25 Aristophanes Comedies

In this, our 25th lecture, we continue our exploration of the life lessons that we learn from the great books and we turn now to a new theme, laughter and irony. We've explored the themes of the unconquerable human spirit, discovered and discussed how we live our lives, we've thought about love, we've thought about adventure, but at every stage of our life, we are in very serious trouble if we are no longer able to laugh at ourselves or find anything funny. And laughter and irony are natural human emotions that enable us to deal with the good things of life, not to take them too seriously, and not to take even the bad things too seriously. And we're going to look in this section at the idea of laughter in classical Greece, and then in the age of the Renaissance, two absolutely seminal periods in human history, and end up with the 20th century. So we will start with the plays of Aristophanes, of classical Athens, and the plays of Menander. And then we will look at three great figures of the Renaissance, Machiavelli, Erasmus, and Sir Thomas More, each of whom used irony to point out the foibles of their own day. And then finally, George Orwell's Animal Farm. But we begin, as we always should, with the Greeks and with Aristophanes. The Greeks invented tragedy, and also at Athens, they invented the political satire as comedy. And both were part of your civic functions as an Athenian citizen, to watch the tragedies that were put on. But the Athenians understood that you could not watch someone like Oedipus gouging his eyes out every day. That got to be too much. So you had to lighten this up. And so they put on comic performances as well. And Aristophanes was an Athenian citizen, just as were all the writers of tragedy, and he was the great comedian of the Athenian democracy. And his central theme, the decisive period in his life, as it was the decisive period in the whole history of the Athenian democracy, was the great war between the democracy of Athens and the great war with the democracy of Sparta. That war, which from 431 to 404 was a world war, drawing the whole of the Greek world, as well as far off Persia, into this war, and ultimately destroying the Athenian democracy. You need to remember about our Athenian democracy. It's been a leitmotif running all the way through our course. It was the first government in history based upon the ideal of the greatest good for the greatest number of citizens. It was government of the people, by the people, and for the people. It rested upon the belief that every citizen was capable of handling any governmental job, and its goal was to involve as many citizens as possible in the operation of the government. It was not a government of experts, and every decision of war and peace, of taxation, of domestic and foreign matters, was made by the entire assembly of the Athenian people coming together to vote. Now, only males were citizens in the fullest sense of the word, because for the Athenians, the rights of citizenship, such as freedom of speech, the protection of the law, were not only a right, but an obligation. And only those who served in the army of Athens could be citizens. And Athens did not have a professional army, did not pay others to fight for them. Every citizen was required to be available for military service from 18 for the rest of their lives. Old men could be brought into the military forces when circumstances required. So, to be a citizen, in its fullest sense, was to serve in the military. Now, we shouldn't be too hard on the Athenians for not allowing women to vote. Women were passive citizens. They had the protection of the law, but they weren't allowed to vote. And the Athenian democracy saw no dichotomy between freedom and slavery. In fact, they defined freedom as the ability to rule over yourself and to rule over others. But another great democracy came into being, 1787, with our Constitution, in which women did not vote, and in which slavery was part of the Constitution. So, let's not be too harsh on the Athenians, for their values were our values. And these values were laid out for all time in the funeral oration that Pericles spoke to the Athenians in the first year of this great war that had broken out in 431. The war with Sparta. We are a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. That is why we are a democracy. We believe in the law, both the law that was handed down to us by our forefathers and the laws that we make. Well, now, are we Americans not a government of the people, by the people, and for the people? And do we not believe in the law that was handed down to us, the Constitution, and the laws that we make ourselves? We are a people who let the goods of the entire world flow into us. We believe in a free market economy. We believe in equality of opportunity, that everyone should go as far in life as they can. We allow foreigners from all over the Greek world to come and reside here and profit. We do not think it's a shame to be poor. We do think it's a shame not to work as hard as you can to become rich. We are a tolerant society. We do not condemn you if you live a different lifestyle. We don't even give you sour looks, which might hurt your feelings. And we love wisdom and beauty. And the intellects from all over the Greek world come to us because they can flourish here amidst our freedom of thought and freedom of speech. But we are as brave as anyone else. We are patriots, and we love our country because it is worthy of loving. Taking all things together, Pericles told his fellow citizens, we are a model to the world. And it was as a model to the world, in the belief that its democracy was threatened, and that it was the duty of Athens to bring democracy to the entire Greek world, that they had entered this war with Sparta in 431. Now, one of our own follies of today is the idea that democracies are peaceful neighbors, and that if you can just set up enough democracies around the world, there'll never be another war. Well, history teaches us very differently. The First World War was between parliamentary democracy, like Germany, Austro-Hungary. Even Russia had a parliamentary democracy, and Britain and France. What Winston Churchill pointed out is that democracies do not necessarily make for good neighbors, and when they do get into a war, they fight it through to the absolute finish. You see, a monarchy or an empire, the king or emperor can just sit down with the other king or emperor and sign a peace treaty. But democracies rest upon the vote of the people. And once into a war, they demand that it be fought through to the finish in order to justify the losses that have been entailed. And in 431, Pericles, who certainly wasn't a dictator of Athens, he was a highly regarded leader who rested his leadership upon his moral authority. He convinced Athens that they must undertake what was, in effect, a preemptive war against the democracy of Sparta. In 480, those two great democracies, Sparta and Athens, had stood side by side and defeated the Persians, who had sought to rob the Greeks of their freedom. But in the after years, they had become ever more estranged from one another. Athens had its own alliance of some 243 Greek states, and Sparta had its alliance, mainly in the area of the Peloponnesian Peninsula. And in 431, Pericles convinced the Athenians that Sparta was conspiring against them, Sparta intended to attack, and the great war began. Pericles also gave the Athenians the strategy by which they would win that war. And that is certainly part of a great leader, a statesman, to explain why you must go to war in a democracy and how you're going to win it. And Pericles convinced the Athenians that they could not defeat the Spartans in a great single-pitched battle, that their best strategy lay in coming inside the mighty walls of Athens, living inside those walls, using their great fleet to bring food from all over the world, and allow the Spartans to ravage their lands, but avoid a major battle in which Sparta would win because of its superior infantry forces. And so the first year came and the Spartans ravaged the land. And then, in that first year, not long after Pericles had given his funeral oration, celebrating the values of Athens, a plague came. And for two years, this plague ravaged Athens, but not Sparta. And older people looked back and said, when this war began, Pericles ignored the warnings of the god Apollo, the god who sends plagues, that this was a holy war on the side of Sparta, that it was an unjust war by Athens, and that we would pay the price. And now we're paying it with this plague. But despite the ravages of the plague, probably typhoid was the nature of the plague, maybe as much as 10 percent of the Athenian population died, Pericles convinced them to continue the war, pointing out now, well, maybe we never should have begun the war, but once we're in it, we must see it through to the end. We have to stay the course. If we do not, Sparta will destroy us, and all of our allies, our coalition partners, will rise up against us. And even after the death of Pericles in 429 from the plague, the Athenians stayed the course. But there rose in the absence of Pericles a new kind of politician, who did not lead by moral authority, but by pandering to the people, professional politicians who drew heavy salaries from their public service, and who followed public opinion polls. And it was against these kinds of politicians that Aristophanes directed his satirical wit. And once again, citizens are required to attend the performances of the comedy. They have a religious dimension. They are put on in honor of the god Dionysus, and an altar to the god Dionysus sits in the middle of the orchestra, where the chorus performs. You are paid a good day's wage to attend the comic performances, so that you don't lose money, and it is part of your citizenship to go. But since they are not full-fledged citizens, no women attend. And that's very important in understanding the message of Aristophanes. It is only the Athenian citizens, the males, allied members of their coalition partnership, send representatives, and occasionally other foreign states might have a representative there at this religious performance. But it's mainly the Athenian males who are watching. And in 426, Aristophanes' criticism of the chief politician Cleon, a man who had been a tanner by profession, had been so severe that Cleon was able to haul him into court and sue him, and almost ruin Aristophanes. Now, the Athenians believed in freedom of speech, but you could also bring a libel suit against somebody, or a slander suit, and take them into court. So Aristophanes starts off his play in 425, The Arcanians, with a little bit of statement about he's not afraid to speak the truth. His task is to be a teacher, and to tell the Athenians through this comedy what a tragic mistake they are making by continuing the war. And if any politician wants to sue him, then, well, let it be for an Athenian jury to decide what is more important, the politician's reputation or the truth. Now, The Arcanians takes its name from the chorus. And just as in Greek tragedy, there is a chorus of listeners who occasionally speak in beautiful verse, giving the ordinary person's opinion about the situation, so too there is a chorus in comedy, giving the opinion of an ordinary Athenian about the action and the issue at stake. And these are The Arcanians. That's an area, a rural district of Athens, famous for its hardy farmers who make up an important part of the Athenian army. Rugged soldiers, independent and reliable way a farmer is, taking their duties as citizens very seriously, taking the war very seriously, willing to give up their farms, allow their farms to be destroyed in order to win this necessary and, as they see it, just war against the Spartans. And they are, of course, absolutely convinced that Sparta is determined to destroy them, and they must stay the course. So the action begins with the hero of the play. His name is Dekeopolis, and it essentially means the good citizen, Mr. Good Citizen. And he is waiting for the assembly of the Athenians to begin. And the way they did that is every citizen came into the great market area, what the Athenians called the agora, and state servants ran along with a rope that was painted red, and they began to push everybody together, gather them together. And if you came into the assembly late, you would have gotten some of the red paint on you, don't you see, from there circling the outer ones. And that was always a reason to laugh at somebody. And, of course, the ones who always come in in the red paint are the politicians themselves. They've been dining and carousing and scheming, and so the rest of the citizens are just waiting there. And Dekeopolis stands up and says, I want to make a speech. And the assembly says, no, you're not on the agenda. Any Athenian can make a speech. No, you're not on the assembly agenda for today. We are entertaining the ambassadors from the court of the king of Persia. And indeed, since the beginning of the war, both Athens and Sparta had tried to get the king of Persia to come in as their ally. In other words, betraying the very notions of freedom which they had fought for against the Persian despotism. But now they're trying to get the money from the Persian king. And in comes these delegates, and Dekeopolis, the good citizen, asks, is that the same delegation we sent off years ago? Yes, yes, but it's been a very hard task. Yeah, a very hard task to take all the gold the Persian king has given you. Look at the clothes you're wearing now. You went off in rags, and you have all these magnificent garments now, these custom-made suits, even dressed like a Persian. Ah, and look how fat you've gotten. Well, we had to do a lot of feasting with the king of Persia in his court just to try to win them over. And have you won them over? Well, not exactly right, but we brought an ambassador. And the ambassador, of course, conveniently for their ambassadors, the ones, the delegates, the politicians that the Athenians have out at public cost. All of this is on the public treasury. This ambassador who has come back from Persia doesn't speak any Greek, so they translate for him, the ambassadors do. And he says something that means like, the king of Persia will never give you any money in Persian. And the delegates say, aha, the king of Persia is willing to give us money. And then the ambassador from Persia understands enough Greek to say, no, no gold, ninki pupi. And Dekeopolis said, you just said it, no gold. Ninki pupis, he's calling us ninkum pups. No, no, no, what he said was gold coupons are coming fast. So, immediately they vote to extend the term of these delegates, send them back on this junket, that's what it is, a great political junket. All right, then Dekeopolis tries to stand up again and speak. But no, there's another delegate who has just returned from Thrace, that's the northern part of Greece. And the Athenians have been trying to lure the various tribes, less civilized tribes of Thrace in on their side. And Aristophanes' hero, Dekeopolis speaks out and says, what have you been doing in Thrace? I just served a year in Thrace. Because this is a man in his 40s, Dekeopolis, but he's in military service. I froze up there. I was wounded up there. You, Mr. Delegate, you, Mr. Politician, you're looking very fit. Yes, well, we had to spend a lot of time with Sidocles, the king of the Thracians. And what did you do? Well, we had to drink some with him because, you know, the Thracians drink hard. And have you brought us any aid from Thrace? Well, we have. We brought these superb soldiers. Well, what they are, these very old-looking men, raggedy-looking men. And how much have we paid for these? Oh, about a million and a half for each one of them. That's what you've spent our money on? How much were you bribed? Dekeopolis has shouted down again. And this time, the politicians bring a charge against him. He is a traitor. He is attempting to delude the Athenian people. So, this is very dangerous. And as he's leaving the assembly, he's set upon with stones by the chorus. And this is this group of old farmers from the land of Arcania, the district of Arcania, the Arcanians. And they begin to stone him. And Dekeopolis turns around and says, why are you stoning me? Why, we're the men who fought at Marathon. And we fight for the democracy and freedom of Athens, the democracy and freedom of Athens. What you're fighting for is for politicians to get fat off of this war, and for ordinary people like you and me and our sons to fight this war and to suffer in it and to die, and for women to go without husbands because they have died in this war, and children to grow up without parents, losing their father in this war, their mother dying of heartbreak. That's what you're fighting for. But this war is absolutely just, and we must fight it through to the end. And Dekeopolis says, you know, I'd like to tell you a little bit about how this war really got started. Now, what we know about the Peloponnesian War, as this war between Athens and Sparta is called, comes to us here in the 21st century, almost entirely from the historian Thucydides. And he was the first truly great scientific historian. He was a contemporary of the war, and he wrote so that we might use the past to make decisions in the present and to look into the future. He was a great admirer of Pericles, and he presented the view that Pericles had of the war, that Sparta was scheming to destroy Athens, that part of Sparta's plan was to weaken the power of Athens economically, and that Pericles had stepped in, had the Athenians pass an embargo upon the city of Megara, and Megara was part of the coalition of Sparta, in order to force Megara into the Athenian alliance and to destroy the power of Sparta. So that's how it all got started. The Spartans were conspiring against us, and we had to take this act of embargo against Megara. Well, Pericles never lacked for enemies. No great statesman does, and Aristophanes was one of his most bitter enemies. And he said, do you know how the war really got started? And the Archeronians said, no, tell us. Well, Pericles has as his mistress, as you know, Aspasia. And it's true, Pericles lived a very unconventional life. She runs a set of brothels, correct? Yes. She had some young men go raiding into Megara to bring back girls for her establishments. She did? Yes. And they then raided here and carried off a couple of her girls. That's how it really got started, yes. And the scandal began to break, and Pericles was looking for a way to cover himself up. And he said, get the Athenians into a war, and they won't examine anything more closely. And then, you know his friend Phidias, the one who designed the whole of the Acropolis, do you know how much that cost? Yes, it would cost a whole lot, but Pericles convinced us that it would be a monument for all time, and so it was. Yes, but we tried to look into the accounts of Phidias, and they were all scandalously wrong. Huge cost overruns. So, first we persecuted or prosecuted Phidias, the architect. Then it turned out that Pericles had been in on the take. So, we were coming at him from political and financial reasons. And so, he began this war so that you would be blinded about his own personal misdeeds. Should we talk ill of the dead? For Pericles has been dead for four years. It doesn't matter. You need to know the truth. Well, why don't the Spartans sit down and make peace with us? Because they're just as hard-headed as you are. And the two of you should sit down and negotiate and make a peace. But in the meantime, I'm making my own peace with Sparta. So, he does. Deciapus makes his own peace with Sparta, and he has all these goods from Sparta imported and from other parts of the world that have been embargoed, and sets up his own little marketplace. And suddenly, one by one, all the visitors start coming. Are those eels? We haven't had smoked eels since this war began. Yes, yes. You can have smoked eels if you're willing to think seriously about peace. What about this? These little pigs? Ah, we haven't seen pigs like this since the war began. Are you willing to talk seriously about peace? Yes, yes. Bridal pair comes. We've got no cakes for our wedding because we can't get any flour imported. I've got all these wonderful cakes here that have been brought in from Corinth since I've made a peace with Corinth as well. Oh, our wedding will be so wonderful. Well, you're going to have wedding cake, and then your husband there is going to go right off to war, isn't he? Yes? Well, darling, why don't you go into the assembly and talk about peace? And so they began to make the peace. It's turned out in a second of his plays, Aristophanes explains to us in his play, The Peace, that the god of war has literally stolen peace from the earth in order to have this bloody war, and that he has taken all the nations of Greece and put them into a huge mortar with a little garlic, a little honey, a little saffron, and pounded them up just to continue this great and bloody war. So bring peace back to earth, Aristophanes says. And the Athenians finally do in 421, and they sign a peace treaty with Sparta that is meant to last for years. And the teacher, Aristophanes, has had his triumph, but it can't last. Almost immediately, the Athenians begin to ask, why did we go to war and fight for 10 long years just to make a peace? And by 415, the war has begun again. And this time, the Spartans have become convinced that Athens is determined to be a tyrant over the entire Greek world. And this time, they must fight on to the end. The Athenians launch a preemptive strike against Sicily, and their fleet is destroyed, and they lose thousands of young men around the walls of Sicily. And by 411, their coalition partners are in revolt, and the Athenians are in the most desperate economic straits, military straits. And this time, the Spartans are going to see it through to the end. And then, Aristophanes produced his last peace play. It is called the Lysistrata. And it is generally seen as one more plea for peace, one more plea to end this war. But it's changed some, as the atmosphere in Athens has changed some. And as Aristophanes himself has come to realize, once you're in a world war like this, you must fight it through to the end. And the main spokesperson for peace in this play, the Lysistrata, is not a hearty Athenian soldier, a brave farmer. It's a woman, Lysistrata. Her name means the dissolvers of the army. And when the play begins, it's early in the morning, and Lysistrata has brought all the women of Athens together into an assembly. And they vote that they will not have any relations with their husbands until the husbands agree to make a peace with Sparta. And then, Lysistrata brings the women of Sparta in, and they make the same agreement, no relations with their husbands until they bring this war to an end. And the women even occupy the Acropolis of Athens to seize the treasure of Athens. And the men are portrayed in very graphic form, standing outside the walls, begging their wives to come down and just have one little visit with them. One of them comes up with his little baby, and he holds it up to the walls and says to his wife, how could you have run off, Myrna, from our little baby? And she talks to Lysistrata and says, I have to just go down and see the baby a little bit. Oh, you haven't even changed his diaper. What is wrong with you? He said, well, I'll change it, but couldn't we just a little bit? And she leads him on, needs a mattress, needs some perfume, and then runs back up and leaves him there. And so the men are getting desperate. And finally, the Spartans come to Athens, and the Athenians say, are you as desperate as we are? And the Spartans say, yes, yes, we are. So they begin to make a peace treaty. But immediately, they begin to quarrel over the same reasons, why we want the island of Aegina back. We're determined to keep Pylos. And so they're about to go to war again. And suddenly, the Spartans say, do you like to drink some? The Athenians say, yes, let's have a little bit of wine. That'll make the whole thing better. And so they began to drink. And by the time they're both good and drunk, they make a peace treaty. And they march off together, hand in hand, singing a Spartan war song. Now, interpreters in the 20th century have taken that comedy, the Lysistrata, and turned it into a great plea for peace. And in fact, when we were about to go to war with Iraq, the Lysistrata was performed all over the world as a statement of pacifism. But we must understand that each age has its own humor. And like Athens, Aristophanes had grown bitter during this war, and come to believe that Athens indeed had to stay the course. And if we look at this play, the Lysistrata, with the eyes of an Athenian audience, you'll see a very different meaning in it. For women were not held in high regard at Athens. Pericles completed his funeral oration praising Athens by simply saying, as for the women, I suppose I'd better say a word or two. Try not to be worse than you already are. And remember, that woman is best of whom the least is said. And Socrates, the wisest of the Athenians, one of his most used criticisms, you are worse than a woman. And women were portrayed constantly by Aristophanes as foolish, treacherous, and lascivious. So by now, Aristophanes' message is different. We tried peace, but it didn't work. And now, to make a peace treaty with the Spartans would be the same as to be like women, to get drunk and for the ephemeral pleasure of the moment, throw away all the glory that we have fought for. And so, we must see this on through to the end. And in that belief, the Athenians would reject for the next seven years every attempt by Sparta to make a peace treaty. And Aristophanes would live on to see Athens absolutely defeated, its empire and navy stripped away, and its beloved Athens and its beloved democracy become dominated by the Spartans. So they stayed the course, and Aristophanes gave them the wisdom of peace early in the war, and then followed them in their belief that the war must be won at the end. But all through, he remained just what he called himself, a teacher, teaching through comedy, teaching you to laugh despite all the disasters, and to find truth in laughter.