Heads-Up: Profanity; Offensive, Yet Serious Material

This for some of you will be your first exposure to what is termed "Attic Old Comedy," i.e., the kind of free-wheeling, sexually and scatologically rich comedy that Athenians enjoyed from 485 through about 380 BCE. You've actually already seen a little of that: isolated quotations pertaining to Pericles and his leadership, and often attacking him in outrageous style.

Now, Old Comedy didn't always feature political content, but it often did, and Aristophanes was the master. Expect a seemingly loose plot (though in this case, you'll find it all hangs together quite well, thematically); lots of what look like the words to songs, as in a musical comedy (actually, Old Comedies WERE musical comedies — those really were songs); lots of "duh-DUM-dum" jokes, often meant to comment on personalities, Socrates especially, well known to the audience.

Above all, please don't be surprised (you're welcome to be shocked) by the abundant quantities of sexual, scatological (i.e., bathroom), and generally offensive humor, including that of a clearly biased and intolerant character.

Please understand that translators, in their use of language, aren't making it all up. Rather, they try to capture in English what most certainly was originally meant to come across as offensive, abusive, etc.

Anyway, what might not be so immediately obvious is that Aristophanic comedy cannot simply be dismissed as puerile and egregiously incorrect politically. Well, it is all that, yet needs as well to be approached as satire addressing important themes the way satire typically does: through jokes, outlandish imagery, and exaggeration.

Your job will, then, not be to try to read Aristophanes sympathetically as much as to answer the following question: WHAT KIND OF SOCIAL-POLITICAL COMMENTARY UNDERLIES ALL THAT HORSING AROUND.

In-class Discussion

Many of you will have noticed I've been lecturing a lot of late. Expect from this point forward that most of the facts and theory I needed to cover has been covered, that class will, henceforth, largely revolve around student-centered discussion.

Put differently, I've mostly completed my tasks; it'll be your turn now — thanks!!

Readings Journal Entries

Pheidippides' Choice of Education Revisited: "Better" Argument v. "Worse" Argument

Prepare one argument pro-"Better Argument, one argument pro-"Worse Argument." In other words, be prepared to argue either side of the question of whether Pheidippides should study with one or the other. Try to pitch your case to Pheidippides as best you can. Approach this basically as an experiment to see what sorts of arguments best convince. We'll choose a panel of judges to represent Pheidippides' interests. We'll not, however, stipulate winning criteria in advance.

In class I will form you into three groups
- Pro BETTER ARGUMENT
- Pro WORSE ARGUMENT
- Judges
Points awarded for. . .
- Ringing phrases appealing to shared values (review Gorgias Epitaphios [Funeral Oration])
- Spin well spun (Protagoras, sophists generally)
  - If you can convincingly spin the "radish" argument (see below) either pro or con, then you'll win the special door prize
- Appropriate leveraging of ideas dealt with by Weber, Michels, Finley
- Any suitably convincing utilization of concepts operative in our class
Points subtracted for
- Offensive language, sentiments, etc. (again, standards have changed)
- Mere echoing of the play
- Poor prep, incomplete reading, etc.
In short, read and meditate on the whole play, not just the agon!

Study Guide Proper

Strepsiades ("Twister") is an Athenian old man described by the critic Dover as living " 'far off in the country.' He is ignorant, stupid, and boorish, a son of the soil and smelling of the soil — but one of its richer sons." His son has the somewhat aristocratic-sounding, yet oxymoronic, name of "Pheidippides," "thrifty with the horses." But Pheidippides is anything but: a horse-racing enthusiast, he's racked up huge debts on his father's account. So Strepsiades wants to send him to Socrates' "Thinkery" (Phrontisterion) to learn the skills necessary for Strepsiades to weasel his way out of debt.

As to the structure of the play, you'll find that if follows an oft-repeated formula in ancient comedy generally:

Problem, here, Strepsiades' debts.
Solution, here, sophistic training so that Strepsiades (or his proxy) can argue away that debt in court.
Celebration, the Dionysian part, were the protagonists party.

You'll find, though, that that "formula" gets played with by way of a kind of second plot, same "formula," but with the variables filled in differently:

Problem, here, SOPHISTIC TRAINING.
Solution, here, A SATIRIC INTERROGATION OF SOPHISTIC and sociopolitical circumstances leading to its prominence in late 400s Athens.
Celebration, here, . . . what, if anything????

Pay special attention to the changing role of the CHORUS OF CLOUDS, what they represent at various points in the play. Pay SPECIAL attention to the ending, and what kind of "celebration" that represents — who, in the end, is the joke really on??

The New Intellectualism

Sophists

From the "Sophists" study guide:

Who were the Sophists (that's "SAH-fists")? To quote from Webster's Dictionary, "In ancient Greece, any of a group of teachers of rhetoric, politics, philosophy, etc., some of whom were notorious for their clever, specious [= "attractive but tricky"] arguments."

To quote from my own terms document (s.v. "sophist"):

Prior to the later 400s BCE, a "wise man," one who stood out for sophia: wisdom or skill. By about 430, sophistes had come to refer to an itinerant professional (i.e., paid) teacher of subjects of interest to young men intending to enter public life. The term could carry negative connotations; to ordinary Athenians, it seems to have suggested a teacher of the art of verbal deception.

Intellectually, the sophists seem to have been willing to go farther than other early Greek thinkers in challenging traditional ideas. Other thinkers elevated natural forces over mythical gods as the causes of things; the sophists (at least some of them) challenged the notion that the causes of things — anything — could even be understood with any sort of objective certainty at all.

Why are the sophists interesting to us? It is at least interesting that one of the sophists, and an important sophist at that, namely, Protagoras, from the Thracian city of Abdera, was friends with Pericles. Pericles and he are said to have discussed the question of responsibility if, in a gymnasium, someone were to die by accidentally walking into the path of a thrown javelin. Should the javelin thrower be charged with involuntary manslaughter, or should the victim be "charged" with causing his own death? (Compare Antiphon Tetralogy 2.) Pericles would appoint Protagoras to draw up laws for the Athens-sponsored colony of Thurii, in Italy.

More to the point, much of the teaching of the sophists was focused on linguistic matters, that is, on logos. Skill in logos now being essential to anyone seeking success in the courts (which were very busy!) and in the democratic assembly, the sophists attracted numerous pupils. Some sophists (e.g., Protagoras, Gorgias) could command high fees. At Athens, most all of the sophists were foreigners.

But this mode of instruction could be viewed as profoundly, even dangerously, untraditional: the young were expected to receive moral instruction from friends and kin among their fellow citizens, not from foreign strangers hired to teach. Further, the instruction offered by the sophists clearly suggested to some (whether or not a given sophist would have endorsed the notion) that the power of logos to induce belief — in Protagoras' formulation, "to make the weaker argument the stronger" — should be esteemed higher than truth itself. (Compare what Gorgias has to say about tragedy.) Further still, the paying of money to a sophist could suggest to the unsympathetic the paying of money to a sex worker.

In short, the sophists could be associated . . .

with the sort of training needed by a leadership-elite desirous of acquiring political virtue so as to be able to lead well (see especially Protagoras)
with the subversion of traditional values

— sophistic, in other words, as simultaneously traditional, anti-traditional, hyper-democratic and crypto-oligarchic.

What would a sophist have told ? Ask Protagoras, and he would tell you he educated his pupils in political virtue to make them better citizens. Ask Gorgias, and he might have told you (though I'm not sure we can really know this) that he showed his pupils how not to fall for tricky arguments. But you decide . . . .

Presocratics

In Clouds, Aristophanes attacks all intellectuals, including philosophers we now call Presocratics, whose interests lay in physics (i.e., what we'd call science), metaphysics (the study of the foundations of reality), and ethics. In the play you see the denizens of Socrates' "Thinkery" studying astronomy, geology, and such — that probably has more to do with these Presocratics than with the sophists.

Socrates

An Athenian philosopher, lived 470?-399 BCE. He himself never wrote anything (Plato has him say he wrote a hymn to Apollo and adapted a fable of Aesop, but we have none of either), and our knowledge of him and his thought comes from the writings of others. In his youth he showed an interest in physics. Later, his interests seem to have narrowed almost exclusively to ethics and ethical definitions. The degree to which doctrines attributed to him by Plato really were his (Socrates') remains unclear. (E.g., Platonic metaphysics — theory of forms and such — may be more Platonic than Socratic.)

NOTE: Socrates would not have thought of himself as a sophist (teacher for hire), nor in his mature years did he think of himself as interested in the sorts of subjects (particularly natural science) that preoccupied a lot of the thinkers of the time. This is, then, a very unfair portrait of Socrates, who seems to have resented what Aristophanes' comedy did to his reputation (if Plato in the Apology is to be believed). But that didn't stop Socrates from being the butt of jokes treating him as a sophist.

In 399, Socrates was put to death by the Athenian people on a charge of impiety.

Aeschines, in his speech Against Timarchus (364 BCE), calls Socrates a sophist.

General Questions

How does Aristophanes characterize the new intellectualism?
Why does he chose Socrates as his target?
How does the playwright try to connect with his audience?
How well does he do?
What (if anything) can the play tell us about sophistic and/or popular attitudes toward same? What do we learn?

Agon ("contest") pp. 203-215

Between "Better Argument" and "Worse Argument," personifications of two sides to the issue of the utility-morality of sophistic.

The Greek says kreittōn logos ("better/stronger argument") and hēttōn logos ("weaker/inferior argument"). This evidently was inspired by the phrase associated with Protagoras: "to make the weaker argument (hetton logos) stronger (kreitton)" (fr. 6 D-K; click here).

Questions:

How does the playwright characterize the two logoi ("arguments")?
What seems to be his rhetorical aim?
- How does Aristophanes seem to try to connect with his audience?
- How is humor used here?
- How does the imagery work?
- How well does Aristophanes do?
What do you make of the "radish" argument?
- Worse Argument wants to convince Pheidippides that (a) by studying with him he can beat a charge of adultery (and thus commit adultery ad libitum), and (b) that the painful humiliations sometimes suffered by adulterers, including being reamed up the rear with a radish, aren't so bad after all. Note that, quite apart from the physical harm thus inflicted, for a male adulterer to undergo a radish-reaming would be tantamount to being "buggered" (being used sexually like a woman), an intolerable form of treatment for an Athenian citizen male.
Is there a serious commentary here? (Yes, probably, but what is it?)

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