Conversations: I Guess Aristophanes Is Worth Reading After All, Redeeming the Thesmophoriazusae w/ George Kovacs

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:32):
Oh Hi, hello, nerds, it's me again. This is Let's
talk about Mitt's baby, and I am that host of yours,
she who officially has realized her limitations on narrative storytelling
I live, and those limitations are Aristophanes. I will be
honest with you. I am not proud of that series
of episodes we just finished. If I could go back

(00:53):
and cover something else, I would, But I am very
glad that I managed to get the two guests that
I have spoken to four this series, independent scholar Julie
Levy last week and associate professor at Trent University George
Kovacs today. Between these two, they actually make Aristophanes an
interesting person to read about and a playwright whose plays
are worth reading and studying. Thankfully, because God's no, I

(01:16):
was not making that case by myself. In today's episode,
George and I talked about all things Aristophanes and the
Thesmaphoria Zusai. We talked about gender dynamics and politics in
ancient Athens. We talked more about that historical and political
contexts that drives this play and everything within it. We
talked about Aristophanes as a person, his style and intentions,

(01:42):
and so much more. I could not have found a
better guest to make the case for Aristophanes and this play.
So I really cannot wait for you all to hear
this episode. Gods, no, I don't have enough good things
to say on my own, So let's get right into
this fascinating look and why the these before Zusai is
interesting and important Willie Conversations. I guess Aristophanes is worth reading,

(02:19):
after all, redeeming the thesmaforey Zusa with George Kovac's So,
as the listeners heard last week, I have I'm not

(02:41):
an enormous fan of this play. I'm glad I covered
it because I'm glad I now know what the story is,
but I definitely was not prepared for exactly how Aristophanes
was going about talking about women specifically in this play.
And then also that's right, yeah, yeah, so what like,
you know, why, what's kind of your connection to this play?

(03:02):
You you know, you volunteered to come on and thank
you for that. So what's sort of your yeah, your
story with us before? As you say, I've got a
pretty long history with this play actually, so right now
I read it with a couple of my classes here
at Trent I've got a course on Comedy in the
Ancient World, which I'm going through right now, and so

(03:24):
that's why when you were tweeting about it, it was
like I had just worked through the play yet again.
And in that course we look at the nature of
comedy and is this actually funny? And do we still
want to read things from antiquity when we don't find
them funny anymore? And we spend a lot of time
thinking about Euripides. Yeah, Euripides, right, So Aristophanes kind of

(03:48):
has this obsession with Greek tragedy that you know, if
you've talked about frogs before, you've you've seen an action.
But this is the second of the three Euripides cameos
that Aristophanes has in his sort of ouvra right. And
the other play that or the other course that I

(04:08):
read this with is My Love, Sex and Death in
the Ancient World course. That class is cross listed with
the Department, formerly the Department of Gender and Women Studies
and now it's the Department of Gender and Social Justice.
So that really kind of pushes us in some very

(04:30):
interesting directions. And when we read the play there, we
think about it in terms of the treatment of all
basically all of the non cishet male characters, so not
only the treatment of the women, but of Agathone and Kleisthenes. Right.
But yeah, I've been working with this play a long time.

(04:52):
I'll tell you, because I'm very confident. There's no video evidence.
I performed in a production of it in the year
two thousand and here at Trent. I played Mozilochus, the
kinsman in that production, and you know, so, yeah, I
come back to it a lot, and it's a play
that I think everything about Aristophanes changes over time. One

(05:17):
thing about comedy is that it changes more quickly than
almost anything else from antiquity. You know, I can teach
my courses on Greek tragedy, and I can use translations
from the nineteen fifties if I have to, and they're
still pretty consistent with what we do today. Translations of
comedy tend to go stale very quickly, and I find

(05:39):
the attitudes with which even I'm reading the plays has
changed considerably, you know, in the twenty five years that
I've been doing this, and you know, it's like almost
every two to three years, I have a completely new
cohort of students who are thinking about how comedy works
in really different ways. Right, So so yeah, that that's

(06:02):
my history of the with with this particular play. Yeah,
well I'm even more excited to have this conversation then,
because it sounds like you've got kind of exactly what
what I want to talk about even more, which is that,
I mean I kind of knew what I was getting
into because I knew it was an Aristophanes play, you know,
at a women's festival, and that there was going to
be you know, men disguising themselves, you know, in order

(06:24):
to get in. But I was not expecting things like
the character of Agathon and Kleisthenes and and what that
means both in the ancient world and today. And it's
I mean, it added a whole other level of like
both fascination but also like a bit of just kind
of like me wondering how on earth I should be
talking about this, you know, in relation to keeping it

(06:47):
contextual with the ancient world and also being like, well,
you know, I'm also in twenty twenty three, and I
am a show that is deeply conscious of of gender
and gender you know, presentation and and everything like that.
So it was it was it was unexpected getting into that.
So I would I mean, I'd love to hear anything
about those two characters, I mean, and really anything about
this play broadly. But they really are the characters that

(07:10):
really both fascinated me most, and we're the sort of
the hardest for me to kind of wrap my head
around in terms of how to present them in a
narrative form like I do. Yeah, fair enough, you know,
Kleisnes in a sense, he's a little bit easier to
deal with in some ways because he's a running joke
for Aristophanes. We don't know quite what it is about him,

(07:33):
but we're told explicitly in the play. He's the only
male who's allowed to enter the women's only festival of
the Saysmaphoria. He seems unable to have been be able
to grow a beard. That seems to be what the
problem is for him, and that for Aristophanes, that makes
him the butt of jokes because it makes him womanly,

(07:55):
it makes him, you know, not masculine. So we have
other places where he's mocked in aristoph and he's in
Lesistrata for example, when the men are all you know,
sort of separated from their wives. You get a one
liner like the men are so desperate. Even Klycenes is
starting to look good. Even in Frogs. There's a reference

(08:21):
to him, I believe, if I recall correctly, where they're
still making fun of him, but he's a one note
joke like it's it's just you mentioned Klysnes, and it's
that he's not manly and that he is sexually submissive.
And I don't think we actually have any corroborating evidence
for Klycenes's personality or his sexual preferences. But because he

(08:41):
doesn't have a beard there it is. Agathon is in
some ways more complex as a character for a couple
of reasons. Ay, we know more about him, we can
say more about him. I don't know if you've ever
talked about Plato's symposium on your podcast but here too
long ago now, But yeah, yeah, but Agathone appears as

(09:03):
a character in that dialogue, and in fact, Plato's symposium
is set at Agathone's house after he's won his victory
in the year four sixteen, I think if I recall correctly,
and so he's kind of the host for this discussion
of love and he's there with his sexual partner. Is

(09:28):
another one of the speakers there, so we actually do
have evidence of a relationship there. But then, you know,
what makes it even more complex is that he's a
tragic poet. And one of the things that Aristophanes does
extraordinarily well in this play is he kind of smashes

(09:48):
together these two separate issues. One is, you know, the
issue of gender in the man versus woman, you know,
sort of competition that's told entirely from the ma masculine
point of view, right, like there's there's no one's mistaking
this for a play that's written by or for the women.

(10:09):
And I think, but the same thing is going on
with tragedy and comedy. So Aristophanes as a comic poet,
he loves tragedy. I think, I think we can say
that with some confidence the level at which he's able
to engage with Greek tragedy, and like he's able to
quote lines, and he's able to um really cleverly recontextualize

(10:35):
quotations and passages, and indeed, right the second half of
this play has that sequence of four tragic parodies that
are really well done. But he's also got a bit
of a chip on his shoulder that tragedy is considered
the senior sibling or the more prestigious of the two

(10:58):
art forms, and so he's kind of always ready to
chip away at the superiority of tragedy and sort of
assert you know, comedy as as something that is at
least equal, if not better. And so when we get Agathone,
who's portrayed in this kind of sexually submissive, gender ambiguous manner,

(11:25):
we really have this kind of fusion of the you know,
the man woman debate that's going on in one half
of the play, but also the play of genre of
tragedy and comedy. Now I'm not the originator of this theory,
I should say there's a very influential article by froma
Zeitling called Travesties of Gender and Genre. It's a very long,

(11:47):
very complex article, but she does an amazing job of presenting,
you know how these two seemingly very different threads are
kind of brought together throughout the play. That is, I mean,
this is exactly the context I wanted. So thank you,
this is it given me the perfect additional episode. But yeah,

(12:07):
it's so interesting to look at these characters and from
my perspective of how I handle at least my narrative episodes.
And this is why I'm also so grateful that I
get to have conversations now on the show, because it
adds so much more. But on my end, you know,
I'm telling these these plays and stories, and I tragedy
is considerably easier to tell in the form that I do.
I'm increasingly realizing how difficult it is to do comedy

(12:30):
in this way, and that I'm doing a one person
show kind of thing trying to explain these plays. And
the thing about comedy is that, I mean, not only
is it more difficult to express like the type of
jokes that they use, like in the form that I do,
but also it is so ingrained in the contemporary time,

(12:51):
like you have to do all these things like explain
who Agathon is and cleis, the needs and how Aristophanes
feels about them, and I mean, then of course Euripides,
and you know, using Eurippdes as a character while reminding
my audience that this is a Aristophanes, this fictional version
of Euripides, and it's such a it's obviously considerably or

(13:11):
it's it's quite interesting in that respect, but so difficult,
you know, to to portray any kind of like coherent way,
but it Yeah, it's interesting to think about also, like
you're saying that, you know the way that Aristophanes is
commenting on tragedy as a genre within his play while
also commenting on on women and gender broadly. And I'm

(13:33):
so curious kind of you know how I mean, it's difficult, obviously,
it's kind of impossible to say how he really what
he was kind of trying to convey with these characters,
Like obviously he is kind of using Clesnes as this
one liner like you're saying, especially because I'm glad you
mentioned that lycens Road and um was it Frogs, Also
that he's he's in both and where Euripdes appears. Yeah,

(13:57):
that's right, Yeah, yeah, yeah, And I covered both of
those so long ago now that I had not even
remembered the name. So it's it's interesting to have that
kind of connection. Yeah, And they are just one liners
in both Strata and Frogs. This is the only time
we get the cameo, so you know, he's I guess
more than a one liner here, but it's all about

(14:18):
you know, this is a masked theater tradition, so it's
a caricature mask, right, It's gonna look ridiculous in some way,
and Aristophanes clearly thinks he's going to get big laughs
if he brings, you know, a beardless Klysnes mask on stage. Yeah,
that's so interesting, and that brings up like the idea

(14:40):
of of comedy broadly, especially in the ancient world comparatively today.
So I mean, I don't know if I how much
we want to jump around. And so if you have
more kind of to talk about when it comes to
the agathon and clycenes of it all, please feel free.
But but I'm curious then, because you were mentioning that
you also talk about or in your class you talk
about when you know how to navigate something where it

(15:03):
was hilarious in the past. And you know, while there
are funny parts of this play, there are other plays
of his where the comedy still shines in a way
that this one really doesn't age all of that well,
but it is of course still interesting to study. So
I'm so curious about that whole aspect. No, I think
that's right, And you know what you're saying earlier about
just how deeply contextual or embedded in his own time

(15:28):
Aristophanes is exactly right. So again like this, I'm teaching
this comedy course right now, and for the first four
or five weeks, I'm just constantly behind my lecture schedule
because it's, like you say, it's just joke after joke,
scenario after scenario that has to be explained in some way.

(15:49):
We're off into new comedy now, which is about one
hundred years or one hundred and twenty years after Aristophanies,
depending on how you measure it. And there it's easy,
like we know a little bit about Menander the comic poet,
but we don't need to know much. Here's a family
that lives just outside of Athens. This guy hates everybody

(16:10):
and has divorced his wife and he's estranged from his son,
and they're gonna things are going to happen that bring
them all back together, right, And that's that's kind of
all the context that you really really need to make
sense of it. And you're right about this play too.
I mean there's some that some of the plays of
Aristophanes are very challenging because of the way that you know,

(16:32):
are changing value sets have you know, kind of overrite
what's there. Right, So with this play, you know, the
treatment of the women is very difficult to sort of
reconcile with modern sensibilities where there are other plays where
you can read that don't have that same engagement, or
where they are engaged, or in ways that are sort

(16:55):
of so critically distant from us that that it's not
going to and affect us in quite so immediate a way,
if that makes sense. Yeah, well I didnt think about
comparing it to The Frogs because it was fun to
cover the Frogs, because it was mostly just kind of
silly and mostly playing with tragedy more than anything, which

(17:17):
is obviously is you know, it doesn't contain the same issue.
So even if there were like maybe a handout joke
and it's been like two years since I covered it,
but you know, it's a very different thing. And also
just have the inherent nature of like frogs singing in
the underworld is funny, like that's just great. It makes
it so much easier. It's just silly, whereas, yeah, this one,

(17:39):
I was interested in it primarily because of the Women's Festival,
and then Euripides, like I was saying, because I absolutely
love Euripides and I love him and defend him explicitly
because of his use of women. So I was really
interested in looking at, you know, what kind of the
complaints are through Aristophanes, and that I think in itself
is a fascinating thing. But maybe we want to talk

(18:00):
about that a little bit later. But but how he
covers the women and then trying to navigate the the
like figuring out what level of the stereotypes and jokes
that he's playing with are Aristophanes versus like the culture
at the time or completely you know, overblown intentionally is

(18:22):
really interesting and difficult to look at. Yeah, and you know,
one funny thing about this play, given the way that
we're talking about it and looking at it, this is
actually the safe material for Aristophanes in some ways. Right.
So I know you've already had a couple of episodes,
you know that you'll have talked about this, and maybe
you've got a little bit of historical context. But you know,

(18:46):
aristophanes career, most of it plays out against the Peloponnesian War,
which is this big, long sort of sequence of conflicts
with the city of Sparta, and quite recently for this play,
they've had a truce as part of the conflict, but
Athens has sent an expedition to Sicily, and they're going

(19:08):
to try and conquer Sicily during this period of truce,
and that Sicily is just too close to Sparta. It
completely reignites the war and it's an absolute disaster. They
basically send all of their ships and all of their
ships are destroyed. And they get this news in four thirteen,
and so four twelve, it's an extraordinarily politically fraught time

(19:33):
in Athens, so much so that we actually have an
oligarch at coup in the offing. It's about six weeks
after this play is produced. The democracy is overthrown, right,
this so called oligarchy of the four hundred. So Aristophanes,
who for the first decade or so of his career

(19:54):
is extraordinary, extraordinarily politically engaged, and he critiques, you know,
politicians of his day. He makes fun of the city
for some of its policies. He's very, you know, sort
of vocal about the nature of the Peloponnesian war. Um
when he gets to four eleven, things change, right, So

(20:19):
he writes his two the first two plays that feature
women in power. So he does Lisistrata, which is an
anti war play, and for that reason we think he
produces it at the festival known as as the Lanaia
because that's a bit smaller, there are fewer visiting dignitaries.
It's kind of more exclusively Athenian, right, um, you don't

(20:43):
have any any visitors, you know, to watch this thing.
But even there, the central figure is um um lisistrata
rather than caricaturing any particular Athenian general or politics. And
then we get says before he had Zusai in April

(21:04):
at the city Dionysia, the other festival, and the politics
are completely gone, like it is just not a good
time to be political. So in a sense, you know,
Aristophanes almost has to reinvent what he's doing a little bit.
He can't rely on his traditional political fair so what
does he do. He goes after this battle of the
sexes in this environment that of course is extraordinarily chauvinistic, misogynistic,

(21:31):
and it's kind of this wall to wall sort of
locker talk idea of what women get up to and
what would happen if women ever had any kind of power.
And even the speech at the center that you get
from the chorus, you know, the it's called the parabasis,
is the sort of formal set piece name normally Aristophanes

(21:53):
his chorus. It's step out of character and they address
the audience directly, and they'll often talk about some big
political or social issue of the day, and here it's
all about the women saying, you know, you men are
so crazy, why do you there's a total paradox here.
You say you don't want us in the house, but
then you won't actually let us leave the house, that

(22:14):
we're a curse on the household, but you trap us inside, right,
And it's all got this kind of sense of you know,
this almost like sort of head padding attitude. We're gonna
let the women speak for a little while, but in
this really safely contained way. And of course, right all
of these women, all of them are played by men, right,
So so it's a real shift in what Aristophanes has

(22:37):
done before, and he's not going to return to this
women in power theme for a while. There are fragments
of another thesmaphoriad Zusa that he seems to produce maybe
about ten years later, we know very very little about it.
And then in the three nineties he does a play
called a Kleidziadzusa or the Women of the Assembly, and
it has some things in common with with sesmafoiad Zoosi.

(23:02):
The women all put on fake beards and they vote
themselves into power at the local you know, Athenian assembly,
and then you sort of get this fallout of what
happens when the women are in charge, and it's got
a real kind of utopia dystopia feel to it. But
but it's quite interesting. Yeah, yeah, sorry, I think I
wandered away from some of the things you're you're saying earlier,

(23:24):
but that is always my goal to worry. Yeah, because
we did talk about that a little bit in my
episode with Julie, just the sort of exactly where Athens
was at the time, because that really and I wasn't
totally aware of It's funny. I was reading I've read
it like a number of sections of books on Aristophanes
himself and then also introduction to this, and somehow seemed

(23:48):
to not get a lot of that historical context, which
seems so vital and like and important. But also it's
fascinating that it's quite so close, Like I didn't realize
it was even six weeks from this coup. Yeah, it's
it's right on the edge, like they've got to see
something coming. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well and what's interesting too

(24:08):
is like, you know, like you're saying comparatively to less strata,
like there is very little political aspects, but at the
same time, there are a few little moments kind of
peppered in where they talk about tyranny, and so it's
it's almost like you couldn't totally resist, you know, you
had to least toss in little bits of keeping tyranny
down and like, and there's that Russian aspect as well.

(24:31):
And we don't we don't know for certain which play
was played at which festival, but it's a kind of
scholarly consensus that the one that does have some political
content is sort of safely you know, squared away in
the January festival, and then this one Thesmo, which is
you know, sort of you know, clearer of you know,

(24:51):
this political engagement is put in them late March early
April festival when there would be visiting dignitaries here to see,
you know, but it's we don't know that for sure.
Maybe someday evidence will come to light that you know,
reverses the order, but it seems very unlikely at this point.
So we'll just have to keep guessing. So yeah, yeah,

(25:12):
I'd heard a lot about how that one was at
the Lenaia, this one is at the didn't Dynasia, And
I didn't think about that the reason that's but it
makes sense and it makes it more interesting to consider
why it was at which you know, why it was
at each festival. Now, remind me like the comedies, they
only did one at each festival, right, It wasn't like
the tragedies where they would do three. And that's right. Um.

(25:36):
Aristophanes does manage to break that rule at least once.
In the year four twenty two, there seemed to be
two plays written by Aristophanes, but he seems to cheat
by getting a buddy of his to produce another play.
So in four twenty two his play wasps Wins and
it beats out another play by Aristophanes. But yes, it

(25:58):
is normally one player comedian per festival if you get selected, right,
there's a whole process, right, there's a magistrate in charge
of the festival, and the magistrate chooses who's going to
get a chorus? Is the official phrase that you're given
a chorus for the festival, and it's up to that person.

(26:20):
We don't know what the selection criteria are. Almost certainly
there's a kind of political connection, you know, element to it, right,
It's got to have something to do with who you know.
But but Aristophan he's get selected a lot. He's extremely
popular in the first you know, decade or so of
his career. In that he's getting in the first I

(26:43):
think it's in the first seven years. He could perform
fourteen times, because there's two festivals per year, and he
gets at least nine of those slots, and there are
actually a couple others that might be up there. So
the high estimate is that he gets twelve out of fourteen. Wow.
And that suggests that he's getting such popular reception that
the magistrates are continually bringing him back. M M. That's

(27:07):
really interesting and sort of connects to and I deciding
whether it's jumping around too much. But I'm fascinated by
his treatment of Euripides, especially in comparison to the Frogs,
because he really like in the Frogs. It just kind
of seems like he sort of and I know there's
kind of commentary around that two of him kind of
picking Euripides because Sophocles had only just died and it

(27:30):
was easier. Yeah, there's questions about that. But the other
thing about Sophocles is he it's possible he's just untouchable
for a comedian. What we know, we don't know the
dates of almost any of Sophocles's plays, but we actually
have a pretty comprehensive picture of his political life. So

(27:51):
he held a number of political positions and religious positions
as well. He held a couple of priests ships, and
so he's kind of like this super upstanding citizen. He's
also seen as this kind of perfect example of the tragedian,
and you know, there might just not be a lot
of room for Aristot and he's to make fun of that,

(28:13):
and so he's kind of boring, right, Whereas Euripides has
this reputation of being an iconoclass and he you know,
he's he's innovative, but he breaks with tradition. He's you know, associated,
whether properly or not, with people like Socrates and these
weird intellectual sophists, right, and so there's just there's just

(28:36):
so much to play with there, you know, And I
don't know if you guys um, if you've talked yet
about you know, things like the reputation of Euripides as
hating women and not believing in the gods. Like those
are the kind of two you know, sort of reputational

(28:56):
pieces that that stick to Euripides. And this is our
first evidence for UM. At the assembly of the women
where they're deciding what to do with Euripides, the first
woman gets up and she gives her speech and she
talks about how Euripides is mistreating women all the time.
And then the second woman is really upset because she

(29:17):
sells garlands at you know, religious festivals, and Euripides is
going around telling everyone that the gods don't exist, so
nobody's buying you know, garlands for religious festivals anymore. And
you know, both of those claims dog Euripides now for
the next two thousand years, like you can find um,

(29:38):
you know, scholarly works in the twentieth century that will
very confidently talk about um Euripides's attitude towards women or gods,
and it's really just you know, keeping this tradition alive.
And it's a funny there. It's a funny pair of
accusations because they don't really stick. If you read the

(30:00):
plays of Euripides very carefully from a comedy perspective. You
don't want to talk about, you know, sort of nuanced positions.
You want things to be very black and white, and
that seems to be what's happening here. But Euripides or sorry,
Aristophanes seems to think it's you know, kind of a
slam dunk if you make these two associations about Euripides

(30:21):
and that they'll be accepted wholesale. Right, Yeah, that is

(30:54):
what blows my mind the most, and honestly is like
why I wanted to look at this play at all,
because it has happened to me multiple times where I
have commented upon Euripides's use of women, because that is
why I love him, Like the women that he writes
are real people, and they're complex and flawed and fascinating.

(31:14):
And you know, I think the other two tragedians have
a couple women like that, but by and large, for me,
I find them all in Euripides, Like Dianara is like
the only one I liked. Otherwise, Yeah, it's it's it's
it's a real challenge, right. So you know, I'm not
going to say Euripides is or sorry, I'm gonna phrase this.

(31:36):
So you know, Euripides's relationship with his female characters is
complicated in some ways, like we always have to remember
that this is a male poet writing for male actors
for a notionally male audience. And you know, if you
took someone like Media, for instance, as an example, there

(31:58):
are readings of media that actually suggests that it's Jason
who is the tragic figure, right, that he's you know,
this poor guy who was sent on this quest. He
did what he had to do to succeed. But he's
come back with this woman in tow and these two
illegitimate children, and he's done what any sensible Greek man

(32:18):
would do. He's found a Greek princess to marry so
that he can have legitimate children. And all he's got
to do is get rid of this unreasonable foreign woman
who clearly doesn't understand how marriage works. She thinks it's
a contract between equals. What the hell is wrong with her?
You know, Like, that's not how a modern audience, I

(32:39):
think most of the time is going to understand media,
but it might actually be how Euripides and his Athenian
audience understood that that play. Now, at the same time,
media is an extraordinarily complex character and the psychology of
media as you see her sort of getting closer and

(33:02):
closer and closer to this final act of infanticide, which
just but the most horrible thing that anybody has ever
done in any Greek tragedy. And that's saying a lot, right.
She really has to talk herself into it, and that's
part of the tragedy is that she actually loves these children,
and you know just how how much of an effect

(33:24):
this has on her, right, So I can sort of
see it both ways, right, So you know, I think
Aristophanes is wrong to simply say that he hates women,
and you know, but the relationship there is a little
bit more complex. Now, having said all of that, I
will also note that Aristophanes never mentions media, not once.

(33:47):
The only time he mentions the name of media, it's
in the play. I was looking at this because I
was thinking about it this week. But he mentions media
once in the comedy piece, and he's referencing the tragedy
by a guy named Molancius, who's like a D list

(34:09):
tragedian for whom we have like maybe a few lines survive,
kind of like just references to his name. But he
doesn't mention Euripides as media, which is a really interesting
omission at no point, right, because both here in this play, right,
the women are upset that Europdes is presenting, you know,
bad women. They never mentioned media. And there's a passage

(34:32):
in Aristophanes as Frogs as well where Eschlis tries to
take Euripides to task because he presents bad women, and
again media doesn't show up there either. He likes to
talk about Phidra, and I'm sure you've talked about Hippolytus

(34:52):
on your podcast at other times, but he talks about
a very specific version of Piedra that comes from an
earlier play by Euripides, not the Hippolytis play that survives
now he talks about yeah, yeah, sorry, we can we
can go back to that. So the women that he
does mention, I was looking at this list and the

(35:13):
women that he singles out as these bad examples. So Phidra,
who in the play by Euripides that we have that survived,
she falls in love with her step son Hippolytis, and
she tries to hide it, but the it's all revealed
by the nurse, and Hippolytis is so absolutely disgusted by this,

(35:36):
and he threatens to reveal Fiedra's unnatural lust that she
dies by suicide right part way through the play. But
that's the second time Euripides has treated that story. There's
an original play, and we only have fragments of it.
We have a hypothesis for it. I think that tell
us what happened. And there it was a Fiedric who

(35:59):
was into it. That she goes after Hippolytis. Right, that
she's the adulteress kind of you know, that, like the
cougar kind of thing. Right, that's not actually the right
term because she's almost probably the same age as Hippolytis,
the age difference of the marriage. So I don't know
exactly what the what the right term is for it.
But but this woman who is explicitly trying to engage

(36:24):
in an adulterous relationship with her husband's son. Right. Another
woman who gets mentioned is Senabe. I think she only
appears in Frogs. I don't think she appears in Sesmo
four head Zusa, but very similar situation. She's connected to
the story of Belarafon who flies away on the Pegasus,

(36:47):
and same thing. Blair Faon is staying with her husband
and she gets all lusty for him, and goes after him,
and then the third figure and she is mentioned in
sesmo I think is melan Nippy, who her greatest crime
is that she is You're going to put content warnings

(37:09):
right on the series. But she's raped by Posidon and
she has twin sons and she tries to hide it
from her father and ends up being sent into exile,
and the twin sons are exposed and raised by another couple,
and the wife of that couple then has her own

(37:32):
twin sons, and she's jealous of the adopted twin sons,
and she tries to get her twin sons to kill
the original twin sons, and it doesn't work because they're
the sons of Posidon, so they're stronger and and you know,
basically everybody dies. But melan Nippi doesn't do anything right,
like she's it's it's really weird that she gets cited
as an example of as a bad woman. So there

(37:54):
are two plays by Euripides that tell the melan Nippy story,
and so we have to assume that this is the
version of the story that Aristophanes means, and it doesn't
make any sense at all. So, you know, I think
there are actually maybe some worse women out there that
Euripides or sorry, that Aristophanes could use as as negative
examples here, and he doesn't. And I think, you know,

(38:17):
it's Aristophanes is so frenetic in the way that in
so boisterous in the way that he presents his material
that I think there actually are lines that he won't cross,
but he crosses so many other lines that you don't
really notice that he's pulling back from certain things. So
this is something that I was thinking about as I

(38:37):
was looking at them. You know, the women that he
that he talks about is bad women and Fiedra Okay,
she's bad in that first version he's conveniently ignoring the
second version Sena ba okay, and then Melan Nippie shows
up and I'm like, what is going on here? So
it's it's a weird list. It's a weird list. Well,

(38:58):
what interests me about that is that it almost seems
like and I think that this comes through in a
lot of his the actual like lines critiquing women, is
that his complaints about women tend to be things that
are like, I mean, maybe it's just his own kind
of judgment about what he decides is so bad because
I mean, certainly to us today, they would just be like, oh,

(39:21):
oh she's human, right, Okay, she's human and she's made
a couple of mistakes and or stuff has happened to
her that isn't her fault, or like Aristophanes, feels to
me like so so much of Greek mythology broadly, which
is these ideas of like if you're raped by a god,
it's your fault. You know. It's like Harry going after

(39:41):
all of the women instead of the men and stuff
like that. Right, Like it just feels to me like that.
And and one thing Julie brought up, brought up to
last week is is that he was quite conservative in
terms of his like him as a person, and that
feels very true to me. And yeah, exactly, Yeah, that
does seem to be the political or the scholarly consensus.

(40:02):
Yeah that's right. Sorry, go ahead, no, no, I mean
it just it. Yeah, it feels like that in those
moments because his complaints are like, oh, she, you know,
had an affair, or she had just like had feelings
towards somebody else or thought about having an affair, Like
it's really benign stuff. So it just feels like that
level of Athenian conservative nature of just if your wife

(40:24):
is not perfectly at home, you know, not seeing a
single other person every moment of her life, then she
is inherently a bad person. Like that's what it feels
to what so much of it comes down to. And
I like, you know, when I teach this course on comedy,
one of the taglines I put in the in the
syllabus description is that you can tell a lot about
people by what they laugh at, right, And what really

(40:49):
seems to get at Athenian men is the concept of
the legitimacy of their children. That seems to be what
they obsess over more than absolutely anything else. So almost
everything that the women are accused of doing or described
as doing in Thesmaphoria zusai comes down to some form

(41:12):
of theft. Right, So they're taking things from the pantry there,
you know, but what they're really stealing are legitimate children. Right,
So if they're having adulterous affairs, they're having babies that
don't belong to their husbands. And that's not what wives
are for right there there, for you know, only one

(41:33):
thing and indeed, like that's actually the marriage oath is
the father gives the woman to the bride and he says,
I give you this girl for the production of legitimate children.
That's the whole marriage oath. There's none of this I do,
I do. There's the woman has no role except to

(41:53):
get on the cart and be rolled away to her
new home. So so much of the obsession or around
this is about the production of legitimate children. And if
you look at you know, the Kinsman or Nosilochus, whichever
you're calling him in your translation, when he gives that
absolutely ridiculous speech at the assembly, right, we shouldn't be

(42:17):
mad at europdes for giving a few things away. We
do all these other things that you know, nobody ever
talks about. And he escalates and it's pretty much the
last thing that he talks about, his baby swapping. The
woman who has a baby, and it's not a boy.
So they go out and they find a slave who's

(42:38):
had a who's had a baby boy, and they trade
babies and then they show it to the husband. Oh,
looks just like you, right, even as little pecker is
the right shape, right, which that's not how genetics work,
but you know, but but yeah, it's so much of
it is that's the obsession there. So yeah, yeah, it's

(42:59):
really interesting to look at the things he does complain about,
and especially when you think about, yeah, how he doesn't
mention madea at all who you know, for all that
we do see her as like a fascinating, complex character,
like is obviously the most objectively bad, like complex and fascinating. Aside,
she still kills her children and other people. You know,

(43:19):
she's not She's got some flaws. I love her to
the ends of the earth, but I can see why
she is objectively bad. Yeah, and maybe it's just it's
just not funny, right, you know. Yeah, men going home
from the theater and looking in the pantrees and looking
in the bedrooms, that's funny, ha ha ha, But like
men going home and looking for their dead children is

(43:42):
maybe that's just a bridge too far for even Aristophanes. Yeah. Well,
and what interested me to um was the use of
the very long passages sort of somewhat taken right out
of the Helen and some of why that would be.
Like when I first read it, I thought, you know,

(44:03):
it feels so odd because he's mostly just kind of
either directly quoting it or paraphrasing it. But he's not.
He's not like directly satirizing it, it felt to me.
But then Julie did point out also that he picked
like the woman that Euripides has talked about, who is
I mean, Helen of all people, and he made her

(44:23):
good and so of course that inherently is the complaint,
is he made a woman like Helen good, and so
that's inherently you know, him him doing bad things to
women broadly. It's it's so hard to kind of wrap
your head run because it's so I mean. But it's
also important to note that that gambit fails. Right, Um,

(44:45):
So in the play, it sounds like you talked about
this with Julia last week, but we get four tragic
parodies in a row. We get the Telepist parody, we
get the Palamedes parody, then Helen, then Andromeda. I think
none of them actually work. They're all rescue themed plays,

(45:08):
but none of them actually work. And the only time
that Euripides is successful in achieving resolution with the women
is when he actually just comes and talks to them,
and then he gets them. He comes dressed you know,
as a woman, yet again, right, he gets Nosilochus the
kinsman away from that skytheon Archer by using an explicitly

(45:31):
comic plot device. They're going to get a flute girl
and in trance, right, seduce the scytheon Archer, right, and
so he's like, oh yeah, miso horny and he goes off,
you know, to do his day. And that's when they
get away. Is when they use a you know, a
sexually ribald comic plot, right, but you get four tragic

(45:53):
plots that don't work. It is interesting that the last
two are both you know, based on virtuous women. You're right, like,
it's it's yeah, it's it's quite a thing. Yeah, yeah,
Well and really relevant plays as well, because they would
have been performed like the year prior, both of them,
which is interesting in itself. That's right. Yeah, yeah, three

(46:14):
of them. Three of them are very recent. And then
Telefus is a bit of an outlier in that it's
quite old by this point, it's twenty seven years old.
But yeah, the Telefus is it's a funny one. I
think it might actually be Aristoph and he's his favorite play.
He parodies it a couple of times. He does it

(46:34):
in Acarnians, which is the first play that we have
that survives from him. So that's in four twenty five,
so the plays thirteen years old. It's in four thirty eight.
At the time, that's a little bit old, but this
time around it's twenty seven years old. And he doesn't
even name the play in the in the parody, he
just kind of expects his audience to know what's going on.

(46:56):
But he tells us, we're gonna parody the Palamedes, and
we're going to parody the Helen, and we're going to
parody the Andromeda. You know. Yeah, No, I've got a
theory about the telefast and I did get I gave
a paper years ago on this at the Greek Drama
five conference, which was at UBC, but nobody laughed me

(47:18):
out of the room, so you know, I haven't printed
it out yet. But no, If Aristophanes is born somewhere
around four fifty, we don't know precisely, but that's a
pretty good guess. It means he's about twelve years old
when the Telefist comes out. This this play that he
parodies a number of times, and my guess is that
maybe it's the first time he ever went to the theater,

(47:39):
and it's the first tragedy that he ever saw any
like it. It just stuck so hard in his brain
that he can never quite let it go. And in fact,
most of the tragedies that he talks about, so you know,
we've already talked about melan Nippi and Stenabia and the
first version of Fiedra, those are all plays from the

(48:01):
four thirties. They're all plays from when he's really young,
when he's a kid, and I think he's kind of
got this idea of what Greek tragedy is and who
Euripides is based on his teenage years of going to
the theater. That's really interesting. I like that, and it,
I mean, I know Euripdes' career is really fascinating too,
and that when I covered The Helen last year, I

(48:23):
had on Tough Marshall who talked about how from that
time when The Helen and the Andromeda, which I think
was four twelve, Yeah, that's right, yeah, right, he only
had women choruses from that time on, And that is
my favorite thing in the world, and I think about

(48:45):
it all of the time. But it feels to me
that like there was some kind of progression in Euripides' career,
but also in his own like thoughts towards women, and
that he became interested in telling their story is in
a more like, I think, realistic and like honest and
complex kind of way. And it almost feels to me

(49:08):
like maybe if if Aristophanes, you know, found theater when
he was young with those older plays, that maybe he's
almost taking issue with the changes in euripides Is attitude
and style towards women. And I wonder if that's why
he also kind of talks about like the Helen and
the Andromeda, who are who are both? The Andromeda, of course,
is fragmentary, but I like the Helen is this complete

(49:30):
rewrite of Helen of Sparta and Troy and making her
into this a completely different character who is so much
more interesting and sympathetic and and just like virtuous and good,
and that kind of in itself feels like something that
could make a conservative man mad. Yeah. And you know,
if you sort of think of Aristophanes as, you know,

(49:53):
a little shit, but a little shit who wants to
win prizes at the Lenaia and the Dionysia, you know,
I think there's value to him in citing some of
these older plays of Euripides, because it kind of sticks
in in his eye, right, like he's kind of a
poke in the eye of Euripides to judge him by

(50:14):
these plays that he wrote decades ago. But then when
you get to things like the Helen and the Andromeda,
they have the virtue of not only they seem to
have had quite an impact when they when they came out,
but they're recent enough that everyone in the audience is
going to very clearly recognize what the parody is and

(50:37):
what's being made fun of here, and they're gonna have
a pretty good idea of the ways in which Aristophanes
is manipulating it to get new results. Right. So in
that sense, you know, he's he's very crafty, and that
he wants to do is telepis parody. But he does
that very early, you know, it's the first of these
four sequences, and then he does the Palamedes very quickly,

(51:00):
and then he does he spends most of his time
on that Helen and then the Andromeda parodies, both of
which are they've got some unique staging things going on.
They were probably visually distinctive. I know tough Will have
talked about, you know, costuming and you know what the

(51:20):
set design for Helen might have looked like those are
things that he loves to talk about, and so they're
visually distinctive and easy to parody, but even more important,
they're easy for an audience to get you know everything.
You know, when we look at the way that aristoph
and he structures his plays, even the ones that have

(51:42):
kind of deep political engagement. So Wasps, for example, takes
on the structure of the judicial system in Athens, which
doesn't sound funny, but it actually is. He buries all
of that in the first half of the play, and
the second half of the play is all about the
consequences of this guy running around Athens basically being a
jerk because he's not going to jury duty anymore. And

(52:04):
you end with a dance party in which he challenges
Carkindness a Greek tragedian, and again you get, you know,
Aristophanic comedy vers versus tragedy. But he's very clever at
thinking about, you know, the sequencing of things that he
does in the play, so that he always ends in

(52:24):
ways that will engage the audience. More so if he's
got stuff that he wants but he thinks the audience
might not be as into it. Comes early in the play,
and then when he's got stuff that he thinks the
audience will respond to really well, that comes late in
the play. And you almost always end with some kind
of procession or parade because it's comedy, right, you got

(52:45):
to remember the fun bits, so you put those really
fun bits right at the end. Right. So if he
had reversed those parodies and finishes with the telepist, some
people are going to get that one, but not everyone.
Some people are gonna be like, oh, yeah, he's doing
Telephus again, right, But he builds up and you know,
basically everybody in the audience is like, oh yeah, Helen,

(53:06):
I was there, I saw that, right, And they're going
to have some sense of a pretty clear sense of
of what's going on. H That's interesting too, because it

(53:43):
also just ends up with it being like like, I'm
sure it's not coincidential, but it's awfully convenient for Aristophanes
to be writing this entire play about how your euripides,
you know, treats women, and then have the year prior
he did two plays dedicated to women. And one of
the things that came up in when I talked to
talk about the Helen is is that Like these are

(54:05):
two plays where I mean less so with Helen, definitely
with Andromeda, where like they're not the most famous people
being featured. Like it's not called the Mentalais. Mentalis is
like a bumbling sort of he's nice, but he's very
different from the iliad Mentalis in the Helen And then
he's a he's a he's a weener. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah,

(54:27):
Like I like ye because I disliked Man the Alien,
but like he's he's really odd. He's the most popular
character in Greek tragedy. Nobody else has more appearances than
him in our surviving Greek tragedy. I think I think
Orestes has a tie. I think it's both. I think
they both appear in eight different tragedies if you count
across what survives, right, um, because he's associated with Helen,

(54:50):
and he's associated with Agamemnon, and you know, he's a
bit of a dufus, but he's a connected dufis, right, yeah,
even even in the Odyssey, right, he's gonna go and
before we find out he gets to go and live
on the Island of the Blessed because he's married to Helen.
Like it's he's a very very lucky Dufus. Yeah yeah, yeah,

(55:12):
I mean I've my own like could talk forever also
about the Helen and mentalist of the Odyssey versus the Iliad.
But yeah, yeah, it's interesting also to have the Andromeda
where it's like you would think it'd be about Perseus,
but it's about Andromeda, and it's it's one of those
ones where I desperately wish we had it for that
reason because I'm so interesting. Yeah, and really, the best
evidence we have for the Andromeda is this play is

(55:37):
the Thesmazusai. So if you you know, pick up a
fragments of Greek tragedy, you know, tex or that's the
lob or the Arison filter whatever, right, almost all of
the fragments that we have for this play, it's that dialogue.
It's that that I guess that the monologue that the
Kinsman initially gives, and then the echo scene, which is

(55:57):
a really weird scene. I don't know what you're thinking there, um,
and then and then you get the arrival of Perseus,
presumably on the machine right on the on the crane.
So again you know, he's saving the Andromeda parody for
the end because it's got the most dramatic use of
stage machinery of all four of them. So it's it's

(56:20):
you know, it's pretty amazing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, So that
that reminds me of something we talked about or just
touched on earlier. But I'm really interested in in this
idea that Euripides didn't make or wanted people not to
believe in the gods or something that whole realm, Like
you were saying that it's introduced in this, which makes
sense to me, But is there anything on this because

(56:42):
to me that also feels kind of wild because he
uses the gods in his plays a lot. It seems
like I find his use of the god more interesting
than the other tragedians. But he certainly uses them a lot.
He does use them a lot. He never questions their existence. Um,
what I think is going on there. Again, Like as
his relationship with women is more complex than what Aristophanes

(57:04):
wants to make it out to be, I think it's
more complex here too. So he does have characters who
question not the existence of the gods, but the kind
of morality of the gods. So the Balerafon story has
Balerafon flying on Pegasus and mounting an assault on Olympus
because he doesn't like what the gods are doing. Even

(57:27):
in some of our extant tragedy. So at the end
of Backeye, for example, Cadmus really calls Dionysus to task.
You know, this is a really shitty thing you guys
are doing to us, And boy, does this punishment not
fit the crime. And he's like, yeah, I'm a god man, like,
of course it fits the right. So really kind of

(57:47):
questioning that kind of ethical behavior of the gods and
in some ways foreshadowing some of the things that Plato
will say about the gods, for example, and he he's
you know, he famously kicks poetry out of his republic,
and it's partly because they tell stories about God's behaving
badly and that's not a good moral instruction for good citizens.

(58:11):
But a lot of it comes back too. You know
that we've talked about Plato, we can talk about Socrates,
and Euripides has this reputation for being he's associated with
some of the sophistic intellectuals of his day, especially Socrates, right,
and of course Socrates is going to be executed for

(58:33):
corruption of the youth in you know what year we
infer In four eleven. Yeah, we're actually not that far.
We're only thirteen years from the execution of Socrates. And
of course Socrates gets mocked by Aristophanes in the Clouds
right as this clever, you know, sort of sophistic character

(58:58):
who believes in false gods all all the time, which
is the other big, the other big accusation that's laid
against Socrates. Plato and Socrates bull say, this is total bullshit. Right,
So if you look at the apology by Plato, which
is supposed to be Socrates's last speech, he actually calls

(59:18):
out the clouds as painting Socrates with this false brush,
and Euripdes is kind of associated with those guys, and
so it becomes kind of an easy target, sort of
to paint him with that very broad brush of this
guy who's so intellectual that he rejects the traditional gods, right,

(59:40):
and that's not what he's doing, you know, at best,
he's questioning our relationship with the gods and the morality
of the gods. And you know what that power dynamic means,
you know, in ethical terms for us. Right, And this
goes all the way back like the his play Hippolytis

(01:00:01):
very much with aphrodite and an artemists basically playing chess
with human characters and everybody dies because of it. So yeah,
so it's you know, a good modern analogy might actually
be if you think of the concept of you know,
wokeness right on the internet. You know, progressive leftists, they

(01:00:24):
never describe themselves as woke, right, it's you know, the
term is used primarily by you know, right wing trolls
who are trying to own the Libs, as it were, right,
And it doesn't really matter that they can't quite define
what woke is, and it doesn't really matter that, you know,
the value set there, like, they don't have to they

(01:00:47):
don't have to do much to really establish it. They
can just use it as a label, right, and it
it it's not about engaging with anybody on the progressive left.
It's all about, you know, scoring points with your right
wing audience. Right. There's I think there's a little bit
of that here as well, that you just kind of
throw this. He's this sophistic intellectual who rejects the gods,

(01:01:09):
and it's and it just puts him in a corner
with Socrates, who is also falsely labeled in this way.
And some of the other intellectuals of the day, So
I think that's probably where that's coming from. Yeah, it
feels almost the same as the issues with women, where
it feels like it's more just that he is not

(01:01:32):
in the same vein as the traditional conservative Athenian man
and thus, yeah, that's right, Yeah, yeah, yeah, And now
it feels like the reason why he's so interesting is
all the reasons why he was like getting in trouble
back then or why he was being criticized. Yeah, and
you know, in Euripides, I mean, his relationship with Athens

(01:01:54):
is interesting. He doesn't win very many victories at the
city Dionysia when he's alive, but he's allowed to produce
plays with increasing frequency. Most of the plays that we
have and most of the titles that survive that that
we've lost, but we know the dates for come later

(01:02:14):
in his career rather than earlier. So you know, when
he starts out in four fifty five, he's producing a
play you know, once every three four or five years,
as far as we can tell, but by the time
or sorry at trilogy, every three four five years. But
in the last sort of ten to fifteen years, he's
up almost every year or every other year kind of thing,

(01:02:36):
like he's he's producing with much greater frequency, which tells
us that somebody out there wants to see plays by
Euripides m because he's so good. God, they're they're the best. Um,
very grateful for that. I talk a lot about the
like the alphabet plays on my show too, and just
how are to have all of those? Yeah? Which again

(01:03:00):
includes media, right, poor media, who's so popular today, but
she's always she's always excluded. Oh she's a she's a
slug play. Sorry, now she's a stuck play. That's right.
It does include the Helen though, which I think where
it doesn't very lucky. That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
um yeah yeah, it's just it's I mean, this one.

(01:03:22):
I'm very grateful to have had you on for this
as well. I feel like all of this is so
important to understanding this play, because me looking at it
was just me going like, I don't know how to
fully tell you all all the horrible things that he's saying.
It's very difficult. So this context around it is so
important and it gives Aristophanes a lot more credit but
also just makes it all way more enjoyable. Um. Yeah,

(01:03:43):
I mean, Aristophanes is he's he's very very talented as
a player, Like, he's not flawless, right, so when he
gets a hold of a joke, he never lets it go,
and like I think even the ancient audience must have
got time tired of it. At times. There's some joke sequences.

(01:04:04):
I don't know if they're any in Thesmo, but like
in Acarnians and a couple of the other plays, Nights
have a couple of sequences where he makes like a
kind of pun and he just kind of keeps repeating
it and repeating it, and you're like, dude, like let's
let's move on. But he's very very good at other things.
He's very he's extraordinarily good at visual metaphor, even though

(01:04:25):
we don't see a lot of that in Thesmaphore. He
had Zusai but taking you know, abstract ideas and representing
them as a visual idea. So you know, Socrates is weird.
Philosophical ideas appear as the chorus of clouds or in
his play about angry jurors, the wasps and the jurors

(01:04:49):
are depicted as wasps because they move in big groups
and they sting and they get angry all the time.
And you know, I've already mentioned, right, the very skillful
way that he threads together these two seemingly disparate sort
of you know competitions, right, man versus woman, comedy versus tragedy,

(01:05:10):
and it plays out in this extraordinarily you know, well
thought out way like it's it's it's pretty impressive. Mhmm. Yeah.
I think that's important to note because it is one
of those things that it's difficult on my end to
come through with just because narrative, trying to turn a
comedy play into a narrative is like nearly impossible. I

(01:05:31):
think I'm gonna stopped trying. Um, but I'm glad to
have people on to talk about his plays at the
very least. Um. But the one thing that interests me
because you know, talking about it this way, it sounds
like his comedy is so so smart and interesting, and
then it also is sort of all of that. It's
kind of juxtaposed with his real love of like bathroom

(01:05:55):
humor for lack of a better word, like the dick
jokes are yeah play and like a lot of sort
of absurdist kind of comedy as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
and that's another thing that he does extremely well. Um
So I mentioned like, I've acted in a play of Aristophanes,
I've directed, I've produced a couple And one of the

(01:06:16):
really interesting things about Aristophanes, from you know, a staging perspective,
the jokes. Some of the jokes are impossible to sell,
but there are so many of them on so many
different registers. It's like, if you can land maybe every
third joke, the audience is going to be laughing through

(01:06:36):
the whole play, and they're going to remember, you know,
they're only going to remember a third of the jokes
that they heard, but they're going to like the third
that that that came away with. And the way that
he's very skillfully, like you say, like he can do
this complex political satire. He can do this sophisticated literary
analysis that you get in Sesmo and Frogs. But throughout

(01:06:58):
the whole time, these guys who are performing this political
satire and this literary analysis, their dicks are literally hanging
out and swinging around through the whole through the whole production,
and you get fart jokes, you get sex jokes, you
get right everything from the most base scatological humor all
the way up to the most sophisticated parody and satire,

(01:07:20):
and he just squashes it all in and it fits
in some way. It's it's it's actually pretty spectacular. Yeah.
So that that brings me to a question i'd had
because it's also interesting. I mean, this is like the
ongoing question with all of Greek theater, which is that
the idea of staging. So do we know for certain

(01:07:42):
a lot about how he would stage things? Because I've
been reading two different translations, Like I quoted the theater
Ratis on the show, but I've also been reading a
lot of the Stephen Halliwell translation, and because mostly because
it had like end notes which were interesting, but they
don't seem to agree on much, like in terms of
even naming characters and who played what. Yeah, so those

(01:08:06):
are all major considerations. So most of what we know
about how the plays were staged comes from references to
Greek tragedy. So when people actually do talk a little
bit about tragic like Aristotle talks about it in his poetics,
for example, he always talks about tragedy and then we
have to extrapolate. So a really good example and you're

(01:08:27):
gonna have to have tough Marshal on again because this
is a thing for him. But tragedy was played with
three actors and only three actors. So if a character
walks off the stage and you need it, or if
you've got three actors and you need a fourth character,
one of those actors has to go away, put on
a new mask and costume and come back. We don't
know if the three actor rule holds for comedy. It

(01:08:49):
looks like it doesn't. Like I said, top Marshall has
some sophisticated arguments about quick changes and about how that's funny.
You know, not everyone and will buy that argument. By
the time you get to new comedy one hundred years later,
it's back to being a three actor stageable performance. So

(01:09:10):
we don't know. Questions about how many doors are available
to Aristophanes is a big question. Every single Greek tragedy
that we have can use a single door. This is
the palace of Theoclemenus, this is the palace of Agamemnon,
or the cave of Philip Ted's or you know whatever.
But a number of tragedies appeared in need or repurpose doors,

(01:09:33):
you know, and then we get to play like Theesmo
where does the skeina come in. It gets used as
the house of Agathone at the start, and we rolled
him out. He gets put away. At some point the
kinsman kind of walks away and comes back to the space,
and now it's the space of the women's festival and
the pinnis, but the the skithyon archer goes inside somewhere

(01:09:57):
to have his way with the flute girl. And so
the stage space, the stage building, the door has been
repurposed in some way. Um. And then the other the
other way that we know about staging is through comedy,
because it's so meta, theatrical and self referential. Um. So
there's you know, there's a lot of open question about
how these things were staged. Tragedy appears to have been

(01:10:20):
quite austere, not a lot of props, The costumes would
have been elaborate, but but but fairly singular. Um. And
then we get to comedy, which is just an absolute
mess of props and sight gags and scene changes all
the time, and quick changes with characters. It's a very

(01:10:40):
common phenomenon in Aristophane's to have a whole bunch of
characters in the second half of your play. And again
you know, I keep bringing up Top's argument, but his
argument is that part of the humors that the actors
have to keep running off to play these new these
new characters. So it's a lot more it's a lot
more frenetic, but a lot of what we what we
have to assume, you know, we have to either extrapolate

(01:11:02):
from tragedy or try and kind of figure out, you know,
what's going on from the cues and the text, which, oh, okay,
that reminds me you've said something else earlier as well.
The scripts that we have don't give us character names.
All they typically give us is a little we call
it a lemma. It's just a little line that says
character change, character change, character change, and so and display

(01:11:26):
says Mpore and Zusa is a particularly complex one. None
of the characters are actually named. We have to figure
out who is who. So Euripides, he's mostly easy because
people say, hey, Euripides. And Agathon's easy because Aristophanes has
probably never had an Agathone mask on stage before. So

(01:11:50):
he wants his audience to know we're going to the
House of Agathone now, get ready, right, so that everybody
when they see the mask they're not trying to figure
out who it is. They immediately start jeering at Agathone
or wherever. Nobody ever actually calls the kinsman by his name,
so we don't know what his name is actually supposed
to be. Some translations will call him Nozilocus because there's

(01:12:13):
a biographical tradition that says Europdes had a father in
law named Nozilocus, And so sometimes if you know, if
you've seen that. But then where in Tsima where it's
really confusing is with all the women who talk through
the assembly scene, and then when they're trying to track
down the male infiltrator, and then in some of the

(01:12:36):
parodies as well, it's clear that it's a female speaking
for the most part, but is it supposed to be
the same female that we saw earlier on? So sometimes
you get first woman, second woman. There are a couple
names like Mika and Critilla that get that get said,
and so you know how much how many of those

(01:12:56):
lines are actually supposed to be Mika. Is she on
stage through all of these scenes or does she come
on just for them the assembly? And then it's other
women who talk, and sometimes we don't even know if
it's you know, the women or Mosilochus or what if
it's some of those really fast banters back and forth.

(01:13:16):
It can be very very difficult. So it's not uncommon
to pick up one translation and you get, you know,
one list of characters, and then you get another list
of characters in another translation. M It's funny because I mean,
this is something I feel like I have grasped in tragedy,
and I talk about it on the show all the
time of how stage directions and things like that are

(01:13:37):
all you know, have to be invented by the translator
or or sort of like you know, figure like they
you know, they make really educated guesses on that's all
that stuff. But in comedy it feels like, I mean,
I assumed it was the same thing, but it does
feel so much more difficult, and so hearing all of
these descriptions, it does sound like it was considerably more

(01:13:57):
difficult to figure all of that out. It would be
because you know, comedy there's more than just like comedy
is more than just the spoken word, right, you know,
if there can be all kinds of things that that
are going on, and it's it's very clear, like we've

(01:14:17):
got lots of little scenes and moments in Aristophanes where
it seems pretty clear that Aristophanes thinks that something really
funny has happened, and we don't get it. And sometimes
maybe we're just missing a reference or we don't understand something,
but you know, as often as not, it might be
some piece of physical humor that that we just don't

(01:14:40):
see right, and we have to make lots of different
inferences about what's going on. Right, Sometimes it's really easy,
right when one of the women in Clecones are looking
for trying to prove that that Nosilicus is male, and
they're chasing his foul us back and forth between his legs,
like that pretty clear and easy to see what's going on. Um,

(01:15:04):
But in other places we don't know, We don't know
for sure. Yeah, it's it's extra interesting, especially if you
can't even apply the three actor rule, then it just
adds even more questions to that. Whereas that that at
least like provides some kind of inherent structure in the
tragedies that we can usually figure things out, and even

(01:15:27):
I mean in a lot of the tragedies, you can
usually even figure out who's like the first actor, second actor,
third actor. Yeah, it's all like a puzzle, but it
feels like or at least I feel like I understood
the puzzle involved in tragedy and now yeah, and even
even if we knew, yeah, even if we knew one
way or another, comedy does follow the three actor rule
or it doesn't, right, and we don't. We don't know,

(01:15:50):
so we sort of speculate. And then comedy, of course
has so many more characters, right. Aristophanes is so willing
to bring a character on for a single scene because
it's funny in that single scene, right, you know, And then,
especially like I said, you know, towards the end of
his plays, we tend to get sort of these frenetic

(01:16:10):
visits from multiple characters. Birds does it, Wasps does it?
A Carnians does it? Others do as well, And they're
all on for like just a few lines, right, and
they're running on and off and on and off and
sort of trying to keep track of all of that
and infer it all from just what the characters say.
And you know, sometimes it you know, it doesn't matter

(01:16:32):
that much, but sometimes it can have interpretive consequences. Some
versions of Lisistrata, for example, have her leave much earlier
than other versions of Lisistrata or translations and listis Strata.
Whether she's actually on stage for the final party scene
or not kind of makes a difference what you think
about that character. And some translations will have her come

(01:16:55):
on and deliver some lines. Other translations will assign those
lines to somebody else. Oh that's really interesting. Yeah. The
one that stood out to me most between the two
translations I've been looking at is Echo actually because in
one of them it has Euripides playing Echo, which seems
to me to fit because he played Mentelis in many

(01:17:16):
plays Perseus later. And then in one of my translations,
it's just like echoes on stage, and I just think,
what would that mean, like because it doesn't Yeah, and
like Aristopti doesn't feel like the type of person to
just I mean, certainly in this play to just have
this character come on who without any other reasoning, like
would have to be the goddess or some form. But

(01:17:37):
that doesn't really make any sense. And that was sort
of fascinating to me to question whether it's Echo or
Euripides as Echo, and if it's not Eurypdes or Echo,
who is it. Yeah. Actually, that's a good point. I
had never I had never seen a translation that didn't
have it as Euripides providing the voice of Echo. And
of course there's all kinds of like do we actually

(01:17:58):
do we actually see who's voicing echo? Yeah? Right? Echo
is just an echo? Right? Or do you have Euripides
sort of sticking his head around the stage building and
kind of looking out and repeating lines and you know,
which is actually pretty funny, right, If that's how it's going,
I think you can you can get a lot of
physical humor out of that. I'd never seen a translation

(01:18:22):
that that did it without Euripides. But I think, like
if you look at the text, it doesn't explicitly say,
I mean, we know that Euripides has appeared as Menelais already,
we know that he's going to appear as Perseus. So
it kind of makes sense that when you've got these
extra roles to m to a sign, that it could

(01:18:46):
be that it could be Euripides again. M Yeah, I
mean it makes the most sense because if the whole
point of those two parodies is that they're paroding Ripdi's plays,
like if he is appearing as two of the characters,
like why would he not be the third it seems bizarre.
It might even just be like this is in the theater,
this translation, And there's also a lot of formatting issues
because it's just on that poetry and Translation site. Yeah,

(01:19:09):
and they have like there's like flaws on that site.
So I'm I'm even wondering whether that's just like missing
because there's a few points where they clearly change lines
of somebody but they haven't actually put the person's name,
and it's just yeah, yeah and those you know, it's
a fairly loose translation in some ways as well. Doesn't
mean it's not you know, interesting in some ways, but um,

(01:19:31):
but it does. Yeah. I use some of the Poetry
and Translation courses pieces in some of my classes just
because they're free, right, and yeah, it's good for the
students to see different different translations. But but yeah, yeah,
I could just be yeah, something missing from the from
the site. Yeah, normally I don't use that one, like

(01:19:51):
I'll often look at it for reference because I usually
try to use like two or three translations at least
for every time I do a play, since I don't
speak ancient or don't know ancient Greek um. But that
one specifically, it was very difficult to find accessible copies
of this play. So I became like one of the
yeah things. Yeah, and I remember I suggested to you

(01:20:13):
the translations of Jeff Henderson. But they are, did you? Yeah,
they are, but they are expensive to track down. Um,
he's got M, he's got a. It's a wonderful volume
from Routledge. UM Staging Women. I think it's called and
it's three plays of Aristophanes. It's Licistrata, and it's says

(01:20:34):
before a Zusa and it's um the women of the
Assembly cladsia zusa right. Um. But that it's expensive, and
it's the only expensive book that I assigned to my Love, Sex,
and Death class because his translation is so good. It's
off putting sometimes because Jeff simply doesn't pull any punches

(01:20:56):
on the language, you know, to give you a good example.
Um again, like, I assigned this text about a year
ago to my Love, Sex and Death class, and I
got an email. Even though I always have blanket content warnings. Um,
there's a very early on when they first encounter um,
Agathon Mosilochus calls him the F word. And I don't

(01:21:20):
mean fuck, I mean the you know, the homophobic slur
that should refer to a bundle of sticks, right, um.
And it kind of comes out of nowhere right like
it's it's just there. It just drops into the middle
of this. And this student had, you know, and it
was a stay news you know, who had read Aristophanes before,
but they were just really you know, not prepared to

(01:21:41):
have that word there. And to be honest, I had
forgotten it that it was in there at that point.
But it's exactly the right word to use it that
at that point in the text. It really is a
very close approximation of what the original Greek says, which
is meant to be a slur like it it really yes,
And so yeah, you know, so I really like Jeff's

(01:22:04):
translations for that because they don't pull those punches and
you get a really honest feel. But they're they're they're
tough to find unless you get the lobes he um.
He also does the Lobe Classical Library translations, and I
remember seeing him talk once and he considered a career
highlight that he got the Lobe Classical Library to print
the word fuck in text print. He was so happy. Yeah,

(01:22:29):
I respect that. Yeah, oh that's interesting. Yeah, it's I
mean this this play kind of crept up on me
in terms of when I was covering it. Normally, I can,
like I'm always happy to I like to have buy
fancy translations of things, but to know generally, uh yeah,
I mean translation is just so fascinatet. That's why I

(01:22:50):
always try to make sure I'm looking at more than one. Um.
It's a good approach, especially with comedy. Yeah, yeah, well
in any of the tragedies too, because I mean, the
language can vary so much in terms of the kind
of emphasis or just right where it's coming out of it. Yeah,
it's important. And also I just find it interesting, Like

(01:23:12):
I I prefer that because I get so much more context,
and it often like I can, I know enough Greek
that I can also have questions and then go find
it on perseus and you know, figure it a word
myself at the very least. So that's always kind of
a thrill. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, Like I said, you know,
I guess when we started all of this, Like you know, again,
you're right, like tragedy does engage in wordplay and there

(01:23:35):
are complex ideas that are being presented, so sometimes yeah,
the translation can can make a difference. But yeah, but
then when you get with Aristophanes, like it changes so
quickly and comedy relies it like it's so topical and
and even senses of humor. Right, um, Like, I remember

(01:23:56):
the first time I ever read this play, it was
the old Penguin translation, and it was clearly written by
some British guy in the nineteen forties or fifties who
thought that Cockney was really funny. And so you get
like all these weird lines that are like almost you know,
impenetrable linguistically, and they just don't make it. Everybody's a

(01:24:17):
bloke and that's supposed to be funny, and you know,
maybe it was in nineteen fifty whatever, but you know,
comedy engages in so much colloquialism and slang and topical
language that the translations of comedy goes stale, or at
least Aristophanes. It's different from Menander, whose language is very

(01:24:40):
simple and basic. In a lot of ways, old translations
of Menander look pretty much like new translations of Menander.
But yeah, no, it's a good idea to look at
multiple translations for sure. Yeah. Well, and because my show
is something that gets accessed by people who aren't in
academia at all, and just anyone who is interested in that.
It's also I think like it's important that I do it.

(01:25:00):
But I also talk a lot about translations and the
importance because so often I'll have listeners who are like,
I want to read the Odyssey. I'll just pick up
this cheap translation at a used bookstore, and I'm like,
I mean, I respect your need to do that, but
you're probably not going to like it. I always recommend, yeah,
that you pick up the book and read a couple
of pages in the store, and yeah, if you're still

(01:25:21):
reading after two pages, then yeah, go ahead grab it. Right.
There are some older translations of the ad Latimer's is
still really readable. But you're right, like, there's some that
you know, are you know in even you know, companies
like Amazon repackage old translations and transsell them for profit,

(01:25:41):
and they might have been composed in like eighteen ten
or something. Yeah, you're you're just wasting your money. Even
if it's not very much money, it's still it's still
being wasted. So yeah, always read a couple of pages
if you're unsure exactly. I think the first one I
ever picked up of Iliot or the Odyssey. I don't
even remember what the translation was, but I just remember

(01:26:02):
that they didn't latinize the spellings, and so just like
that alone, I was like, Okay, I mean it was like,
you know, instead of Achilles, it was like achilais with
a k and an agent and like, and I'm there like,
oh god, this is not the way to get into
these works. I was like, probably, yeah, and there can
be a place for those translations, but but yeah, accessibility

(01:26:25):
can absolutely be an issue, especially yeah, in a poem
like the Iliad, which is wall long names, right, yeah, exactly,
Like I love the Greek spellings, but back before I
knew the Greek spellings, I was just looking at this like,
oh my god, what am I even reading? Yeah, yeah, yeah, Well, honestly,
this has been so incredibly fascinating. I'm so thrilled to

(01:26:47):
have had you on because you really added so much
to the understanding of this good. Yeah, I hope so right,
Like it's um, you know, it's it's fun for me
to do as well, like and to get outside of
the academy a little bit, even though I talked about
my university classes a lot. But um, but I hope
it does bring something yeah, yeah, come take my classes.

(01:27:08):
Is really the lesson to be learned here. But uh,
you know, but no, no, this is this is I know,
I know, No, this was super fun to do. You know.
I hope it's useful for you. I hope it's useful
for your listeners. You know, I'm sorry. Aristophanes is not
always everybody's cup of tea, but you know, it is

(01:27:30):
something that's really worth reading because it's it's so it's
so informative. We have to be very careful about, you know,
sort of accepting everything at face value, and we have
to recognize, you know, the rampant misogyny, and yeah, Aristophanes
is obnoxious, but really he's kind of the obnoxious mouthpiece

(01:27:53):
of an obnoxious society. And you know, it's you know,
and I like, I think about how much my own
own understanding of antiquity and the ancient Greeks and Romans
has changed over the last twenty twenty five years. And
you know, I come from that erat like I'm not
that old, but I'm getting there, right, And you know,

(01:28:14):
like we idolized the Greeks and the Romans when I
started out, and now I think, you know, we do
a much better job of contextualizing and understanding exactly what
it is that we're talking about. The Greeks are endlessly fascinating,
but they were also quite awful in some very fundamental ways.

(01:28:35):
Like we have made progress, I think since then, it's
always worth keeping in mind, and Aristophanes is one of
the ways that we remember that. Yeah, no, that's a
good point. I mean, even like my ba is you know,
somewhere over a decade old, and even that, like that
amount of time is everything has changed so much the
way I learned in my classes versus now, And I mean,

(01:28:55):
I'm certainly got to be kind of like a part
of that, especially in terms of sharing it with people
who aren't in academia. But it is, Yeah, it changes
so much, and it is especially important in these kind
of contexts. So but I mean, and that's certainly what
I talk about all the time, is like the misogyny
of it all, but also having the not defensive Aristophanes
but the like just the other ways to appreciate him

(01:29:17):
that I wasn't able to see. So thank yeah, yep. Yeah, um, Well,
is there anything you want to share with my listeners
in terms of like do you want them to follow
you on Twitter or read anything by you or anything
you want to share like that. I do have a
Twitter account. I'm not like I'm more of a lurker.
And Twitter is collapsing anymore in these days anyway, Like

(01:29:38):
it's it's so bad, I'm just watching it burn down. No,
I you know, I don't think I do. I probably
should have a better media presence than I do. But um, yeah,
go away and actually read some Aristophanes is my advice. Um,
you know, keep in mind that it is going to

(01:30:00):
offend at times, but it also is a window into
a different world, and there is stuff there that is
still funny, even you know, once you filter out all
the other stuff. But yeah, yeah, yeah, well, thank you.
That's been That's wonderful, Oh Nerds, Didn't that conversation make

(01:30:33):
all of the difference? Honestly, I'm just so thrilled to
have had these chats, and generally that I get to
have conversations all the time anyway, but I say that often.
In this case, I think it really turned the whole
series around, though, Like I cannot imagine these episodes without
these two conversations, these extra pieces of context and history
and biographical information. Just change everything about how I read

(01:30:57):
the play and how I view Aristophanes. Have I become
a convert? No, we're probably gonna stay away from him
for the foreseeable future, but I do have a different
appreciation of the play and what it can add to
one's understanding of the ancient world, ancient gender dynamics, ancient
Athens specifically. So I'm so thankful to George Kovac's for

(01:31:19):
coming on the show and sharing this knowledge. Like Julie,
he volunteered when I tweeted about it, and I didn't
realize just how perfectly he aligned with what I wanted
to talk about. But I feel like we all just
got to sit in on one of those classes that
he teaches at Trent, and I'm so grateful. God's this
job is fun, even when we're talking about our stephaniees.
So that's really saying something. Okay, I'm sorry, I will

(01:31:42):
stop trying to insult that play. Right, It's just become
like a bit too much fun, you know. Fortunately, though
George was here to defend him and his honor. Let's
talk about it. Maybe is written produced by me Live
Albert michaelas Smith is the hermes to my Olympians and
handles so many podcasts related things except having to read
this play. Lucky her Stephanie Folly works to transcribe the
podcast for YouTube captions and accessibility. The podcast is hosted

(01:32:05):
and monetized by iHeartMedia. Help me continue bringing you the
world of Greek mythology and the Ancient Mediterranean by becoming
a patron, where you look at bonus episodes and more.
Visit patreon dot com slash Myth's Baby, or click the
link in this episode's description. Thank you all so much,
wonderful nerds. Next week we're going to talk about women
in myth rather than comedy. Thank the Gods.

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.css-r6mb8g{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:1;overflow:hidden;}The Bright Side

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Conversations: I Guess Aristophanes Is Worth Reading After All, Redeeming the Thesmophoriazusae w/ George Kovacs

The Bright Side