Moral internalism and moral externalism compete over the best explanation of the link between judgment and relevant motivation but, it is argued, they differ at best only verbally. The internalist rational-conceptual nature of the link’ as accounted by M. Smith in The Moral Problem is contrasted to the externalist, also rational, link that requires in addition support from the agent’s psychological-dispositional profile; the internalist link, however, is found to depend crucially on a, similarly to the externalist, psychologically ‘loaded’ profile. It (...) is also argued that the differentiation of the two competing explanations is insufficient partly because they both fail to consider crucial quantitative parameters of the judgment-motivation link. Such parameters become very important particularly in the light of Smith’s claim that this link is grounded on the observable “striking fact” where changes in the set of one’s moral beliefs systematically bring about changes in one’s moral behavior. Examples of algorithms measuring moral coherence and moral worth are provided to serve as evidence for what it comes down to, vis-à-vis the alleged fact, only a verbal dispute between the two camps. Finally, the ‘misfiring’ of these explanations is understood in connection to the irreducibility of concepts such as ‘moral worth’, and/or, ‘moral sensitivity’. (shrink)

Whether rationalism when concerned with explanations of moral motivation should stand in opposition to the relevant Humean approach is a perplexing question that is oversimplified when reduced to a rationalism vs. Humeanism clear cut opposition about the possibility of rational control over desires.This paper criticizes the significance of this simplification as well as the hypothesis of unitary psychological states constituted by beliefs and desires (referred to as 'besires') and their alleged capacity to secure rational control over desires. Besires contribute in (...) the explanation of moral motivation only indirectly, that is, not as permanent unitary psychological states but only as relatively very short-term 'backgrounds' to subsequently detached matured desires.This interpretation further explored shows that the rational demandfor a genuine rational control over desires presupposes rather than opposing to the Humean belief desire distinctness - the latter actually securing the possibility of genuine moral incoherence as long as we intend to understand it neither as irrationality, nor as psychological deficiency. (shrink)

The logical form of an inductive step figures as a deductive fallacy: concluding the antecedent from affirming a conditional and its consequent. In the sphere of practical rationality, however, where concerned with the presuppositions of action and the interactions between beliefs and desires, certain schemata have been proposed that express rational demands on agents who desire things to happen in the world. In this context, if agent A desires to φ and believes that ψ brings about φ, then, A is (...) rationally expected to desire to ψ. But it is equally rational to expect that A’s desire to φ presupposes her belief that a certain state of affairs obtains where φ is a possibility. It then follows that assuming a desire to φ and a belief that ψ brings about φ, we can derive an logical form that approximates that of the above inductive step: the beliefs that φ is possible and that ψ brings about φ entail the belief that ψ is possible. It remains an open question whether this conclusion adequately supports the rationality of the exact inductive schema. (shrink)

A quantitative interpretation is given of the (in)coherence that moral agents experience as a tension between their ordered moral judgments over n physically incompatible actions, and the competitive ordering of motivating intensities (or, desires). Then a model describing one’s tendency to reduce the experienced in-coherence is constructed. In this model, moral sensitivity (S) and desire attachment (e) function as primitives that motivate from opposing perspectives the reduction of incoherence. Two distinct sub-processes of this reduction are therefore initiated by (S) and (...) (e) co-ordinated (more or less efficiently) by the agent’s degree of rationality (R) characteristic of her capacity to handle such internal tensions. This process ends when a new equilibrium between what motivates and what resists (further) reduction has been reached. A macro-equilibrium is described involving (R) constrained by weakness-of-will (W w ). A reinterpretation of the Aristotelian characters (enkratês, akratês, etc.) and an exegesis of Hume’s ‘Calm Passions’ follow as applications. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer a new interpretation of Aristophanes’ speech in Plato’s Symposium. Though Plato deliberately draws attention to the significance of Aristophanes’ speech in relation to Diotima’s (205d-206a, 211d), it has received relatively little philosophical attention. Critics who discuss it typically treat it as a comic fable, of little philosophical merit (e.g. Guthrie 1975, Rowe 1998), or uncover in it an appealing and even romantic treatment of love that emphasizes the significance of human individuals as love-objects (...) to be valued for their own sakes (e.g. Dover 1966, Nussbaum 1986). Against the first set of interpreters, I maintain that Aristophanes’ speech is of the utmost philosophical significance to the dialogue; in it, he sets forth a view of eros as a state of lack and a corresponding desire for completion, which is the starting-point for Diotima’s subsequent analysis. Against the second, I argue that Aristophanes’ speech contains a profoundly pessimistic account of eros. Far from being an appreciative response to the individuality of the beloved, eros, for Aristophanes, is an irrational urge, incapable of satisfaction. It is this irrationality that precludes Aristophanes’ lovers from achieving the partial satisfaction of erotic desire that is open to their Socratic counterparts through their relationship to the forms. (shrink)

Nietzsche’s Aristophanes. Nietzsche dealt extensively with Aristophanes in his early work. This article reconstructs some of the sources and contexts of Nietzsche’s work on Aristophanes and, against the backdrop of the conventional image of Aristophanes in classical philology, pays tribute to Nietzsche’s farsighted social and political analysis of Attic comedy.

It has been acknowledged ever since H. T. Becker's dissertation on Aeschylus in Greek comedy that Aristophanes' plays can provide us with a terminus ante quern for the composition of the Prometheus Bound. The evidence is clearly presented by Becker and shows that there are a large number of echoes, particularly in the Knights and later in the Birds. Of these latter the most interesting occurs at Birds 1547, a line spoken by Prometheus himself, μισ δ' πατντας τω θεō (...) ς ōσθα ς which is certainly meant to parody PV 975, πλΏ λγ τōς πντας χθα ρω θεōς a line also spoken by Prometheus. It makes explicit what is surely implicit in all Aristophanic imitation, that what we have here is not just a play but a particular context that is so well known that the reference is meant to be picked up not just by the fictional ‘you’ to whom it is addressed but by the audience, too; in short we may infer that the line of the Prometheus Bound was already a classic quotation. (shrink)

An examination of Wealth 160-69 sheds further light on the portrayal of adulterers (moichoi) in ancient Greek comedy and oratory. The moichos is routinely presented as undermining the financial fortunes of a household as well as its domestic harmony. On the Greek comic stage, and in the Athenian courtroom, the moichos is less a Don Juan figure than a treacherous intruder, intent on exploiting his seductive charms to the detriment of another male citizen’s household. Such an understanding of the Greek (...) moichos helps to shed light on figures such as the Eratosthenes of Lysias 1, the youthful lover in the concluding scenes of Wealth, and Apollodorus’ presentation of the former slave Phormion. It also yields further insights into popular attitudes toward women and marriage. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Aristophanes BirdsIan C. StoreyNan Dunbar, ed. Aristophanes Birds. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. xviii + 792 pp. $105.00.Douglas Young's wonderful translation (The Burdies) is dedicated "to Miss Nan Dunbar with all good wishes for her learned edition of the original Greek." That was in 1959, and while Catullus waited nine years for Cinna's Zmyrna, we Aristophanic ornithophiles have had to wait four times that for this wonderfully (...) thorough commentary on Aristophanes' masterpiece. Birds has not fared as well as either Clouds or Frogs which have long dominated the field (and more recently Acharnians and Lysistrata). D. has now given us the "standard commentary."Although she has provided students with "more help with understanding Greek idiom" (v), it is clearly the professional scholar who will be the principal user of this commentary, especially those who are brought here by a reference to Birds and who will find D.'s notes of immense value. I noted excellent studies of peacocks (165), the agon and its roles (315-18), roosters and the early morning (338f.), the influence of Herodotos (374 et al.), the Orestes-problem (451f.), the meaning of in line 789 where D. lands a telling blow against comedy following tragedy (481), levels of meaning in (535f.), the episkopos as comic figure (562f.), dochmiacs in comedy (611), the figure of Iris (616), the sykophantes (674), the role of Prometheus (693f.), and necromancy in drama (710-12). Such notes are the very real strength of D.'s work.Three areas get special attention. First this is a new text, badly needed since neither the OCT nor the Budé is at all secure in text or critical apparatus. The introduction is dominated (thirty-two of fifty-one pages) by a discussion of the history of the text to the end of the eighteenth century, which she had considered issuing separately, but in the end kept with the rest. It does tend to overbalance the introduction, but is immensely informative and useful reading; I would have liked a list of modern editions of the sort that Rogers provided in his various commentaries. Textual evaluation I leave to the experts, but I observe that D. provides well over a dozen of her own readings ( [1064] and [1229] are attractive) and that many changes concern the attribution of lines to Peisetairos (her spelling, based on seeing the Triballian's [1615] as an attempt to say "yes, Peisetairos") and Euelpides, on the assumption that the clever leading lines belong to P. and the following lines to Eu. I am not sure this works in v. 11 where this clever capping fits P. better than Eu.Places where D.'s text makes a difference in sense include: the archon's name (Charias, not Chabrias); 16, deleting the line and its textual problem; 167, where even D.'s text may not solve the problem; 202, Tereus perches on the roof of the skene; 240, deleting both τε; 484, where is wrong; 533-38, rewriting a corrupt paradosis; 698, where μύχιος adds an edge lacking in νύχιος; 994, keeping the paradosis ("a monstrosity"-Sommerstein); 1212, reading and giving it to Iris; 1441, for the 'impossible' [End Page 336] while including some attractive alternatives in the notes; 1681, βα βάζει γ' where others either obelize or defend βαδίζει; 1757, δαπεδον with an allusion to the uncompleted temple of Zeus.Second D. gives very full accounts of the extraordinary variety of metres used in this play. Each lyric section is prefaced by a metrical analysis and consideration of the overall effect. In 227-62 it is that "of a bird repeating the same unit of rhythm over and over" (210), while the various patterns reflect bird movements. The "astrophic monody" reflects but does not parody the "new music" with which Ar. is clearly familiar (212). In 327-35/343-51-a passage seared into this reviewer's memory from the MPhil examinations of 1971-D. now prefers a change of metre rather than a highly irregular responsion, each metre reflecting the mental attitude of the birds. In 737-52/769-84 there is "no simple metrical description" (462), and D. wonders if Phrynichean tragic lyrics have been adapted "to produce a lighter bird-rhythm." There... (shrink)

This passage has been used—and abused—for the study of Athenian female initiations, or, more cautiously, of the practice of the arkteia at Brauron. As it is, it poses more problems that it solves. Most of all, it complicates the question of the age of the arktoi. In fact the scholium seems prima facie to contradict the text, when on v. 645 it says that the ‘bears’ were not more than ten years and not less than five years old, while the (...) accepted text of Aristophanes decisively implies an age greater than ten years. The situation is even more obscured by another indication pointing towards an association of the arkteia with the age of ten, the equation of the verb dekateusai with arkteusai. (shrink)

Ecclesiazusae, the first surviving work of Aristophanes from the fourth centuryb.c.e., has often been dismissed as an example of Aristophanes’ declining powers and categorized as being less directly rooted in politics than its fifth-century predecessors owing to the after-effects of Athens’ defeat in the Peloponnesian War. Arguing against this perception, which was largely based on the absence of ad hominem attacks characterizing Aristophanes’ earlier works, this paper explores howEcclesiazusaeengages with contemporary post-war Athenian politics in a manner which, (...) while different to his earlier comedies, remained closely rooted in the political and cultural concerns of the 390s. By examining the figure of Praxagora, I will first consider recent suggestions thatEcclesiazusaehints at the possibility of an anti-democratic coup. I will then examine how contemporary discussions of constitutional and legal reforms (including the invocation of ‘founding fathers’ such as Solon and Lycurgus) are incorporated into both Praxagora's language and the scenes featuring the Selfish Man and Hags that follow the establishment of Praxagora's regime. Examining these final scenes, I conclude thatEcclesiasuzaedoes not suggest that the idea of democratic equality itself is fundamentally flawed, but instead argues that Athens needs a suitable leader, well suited to the rough and tumble of assembly rhetoric, in order to successfully function. In the world ofEcclesiazusae,the men of Athens have failed too often to inspire any hope, putting their own interest above the state, and the new leader must be someone different. Thus Aristophanes sets up Praxagora as a female Solon to remake the state and lead the democracy. The second half of the play demonstrates this need for a strong leader, as problems arise both from the quarter of critical bystanders (the Selfish Man and Epigenes, the Young Man in the ‘hag scene’) and from over-zealous enforcers (the Old Women). (shrink)

Aristophanes' last two surviving plays, Assemblywomen and Wealth, have long been regarded as something of an enigma. The changes in structure – the diminution in the role of the chorus, the disappearance of the parabasis, etc. –, as well as the shift of interest away from the immediacies of current politics towards broader social themes, can reasonably be interpreted as an early stage of the process that ultimately transformed Old Comedy into New, even if it is unlikely ever to (...) be finally agreed whether Aristophanes was leading or following this trend. The decline in freshness, in verbal agility, in sparkle of wit, in theatrical inventiveness, which is perceptible in the earlier play and very marked in the later, may be put down to advancing years and diminishing inspiration. Such an explanation squares with the evidence of a marked decline in Aristophanes' productivity towards the end of his life. Whereas in the first seven years of his career he seems to have produced, or had produced for him, not less than ten plays, and in the years 420–405 approximately another eighteen, the twenty years or so that followed Frogs yielded a further eleven at the very most unless some titles have been completely lost; and since it is not likely that after the outstanding success of Frogs, and the public recognition that followed it, Aristophanes would have experienced any difficulty in securing a chorus, the explanation can only be that he was writing less. But the truly puzzling feature of the two late plays we possess is the apparent sea-change in the author's social orientation. In his fifth-century plays, from Acharnians toFrogs, as has been shown by de Ste Croix, Aristophanes reveals himself as one who instinctively speaks the language and thinks the thoughts of the well-to-do, even if at the same time he can laugh with the common man at ostentatious and useless wealth in the shape of Pyrilampes' peacocks, Leogoras' pheasants or the sultan-like garments of an Athenian imperial official – as one who was happy for the Demos to be sovereign so long as it was willing to be guided by the advice of its' betters', the καλоί тε κáγоθоί of Knights 738 or Frogs 727–9, and to leave them in the quiet enjoyment of their property. At first sight in Assemblywomen and Wealth this seems to have changed almost diametrically. (shrink)

Revising Clouds for publication some five years after its third-place showing in the City Dionysia of 423 b.c., Aristophanes retooled the first parabasis to praise the play's propriety, omitting as it did distasteful matter and gratuitous buffoonery, which—along with the judges’ crassness—accounted, he says, for its failure.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 126.1 (2005) 127-133 [Access article in PDF] Aristophanes' Frogs: Brek-kek-kek-kek! on Broadway Mary English Montclair State University e-mail: [email protected] Aeschylus: Answer me—why should the dramatic poet be admired? Euripides: For cleverness and sound advice, and because we make the men of the cities better. Aristophanes, Frogs, 1008-1010 Thirty years ago, Robert Brustein, the dean of the Yale School of Drama, commissioned Burt Shevelove (...) to restage a production of Aristophanes' Frogs that Shevelove wrote during his graduate school days at Yale in 1941.1 The performances were to be held in the Olympic-size swimming pool of the Payne Whitney Gymnasium. Shevelove asked Stephen Sondheim, with whom he had collaborated on A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, to compose the lyrics for the musical numbers and Carmen de Lavallade to choreograph the dance pieces. The cast included students at the Yale School of Drama (among the chorus were Christopher Durang, Meryl Streep, and Sigourney Weaver), and, as in 1941, members of the Yale swim team were assembled for the frogs. In addition to stripping the original Greek script of most of its topical allusions, Shevelove updated the comic agōn by replacing Aeschylus with Shakespeare and Euripides with George Bernard Shaw, whose detractors, much like Euripides' opponents, characterized him as "subversive" and "unpatriotic" and believed that his plays favored criticism over commitment. Broadway columnists traveled to New Haven to review the [End Page 127] performances, and, for the most part, the response was positive.2 Despite this acclaim, however, only a few other directors in the intervening years have dared to stage this imaginative adaptation.3The Lincoln Center Theater decided to mark its twentieth anniversary with a revision of this script that poses an answer to Aeschylus' question in Frogs, "Why should the dramatic poet be admired?" The production owes its very existence to the advocacy of Nathan Lane,4 who shrewdly decided to employ the talents of Tony Award-winning Susan Stroman as choreographer and director. Lane updated the original script, and he and Stroman convinced Sondheim to write additional songs for the libretto. In an interview with John Guare, Lane revealed that he saw Aristophanes' Frogs as speaking directly to challenges of our times: "There's something idealistic about the notion of someone believing that the arts can make a difference, that you can effect a change. Dionysos' dream to go down to Hades and bring back this great writer who could actually have an effect on the world, it's noble and touching and crazy—all at the same time. I found it moving, in light of what was going on in the world."5 Stroman, too, believed that Frogs could offer comfort not only to fifth-century Athenians embroiled in a thirty-year civil conflict but also to those trying to rebuild their lives after the recent terrorist attacks: "And when Nathan first brought this [script] to me, it was only a [End Page 128] year after September 11th. We were all still reeling. I think that's another reason I was attracted to the play immediately. Usually, when one grieves, you can go somewhere and have a little relief from it. But when September 11th happened, the entire city of New York was grieving. There was nowhere to go, and there would be nowhere to go for a very long time. No one was stepping forward who could truly speak about what just had happened. No one could find words to comfort us or explain these images we were overwhelmed with daily. There was no one to ease our hearts."6 Although the links that Lane and Stroman draw between fifth-century Athens and New York often work well—the topical jokes about George Bush elicited veritable "hooting and hollering" from the typically reserved Broadway theatergoers—the play's final message, that a dramatic poet, in this case Shakespeare, can save the world from its present woes (or at least help it along), seems unlikely to satisfy an audience whose... (shrink)

Among the Greek manuscripts in the Earl of Leicester's library at Holkham, which were recently acquired by the Bodleian Library throuth the generosity of the Dulverton Trust, is a volume containing eight of Aristophanes' plays. This manuscript is not included in the list of Aristophanes' manuscripts compilied by J. W. White, and it seems that no editor has ever consulted it. The object of this paper is to describe the manuscript, which will be called L, to prove that (...) it is an almost complete copy of the Triclinian edition of Aristophanes. (shrink)

This note concerns the meaning of the phrase μελήσει ταῦτα and the anomalous use of the singular demonstrative pronoun in Aristophanes, Wealth 229. Although the manuscripts are unanimous in their readings, I argue that the paradosis should be emended to μελήσει ταῦτα.

Aristophanes, Lysistrate 256–65 271–80 runs as follows. I print the muchdiscussed and frequently emended2 lines 260–65 275–80 as they appear in the manuscripts and testimonia, and shall argue that they are sound with the exception of 264, for which I suggest an emendation.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Aristophanes: ThesmophoriazusaeElizabeth W. ScharffenbergerColin Austin and S. Douglas Olson, eds. Aristophanes: Thesmophoriazusae. With intro. and comm. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. cviii + 363 pp. 2 color plates. Cloth, $195.This long-awaited edition of Thesmophoriazusae is a welcome newcomer to the Oxford University Press series of commentaries on the comedies of Aristophanes. Colin Austin and S. Douglas Olson have collaborated to produce a generous work of (...) scholarship that offers a comprehensive perspective on this Aristophanic comedy, which playfully imagines the tragedian Euripides and his kinsman-by-marriage (the "Inlaw") fighting for their lives as they seek to allay the wrath of the matrons of Athens, who have been angered by Euripides' representations of female characters, during an annual women's festival (the Thesmophoria) honoring Demeter and Persephone. The volume offers a new and carefully edited text, which incorporates emendations that Austin has already proposed in separately published articles, and an informative apparatus criticus. On every page of the text there is a second apparatus (standard in Oxford University Press's recently published editions of Aristophanes) that indicates where words and verses are cited in the works of later authors (e.g., Philostratus, Lucian) and [End Page 140] in ancient and medieval lexica (e.g., Hesychius, the Suda). The introduction and meticulously detailed commentary supply extensive information about the comedy, the circumstances of its original production in 411 b.c.e., its relationship to other Aristophanic dramas, the history of its transmission, and a host of related topics. A bibliography, two indices (one for Greek words and one for general references), and two color plates of the Würzburg krater, representing the comedy's parody of Euripides' Telephus, complete the volume. Students and scholars with a variety of interests and needs will find this edition of Thesmophoriazusae most useful. Thanks to its editors' erudition and the thoughtfulness of their presentation, it is also a pleasure to read.In the introduction's summary of Thesmophoriazusae's manuscript tradition (lxxxix-xcviii), the survey of the most frequent errors in Ravennas 429 ("R," the tenth-century manuscript that is the only independent witness for its complete text) permits readers to get a sense of the kinds of emendations that have become common property in most of the editions published since the Renaissance. These conventional emendations aside, Thesmophoriazusae's text still leaves much room for editorial discretion, which Austin and Olson always exercise judiciously (even if one disagrees on occasion with their choices). Most importantly, a keen appreciation of Aristophanes' humor consistently informs their decisions concerning emendation, as is revealed by the interpretations of the jokes in 12 (defending the verse against deletion), 232 (retaining R's α), 242 (retaining R's and accepting Medaglia's restoration of ), 912 (retaining R's ), and 1094 (accepting Brunck's supplement ). They are also guided by the concern for making the text square with fifth-century Attic usage: see, e.g., the restoration of (for ) to 758-59 and the preferences for (over the transmitted v) in 173 and 478 and for (over the transmitted ) in 554.An unusual textual feature in this comedy—and an editorial challenge—is the pidgin-Greek spoken by the Scythian archer who guards the captured Inlaw in 1001-1225. Austin and Olson print his part without accents because, as they explain in the commentary's note on these verses (which also supplies a helpful list of the idiosyncrasies in his speech), "he must consistently have got [the accents] wrong" (308). Other editorial decisions (e.g., Austin's for R's unmetrical in 1088) bear out the editors' perception of the Scythian as a consistently bad speaker of Greek (325, n. on 1087-89).The comedy's lyric passages arguably present its thorniest set of editorial challenges. Most of the songs are marked by complexities in their rhythmic patterns; there is relatively little strophic responsion, and the two showcased parodies of tragic lyric (Agathon's song in 101-29 and the Inlaw's reworking of Andromeda's lament in 1015-55) feature elaborate polymetry that additionally complicates the tasks of interpreting and editing. Austin and Olson generally concur with the colometry and analysis of Thesmophoriazusae's songs that L. P... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazousai and the Challenges of Comic Translation:The Case of William Arrowsmith's Euripides AgonistesElizabeth ScharffenbergerThesmophoriazousai is conspicuously absent from the well-known and widely used series of Aristophanes translations that, under the editorial supervision of William Arrowsmith, was published originally by the University of Michigan Press and then taken up by New American Library. This is not to say, however, that a translation of the comedy was never (...) composed for this series. Arrowsmith took the task upon himself and began his translation of Thesmophoriazousai some time before 1960 when the Aristophanes series was at the height of its production; in later years, he revised his text at least once, and the evidence points to 1968-1973 as the principal period during which the translation was reworked. The cover page on the manuscript that he sent me in 1991 indicates that an introduction and notes (standard in this series) were to accompany the translation, but the package I received contained only the translated text, and I have no idea whether the notes and commentary were ever composed or finished. The text of the translation has a handful of typographical errors and minor inconsistencies in the directions on costuming and staging, which seem to mark the project as an arrested work in progress.The unpublished creation of a renowned classicist who was also a prolific and respected translator, Arrowsmith's Thesmophoriazousai — titled on the manuscript's cover page, Euripides Agonistes (Thesmophoriazousae)— provides an exciting venue for exploring the challenges involved in translating Aristophanes for contemporary English-speaking audiences. My purposes in this paper are thus twofold. I want to examine selected aspects of Arrowsmith's version of this comedy and also advance some general ideas about the challenges involved in translating the plays of Aristophanes and, for that matter, any comic work. My endeavor on both scores will be both preliminary and cursory; there is no way to do justice to every feature of this translation in a few pages or to [End Page 429] produce a complete theory of comic translation. But I hope that I can suggest a reasonably systematized foundation for analyzing the choices Arrowsmith made in his rendering of Thesmophoriazousai and, at the same time, present a set of criteria that might have broader use to people who rely on all kinds of comic translations.The "Frames" of Comic TranslationThere are very few works that treat, from either practical or theoretical perspectives, the translation of comic works and comic devices such as parodies and puns. These works include an essay on translating Ari-stophanes published in 1960 by Arrowsmith, titled "The Lively Conventions of Translation," as well as Douglass Parker's 1992-93 Arion essay in Arrowsmith's memory and André Lefevere's Translating Literature: Practice and Theory in a Comparative Literature Context. Their consensus is that translating comedy, especially Aristophanic comedy, poses formidable and unique challenges.1The most obvious challenge is the topicality of jokes and comic scenarios. According to Arrowsmith, "It is initially the hard facts of culture that most torment the translator of Greek comedy.... Tragedy... keeps a decent distance from common life, but comedy dumps into the translator's lap an intolerable profusion of things—odd bits of clothing, alien cuisine... unfamiliar currency, etc." (1960, 123). Thesmophoriazousai bears out this observation; it overflows with difficult "things" and "hard facts" to translate, beginning with the many props and elements of costume that come into play in the prologue with the appearance of Agathon and the dressing of the Kinsman, and including such crucial items as Mica's wineskin "baby." The problem of "translating" these objects is compounded by the challenges involved in making intelligible the comedy's preoccupation with Euripides and its many-layered engagement with Euripidean tragedy, which give rise to the parodies of Telephus, Palamedes, Helen, and Andromeda. These parodies go hand in hand with countless theatrical in-jokes and self-conscious references to local Athenian theatrical practices. Then there are the play's festal performance context (the Dionysia) and festal setting (the Thesmophoria), its allusions to local forensic and judicial procedures, and its caricatures of figures such as Agathon and Cleisthenes who, like Euripides, would have... (shrink)

In my second article on this subject I asked Professor Webster to clarify his previous statements. My article was shown to him before publication, and his reply will be found immediately following it. I will confine my remarks here to a single point, because it is simple and decisive. The only passage in ancient literature explicitly connecting the phallus with Old Comedy is Clouds 537 f. There Aristophanes says that his play does not wear ‘any stitched-on leather, hanging down, (...) red-tipped, thick, to make the children laugh’. Webster, following Körte, throws all the emphasis on and interprets the passage as meaning ‘the phalli worn in this play do not hang down’. Asked why so much emphasis should be placed on the word , he makes no reply. (shrink)

The basis of this article is a reconsideration of some old and familiar problems about Aristophanes' early career. In the course of trying to supply firm solutions to these problems I hope also to present evidence for an early and inconspicuous stage in Aristophanes' development as a comic dramatist, and as a reflection on the resulting picture I shall make some general observations on ou understanding of the relationship between the various activities involved in the creation of a (...) comic production in the fifth-century theatre. Practically all the material I shall deal with comes from the plays themselves, and I should state at the start that I both work with and hope to justify the principle that Aristophai disingenuousness does not normally operate where hard facts of chronology, law and theatrical conditions are concerned. (shrink)

Amongst the people who pester Peisthetaerus with unwanted help and advice in the latter part of the Birds is Meton, famous astronomer and mathematician, who produces and demonstrates with instruments a method of laying out the plan of the new town. Peisthetaerus makes no attempt to follow him and quickly bundles him out again without much ceremony. Commentators and readers with few exceptions treat him in a similar way. ʹΕπίτηδες δανόητα, δόλου νοηταίνε, παίζε—such are the comments of the scholiast, and (...) editors are mostly content with that. Van Leeuwen says, ‘Metonis haec verba intellegere velle, id est operam dare ut suo ioco frustretur cbtnicus.’ The passage is of course highly comical; to make it didactic and attribute to Aristophanes a serious excursion into geometry and town-planning would be perverse and pedantic; but in Aristophanes more than in most comic writers there is commonly a grain or two of truth among the chaff. These grains, though of little or no importance for the appreciation of the play as comedy, may still have some possible value in other ways, and should be carefully sifted. (shrink)

A hexametrical couplet from Aristophanes' lost Amphiaraus has in the past been interpreted as a fragment of an oracular response.

A scholiast's note on Lysistrata mentions that there was an alternative title to the play: Adôniazousai. A close reading of the play with this title in mind reveals that Lysistrata and her allies metaphorically hold an Adonis festival atop the Acropolis. The Adonia, a festival that is typically regarded as “marginal” and “private” by modern scholars, thus becomes symbolically central and public as the sex-strike held by the women halts the Peloponnesian war. The public space of the Acropolis becomes, notionally, (...) a private rooftop, and Adonia-like activity proliferates; boars, myrrh, Aphrodite, “gardens of Adonis,” and lamentation all play important roles. The notion that the women of Lysistrata hold an unexpected Adonis festival on the Acropolis, at the very heart of the Athenian polis, provides a more nuanced reading of the play and forces us to rethink the place of the Adonia at Athens as well as, more generally, the distinction between public and private festivals. (shrink)

In Aristophanes' Male and Female Revolutions author Kenneth M. De Luca offers a detailed study of two of Aristophanes' plays and reveals how each illuminates the other and the question of the rule of law through the lens of democracy. De Luca uses classical thought to clarify contemporary and foundational issues in political theory.

Leo Strauss is one of a handful of political philosophers to turn his gaze to the political thought of Aristophanes. In his book Socrates and Aristophanes, Strauss provides one of the longest, most methodical, and most comprehensive studies of the Aristophanic corpus. Taking as its starting point Strauss’s interpretation of Aristophanes’s Frogs—as it pertains to the political poetics of Aeschylus and Euripides—this essay seeks to demonstrate that Strauss’s reading of Aristophanes was influenced by Nietzsche’s hermeneutical framework (...) of agonistic impulses. Via an interdisciplinary reading of the agonal erotopoetics involving Aristophanes and his older rival Cratinus, I argue that Strauss appreciated the concept of agonal creative contests and its intertextual manifestations. In addition, I raise the possibility that, similar to Nietzsche, Strauss’s perplexing style of writing is a mimetic form of agonal intertextuality. (shrink)

In his article on the early career of Aristophanes, in particular on the relevance of the thiasotai on IG ii2.2343 and the importance of Herakles in the plays of Aristophanes, David Welsh has supported the thesis of Dow, that several of the thiasotai are mentioned by Aristophanes in his plays . He suggests that another of these thiasotai, Lysanias, may be alluded to at Clouds 1162. Here the unusual word λυσανας in the text means ostensibly ‘deliverer’, but (...) Welsh argues that in view of the rarity of the word ‘the spectators would have been put in mind of a contemporary individual…a Lysanias who was known for his filial piety or forensic ability .’. (shrink)

This paper provides a short historical and systematic survey of parameters, problems, and proposals concerning the theoretical treatment of indivisible temporal boundaries throughout the ages. A very early trace of thinking about them is identified in Aristophanes’ comedy The Clouds. The approach of logicians in the late Middle Ages is placed in a broad context. Links of this topic to the issues of vagueness, modality, space and quantized time are discussed.

Kenneth Dover proposes an explanation of this joke in which the gist is to be understood in terms of ‘homosexual rape as an expression of dominance’, so that Dicaeopolis is offering himself up for use as a pathic by Lamachus. Dover believes that the joke becomes ‘intelligible if the assumption is that the erastēs handles the penis of the erōmenos during anal copulation’. Others have seen a circumcision joke here. Alan Sommerstein explains how the joke would work either of these (...) ways. (shrink)

At the beginning of the dog's trial the prosecution state the charge and the penalty they propose. It seems to me that there may be a more complicated joke here than is generally realized. The penalty of a collar is appropriate for a dog and in real life was sometimes imposed on a slave or a prisoner . The epithet applied to the collar is usually translated ‘of figwood’ and taken to be a pun on . Commentators see the same (...) pun earlier in the play at 145, although in that passage the sense may be adequate without the pun; the adjective does not necessarily constitute a joke in itself but is perhaps chosen deliberately to lead into the joke. (shrink)

"Strauss gives us an impressive addition to his life's work—the recovery of the Great Tradition in political philosophy. The problem the book proposes centers formally upon Socrates.

When Kleomenes seized the Athenian Akropolis , he was forced to surrender and leave Attika. Why was he wearing a very short cloak? Wilamowitz thought it was because he had to give up part of his clothing when he surrendered. But in fact Spartans always wore scanty clothing; being unwashed for six years cannot have been a condition of surrender after a siege lasting only two days ; and clearly the whole of 278–80 is not an account of the conditions (...) of surrender, but an expression of the Athenians' amusement or disgust at the normal appearance of Spartans. (shrink)

in memory of Eric HandleyDicaeopolis brushes the informer aside and closes his deal with the starving Megarian: ΔΙ. … λαβὲ ταυτὶ τὰ σκόροδα καὶ τοὺς ἅλαςκαὶ χαῖρε πόλλ’. ΜΕ. ἀλλ’ ἁμὶν οὐκ ἐπιχώριον.ΔΙ. πολυπραγμοσύνη νῦν ἐς κεϕαλὴν τράποιτ’ ἐμοί. 833 Even before Douglas Olson's thorough study of the tradition in his commentary on Acharnians it was clear that the oldest manuscript, R, has as much weight as the agreement of the others that editors report. In 833 it reads πολυπραγμοσύνη, the (...) others –σύνης. A scholion runs λείπει τὸ ἕνεκα, ἕνεκα τῆς πολυπραγμοσύνης, plainly written for a text that had –σύνης, which is also the lemma in one manuscript; the lemma in the other that has one is –σύνῃσιν. It has not been shown, however, either that this scholion is ancient or that its agreement with all the manuscripts but R overrides the testimony of R. As regards attestation, therefore, the tradition offers two readings of equal weight, or three if –σύνῃσιν is taken to be a relic of a text different from the one that prompted the scholion. (shrink)

This passage has long embarrassed interpreters, and many, beginning with Kock, have condemned it as spurious. But this would mean that Aeschylus' only answer to Dionysus' question ‘what safety have you for the city?’ would be, in effect, ‘none’ : and this would hardly justify the general confidence expressed in the final scene that Aeschylus will in fact be able to save the city. The most recent editor, Stanford, rightly rejects the idea of interpolation here.

The author makes a study of the problem of love understood as meeting of the two parts of a soul-sphere. It is a Greek myth that has had a long tradition in the Arabic literature on love. The author is centered in Ibn Hazm of Cordoba.

Aeschylus has just defeated Euripides in the verse-weighing round of their contest. In 1407–10 he issues a final challenge, that with two lines he could outweigh Euripides' whole household. But as it stands the challenge is incomplete; to finish it we need something like ‘and my poetry would easily appear the heavier’. Perhaps Aeschylus is interrupted by the next speaker— or, it has been suggested, by a thunderclap heralding the arrival of Pluto.

Professor Webster has replied briefly to my article on this subject, and has dealt elsewhere with the works of art. One point I will gladly concede. In referring the phlyakes-vases to ‘the fourth or third century’ I was quoting Pickard-Cambridge's words in Dithyramb, etc. , p. 267. But in Dramatic Festivals , Pickard-Cambridge, perhaps influenced by Trendall, speaks of the fourth century only.

So van Leeuwen prints the lines, following Cobet and Meineke in athetizing 16. Nor is it difficult to find grounds for the exclusion; τòν πο is repeated at 47; the following three words smell of the scholiast; the last three resemble the end of 13. The line taken as a whole seems to play little if any role, and indeed to lack meaning, even if line 47 is some way away and it is a little odd that the three separate (...) elements meld into a perfectly acceptable comic trimeter . Conjectures are not lacking for the replacement of κ τν ρνων by something which gives more sense; Köchly's νθρωποσ ποτ' ὢν may be taken as typical in both meaning and style. (shrink)

Although there is a long tradition, going back at least to the tenth century, that would see Aristophanes' Birds as somehow related to the exile in Lacedaemon of Alcibiades, and to the fortification of the Attic township of Decelea by his Spartan hosts , current scholarship surrounding Birds is firmly in the hands of those who are antipathetic to seeing the creation of Cloudcuckooland in terms of a political allegory. ‘The majority of scholars today…flatly reject a political reading’; Birds (...) has ‘no strong and obvious connection with a topical question of public interest’; ‘attempts to find in Birds any extensive allegorical comment…are unconvincing’. Not only is it widely believed that ‘Birds… is strangely free of political concerns’. but also that ‘the theme of the Birds is absurdity itself…it is about meaninglessness’ . This is a tradition that descends from A. W. von Schlegel, for whom Birds was ‘merely a “Lustspiel”, full of imagination and the marvellous, with amusing touches at everything, but with no particular object’. This approach was reinforced by the fact that by the second half of the nineteenth century, the allegorists had apparently spun out of control. By 1879, there were no fewer than 79 accounts of the Tendenz of the Birds —some political, some ‘escapist fantasy’–on offer. The most influential allegorical interpretation of Birds was J. W. Suvern's study of 1826, but which is now generally dismissed, and only mentioned to be held up as a warning to those who might be tempted to take the allegorical route. This paper takes a different point of departure, namely Pierre Brumoy's Le thétre des grecs , an allegorical treatment that is full of good sense, and which was too hastily dismissed by Suvern, and ignored by others. (shrink)

In his admirable commentary, Jeffrey Henderson notes the significance of posture and of physical setting. He does not remark that the statue of Leaina near to which Lysistrata and Kalonike are standing on the Akropolis was intimately tied to the obscure story of the later years in the Athenian tyranny. With minor variations of detail or colour the story was that Leaina, a hetaira beloved of Harmodios or Aristogeiton, had been tortured by Hippias after the murder of Hipparchos but, brave (...) girl, had preferred to die than say yes, or indeed say anything. She bit out her tongue. The Athenians set up a bronze lioness, the work of Amphikrates, to commemorate her martyrdom. (shrink)

The vastly underrated Plutus receives at least some of its due in this paper. At its beginning, I attempt to locate Plutus within both the Hegelian discourse on comedy and within Hume's poetical and philosophical fictions. Employing the same method of close textual analysis that I employed in Philosophy and Comedy: Aristophanes, Logos, and Eros, I focus upon the thoroughgoing materialism of the poor farmer Chremylus who laments the unjust distribution of wealth, and who seeks to restore the god's (...) sight so as to obtain a large amount of the wealth he lacks. The critical section of the play occurs in an exchange with Poverty or Need, who is depicted as an ugly hag but who speaks beautifully. Aristophanic music subtly sings the glory of need as the spur to all that is good in human actions, as it mocks wealth as a standard of human worth. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:After Irony: Aristophanes’ Wealth and its Modern InterpretersJames McGlewThe contest between Chremylus and Penia in Wealth (488–626) lies at the center of interpretations of Aristophanes’ final surviving play and of Old Comedy’s dramatic and receptive development in Aristophanes’ last years. In much of the work of scholars since Helmut Flashar’s 1967 article, 1 and including A. E. Bowie’s recent study (1993) on Aristophanes, that contest (...) and the episodic portion of the play following it are seen as dominated by a tension between the play’s logical consequences and its dramatic outcomes; Penia, these scholars believe, gives the better argument, and when Chremylus nonetheless proceeds with his plan of restoring Plutus’ sight, his program is haunted by her warnings: for the insightful members of the audience, Chremylus’ plan proves to be a social and ethical catastrophe. This “ironic interpretation” of Wealth has troubled some recent commentators. But most of those who refuse to see a fundamental disengagement between the logic and drama imbedded in the play, find a similar tension between the play’s dramatic promise and its reception; for Konstan and Dillon (1981) and for Olson (1993), the play imagines universal wealth but serves a conservative, anti-revolutionary ideology: comic fantasy provides an escape for an increasingly impoverished and powerless dēmos. Thus, even if Wealth did not persuade poor Athenians that Penia was better than Plutus, it still helped keep them loyal to her.Recent interest in Wealth has had some effect in rescuing the play from literary death. Viewed as enervated and unimaginative by most scholars of recent generations, 2 Wealth has regained the moral weight [End Page 35] that once inspired the Italian Renaissance to honor it before any other work of Greek antiquity with a Latin translation, 3 and that invited the attention of Fielding (Aristophanes 1742) and other modern translators. Underlying this new interpretation of Wealth lies a reassessment of its dramatic qualities: the dramatic and narrative infelicities that troubled the last generation of Aristophanes scholars are now seen as keys to the subtlety of this last extant example of Old Comedy. But the revived interest and dramatic reassessment of Wealth have made it into a very different play. 4 What earlier scholars had read as a somewhat anemic flight into escapist fantasy is now taken as a demonstration that wealth and justice, good behavior and material happiness are inherently irreconcilable. Chremylus may dream of universal wealth, but the play itself hopes to offer its audience a superior moral wisdom.The new readings of Wealth constitute a relatively united front against which the few dissident voices—Sommerstein’s (1984) is the most important 5 —have had little effect. This paper examines the dramatic and political character of Aristophanes’ last comedy to argue that Wealth itself thematizes the relationship between comic fantasy and its audience’s private desires, a relationship at the heart of recent conservative interpretations of the play. I will suggest that Aristophanes has constructed Chremylus’ victory over Penia to restate—albeit his audience and comedy itself were changing—the political significance and integrity of comic fantasy. Accused by Penia at 557—and by her modern admirers—of doing nothing more than “trying to kō mō idein” her, Chremylus [End Page 36] invites his audience “to laugh at poverty” and dream of escaping it in a way that reaffirms Athenian democratic identity and celebrates the decision-making powers of the collective dē mos. 6The ironic interpretation of Wealth, and even some critics of this interpretation, 7 assume that Aristophanes’ audience would have perceived, and held on to the perception, that Penia’s argument was stronger than Chremylus’; and that, moreover, the superiority of Penia’s argument shaped the audience’s view of the second half of Wealth, which presents a utopic vision of life without her (Olson 1993, 235–36). But the comic arguments of Aristophanes’ earlier agons—our best source for reconstructing the expectations of Wealth’s audience—do not offer much support for these assumptions. Arguments win in Aristophanes’ earlier plays by uniting the Chorus, the synecdochic audience, behind the protagonist; for this, verifiable fact is not necessarily the best tool. In Acharnians, Dicaeopolis’ argument... (shrink)

I set the stage for Socrates and Aristophanes’ alliance by beginning with Hegel’s question, what is the object of art?, in the context of his analysis of ancient Greek “art-religion.” Hegel traces the shifting object of art through a variety of artistic practices before arriving at comedy, which he identifies as the last stage of Greek aesthetic life. He finally asks, what is the object of comedy? Unlike other artistic practices that are positively defined by their created object or (...) creative activity, ancient comedy appears to be purely destructive, terminating anything that might be traditionally recognizable as an object of art. Hegel points to Aristophanes and Socrates as representing two sides of the defacement of the object of art-religion as such. Moving beyond Hegel, I turn to Aristophanes and Plato to consider how in the performative destruction of the object of aesthetic and philo- sophical reflection, something slips into being that may be identified as the phantom form of the Subject. (shrink)

This article argues that a joke about the demagogue Hyperbolus in Aristophanes’ Peace (685–7) can be illuminated by a reconsideration of the meaning of the little-attested word περιζωσάμενος in the Aristotelian Constitution of the Athenians (Athênaiôn Politeia 28.3), where it describes how Cleon dressed in an unconventional manner when appearing before the assembly. In recent translation of and commentary on the Aristotelian text there appears to have been no investigation of the meaning of περιζωσάμενος in Greek comedy: readers are (...) informed that Cleon either hitched up his (unspecified) clothing or somehow fastened his cloak to allow him to make gestures with both hands. However, the philological and material-cultural evidence presented here points to something more specific and more dramatic. Elsewhere in classical and later Greek the word περιζώννυσθαι means belting or knotting something around the waist and is most frequently found in contexts of manual labour. Here, it is argued that the import of Athênaiôn Politeia 28.3 is that Cleon spoke to the assembly dressed for work in his family’s tannery—a powerful symbol of his allegiance to the manual-labouring demos and his antagonism towards the aristocratic elite. It is to his unconventional self-fashioning that Aristophanes alludes in Peace when he jokes that after Cleon’s death the naked demos has wrapped itself (περιεζώσατο) in Hyperbolus, the new leader of the people. (shrink)

In The Concept of Irony, Kierkegaard aims to show the inadequacy of an ironic standpoint not through a generalized dialectical account of its failure onits own terms but through an empirical examination of the actual life of Socrates. Crucial to his methodology, I argue, is his use of the term “suspend” (svæve).Socratic irony is not overcome, superseded, or annulled, but rather “suspended” in its incomplete connection to its community. In both his depiction of Socratesas hanging in a basket and his (...) deification of insubstantial clouds, Aristophanes provides a model for Kierkegaard’s conception of suspension. By bringing Socrates into direct engagement with the Clouds, Aristophanes shows Kierkegaard not just the tendency of Socratic irony to suspend itself, but a way of approaching irony that does not reduce it to a moment of a greater totality. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to focus the function of women in Aristophanes’ theatre and in Plato’s book V of the Republic, in an attempt to compare the different strategies adopted by these two authors in staging the female subject on the scene of their respective writings. This enquiry involves raising some fundamental questions such as : is the world of women, evoked by Aristophanes in his dramas and by Plato in his dialogues, a simple metaphor and (...) a mere instrument, if not an utopian mirage, of political theorizing? If this is not the case, what is the real and practical importance of women within the models of society and collective life outlined by Aristophanes and Plato? Do Aristophanes and Plato share a same perspective about the role of women in their hypothetical ideal cities? If not, what are the differences between Aristophanes’ and Plato’s views on this matter? (shrink)