Of course, Goldhill and others also address ideology in the texts. An at least superficially gratifying picture of Athens and Athenians can hardly be denied (Zeitlin 1990; Mills 1997); some equate this with civic or democratic ideology and argue that tragedy basically affirms it. Others work with subtler notions of ideology (a notoriously tricky concept) and find in tragedy’s many kinds of complexity - ethical, emotional, and intellectual as well as political - support for other conclusions about its ideological import, for example that it is didactic, admonitory, interrogative, or subversive.3 Of course the relation may vary with different authors and plays and for different members of the audience. And, we may add, for different audiences. While attention to the plays’ premieres remains indispensable, scholars increasingly recognize the importance of drama’s early spread beyond Athens. Whatever meanings the plays had when received by democrats, reperformance in other settings was not only possible, but quite successful, and at times the poets may have anticipated it when composing.4
An aspect of self-definition in which there were obvious differences among Athenian citizens is social or economic class, and this suggests the possibility of competing ideologies in drama. For many, containing or neutralizing its competitors is, so to speak, all in a day’s work for democratic ideology - which is not to deny that close attention reveals contradictions, occlusions, mystifications, and so on. For others (e. g. Rose 1992,1995; Griffith 1995), tragedy offers more or less consistent validation for elite ideology (even if that is not all it does). The disagreement leads still others (e. g. J. Griffin 1999a) to wonder whether there are sufficient grounds for either view; for whatever reason, tragic critics do often avoid the subject. Interpreters of comedy, on the other hand, almost always explore its political thought in terms of identities at least as specific as ‘‘mass’’ and ‘‘elite’’ (Henderson 1990,1993; Konstan 1995; with his emphasis, more typical of tragic studies, on what unites citizens, McGlew 2002 is something of an exception). A brief look at the ideological import of Aristophanes’ early comedies will lay some groundwork for the discussions that follow.
In two of Aristophanes’ plays from the years 425-421, a comic hero devises a fantastic scheme to get relief from some oppressive aspect of contemporary reality; in his way stand ‘‘the powers that be.’’ After attaining his goal, he is approached by others who want to share his good fortune, but he doesn’t let them. He humiliates and routs these ‘‘impostors’’ and secures his hold on prosperity (defined in comic terms as food, wine, and sex). The other three plays from this period offer variations in place of the hero but a similar opposition between the ordinary citizen (whose fictional name often marks him as a kind of Everyman) and the prominent or powerful (including real contemporaries singled out by name). The latter are ‘‘elite’’ in that they can be portrayed as getting more than their share of good things, the former ‘‘demotic’’ in that they (and the group they represent) are being cheated of theirs.
Concerning the political implications of this scenario, three main positions have emerged.5 According to the first, the comic poet is fundamentally an opportunist, who does not mock if he thinks it will hurt his chances of winning the prize (Heath 1987a, 1997). The second sees Aristophanes as playing to the demos, offering it a vision of itself as blocked from gratifying its every desire only by the malfeasance of its leaders. He gets away with mocking the demos for its stupidity because it is after all not to blame; the people can wise up, throw the bums out, and set the city back on course (Henderson 1990, 1993). According to a third view, the lists of those Aristophanes satirizes and spares (as well as the few he praises) reveal systematic bias in favor of the traditional elite (Sommerstein 1996a).
These views leave room for varying conclusions about comedy’s political effect. Some degree of opportunism - perhaps even a high degree - is consistent with a desire to affect decisions outside the theater. Heath denies Aristophanes that desire because he also thinks the audience regarded comedy as irrelevant to practical politics. On the other hand, playing to the demos could be merely opportunistic, if the demos played an important part in awarding the prize and that was all Aristophanes wanted. Henderson takes comedy’s political effect seriously because he also thinks the Athenian understanding of politics was broad enough to encompass comedy as a forum that mattered, and that Aristophanic comedy empowers its audience by reminding it that, all appearances to the contrary, it is sovereign. Finally, if Aristophanes systematically favors the traditional elite, that does not have to be the result (only) of his own beliefs. Sommerstein’s findings in fact lead him to suggest that the comic audience belonged to a higher socioeconomic status, on average, than assemblymen or jurors; Aristophanes may still play to his audience’s prejudices, but comedy as an institution appears in a new and less democratic light (Sommerstein 1997). More convincing is Henderson’s harmonization of Sommerstein’s findings with his own. Aristocratic bias was well established in political and cultural discourse, and spectators did not have to be aristocrats themselves to tolerate it. It remains significant that the comic poets did not ‘‘offer illegal advice, question the right of the demos to full sovereignty, or suggest any changes in the rules of democracy’’ (Henderson 1998: 271). Occupying the political center, comedy tends toward inclusive rather than divisive or partisan effects.
As we shall see, critics have favored a similar conclusion about Aeschylus (and tragedy in general). Before turning to his Eumenides and the other plays to be studied briefly in the rest of this chapter, I note that the selection is not meant to be representative. The tragedies (Eumenides and Euripides’ Ion) are unusual both in their overt relationship to Athens and, perhaps not coincidentally, their lack of the catastrophic outcomes that are so common in, and eventually come to define, the genre. The comedies (Birdsand Lysistrata) vary and extend the ideological model just sketched; other unusual features have led to interpretation in modes more typical of tragedy than comedy. As a group, then, the plays bring out some common themes in the political thought of Greek drama’s two main genres. At the same time, they indicate the wide range of political issues on which drama has something interesting to say. While many of these can only be mentioned in passing here, I have tried to be generous with references and suggestions for further reading. As for the Athenocen-tricity of the examples, I suggest that it makes for homogeneity of only a fairly unimportant kind. My interest is in how drama’s political thought, which constantly puts Athenian identities themselves to the test, is broad enough to engage non-Athenians, including modern readers, in reflection that is of much more than antiquarian interest.
Eumenides
Aeschylus’ Oresteia trilogy (458 bce) dramatizes the return of the Greek commander Agamemnon from Troy and his murder in Argos by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus (Agamemnon); the murder of these two by Agamemnon’s and Clytemnestra’s son Orestes, acting on the god Apollo’s instructions (Choephoroe); and the Furies’ punishment of Orestes for this crime and his trial and acquittal in Athens (Eumenides). The most obvious narrative challenge the trilogy sets for itself is what to do about a potentially endless cycle of revenge killing. Because Clytemnestra and Aegisthus usurp Argive royal power, there is also a problem of royal succession, and because Apollo commands matricide, which it is the age-old duty of the Furies (the chorus of the third play) to avenge, there is a crisis of cosmic order. These all come to a head in the trial, which is made relevant to fifth century Athens in ways that are both unusual for tragedy and clearly important. Some of the issues that demand attention are political in a rather narrow sense, but their interpretation inevitably involves broader contexts. Indeed, by virtue of their number, variety, and increasing sophistication, political readings of the Oresteia, and of Eumenides in particular, have acquired paradigmatic status in the study of Greek drama and require somewhat more detailed treatment here.
We may summarize the features that would most strongly encourage an Athenian audience in 458 to think of its own historical experience as follows:6 (1) Athens is promised a beneficial alliance with Argos; (2) high hopes are expressed for Athenian success in war, which is contemplated almost cheerfully (a most unusual attitude); (3) repeated warnings of the dangers of civil strife are given; and (4) Orestes’ trial becomes the mythical explanation ( aition) of the Athenian Areopagus Council. All of these can be linked with issues that were or recently had been of intense partisan interest. Just three years earlier the Athenians had abruptly abandoned all pretence of cooperation with Sparta and made an alliance with Sparta’s old rival Argos. Almost immediately, they embarked on a series of military adventures which by 458 included open conflict with Sparta (the ‘‘first Peloponnesian War’’). With the change in foreign policy came the adoption of domestic reforms urged by Ephialtes, including a reduction in the duties and influence ofthe Areopagus Council, which, consisting of former archons (an office for which members of only the two highest property classes had been eligible), was associated with aristocratic tendencies. Soon after the reforms were enacted, Ephialtes was killed, assassinated (his supporters assumed) by his political opponents. Civil war may have seemed a real possibility.
Debate once centered on Aeschylus’ personal opinion of these changes and/or others the Athenians might yet make. Contemporary scholars, among whom the most common view is that the plays do suggest support of what the democrats had done so far, have not altogether abandoned this question (references in Goldhill 2000b: 77; Kennedy 2006: 39), but they usually go on to consider other political effects experienced by Aeschylus’ audience. One view is broadly allegorical and straightforwardly didactic: the Furies represent the old (traditional aristocratic government), trial by jury the new (democracy), and the audience is warned not to let the new run roughshod over the old (Meier 1993: 102-16, Boedeker and Raaflaub 2005: 116-18).
Similarly, the effect of the contemporary allusions themselves is often taken to be promotion of solidarity among Athenian citizens. At least three routes (which may be combined) have been taken to this conclusion. First, observation of textual indeterminacy. For example, Alan Sommerstein writes that ‘‘Nowhere in Eumenides is there an avowedly partisan utterance relating to domestic Athenian politics.’’ Where specific issues are broached at this level, artful ambiguities ensure that each audience member can hear what he wants to hear, and the play as a whole insists on ‘‘the vital importance of avoiding anything that might lead to civil conflict’’ (Sommerstein 1989: 31-2). Second, appeal to historical context. Thus Malcolm Heath argues that what had been highly contentious partisan issues in 462/1 were no longer so three years later: ‘‘Aeschylus is taking both the reforms and the new political consensus for granted, and is doing for it what came so naturally to the Greeks; he is using myth to furnish an aetiological charter for the political status quo. The significance of this is obviously pan-Athenian, not partisan’’ (Heath 1987b: 69). Third, appeal to other aspects of the play, especially its means of achieving closure. The many who take this route emphasize, for example, that the solution to revenge killing is found in Athens, the Furies are incorporated into the city’s religious order as Reverend Goddesses inspiring respect and moderation, and the trilogy ends in a procession like that of the Panathenaic festival, in which the elements of the population are harmoniously ordered.
The combination of warnings against civil strife and avoidance of unambiguously partisan views on domestic matters makes for a strong case that the text promotes solidarity. It should be remembered, though, that some degree of indeterminacy is a feature of all texts, and viewers and readers cannot avoid choices (and thus disagreements) about whether and how to respond. For example, disagreement as to who is warned (aristocrats, democrats, or everyone) has arisen because the text does not spell it out. About the cheerful acceptance of war implied by Eumenides, Sommerstein argues that it makes no sense except as support for the new Athenian foreign policy. Aeschylus does not avoid clarity on this issue, he believes, because ‘‘Athens is embattled on many fronts. . . and the proponents of war feel entitled (as always in such circumstances) to the support of every loyal citizen’’ (Sommerstein 1989: 31-2). In other words, Sommerstein determines both that the unusual attitude (less jarring in its fictional context than, say, mention of the Areopagus Council) must have been received in the light of current events, and that it was compatible with promoting solidarity. These moves are reasonable, but in place of the second, one could argue that soft-pedaling domestic issues while exploiting war fervor was precisely the most effective partisan strategy for a ‘‘radical democrat’’ in 458. Obviously, Heath’s appeal to history is also contestable: if he is wrong about consensus, Eumenides is not so obviously pan-Athenian. Where evidence is so slight, his dismissal of Thucydides 1.107.4, which mentions a conspiracy to overthrow the democracy in 458 or 457, is tendentious, and Christopher Pelling rightly emphasizes the danger of circularity in the whole argument (2000: 173).
Appeals to closural devices are another way of imposing determinacy. Evidence can be found to support open readings, too, but recent critics who tackle this issue prefer to avoid simple alternatives and see Eumenides not as promoting some one effect, but as reflecting or constituting political discourse or ideology, negotiating between competing ideologies, or the like. Both Griffith and Goldhill, for example, present the relationship of tragedy and ideology as anything but simple. They agree that tragic conflict is not always resolved, but sometimes suppressed, contained, or displaced. They also agree that tragedy offers different subject positions to its audience, and that some measure of validation is available to many, if not all, positions. For Griffith, ‘‘the actual or implied outcome of the whole process is a mutual assurance of the continuation in authority of a class of aristocratic leaders, vulnerable, occasionally flawed, but in the last resort infinitely precious and indispensable’’ (1995: 110). For Goldhill, on the other hand, the privileged discourse is democratic. The disagreement mirrors the one we saw earlier concerning the ideological import of Aristophanic comedy. Like Sommerstein in the case of Aristophanes, Griffith highlights aristocratic bias; like Henderson, Goldhill insists on the affirmation of the relatively new democratic framework. Since Athens in the fifth century did in fact see the persistence of aristocratic ideology and privilege alongside democratic ideology and institutions, the choice is largely one of emphasis. We may speak of a tension, rather than a contradiction or incoherence, because the effect of drama on most spectators was probably to promote thought and feeling rather than political action.
Outside the theater, of course, citizens did act directly. Choice might be easy or hard, but it was unavoidable; also, its motives might remain hidden. Because Eumen-ides so conspicuously politicizes its subject matter (Goldhill 2000b: 79), those spectators who were also citizens doubtless thought of the Athenian jurors’ vote on Orestes’ case at least partly in terms of political action. For reasons that remain inaccessible, the vote is split, and the jurors thus become a figure for the impossibility of simple meaning.7 Goldhill (2000a: 55) suggestively connects this impossibility, in turn, with the inscription of political language in a ‘‘narrative web’’ that includes ‘‘the discourse of divinity, action, causation, power, memory, ritual that so dominate the narrative of the trilogy.’’ Once again, a banalization is possible: as the original Areopagus Council, the jurymen are open to partisan reading as aristocrats. But the ways in which they are underdetermined seem equally or more important. Anonymous, idealized, silent, and the only Athenian men present (including in the closing procession), they are a fit projection of Athenian unity. Like the trilogy’s political thought, however, this unity is irreducibly diverse.
Birds
In Aristophanes’ Birds, produced in 414, two Athenians leave Athens in search of a topos apragmOn, a place free of trouble (line 44). They believe Tereus, who was a man but has been changed into a bird, can help them find it. While talking with him, one of the Athenians, Peisetaerus, conceives the plan of founding a city in the air. Called Cloudcuckooland, it will prosper by threatening the Olympian gods with a blockade and demanding that humans make their sacrifices from now on to the birds, who (he says) were the original rulers of the universe. The plan succeeds, and the play ends with Peisetaerus supremely triumphant; Zeus’ promise to give up power is symbolically fulfilled by the arrival of a young woman called Basileia (‘‘sovereignty’’), whom Peisetaerus marries.
Birds reprises elements of the comedies discussed earlier, but a major difference is that there is no topic of immediate relevance to Athenian politics. As a result, it has been called ‘‘escapist,’’ but while the atmospheric setting and mythical resonances of the plot make this understandable, Athenian content is pervasive, and Jeffrey Henderson insists that ‘‘Neither in the play nor in any external source is there the slightest suggestion that in spring 414 the Athenians generally were in an escapist mood; on the contrary, Thucydides portrays their mood as buoyant to the point of hubris (6.24-31)’’ (Henderson 1997:136). Indeed, some detect more than a hint of hubris in the play itself: Peisetaerus’ arrogant contempt for the gods and eventual displacement of Zeus convey a warning, and his triumph must be seen in an ironic light (Hubbard 1997; Romer 1997). Others doubt that Aristophanes would make such a warning central to the meaning of his play and suspect that the move to ‘‘irony’’ (the idea that the play really means the opposite of what it appears to mean), unusual in the interpretation of Aristophanes, is driven by a preconceived notion of what it ought to mean.
But if the move to irony is desperate, the way the play distances and generalizes its political content - a technique rare in surviving comedy but typical of tragedy - does call for an unusual mode of interpretation. Henderson, for example, continues, ‘‘The utopian fantasy of Birds was indeed generated by contemporary realities, but it is too large, distant, and autonomous to be limited by them’’; the way the play comments on reality ‘‘is bound to be ambiguous and complex, and its mode suggestive or ‘interrogative’ rather than allegorical or didactic’’ (Henderson 1997: 136). The critic’s task is ‘‘not to find one ‘correct’ meaning but rather to determine a range of meanings whose coexistence is topically significant’’ (1997: 137). Henderson fulfills this task in part by putting forward an intriguing new idea about Peisetaerus. Briefly, while Peisetaerus shares many traits with other Aristophanic hero(in)es, he differs from them in (1) being so full of contradictions that he represents no one social type; (2) possessing some elite traits (e. g., ambition, rhetorical and intellectual sophistication, contempt for religion) at which Aristophanes elsewhere takes satirical aim; and (3) undergoing a transformation from apragmon to ruler of the universe. The historical background Henderson assumes is that, under the democracy, some ‘‘well-to-do and cultivated Athenians’’ had ‘‘decided not to be ambitious for public distinction’’ until, in 415, a number of them (notably Alcibiades) stepped forward with a bold plan for Athenian expansion, of which they were to be the (natural) leaders. (On apragmones, ‘‘quietists,’’ see also Brown, this volume, chapter 31.)
Henderson suggests that Peisetaerus may have evoked this brand of elite identity, though not, perhaps, for every spectator. After all, his talents are useful for the protagonist of any comedy to have, and his name (‘‘persuader of comrades’’) can betoken the fundamentally democratic value of free and open debate. That ‘‘elite’’ is included among the hero’s possible identities, however, is taken by Henderson to hint at Aristophanes’ satisfaction that some members of that class had (re)entered politics, and/or his hope that still more would. In the event, Alcibiades’ self-assertion provoked a backlash, and was soon followed by the divisive affairs of the Herms and the Mysteries. According to Henderson, Birds both contains hints of Aristophanes’ disappointment at these developments and offers a fantasy in which the ‘‘true’’ elite assume their natural role without causing such a rift.
Crucially, a relationship to civic ideology like that with which Aristophanes had been successful earlier in his career (see above) remains available, and the new articulation of political identities differs only subtly from the old. The earlier distribution of satirical targets already offered evidence of bias (and in general, Aristophanes’ appeals to the good old days are ‘‘conservative’’), but unlike Birds, the plays from the 420s contain few if any positive hints that the ‘‘true’’ elite could actually lead. A hopeful and inclusive new vision of leadership is possibly to be seen in a few further details. First, Peisetaerus at least nominally acts on behalf of a community. (Critics disagree as to whether his roasting of allegedly rebellious birds at 1583-5 is a passing joke or unmasks his apparently sympathetic concern for the birds as a sham; see further Sommerstein 2005: 79-84.) And while his treatment of impostors is in most respects typical, the scene with the Father Beater suggests how internal unity may be achieved. The young man is given a panoply (like a war orphan) and urged to enlist in the army and find an acceptable outlet for his aggression (1360-9). It is also at least arguable that the treatment of hated types who profited from the empire (Inspector, Decree Seller, and Informer) represented a somewhat conciliatory gesture toward Ionian and other ‘‘allies’’ in the audience, at a time when Athens was no doubt keen to avoid conflict in the Aegean. In this case, the notion of‘‘internal’’ unity expanded to include non-Athenians.
Ion
Euripides’ Ion dramatizes the reunion of Creusa, last living child of the mythical Athenian king Erechtheus, and Ion, the son she bore after being raped by the god Apollo. My summary of an intricate background and plot must be limited to a few points of political significance. Erechtheus and Creusa are descended from Erichtho-nius, said by a popular Athenian myth to have been born from the earth. This is one meaning of the word ‘‘autochthonous’’; literally true of Erichthonius, it applies by extension to his descendants by ordinary sexual reproduction, and in some sense to the community as a whole by association with its rulers. Myth also told that the Athenians had not, like other Greeks, come to their territory from elsewhere, but had always inhabited Attica; all Athenians could claim to be ‘‘autochthonous’’ in this second sense, even though they knew very well that many of them, or their forebears, had more or less recently immigrated, and indeed other myths praised Athens for opening itself to them. (On autochthony, see, e. g., Loraux 1993; Zacharia 2003: 56-65.)
Few stories were told of Ion; his one indispensable function is as eponym of the Ionian Greeks. Athens claimed to be the base from which colonial expansion into the lands inhabited by Ionians occurred, and in the fifth century, this became a charter myth for Athenian domination of the region. What most Greeks believed about Ion’s place in hellenic genealogy is reflected in the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women (fr. 1a.20-4 MW), where he is the son of the Erechtheid Creusa and Xuthus, son of Hellen; his brothers are Dorus and Aeolus, eponyms of Dorians and Aeolians. Euripides alters this: in Ion, Athena tells Creusa she will bear Xuthus sons, Dorus and Achaeus (1589-94). While using the new or little known story of Apollo’s paternity to associate Athenians and Ionians with divinity and each other, then, Euripides brazenly demotes Dorians and Achaeans to lesser descendants of the Athenian royal house. (On Ionianism and genealogy, see Parker 1987; J. Hall 1997; Zacharia 2003: 48-55.)
Myths of Athenian autochthony became popular after the Persian Wars and remained so throughout the fifth century; their uses included ‘‘propaganda’’ throughout the Peloponnesian War. Likewise, Euripides’ revision of Hellenic genealogy, taken at face value, would be welcome to Athenians at any time during that war. No external source gives a date for Ion, but metrical criteria point to the second half of the 410s, a period about which we know so much that assigning Ion to a particular year could have enormous implications for nuanced political interpretation. And one still has to gauge the tone of the play, an unusually difficult task that cannot detain us here. Most scholars see the effect of both autochthony and Ionianism on Athenian viewers as affirmative and cohesive, but a few take the opposite view or, more subtly, argue that the play invites searching questions about the supposed purity of the citizen body (Walsh 1978; Saxonhouse 1986). Also, in light of what we have said about Birds, it is worth mentioning that Ionianism seems to presuppose an audience in which the presence of Ionians matters.
While they have a fifth century history, autochthony and Ionianism work by making claims about the mythic past in which the play is set. At one point, however, the issue of Ion’s participation in practical politics is framed anachronistically in ways that strongly suggest fifth century realities. Halfway through, when he believes wrongly that he is the son of Xuthus and an unknown but probably non-Athenian woman, Ion explains that he would rather stay in Delphi than go to Athens because, among other reasons, (1) he is the bastard son of a foreigner rather than an autochthon (589-92); (2) if he tries to lead, he will be hated by the mass of unprivileged citizens, laughed at by elite quietists, and opposed by rival leaders (593-606); and (3) he will not enjoy parrhesia, the privilege of frank speech, unless his mother turns out to be Athenian (670-5). Ion is ‘‘in fact’’ the son of an Olympian god and an Athenian princess. Projected in one way onto fifth century reality, this looks like as elite an identity as it is possible to have. But here and elsewhere (especially 1539-45, which raise issues of legitimacy and inheritance) the text dwells on practical and legal obstacles he will face, not only on the mistaken assumption underlying the passage just summarized, but also on the basis of his true identity, the revelation of which might have been expected to remove them. All of the following identities bear on Ion’s case, at some point and/or at some level: temple slave; bastard son of a nonAthenian man who may or may not have been naturalized as a citizen; adopted son of that man and an Athenian woman; bastard son of an Athenian woman and a god. One of these (the third) might just entitle him to citizen rights under Athenian law, but even that one is a far cry from the ideal of legitimate offspring of two Athenian parents envisaged by the Periclean Citizenship Law enacted in 451 (for details and bearing on Ion, see Ogden 1996: 59-77, 155-6). One effect of this jumble of identities could be that the discourse of political participation is in some subtle way broadened. The significance of this is not its bearing on any policy issue actually before the Athenians at the time - though at dates close to Ion Athens found itself rethinking such matters amid oligarchic revolution and military collapse. It is rather that Ion, in many respects an ideal Athenian, is no Athenian at all according to the usual, exclusionary definition.8
Lysistrata
The title figure of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata (produced in 411) masterminds a two-part plan to force the Athenians and Spartans to make peace. The wives of Greece refuse to have sex with their husbands, and older women seize the Acropolis and deny Athenian men access to the treasure used to finance the war. The first action is carried out by individual women, whose struggle to maintain their resolve and torment of their husbands make for several bawdy scenes; the second is the work of a half-chorus, fecklessly opposed by a half-chorus of old men. Representatives of Athenian male authority appear and negotiate with Lysistrata, who leads (while standing somewhat aloof from) both prongs of the attack. Eventually, the men capitulate. The halfchoruses reconcile and unite, and Lysistrata brings a woman called ‘‘Reconciliation’’ before the Athenian and Spartan representatives, who come to terms by dividing the sexual ‘‘territory’’ represented by her body.
An obvious question to ask about the play’s political significance is whether Aristophanes wants to be understood as seriously favoring a negotiated end to the war. The actual terms the Athenians might have obtained at the time would have involved much more sacrifice than the play even remotely suggests; as in other plays, real obstacles are conveniently elided (Henderson 1987: xix-xx). Away of attributing serious purpose to the play nonetheless is to say that it reminds those in authority that the people are tired of war and won’t put up with it forever. Further dimensions of political thought follow from two important innovations. First, as in the 420s plays, a dominant character engineers a solution to a pressing contemporary issue, but for the first time, that character is female. Second, delaying the success of the heroine’s plan produces a tension more typical of tragedy than old comedy (Henderson 1987: xxviii-xxxiii).
Within the comic fantasy of‘‘women on top,’’ the women speak and act in ways that are both laughable and serious (Pelling 2000: 209-18). Much potentially serious content is offered by Lysistrata herself, who is allowed several more or less overt claims to authority. She has an apparently longstanding interest in public affairs, which she hears about from men at home or even, surprisingly, in the streets (lines 507-24). She points out that women contribute sons to the community - an obvious point, but one whose seriousness is underscored by the pained reaction it gets from the Athenian magistrate (‘‘Proboulos’’) at 589-90. At 1124-7, she proclaims her own intelligence and says she has been educated by listening to her father and other elders; the adaptation of a tragic heroine’s words here constitutes another implicit claim to authority. As for her arguments themselves, when she describes managing the city’s affairs in terms of women’s traditional role in managing the household, inventive humor may or may not overshadow a fundamentally sound idea; many modern readers find the extended metaphor of working wool and weaving a cloak for the city plausible and even moving (567-86, lines which seem to have influenced Plato at Pit. 308d-11c). When she lectures the Athenian and Spartan representatives, her broad and nostalgic program unseriously elides real difficulties but is probably not without emotional appeal (1129-61). If so, it is lost on the men, who ignore her and lust for Reconciliation; for the audience, it may be the same, or humor may provide the cushion enabling her to be taken seriously. Mention should also be made of the possibility that Lysistrata (‘‘Army-Disbander’’) reminded the original audience of Lysimache (‘‘Battle-Disbander’’), Priestess of Athena Polias at the time. Lysimache is in fact mentioned at 554; association of the heroine with a real woman (who may even have had known views on public matters such as the war) in a genre that avoids even naming respectable women would be a remarkably bold step. It is disputed whether Aristophanes took it (Henderson 1987: xxxviii-xl; Revermann 2006: 236-43), but a more general association of Lysistrata with Athena herself constitutes yet another claim to authority. Fewer such claims are evident in the case of the half-chorus of women, but their remark that they owe good advice to the city because they have participated in important religious rituals is noteworthy (638-48), as is their repetition of Lysistrata’s point that contributing sons gives them a stake in the community (649-51).
Crucially, Lysistrata acts on behalf of the whole community; the contrast with the selfish heroes of earlier plays (with the very partial exception of Peisetaerus, as discussed above) could hardly be sharper. Delayed success means that there is no parade of ‘‘impostors’’ denied a share of blessings; on the contrary, Lysistrata makes sure the men and women of Greece all get what they want. She is so self-effacing that there is no trace of her in the text after 1188, though the idea that she presides, Athena-like, over the final scene is attractive (Henderson 1987: 215). Even more significant is the form her success takes: not fulfillment ofindividual sexual fantasy, but restoration ofdomes-tic happiness for everyone, perfectly symbolized by couple dancing (1273-end).
World History
