most influential man in the city, and he is widely regarded both in the ancient world and modern as being the worst kind of democratic leader. The Greeks called him a demagogue, which means a people leader. We today might call him a populist and a shameless populist at that. He is seen as being a dishonest and power-hungry man because he manipulated the electorate not by proposing sensible policy but by playing on people's emotions, playing on their fears, and most importantly playing on their prejudices.

[00:30:48]Again, with modern parallels. If anyone wants to draw them, go ahead.

[00:30:54]Or at least that's the image of Cleon that we get today. He is also the victim of a deeply hostile historical tradition. The American author Mark Twain famously said, "You should never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel." Writers are some of the most dangerous people on earth because actions and words as they're spoken, they fade with time. But writing can last for thousands of years. And everybody who writes about Cleon, all of our sources of information for this period are people who he at some point or another prosecuted, everything we know about this man comes from the pen of somebody who personally hated him. And because of that, we get a very unflattering image. And this included Aristophanes, who he had successfully prosecuted. Aristophanes dedicated the next few years of his life to getting his revenge.

[00:31:52]He was very clever in how he went about doing this. The next time he wrote a politically charged play, the kind of thing that, you know, might land him in some trouble, he chose not to perform it at the massive Dionia festival in March, but rather the small Lana Festival in January.

[00:32:13]Why did he choose this smaller and in many ways less prestigious venue? It was all about timing. The Dionia festival in March was an enormous event. It was attended by people from all around the Greek world. People would travel to see it. But the Lana, smaller and less famous, took place in January, mid- winter, a very dangerous time to travel in ancient Greece because the Aian Sea was and still is hit by unpredictable and violent storms. Therefore, in January, very few foreign visitors in Athens. He was protecting himself from yet again being accused of slandering the city in front of foreigners. And then in the year 424, he wrote and performed the most venomous and spiteful play of his entire career, The Knights.

[00:33:08]Sometimes translated as the horsemen or the cavalry.

[00:33:12]The Knights tells the story of four characters, a master and his three slaves. The master is called Demos, the people. The master is the people. And the three slaves are all named after real life politicians from contemporary Athens. We have Demothanes, Nikkias, and of course, Aristophanes's arch rival, Cleon.

[00:33:38]These three slaves all compete with each other for influence over the Demos. And this is easy for them to do because the Demos is both gullible and easily swayed by flattery.

[00:33:51]And this itself tells us an awful lot about how the Athenians viewed politics in their own city. In the democracy, the demos, the people are on top. They are the master. Nothing happens without their say so or without their vote rather.

[00:34:08]But a skilled politician though a slave of the people can manipulate them and by doing so he can hold the real power himself.

[00:34:18]So the play starts with two of these slaves Demophanes and Nikkias complaining that the third slave Cleon has undue influence over the master. How did he get this influence? By being a dishonest sickopant obviously. Demosese even says, "I baked a fine Spartan cake for the master the other day and I was going to give it to him, but Cleon stole my cake, gave it to the master, and claimed he was the one who baked it."

[00:34:49]Aristophanes loves a good food and drink metaphor. His plays are filled with them. And this particular one is a reference to a real life recent event in Athenian history. Demothanes, the man being portrayed on stage, was a real life politician. He was also an admiral in the Athenian fleet and a brilliant tactician. A few months before this play was performed, he had won a stunning victory against the Spartans. He had lured a small Spartan army onto an island called Spacteria. And when they were on the island, he came in with his ships and cut them off from the mainland.

[00:35:28]The blockade was fairly short and the Spartans were forced to surrender, which I'm sure was very embarrassing for them.

[00:35:35]Dealtines captured 292 Spartans, the greatest Athenian victory in the war so far. But then, at the very last minute, when all of the hard work had been done, Cleon, that dishonest demagogue, turned up in the Athenian fleet. He relieved Demothanes of his command and took control of the fleet himself just as the battle was being won which allowed him to return to Athens triumphant and claim complete credit for the victory.

[00:36:10]But his detractors including Aristophanes would forever assert that he had stolen the glory that rightfully belonged to Deosineses.

[00:36:19]And so the play continues. Demosines and Nikkias formulate a plan to dethrone Cleon. They employ the services of a simple sausage seller to engage Cleon in a shamelessness competition. The sausage seller and the politician will compete with each other to see which one can degrade themselves the furthest in an attempt to flatter the demos, the master. And in the end, the sausage seller wins. Cleon is deposed from his office and banished to the city gates, forced to debate with drunks and sex workers, people who Aristophanes says are more on his level.

[00:37:01]The Knights, as far as plays go, is really little more than just a brutal character assassination. The plot is flimsy. Some might say completely non-existent. And the humor comes pretty much entirely from the creativity of in way in the ways that Aristophanes can mock and insult Cleon. And he wasn't subtle. Everybody in the audience would have known exactly who he was talking about. And to make matters even funnier, Cleon and his family were certainly present in the audience. In fact, as one of the most powerful men in Athens, he probably had a front row seat just like you guys.

[00:37:43]This means that Aristophanes, who likely performed in his own plays, could stand on stage, look his rival directly in the eye and deliver a relentless stream of insults. And Cleon would just have to sit there and take it as Aristophanes lent back and basked in the adoration of the crowd.

[00:38:06]These first two surviving plays of Aristophanes, the Accanians and the Knights, must have struck some kind of chord with their audience because both of them won first prize at that year's dramatic competitions. Aristophanes, only in his early 20s, was already one of the biggest names in Athenian theater.

[00:38:27]However, just because Aristophanes was popular doesn't necessarily mean that people agreed with him and his politics. These first two plays lay out in an incredibly obvious way what he wants, what it is he stands for. In the Accians, he calls for peace, an end to the war with Sparta.

[00:38:48]And in the Knights, he urges the people to kick Cleon out of government. These are the two things he stands for. He hates war and he hates Cleon. But despite the enormous popularity of these plays, neither of these things happened.

[00:39:04]The war continued. In fact, the very same year that Aristophanes won a prize for impressing the Athenian people with his play that called for peace. Those same Athenian people went to the Ecclesia and voted to reject a Spartan offer to end the war. They felt that if they could just fight a little longer, win a few more victories, maybe they could press for better terms.

[00:39:29]And Cleon was not voted out of office.

[00:39:32]Quite the opposite, he continued to dominate Athenian politics.

[00:39:38]Cleon enjoyed consistent electoral success year after year, even as Aristophanes was tearing him to shreds on stage.

[00:39:49]And this poses an interesting question, a question that all comedians and satists must wrestle with at some point.

[00:39:57]Just because people laugh at something, just because they find something funny, does that mean that they agree with the sentiment behind it? Can jokes actually impact people's worldview, the way that they see things, or is it really all just a laugh? Can humor in any way change the world?

[00:40:16]I often think about the fact that uh one of the golden ages of 20th century satire took place in Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s.

[00:40:26]The cabaret venues of Vimar Berlin and the satirical magazines that were popular at the time loved making fun of politics and political figures, especially this rising national socialist movement. You know those goostepping idiots in their ridiculous costumes and their silly little badges and their absurd leader with his little mustache.

[00:40:50]These venues were incredibly famous and incredibly popular, but all of the mockery on earth did seemingly nothing to prevent the rise of the Nazis, as the British satist Peter Cook famously pointed out.

[00:41:04]And yet when Hitler consolidated power in Germany, he cracked down very hard on these kinds of venues. By 1938, there were practically none of them left. Even today, dictators, authoritarians, even the occasionally democratically elected leader can show an almost petulant childlike sensitivity to the idea that someone out there is turning them into a joke.

[00:41:31]And this suggests that these people at least feel that they have something to fear from humor. That being the butt of a joke might in some way be damaging to them. It might stop people from taking them seriously. So when we ask ourselves the question, does comedy ever have a realworld impact? The answer is clearly more complicated than just yes or no and frankly beyond the scope of this particular talk. But I can tell you what Cleon thought. Cleon thought that this was vile slander and that Aristophanes should be punished. Of course, he thought that.

[00:42:08]Yet again, he tried to drag Aristophanes through the Athenian courts. But Aristophanes had been careful and clever. He had written these plays very carefully. He made sure that nothing he said, no matter how cruel or personal it was, could possibly be construed as a direct violation of Athenian law.

[00:42:30]And so Cleon accused him of a completely separate crime. Cleon accused Aric Aristophanes of pretending to be an Athenian citizen. A very, very serious charge. If found guilty, Aristophanes would have had all of his property confiscated. his house, his money, his possessions would have all been seized by the state and he would have been sold into slavery. That's how seriously the Athenians took this. But luckily for Aristophanes, this accusation seemingly had no weight behind it whatsoever. It never even made it to court. It was probably little more than just an attempt to scare the comedian. But it does show how personal and how fierce this rivalry really was.

[00:43:20]But Aristophanes would get the last laugh. In 422, 2 years after the Knights was performed, Cleon died. He was killed in battle fighting the Spartan general Brassidas at Amphipilus in the north of Greece. And you might think that now that his rival was dead and had died in battle, nevertheless, Aristophanes might, you know, ease up a little bit on him, at least for a while.

[00:43:46]Not a chance. Aristophanes had no concept of sensitivity towards the recently deceased, or the idea that a joke could ever be too soon.

[00:43:58]The very first play that he wrote mere months after Cleon's death was the aptly titled Peace.

[00:44:06]The very first scene of this play involves two men feeding a giant dung beetle from an enormous pile of manure.

[00:44:14]And one of the first lines of dialogue involves one of the actors turning to the audience, breaking the fourth wall, and addressing them directly and saying, "I bet there's already some knowit all young man amongst you who's trying to sound clever and impress people by pointing out that this beetle is obviously an allegory for Cleon, who is eating crap down with the dead in the underworld as we speak."

[00:44:41]Jeez, even in death, Cleon was not safe from Aristophanes or his mockery.

[00:44:48]The 420s really were the decade that Aristophanes made his career when he earned his reputation as the greatest comic in Athens. But in the following decade, things would change. The war with Sparta would rage on and on and begin to turn against the Athenians. The situation in the city became gradually less stable and the democracy began to struggle. And as all of this happened, Aristophanes aged. And as he got older, he became in many ways more thoughtful, but also a good deal more cynical.

[00:45:27]But all of that is for after the break.

[00:45:29]We're going to take a short intermission there so that everybody can go and get a drink. And I'll see you all back here in about 10 or 15 minutes.

[00:45:40]Lovely.

[00:45:44]All right, I'm switched off. Delightful.

[00:45:48]All right, is everybody comfortable?

[00:45:54]>> Excellent.

[00:45:55]Welcome back everybody. In the first half, we saw how Aristophanes made humor from the world around him.

[00:46:04]That world, the world of fifth century classical Greece, was a rapidly changing one. When democracy had first been introduced in Athens in the year 507, it was a radical new idea.

[00:46:19]New ideas can be scary because they are often untested. Old ideas, customs, and traditions, however flawed they might be, can be very comforting because there's a sense of stability that comes from something that has just been around for a long time. But democracy, this new and radical idea, had turned out to be a great success.

[00:46:42]Athens under its democratic system was more powerful and wealthier than it had ever been before. And this led to even more new developments.

[00:46:53]People at this time had new questions about the world. Questions that required new types of answers. Novel ideas and explanations were becoming popular and old ideas that no longer seemed to fit the world as people saw it were being cast aside as outdated or irrelevant.

[00:47:14]Aristophanes lived during this time of immense social, political, and intellectual change. All of the old assumptions that had that had governed Greek life for generations were being questioned. And the way that young Athenians saw themselves and the world around them and their place in it was very very different to the way that their parents and their grandparents had.

[00:47:39]One of the most prominent figures in this new movement was a man called Socrates.

[00:47:44]Socrates was a philosopher and a teacher. He is sometimes called the founder of all western philosophy, the archetypical wise old man with a beard.

[00:47:56]And he spent his life questioning the assumptions and the traditions of the world around him.

[00:48:03]It would go like this. Somebody in Athens would make a definitive statement about anything. Let's just say justice for example. And then Socrates would appear like a ghost and ask a question along the lines of, "Well, what even is justice?" He would then engage in a conversation in much the same way that a toddler does. He would repeatedly ask why, but why, but how, but why, until the person he was speaking to got frustrated, gave up, admitted that they were very, very stupid. And Socrates was very, very clever. And they were sorry for having ever said anything at all.

[00:48:43]His most famous statement, "All I know is that I know nothing," sums the man up very nicely. He was the worst kind of critic, the kind of person who spent his life poking holes in other people's ideas whilst vear offering any of his own. Nowadays, Socrates is fel held in fairly high esteem by pretty much everybody except me. He's the f he's the founder of western philosophy after all.

[00:49:12]You know, he's the epitome of ancient wisdom, whatever that is. And all of this reverence makes it very easy to forget that during his lifetime, he was a controversial and widely disliked figure. After all, questioning the long-held traditions and assumptions that are close to people's hearts is also a great way of making enemies.

[00:49:34]And this is this brings us to The Clouds, Aristophanes's third surviving play dating to the year 423.

[00:49:43]The clouds, much like the knights, is a ruthless attack on the character of one man, Socrates, as well as the entire intellectual movement that he was a part of. The play opens with a main character, a man called Strepziardis, who's an elderly Athenian man who has fallen into hopeless debt. He owes lots and lots of people lots and lots of money that he can't possibly pay back.

[00:50:12]His wife has expensive tastes and his son is an idiot who is addicted to buying raceh horses and then placing ill- fated bets on them. But Strepziardis has a plan to enroll himself in the school of Socrates. He does this because he hears that Socrates and the philosophers have a unique talent. They can argue a point and no matter how wrong they obviously are, they can do so in a way that is impossible to argue against. He hopes that if he can learn this skill, he might talk his way out of all of his debts.

[00:50:48]So, Strepziardis goes to the school of Athens where he meets the intellectuals or rather he meets Aristophanes's caricaturures of intellectuals. They are all thin, pale, sickly, and deathly scared of breathing too much fresh air.

[00:51:08]Philosophers, according to Aristophanes, like to spend their time inside, in the dark, isolated, engaging in pointless acts, acts of study.

[00:51:19]One of them, the first one we fi find, can be found examining the rectums of bugs and gnats to find out if that buzzing noise they make is actually just a long ongoing fart.

[00:51:32]Another one of the philosophers can be found completely bent over in the garden. And Aristophanes explains that this particular intellectual is teaching his head and his anus to learn independently of each other. Whilst his head studies the underworld, his backside charts the movements of the heavens above.

[00:51:54]Finally, Strepziardis meets with the big man himself, Socrates, and he says, "Socrates, I need you to teach me how to argue. I'm in lots of debt and I definitely owe lots of people this money. But if I can learn to argue like you can, Socrates, I can talk my way out of anything, no matter how obvious it is that I'm wrong. That way, I can borrow as much as I like. I can spend as I please and never have to worry about paying anybody back. Socrates mentions that there is a charge for his course, but Strepziardis goes, "Don't worry about the cost. I'll pay you back later."

[00:52:31]So, Strepzpiades is sent on a crash course to learn how to be a Greek philosopher. In the end, he gets his wish. He learns to argue like Socrates can. And with his newfound skills, he argues his way out of all of his debts.

[00:52:47]But he soon comes to regret it. His son has also been learning from Socrates.

[00:52:53]And he's a true believer, a full convert. He loves this radical new philosophy stuff. And inevitably, father and son end up falling into an argument.

[00:53:04]They argue about their favorite poets.

[00:53:07]Strepziadis being quite an old man likes the good old-fashioned traditional patriotic songs sung by poets like Iscilus.

[00:53:17]But his son writes Escilus off as an outdated product of a bygone age.

[00:53:22]Iscillus, he says. Ha, nobody recites Iscilus anymore. The son prefers Uripides, a younger, more contemporary poet. But Uripides, with his everyday language and his subversive themes, horrifies the sensibilities of his elderly father. Eventually, this argument turns into a physical fight.

[00:53:45]The father and son beat each other, and the son, being younger and stronger, beats the living daylights out of his own father.

[00:53:53]This is a deep transgression to the ancient Greeks. In ancient Greece, children, no matter their age, owed absolute respect and absolute obedience to their parents. Thank you for smiling, Mom.

[00:54:07]There was no circumstance in ancient Greece in which a son laying a hand on his father in violence could ever be interpreted as justified. And Strepziardis points this out in the final scene of the play. He limps on stage and goes, "I can't believe this happened. I have the right to chastise my son for the rights of the father are enshrined in the most ancient of Greek traditions."

[00:54:35]But his son is a student of Socrates and Socrates laughs in the face of customs and traditions. So Strepziardis out of a sense of vengeance goes back to the philosophers school of Athens, sets it on fire and kills Socrates. Hooray.

[00:54:55]This play was performed in the year 423 and it met with a terrible reception.

[00:55:01]The Athenians hated it and it came dead last in that year's dramatic competitions. It is the greatest failure of Aristophanesa's life that we know of.

[00:55:12]a failure that he would come to bitterly resent.

[00:55:16]Which is odd because I really like this play. It's one of my favorites. Now, maybe that's just because I like watching Socrates getting knocked down a peg. He gets treated with such sanctimonious reverence both in the ancient world and the modern that it triggers the contrarian side of my brain that just wants Aristophanes to ruthlessly mock him. Or maybe the reason that I like this play that bombed so hard in ancient Athens is because the version that I've read is not the same one that failed in 423.

[00:55:50]Aristophanes was utterly humiliated by this failure and he tried desperately to redeem himself. He revised and rewrote the play several times over the course of several years hoping that he could reperform it and restore his reputation.

[00:56:07]Now, the Athenians never allowed him to stage this reperformance, a fact that he deeply resented, but nevertheless, it's one of these later revised and improved versions that survives to us today. We don't have the original.

[00:56:23]But despite his mockery of Socrates, it doesn't seem that Aristophanes felt the same level of spite and venom towards him as he did towards Cleon, his other rival. In fact, we have quite good evidence that Socrates and Aristophanes might have moved in similar social circles. They may have even been quite friendly with each other offstage.

[00:56:46]Socrates never wrote anything down.

[00:56:49]Someone once pointed out to me that three of the most influential people in human history when it comes to thought and the way we see the world are the Buddha, Socrates, and Jesus Christ. And all of them are similar in that none of them wrote any of their teachings down.

[00:57:05]Everything we know about them comes from the writings of people who knew them. In Socrates's case, almost all of his philosophy comes to us through the writings of one of his students, a man called Plato. Plato wrote a very famous philosophical dialogue called the symposium, which means party in ancient Greece. in ancient Greek. It's a story, possibly a fictional one, about a huge party thrown in Athens. And invited to this party are all the greatest philosophers and intellectuals from the age. Socrates obviously gets an invite, and so do all the other finest minds in Athens, including, interestingly, our comedian Aristophanes.

[00:57:51]Now this is interesting because Plato the author was really not a fan of Aristophanes. He didn't like him at all.

[00:57:59]And this and this means he didn't write him into this story just because you know he was fond of him. There must have been a sense that behind all of the jokes Aristophanes possessed an intellect that was powerful enough that he belonged in such company.

[00:58:15]During this party, one of the guests gets up and says, "You know, there are many songs sung in honor of the Greek gods." But there are surprisingly few sung in honor of aeros. Aeros is the Greek god of romantic desire. His name is the root of our English word erotic.

[00:58:34]And many of you might be more familiar with him through his Roman counterpart, Cupid, the guy with the heart-shaped arrows. And so all of these philosophers get up and they take turns making speeches in honor of Eros. Now Aristophanes might have been at home amongst this high-minded company, but he was still a comedian and therefore obviously the least serious of the bunch. To start with, he turns up to the party still very hung over from the night before and is therefore quite slow to wake up. And when he does wake up, he drinks an entire vat of wine far too quickly and is attacked by a bout of hiccups.

[00:59:15]But finally, Aristophanes recovers and he gets a chance to speak. And when he does, he doesn't let us down. He gives us a proper good old-fashioned Greek origin myth explaining the nature of love and desire.

[00:59:31]Aristophanes says that once upon a time way back in the primordial Greek past all human beings had two bodies.

[00:59:40]Everybody had two heads, two torsos, four arms, four legs and two sets of genitals.

[00:59:48]These human beings came in three varieties. There was male male female female and male female. But one day, Zeus, the king of the gods, noticed the humans. This is bad news. Zeus only has two feelings towards mortal humans, anger and arousal, both of which are very dangerous. But in this case, he is angry. And in his divine wrath, Zeus took an axe and chopped all of the humans in two. Now we are forced to roam the earth feeling empty and incomplete until we can reunite with our other half. And when we do, the sense of happiness and satisfaction that we get is called falling in love. Ah, I know. Isn't that sweet?

[01:00:42]Scholars are divided on what Aristophanes meant by this. Now, maybe he's creating a genuine Greek creation myth explaining not only love but also sexuality. Why is it that some people are attracted to the same sex and other people the opposite sex? Well, says Aristophanes, it's all to do with your separated other half.

[01:01:05]Or maybe this whole thing is a parody.

[01:01:08]He was a comedian after all. Parody is his language. It's possible, and some scholars have suggested, that Aristophanes is mocking the very idea of a Greek creation myth by coming up with this obviously absurd story. Who knows for sure? But if there's one work, one play he wrote that I think proves that Aristophanes was not only a funny man but also a clever man, it's this. In 411 when he was 35 years old, Aristophanes wrote a masterpiece called Lissraata.

[01:01:44]But before we dive into this play, we have to talk just a little bit about women in ancient Greece.

[01:01:51]Ancient Greece and specifically ancient Athens was a deeply patriarchal society.

[01:01:58]Men ran practically everything. You could read 90% of Greek history and be completely justified in believing that there just were no women in ancient Greece. They are hardly ever even mentioned.

[01:02:12]The great Athenian statesman Pericles, the man who built the Pathonon, regarded both in the ancient and modern world as the first great democratic leader, famously said that the greatest reputation a woman can have is no reputation at all. be it for good or for bad.

[01:02:33]This means that women were quite literally expected to be neither seen nor heard in many aspects of Greek public life. Everybody had the right to speak in the democracy. Everybody expectc except the women. Of course, they weren't even allowed to attend the ecclesia, let alone speak up during it.

[01:02:50]The woman's domain was the oos, the household. And whenever she left that very very small world, she would often have to do so wearing a veil to keep herself anonymous.

[01:03:02]And all of this is worth knowing because Lissa Strata is a play that is all about women.

[01:03:10]The play is named after its main character, Lissa Strata, whose name directly translates to the dissolver of armies, which gives you a pretty good idea as to what she's all about.

[01:03:22]The play opens with Lissa Strata, our lead character, organizing a meeting of all the women in Greece. When all of the women have gathered, she tells them her plan. They must all go on strike until the war is brought to an end. What kind of strike, you wonder? Why, a sex strike, of course. The women of Greece will refuse to sleep with their husbands until a peace treaty between Athens and Sparta can finally be decided on. The women all swear a sacred oath to this effect. They gather around a bowl and they say, "I will not invite my husband to bed. I will not raise my slippers to the ceiling. I will not adopt I will not adopt the lion on the cheese grater position.

[01:04:19]That last line is curious, isn't it?

[01:04:22]The lion on the cheese grater position.

[01:04:25]What could that mean?

[01:04:28]>> I don't you know. Oh, great.

[01:04:32]Well, I'm glad you do because I don't.

[01:04:35]And neither does anybody else.

[01:04:37]>> Oh, okay. Excellent. Yeah. All right. No worries.

[01:04:42]>> Well, I was going to say nobody knows, but outside of Maggie, nobody knows because Aristophanes never explains what the lion on the cheese grater position is. And the phrase never again appears in the entire corpus of surviving Greek literature. It could mean anything. So, please all of you right now use your imaginations.

[01:05:04]Word soon gets out about this strike and a macho Athenian magistrate insists he'll be the one to sort these ladies out. He marches right up to Listraata and says, "Right out of the way with you, chop chop. I have important men's work to be got getting on with. We have masculine business to be getting on with. We have a city to govern and a war to win. And we can't do that with women in the way."

[01:05:28]This magistrate embodies the typical what we today would call incredibly misogynistic attitude that most Athenian men had. He tries to dismiss Lissraata, telling her this is men's work. She has no place in it. She better learn to stay in her lane or he'll give or he'll give her a headache for a week. Yeah. But Liss Strata doesn't back down. She argues. She says, "I've heard this kind of thing my entire life. Anytime I bring up a concern or worry, somebody tells me, don't worry about it, dear. This is men's business. The men will take care of it." And this was all well and good, she says, back when men were wise. But this current generation of Athenian men have proven incapable of ruling intelligently.

[01:06:22]So she says this has necessitated a change in leadership. From here on out, men no longer need concern themselves with such difficult tasks as governance or warfare because women shall do all of that work for them. This sends the magistrate flying into a rage. He insists that it is unnatural that a man should take orders from a veilwearing woman.

[01:06:50]This Estraata responds by saying, "Oh, well, if that's what bothers you." And she removes the veil from her head and places it on the magistrates. Lovely bit of symbolism for you guys there.

[01:07:03]And so, Lissraata's plan unfolds. The men of Athens begin to collapse under the weight of their own sexual frustration. It drives them quite literally mad. And obviously because this is ancient Greece, there is only one way to symbolize this sexual frustration. All of the male characters wear giant fake perpetually erect fallacuses. You see, I told you the fallacuses would be back. I know you've all been sitting there thinking this history is well and good, but when's he going to bring the fallus back out? Fear not fallus enthusiasts. This Estraata, given that it's a play that is all about women, is also at the same time incredibly phallic.

[01:07:45]Eventually, the men of Greece give in.

[01:07:48]Athens and Sparta decide to sign a peace treaty, and the play ends with everyone in the city getting getting incredibly drunk and throwing a huge party on the Acropolis. And they all agree that, you know, they ought to try harder to get along with each other, which is very nice.

[01:08:04]There's even a very sweet moment at the end of the play when the chorus changes.

[01:08:09]All Greek plays in this era have a chorus. That group of dancers that sing narration throughout the play. It's one of those things that hearkens back to theat's roots as ritual song and dance done in honor of Dianisis. Throughout Liss Estrata, there have been two choruses, a men's chorus and a woman's chorus located on opposite sides of the stage. And throughout the play, they sing at each other in argument in confrontation.

[01:08:39]But at the end of the play, the two choruses come together in the middle of the stage, and for the first time, they sing in unison. It's a really lovely moment that sadly has absolutely no bearing at all on reality.

[01:08:55]As much as I love Lissa Estraata, I think this is one of the best plays ever written, it is a complete fantasy. To start with, there is absolutely no world in which Athenian men would allow women to get away with this. And you can see this if you read the text closely. Lista is littered with references to the casual everyday violence that men would use to keep women under their control.

[01:09:22]Aristophanes makes it very clear to us in his play that if women were to actually do this, they would face truly dire consequences.

[01:09:32]And secondly, no peace treaty would actually be signed in 411. Instead, the war would rage on and on for another 7 years. Athens threw everything it had into staving off defeat. But it was no good. In 404, the Spartans finally closed in on the city. They tore down its walls. They forced the Athenians to capitulate. and they dismantled the democracy, installing in its place a council of pro-Spartan aristocrats called the 30 tyrants.

[01:10:09]Throughout this time, Aristophanes continued to write plays. In 405, he wrote a play called The Frogs, which was so successful that it not only won a pri it won first prize in that year's dramatic competition, it also got Aristophanes a completely separate award. He was given a civic crown and celebrated for his services to the city in the theater. This crown he got was made of olive branches and it was a very very high honor. But this award must have been at least a little bit bittersweet.

[01:10:43]These crowns that were given out to playrs as rewards were traditionally made of gold, silver and other precious metals. But by the year of 405, Athens was so destitute that there was no longer enough gold in the city to give awards to playrights with it.

[01:11:01]Aristophanes had to be content with a crown made of sticks instead.

[01:11:06]The months that followed Athens's surrender were absolutely brutal. The pro-Spartan regime, these 30 tyrants, were aristocrats and they began a project of revenge killing. Aristocrats and nobles in the Greek world genuinely believed they were physiologically superior to everyday people and as a result they believed they had a right to rule. To them the democracy was a hundred years of unbearable humiliation and they wanted revenge for it. They killed thousands and drove even more into exile.

[01:11:42]This brutal regime was overthrown after only eight months in power and the Athenians managed to reestablish their democracy.

[01:11:51]But then a second wave of revenge killings took place. The pro-democracy group who had just endured eight months of terror began going after those who they perceived as collaborators with the previous regime. One of the victims of this terror was none other than Socrates the philosopher.

[01:12:11]Socrates was put to death for the crime of corrupting the youth of Athens. The very same thing that Aristophanes had accused of 20 years earlier in the nights in the clouds. Even during this time Aristophanes took a little break from writing plays which is hardly surprising. People were being killed left, right, and center for their perceived political allegiances and that made it a very dangerous time to be a opinionated comedian like Aristophanes was. But things calmed down in the late 390s and he did return to the theater.

[01:12:50]He continued to write plays largely in collaboration with his own son who it seems wanted to follow his father's footsteps into the theater. And then in the year 386, aged 60, Aristophanes disappears from history. It's possible that he died. Or maybe he just chose to retire from public life, hand the baton over to his son, and live his remaining years in quiet obscurity, blissfully unaware that two and a half millennia later, a 30-year-old English man would develop an unhealthy obsession with him and talk about him for 90 minutes straight in an 18th century granary.

[01:13:30]The legacy of Aristophanes lives on and on in everybody who looks at the world and sees nothing but absurdity.

[01:13:39]In everyone who treats the symptoms of the human condition with laughter, the best medicine of all. So, I'm going to leave you with a quote from the great man himself. Writing comedy is the hardest job of all. Thank you everybody for coming.

[01:13:57]Awesome.

[01:14:08]>> Does anybody have any questions before we finish?

[01:14:14]>> Yes.

[01:14:22]>> No.

[01:14:23]>> No. This is something. Lisa Strata, a play all about women. Um, every single person on stage would have been a man.

[01:14:30]Sorry for those of you who don't didn't hear the question. Um, someone asked if the people on stage playing the women's chorus would have themselves been women.

[01:14:40]No, women we have very good evidence were allowed to attend the theater, but they were not allowed any level of involvement. Or at least we have lots of evidence suggesting they weren't and no evidence suggesting they ever were.

[01:14:54]Women couldn't be playwrights. They couldn't be actors. They couldn't be dancers. That means that in Lissa Strata, this play all about the power of women, all of those women were played by men in costumes.

[01:15:08]>> And sorry, >> yeah. Yeah. Or like in the same way that Shakespeare's plays, um, all of the female parts were played by men as well.

[01:15:17]Does anybody have any other questions?

[01:15:19]>> Yes. How well were Aristophanes plays received?

[01:15:24]>> Um, someone asked how well were Aristophanes's plays received abroad.

[01:15:29]The answer is we don't know too much about um we don't have any evidence really from other Greeks at the time, but I can tell you what the generations following Aristophanes thought. Um, just after Aristophanes died, the entire genre of political comedy, what we call old comedy, effectively died out. And Greek comedy became almost aggressively non-political. Became this new genre called new comedy. For hundreds of years, Aristophanes was received by all Greeks as not a particularly brilliant man. The reason for this is once the Athenian Empire had faded from memory, Athens would never be as powerful again.

[01:16:10]And it was appreciated by other Greeks as being the real cultural center of their world. So people started looking at this period of history through very romantic eyes. This became the the very word we use for it. Classical Greece is telling. Classical comes from the Latin class meaning of the highest class. The best bit, the bit worth remembering.

[01:16:34]People romanticized this era and they were disinterested in hearing Aristophanes mock it. They didn't want someone to come along and explain that Socrates was actually a bit of an idiot because Socrates was the founder of their great philosophical school. They didn't want anyone explaining that Athenian democracy was actually corrupt and horrible because people had based their own democracies on this. And then something changed. A group of people, a particular group of people really loved Aristophanes, the first century Romans in first in the first century CE. Um so 500 years after Aristophanes died a group of Roman poets led by people like Horus and Quintilian spearheaded a new genre called satire and they cited as their influence Aristophanes. Quintilian even said in a um he wrote a treaties on training for actors and orators and he says anybody who wants to learn to speak publicly needs to learn Aristophanes.

[01:17:35]But then Aristophanes stopped being received very well again. Interest in him died out at during the late Roman Empire. The empire was Christianizing.

[01:17:44]Interest in old pagan people began to wne and Aristophanes faded yet again until the 9th century CE when the Byzantine Roman Empire developed this new interest in its own in its own history. Byzantine scholars in Constantinople and their counterparts, the Arabs in Baghdad, started aggressively compiling as many classical texts as they could find and translating them to make sure they were preserved.

[01:18:11]And by this era, only 11 of his 40 plays were left. But it's through the Byzantines and the Arabs that those 11 survive to us today. And nowadays, obviously, we love him, or I do at least, and hopefully now you do as well.

[01:18:27]Any other questions? Yes.

[01:18:29]>> When when was Aristophanes brought into the English speaking world?

[01:18:34]>> I believe and I I can't tell you this with absolute certainty. I think it was he became popular in roughly the 16th and 17th centuries effectively just after the Renaissance, the arrival of classical texts in Western Europe and this revived interest in them had taken place on the continent. Britain always a generation or two behind um began absorbing this knowledge from their continental partners roughly around that time. I cannot say that with certainty though because that is simply the earliest where I found English texts on this and it's actually very interesting the way that British people interpret Aristophanes because obviously when we translate him things are lost. I mean I mentioned that all of this is poetry it's meant to be sung. poetry famously does not translate across languages very well and so they have a very difficult time English translators trying to make Aristophanes for an English-speaking audience. One of the ways they do it is the versions that I read in preparation for this were the Penguin books um Aristophanes plays translated by two British scholars in 1976 uh called David Barrett and Alan Summerstein and they were trying to get across how Athenians and Spartans spoke differently. In ancient Greece for example an Athenian would call their form of government democratia.

[01:19:57]A Spartan would pronounce that darocritier with an R. And so we get the idea in ancient Greek these people were a bit different. So in 1970s Britain, how did they represent this? All of the Athenians in this translation are English and the Spartans are Scottish.

[01:20:15]That's how they brought it across.

[01:20:17]Obviously makes no sense to an ancient Greek who wouldn't have known what England or Scotland were. Those words didn't even yet exist. But it every uh translation into English going back over a hundred years, there are some from like the 1890s, tries to find some way to make sure that their modern audience gets the joke. And inevitably, this means that they age quite badly because what pe what made people laugh in the 1970s and go, "Oh, yes, I get that." is very different to what makes me laugh in the year 2026.

[01:20:49]Um, sorry, I've avoided the question brilliantly by going off on a separate rant. Short answer, I don't know. But by the 1600s, Aristophanes had absolutely made his way into academic circles in British life. Thanks everyone again for uh coming. Does anyone want to buy me a beer?