January Conference 1999
THEATRE
: ANCIENT & MODERN
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The
Parodos of Aristophanes’ Knights
Keith
Sidwell, University College Cork, Ireland
It is a natural assumption of readers of Knights that the identity of the chorus is beyond dispute. They enter at 247 after a clear summons from slave 1/Demosthenes in line 242 (a[ndre~ iJpph'~ paragevnesqeiv 'Cavalry men, come here!'). Their character during the parabasis cannot be doubted (see especially 551-580). And despite many passages where no reference is made to their special attributes, the mention of their youth by Paphlagon at 731 and their long hair by Demos at 1121-2 seems to confirm that they have not changed their character in between. Then in the second parabasis (1266) they again refer to themselves as qoa'n i}ppwn ejlath'ra~ (‘we drivers of swift horses').
However, the parodos contains a curious formulation which does not sit very easily with this interpretation. Here is the whole passage (255-72) with Alan Sommerstein's translation.
PAPHLAGON: Venerable jurymen! Brethren of the Order of the Three Obols, whom I feed by my loud denunciations, true or false! Come to my aid, for I am being beaten up by conspirators!
CHORUS-LEADER: And rightly too; for you eat up the public funds before the lot has fallen on you, and you pick off the outgoing magistrates like figs, pressing them to see which of them is green or ripe or not yet ripe. Yes, and you seek out any private citizen who's a silly lamb, rich and not wicked and frightened of public affairs, and if you discover one of them who's a simple fellow minding his own business, you bring him home from the Chersonese, take him round the waist with slanders, hook his leg, then twist back his shoulder and plant your foot on him.
PAPHLAGON: Do you join in the attack too? But, gentlemen, I'm being beaten up on your account, because I was about to make a proposal that it's fitting to set up a monument to you on the Acropolis in honour of your courage.
CHORUS-LEADER: What a fraud! What a supple rogue! Do you see how he tries to flatter us and humbug us, as if we were senile? Well, if he moves this way, he'll be struck by this ; and if he tries to duck out this way, he'll butt against a leg. (tr. Sommerstein)
At 255-7, the Paphlagonian
calls his own troops into the battle to defend him. These are,
of course, the old jurors who are familiar to us from Wasps
of 422, but not yet at the Lenaia of 424 to the audience
of Knights. At the end of his appeal, line 257, he gives
the reason for it as follows wJ~ uJp j ajndrw'n tuvptomai xunwmotw'n ἑν δἱκῃ γε ‘for I am being beaten up by conspirators’).
The chorus then respond at 258 with ἑν δἱκῃ γε (And
rightly too), and give as their reason his unethical activities
in the lawcourts. Paphlagon’s reply to this is curious: xunepivkeisq j uJmei'~; ejgw; d j, uJmei'~ tuvptomai... (266) 'Do
you join in the attack too? But, gentlemen, I’m being beaten
up on your account...’. Commentators naturally assume
that he is speaking to the knights.[1]
But it is very odd that he should have to explain that he is
being beaten to the very people who are beating him. And what
is the explanation of the prefix xun- and the intensive ὑμεῖς in 266?[2]
If we were to take
all these indications literally, as hints of what is happening
on stage, they would surely lead us to suppose that at 258 another
chorus group (or rather a semi-chorus), consisting of old jurors,
enters in response to Paphlagon’s appeal. However, instead
of helping him, as he expects, they fling at him accusations
of precisely the type which old jurors would be expected to
have at hand. Paphlagon’s startled response at 266 shows
that he did not expect them to side with the knights.[3]
He then makes up ad hoc the false claim that the knights
had been beating him because he was going to propose the setting
up of a ujmw'n...ajndreiv~ cavrin ( 267-8): ‘A monument to you...in honour of your
courage’).[4] Sommerstein
comments ‘presumably in the Corinthian expedition (cf.
595-610)’. This, however, depends. If they really are old
jurors to whom he is speaking, then they are probably, like
the Acharnians (181) and Wasps (1078[5]),
also implicitly associated with the battle of Marathon (cf.
1333-4). So this could be the point of reference. Or Paphlagon
could be claiming that he was suggesting that these men deserved
a monument for bravery qua jurors.
But how can the
old jurors be just that and also be knights? The obvious
answer is that they are old men, but for some reason
they are dressed as knights. Hence, the humour of this double
chorus entry - or rather the entry of two semi-choruses, one
of young knights and one of old - will have been both highly
visual and rest on something about knight and old juror choreuts
unknown to us. At 269-70, the chorus accuses Paphlagon of deceitfulness
and suggests he is treating them wJsperei; gevronta~ ( ‘as if we were senile’)33. Then, with words presumably
matched by their movements, they show the impossibility of Paphlagon’s
escape. The question now is this. Assuming the hypothesis of
a double-chorus is right, are the chorus here speaking as young
men, the knights, or as old men, or both? If it is correct to
assume that Kleon’s cry is answered by old jurors,
then at this point the two semi-choruses will have joined forces.
Thus they remain, at least textually, for the rest of the play.
Here we reach the
nub of the problem. Our text leaves the main points unspoken,
viz. the double entry, the absurd disguise, and whatever it
is which underlies the joke of the double entry. Yet we cannot
deny that an original audience could have known these things.
The double entry would have been anticipated by them if at 247
only twelve knight choreuts had entered. The absurd disguise
would have been palpable in masking and body-padding. The humour
of the double entry would have rested on a point of reference
outside the play, which could be assumed to be known by the
audience.
This reading would
give additional amusement to the epirrheme of the first parabasis
(565-80), where the chorus praise their fathers, and give background
to the evocation of the trophy at Marathon by the chorus at
1333-4. Moreover, the strophe at 973-84 actually seems to mention
once more the same group of old jurors who gave such fervent
support to Kleon as the Paphlagonian himself assumed at 255-7:
So once the inference
of a double chorus is made from 266, the insight does have a
palpable effect on the humour of later choral interventions.
But how could the
audience be expected to recognize that old men dressed as knights
were in fact old jurors? Clearly, they could only do so if they
had seen this group before. Where? Obviously not in the real
lawcourts. Possibly, though, in the comic theatre. Acharnians
1150f. allows the possibility that a chorus from an earlier
play by some other dramatist could appear in another poet’s
play and be recognized for what they are (and the Acharnians
are both old and, at least by implication, jurors: 377f.).[6]
Hence, the composition of the chorus in Knights could
very well be metacomic.
I had better explain
this new horror of a word. By ‘metacomic’ I mean that
the humour has been constructed with another comedy as a fundamental
reference-point, without which the audience misses a vital layer
of the joke. Take as an example the scene in ‘The Simpsons’
where Bart sees Hans Mohlmann, a very old and wrinkled man,
respond to a knife threat by pulling out a samurai sword. As
he does so, he remarks, ‘You call that a knife. This
is a knife.’ Then, of course, he cannot hold the sword
up, and the scene ends in bathos. This is a parody of the famous
scene in ‘Crocodile Dundee’, where the hero pulls
out a huge outback blade in response to a mugger’s knife
threat in New York, with the words already quoted on the lips
of Hans Mohlmann. I tend to use the term ‘metacomedy’
as generic. The term ‘paracomedy’ implies more specifically
that the intention of the metacomedy is to ridicule its point
of reference, by suggesting that it is bad comedy etc.[7]
Thus it would help
to substantiate this hypothesis if we could point to evidence
that Knights was a metacomedy.
I have recently
argued that the claim of the parabatic voice in Eupolis fr.
89 from Baptai to have co-written Knights, taken
together with Cratinus’ attack on Aristophanes (fr. 213)
in Pytine of 423 for ‘saying the things of Eupolis’
in Knights, can best be interpreted as a riposte to the
reuse of an earlier play of Eupolis for satirical purposes in
Knights.[8] I identified
this play as Chrysoun Genos of Lenaia 426 and suggested
that two passages in Acharnians (5-8, 299-301) refer
to it. It now becomes somewhat easier to see what is going on
with this double-semi-chorus entry in Knights. In Eupolis’
play, if we can take the Acharnians passages as unmasked
versions of it, Kleon was put on trial by the knights (5-8)
and condemned by a jury of old men (299-301). We do not know
if in fact Eupolis had made the two groups into separate semi-choruses.
Fr. 298 of Chrysoun Genos, if it enumerates the chorus,
argues against this hypothesis, since the numbers are 12-18,
which would overlap the semi-chorus. But he did use this technique
in Marikas (rich men/poor men, who speak separately at
times and together at others[9]),
which I have argued bore the same relationship to Knights
as did Knights to Chrysoun Genos. It is reasonable,
at least, to suppose that Eupolis had two contrasting choruses
in Chrysoun Genos (cf. Frogs), which came together
to condemn Kleon. To satirize Eupolis, Aristophanes borrows
both groups, suggests that their views are compatible right
from the start, and dresses his old jurors - recognizable as
the Eupolidean group from their masks[10]
- as knights to underline the point. Dramatically, then, the
parodos reinforces the point already made by the opening scenario,
where Nikias and Demosthenes in unlikely manner combine forces
against Demosthenes’ political friend Kleon.[11]
It also produces paracomic humour by subverting the Eupolidean
scenario and ridiculing the knights by adding to their number
an absurd and ugly gaggle of pro-Kleonian caricatures.[12]
It is a result of
this analysis that certain choral passages (e.g. 973f. attacking
Kleon and mentioning his old juror supporters and 1112f. accusing
Demos of cynical pragmatism in his adoption and abandonment
of politicians) would work their humour by ironic reference
to the semi-chorus of old juror knights, rather than to the
youthful semi-chorus. It will be possible for us to conjecture
that such passages were sung only by one semi-chorus, while
the others danced. For example, the epirrheme 565-80 could well
be sung by the young knights, while the actions are danced -
appropriately - by the old juror knights. The reverse inscenation
could then be applied to 595-610. Such reconstructions are of
course completely conjectural. However, the discussion underlines
how little our texts may be able to guide us in matters of visual
humour, especially where we are dealing with plays where a vital
point of reference - the play which it parodies both in its
textual and visual manifestation - is completely lost to us.
One final point,
the most counter-intuitive and controversial of all. The argument
between the poets Aristophanes, Eupolis and Kratinus over Knights
is real enough. But if metacomedy is as important as my argument
seems to reveal, we may be reading it wrong. Elsewhere I have
argued that the parabasis of Acharnians is itself satirical.[13]
The ancient scholiasts and MacDowell tried to resolve the issue
of the poetic voice here by ascribing the apparent authorship
to Kallistratus. The truth is more startling and more complex.
In my view, the play’s parabasis is a parody of Kratinus.
I believe that Hubbard was on the right track in tracing the
invention of the parabasis to Kratinus, rather than seeing it
as a traditional form.[14] I
think it was necessitated by the circumstances created by the
decree of Morychides in 440. The decree, which banned naming
of caricature characters, forced Krates in one direction (Aristotle
Poetics 1449b 5-9) and Kratinus in another. Krates abandoned
caricature comedy and adopted the Sicilian plot-based type.
Kratinus carried on with caricature comedy, but went ‘enigmatic’.
He needed something like the parabasis to explain what the play’s
point of attack really was. Aristophanes and Eupolis both mercilessly
satirised and parodied Kratinus. Hence, any parabasis we find
in their works has some point of contact with its inventor.
This brings into
question not only the identity of the poetic voice in Knights
(and other Aristophanic plays), but also that of Eupolis fr.
89. Since the actual author of Knights was Aristophanes,
it is not untoward to suggest that the first person voice in
that fragment is his. The falakrov~ (Baldilocks)
must then, of course, be someone else, and the recipient of
the gift of this drama must be a third comic poet. I suggest
that Knights was presented as though a play by Eupolis.
Further, I suggest that the ‘bald comic poet’ was
Kratinus and that he had appeared in the chorus of Eupolis’
Chrysoun Genos (298.5), the play where the knights, old
jurors and Kleon probably first appeared together, though the
old jurors and their relationship with Kleon were probably the
invention of Kratinus’ Nomoi. The central joke of
the parabasis of Knights is that it is Eupolis who has
used the ventriloquial structure of metacomedy in his previous
comedies, by pretending they were by Kratinus. Now for the first
time, he tries on his own - but it is really a comedy by Aristophanes,
of course, as the audience well knows. So when the chorus says
at 507-9 ‘If any comic producer of the old school had tried
to compel us to come forward to the audience and make a speech,
it would have been no easy matter for him to gain his wish’,
the audience at once laughs because in the play which Knights
parodies a chorus composed of the same elements was made to
do a parabasis on behalf of the old comic poet who was supposedly
the author of that play, viz, Kratinus.
The observations
I have made about the text of the parodos, then, reveal the
tip of a Titanic iceberg. I do not wish to pursue this metaphor.
Suffice it to say that my contention is that we will not know
whether or not this metacomic level is truly as important as
I suggest unless we accept the challenge of testing the hypothesis
against all the available evidence, rather than remaining silent
and assuming that the suggestion must be wrong because it subverts
things we quite clearly know. We do not know anything
any text tells us unequivocally. But this Derridaesque insight
is at its truest in reference to comic texts.
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Endnotes
[1]
E.g. A.H. Sommerstein, Knights (Warminster, 1981) has neither
a stage direction here, nor a note in the commentary.
[2]
Vickers', 1997, 107, is that 'words beginning with xun- seem
often to have carried a special significance in the later fifth
century, namely allusion to the political clubs to which many
aristocratic Athenians belonged.' He refers to O. Aurenche,
Les groupes d'Alcibiade, de Léogoras et de Teucros: Remarques
sur la vie politique athénienne en 415 avant J.C., Paris,
1974, 40-1 and M. Ostwald, From Popular Sovereignty to the Sovereignty
of Law: Law, Society and Politics in Fifth-Century Athens, Berkeley
and Los Angeles, 1986, 537-50. But Paphlagon has just called
the other group xunwmovtai (257). And the presence of
conspiratorial undertones is not the whole story, since it does
not explain the emphatic uJmei'~.
[3]
During discussion at Milton Keynes, Nick Lowe suggested that
ajndrw'n xunwmotw'n at 257 might refer to Sausage-Seller
and Demosthenes. It is true that these are grouped together
by Paphlagon at 235-9, where dual verbs are used. However, all
of the imperatives which indicate direct physical attack on
Paphlagon are singular (244, 246, 247, 251, 252, 253). Moreover,
244 and 246 are spoken by Demosthenes to Sausage-Seller. Cf.
730f., where Paphlagon explains to Demos dia; se; tujptomai uJpo; toutoui; kai' tw'n neanivskwn .
[4]
Note 1, ad 268.
[5]
See A.H. Sommerstein's note ad loc. (Wasps, Warminster 1983).
[6]
For this argument, and references to earlier discussion, see
Keith Sidwell, 'Aristophanes' Acharnians and Eupolis', C&M
XLV (1994), 106-11 with n. 69.
[7]
'Derivative metacomedy' is a further category. Here, the reference-point
is suppressed and the comedy derives its impact from imitating
something already successful, with the intention of cashing
in on the popularity of the original without the debt being
acknowledged. An example would be the use of singing tea-services
in advertisements for tea, which are calqued upon the famous
animated tea-service in Disney's 'Beauty and the Beast', which
sings 'Be My Guest'. As will be clear from what follows, though
the poets of Old Comedy largely claim metacomedy is derivative,
because they are attacking rivals for using their material,
in fact the major mode in use in Old Comedy is paracomedy.
[8]
Keith Sidwell, 'Authorial Collaboration? Aristophanes' Knights
and Eupolis', GRBS 34 (1993), 365-89.
[9]
See fr. 192.186, 117, 118, 120 and fr. 193.5-8 with the commentary
of Kassel-Austin in PCG V, 414-5.
[10]See
fr. 298 for this chorus as individualised, if the fragment does
enumerate the chorus (see above).
[11]
It seems unreasonable to deny that Kleon's success at Pylos
was due to close cooperation with Demosthenes, though of course
it is possible to argue that Demosthenes may have changed his
mind about Kleon after the Pylos incident (as a correspondent
suggests to me). But the evidence for Demosthenes' change of
mind would be the attitude his slave-caricature expresses in
Knights, and it seems the reverse of what one might call the
structure of comic ridicule to ascribe a real opinion to a caricature.
How would it be funny? By the same token, the revelation that
the parodos is comically constructed to achieve this same ironic
effect is actually an argument in favour of the ironic reading
of the opening offered here.
[12]
In an earlier article (Keith Sidwell, 'Poetic Rivalry and the
Caricature of Comic Poets' in Stage Directions: Essays in Ancient
Drama in Honour of E.W. Handley, ed. Alan Griffiths [Institute
of Classical Studies, London, 1995], 56-80), I suggested that
poets might have specific political affiliations, which they
argued in the competition. I now think it much more likely that
the very idea of affiliation with political groups is a device
used to satirize rivals. Comedy's role was to protect the demos
against its leaders by attacking their tim» through ridicule.
Hence all politicians, and especially the most successful (i.e.
in the later fifth century the demagogues), were targets. Thus,
to present a rival as an active supporter of a politician would
be of itself to accuse him of failing to conform with the proper
spirit of the competition.
[13]Sidwell
1994, 101-104.
[14]
T.K. Hubbard, The Mask of Comedy: Aristophanes and the Intertextual
Parabasis, Ithaka and London 1991, 23-27.
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Classical Receptions in Drama and Poetry in English