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Aristophanes' Lysistrata Study Guide

Comic Foreigners, then and now

by Professor Stephen Colvin (UCL)

Although we tend to think of ancient Greek in terms of Attic (the dialect of Athens and Attica), before the third century BCE there was no standard or common Greek language in the Greek-speaking world, just as there was no political entity called Greece. Each polis (city-state) or region put up inscriptions in the local dialect (the Greek dialects are conventionally divided into four major groups: Attic-Ionic, Doric, Aeolic, and Arcado-Cypriot). This dialect diversity seems to have been accepted without worry, and Greeks rarely bother to comment on it. There is an interesting exception to this: when the Greeks wrote (or sang) high literature, there was a tradition that they used, or at least made a bow in the direction of, the dialect associated with the literary genre rather than the local dialect. This explains why the choral sections of tragedy and comedy are in 'literary Doric', which is often a fairly superficial Doric veneer added to a very poetic version of Attic-Ionic. Choral poetry was associated with Doric, and the earliest choral poetry that we have was composed by the great master of the genre, Alkman of Sparta (late 7th century BCE).

Greek tragedy belongs, with Homeric poetry, to the realm of the timeless mythical past, and all characters in tragedy speak in the same poetic version of Attic (which included Homeric forms and borrowings from Ionic). Comedy, however, is a realistic genre, and the normal dialect of comic dialogue is non-poetic Attic; it is written in a looser version of the iambic trimeter, the metre used for most tragic dialogue, and is not essentially different from the language of Lysias, who wrote speeches for delivery in court. In this realistic comic world it would have seemed strange for Greeks characters from other regions of the Greek world to speak in the same beautiful Attic as the locals: in every surviving comic play (and fragment) non-Athenians are given a reasonably accurate version of their dialect to speak. Foreigners from outside the Greek world, on the other hand, are given a very disrespectful linguistic treatment: the Greeks called them barbaroi (English 'barbarian'), and on the comic stage they speak ludicrous pidgin Greek, or even nonsense supposed to represent a foreign language.

In Lysistrata there are two groups of speakers from Sparta, one female and one male. Even though the play was produced at a particularly low point for Athens in the Peloponnesian War, it is striking that these Spartan characters are not portrayed in a negative, rude, or hostile manner: as dramatic characters they are just as serious (or not) as their Athenian counterparts. They speak in an accurate sketch of their native dialect, rather than a pastiche, or the pidgin Greek which characterises comic barbarians. Nor do they speak in the feeble, conventional Doric that characterises the choral sections of drama: even the song at the end of the play, which is a choral ode designed to recall the Spartan poet Alkman, is in real Spartan dialect rather than literary Doric.

We can assess the accuracy of the Spartan characters' dialect by comparing it with inscriptions which survive from ancient Sparta. In a comic pastiche we would expect to see stereotypical oaths and expletives followed by lapses into Attic, markers of the wrong dialect, and broken or barbarised Greek. These would indicate that the point was to raise a laugh, along with remarks by Athenian characters that they could not understand the dialect (etc.). We find none of these signals that the dialect is not to be taken seriously: there are certainly oaths and expletives, but the dialect is consistent and accurate, and is unremarked on by Athenian characters. There are occasional features which look Attic rather than Spartan, but we cannot always trust the manuscripts: over the course of 2000 years of copying, scribes were often puzzled by an unfamiliar dialect form and 'corrected' it to the Attic equivalent (but many Spartan forms are guaranteed by metre -- if you change them to Attic the line will not scan properly). And in any case, Aristophanes was not trying to produce a transcript of Spartan, merely to give a realistic linguistic characterisation to his literary creations.

Modern readers of Aristophanes have sometimes assumed that foreigners are introduced to Greek comedy merely for the sake of a laugh, and that the linguistic characterization is part of this. This is understandable, given the role that dialect has played in much European literature, drama, and film. In nation states with a standard language, regional variation has generally been looked down on or laughed at by the elite who speak the standard (or try to). In Britain between Chaucer and Shakespeare there were important linguistic and social changes: the notion of a standard language emerged, and other varieties could thus be characterized as imperfect approximations to the standard. Regional (and social) varieties were explained by reference to the stupidity, laziness, or ignorance of the speakers; or perhaps even their inherent criminality (this is sometimes the case in Dickens).

Aristophanes' Acharnians also has roles for dialect speakers (one is from Megara, the other from Thebes). Their dialects, like that of the Spartans in Lysistrata, seem to have been regarded as perfectly legitimate varieties of Greek, and not inherently amusing. This must reflect political structures in Greece in the Classical period, a collection of quarrelsome city-states which managed to unite only to fight off the Persian invasions. The notion of a standard or prestige dialect grows out of a centralized system with a political centre, and a standardized spelling system. In Greece each of the city-states regarded their own dialect as a legitimate form of Greek; there is no reason why an Athenian would have thought that Spartan sounded like 'bad' Athenian dialect.

Questions and Points of Discussion

1. What different dialects are there in your native language? What cultural stereotypes are associated with different dialects?

2. What effects does Aristophanes create by using different dialects?

3. What difficulties are there with reconstructing ancient dialects?

No starry-eyed pacifist

Professor Alan H. Sommerstein, University of Nottingham

Today, and for the last half-century, Lysistrata has been by far the best known, most read and most staged of Aristophanes' eleven surviving plays, and the heroine's name is well on the way to becoming, if it has not already become, the second word that Aristophanes has bequeathed to the vocabulary of English (the first, of course, was "Cloudcuckooland").

Certainly an important contributor to the present-day popularity of Lysistrata has been the way it has been seen as almost embodying the famous slogan of the 1960s, "make love, not war"; it is the favourite Greek drama - perhaps the favourite drama, full stop - of every movement that is or professes to be "anti-war". In one way it is not surprising that this should be so. The play is built around an audacious attempt, by the women of all the major city-states of Greece, to end the war that their menfolk have been waging against each other, with short intervals, for the last twenty years, and to do so by the non-violent but (given the comic stereotype of male physiology and psychology) sufficiently coercive method of a sexual boycott. And yet, when we look at the play more closely, we find that Lysistrata is not in fact opposed in principle to war - indeed that the play positively endorses war so long as it is the right kind of war.

We can perhaps leave aside the violence Lysistrata uses, and the pain she causes, in achieving her goals, as in her organized attack on the Scythian archers attending the Magistrate (Proboulos) and the physical effects of sexual deprivation on the men, which one of them compares to an extreme form of torture. But Lysistrata is not opposed in principle, either, to Athens waging war against other states. The great Persian war is recalled with pride by everyone who mentions it, and the women's chorus, steadfast allies of Lysistrata, in the play's first reference to that epic struggle, remember it not as a patriotic fight for Greek independence but as a source of material gain for Athens in the shape of tribute payments exacted from subject-allies. The heroine herself, in her great speech to the Athenian and Spartan peace delegations, reminds them (with much bending and stretching of history) of the military assistance that each of these states had given the other in the past - Athens helping Sparta to suppress a rebellion in Messenia, Sparta helping Athens to expel the tyrant Hippias; and one of the reasons she gives for ending internal warfare among Greeks is that they may soon find themselves fighting the Persians again. She is not, in other words, opposed to war as such; she is opposed to war between Athens and Sparta.

In this respect Lysistrata is absolutely typical of Aristophanes' work as a whole. There is no passage in any of his surviving plays in which any character expresses opposition to any past, present or prospective war against any enemy other than Sparta, unless that war either has already ended in obvious failure or is being used as a stick to beat a politician whom the dramatist detests anyway for other reasons. If Aristophanes is trying to put over a point of view about Athenian foreign policy - and I think he is - his position is not anti-war; it is pro-Spartan (as indeed the hero of his Acharnians proudly asserts, several times over).

Not that Lysistrata is inviting the Athenians to lie down and let the Spartans walk over them. If she is a peacemaker, she is a tough one. She takes no action at Athens until she has the agreement of the women in enemy states to take equivalent action, and even then she takes all but one of their representatives as hostages (while surrendering none herself). And while the detailed peace terms which she brokers are designed merely to elicit bawdy laughter, they hew far closer to Athenian than to Spartan demands. That is not the kind of peace that had any prospect of being made in 411 BC; it is merely a fantasy. And Aristophanes knew it. In the latter part of the play, after the two choruses have united, they sing two short songs, each of two stanzas, in which they make four magnificent free offers to the audience, only to add that (as we would now put it) terms and conditions apply which make the offers worthless. The first of these offers is money, lots of it (200-300 drachmas a time, equivalent to several months' average earnings), with purses to put it in. Only at the end of the stanza it turns out that the money will not be given but lent, and the loan will carry interest (rate not stated, but certainly at least 12%). The debt will, however, be cancelled "if peace ever makes an appearance". On the face of it that sounds generous, but the ethos of these songs guarantees that it can't be, so the implication must be that peace is an exceedingly remote prospect. Why should the Spartans end a conflict in which they were clearly gaining the upper hand but had not yet achieved their war aim of dismantling the Athenian empire - unless they were somehow coerced, as they are coerced in the play by their own womenfolk?

As I once wrote, Lysistrata is not a plea for peace but a dream about peace, at a time when there seemed to be little chance of the war ending unless it ended with an Athenian surrender. Aristophanes the man probably did strongly desire an end to the war, and Aristophanes the dramatist probably did hope to persuade his audience to take a similar view. But neither he, nor the heroine he created, believed that war was invariably, or even usually, a terrible evil to be avoided at all costs, and nothing in any of his plays suggests that he would have accepted a peace that did not leave Athens free to maintain her empire. Lysistrata is not an "anti-war" play.

This note is a condensed version of my essay "Lysistrata the warrior", which may be found in full in Talking about Laughter and Other Studies in Greek Comedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 223-236, and in David Stuttard (ed.), Looking at Lysistrata (London: Bristol Classical Press, 2010), pp. 37-48.

Questions and Points of Discussion

1. What attitudes towards warfare are there in the play? How do they compare with modern-day attitudes?

2. How good a leader is Lysistrata (and why)?

3. What political functions could Attic comedy perform? How does this compare with modern comedy?

How to approach ancient comedy today?

Professor Gesine Manuwald (UCL Greek and Latin)

When considering ancient (Greek and Roman) comedy today, we are faced with the curious phenomenon that these plays have been popular in one way or another with audiences throughout the centuries, but equally appear rather foreign to modern audiences. What lies behind this paradox is perhaps that some of the structures shown in ancient comedy will always strike a chord and be perceived as funny: for instance, watching difficult love affairs or conflicts between different members and generations of the same family and seeing politicians or losers ridiculed still appeal to audiences; entering a kind of fantasy world (at least from a modern perspective) creates excitement; and getting insight into other people's private lives satisfies a pleasurable curiosity. That some of what is shown is rather removed from us, or we do not even understand everything immediately, then becomes secondary. This analysis perhaps characterizes the difference between reading an ancient comedy, when one looks up all references and tries to work out what the allusions mean, and watching a performance, when one is carried away by the main plot as well as the brilliance and virtuosity of the actors impersonating the characters.

Aristophanes' (c. 450-380 BCE) comedies, the only fully extant examples of the so-called period of Old Comedy, are generally regarded as particularly linked to their time of composition since they are firmly set in the Athens of the fifth century BCE and include references to contemporary politicians and current events (in Lysistrata, for example, there are frequent mentions of the Peloponnesian War, names of generals and locations of battles, sometimes distorted). This topicality must have been one reason that made the comedies successful when they were first performed. A modern audience, however, lacks the relevant background knowledge and will not necessarily know who the mocked politicians are and why they are singled out; yet they will notice that politicians are criticized for inappropriate behaviour or unpopular actions, and since such an attitude mirrors what many feel today, this is still entertaining.

New Comedy (represented nowadays mainly by Menander [c. 342/41-291/90 BCE] for Greece and Plautus [c. 250-184 BCE] and Terence [c. 195/94-159 BCE] for Rome) is generally assumed to be more accessible for modern audiences since plays of this type include only few references to the specific political conditions of the point of composition and mostly deal with domestic affairs and love plots. While this general assessment is true, the world in which these family stories are set is different from ours: there are arranged marriages; slavery is accepted; it is regarded as condonable to rape a girl as long as the perpetrator marries her afterwards; trickery is approved when it furthers the interests of the main characters. It is only once we accept these circumstances that we can enjoy the stories, and even in these plays there are allusions to local landmarks and institutions as well as insider jokes whose relevance is now lost.

The situation is even more complex for the Roman versions of New Comedy, since these plays, taken over from Greek models by Roman playwrights, are notionally still set in Greece, but have been transferred into Latin and adapted to a Roman environment, so that, for instance, the marketplace has changed from the Greek agora to the Roman forum. The resulting fantasy world with an indeterminate setting gives the Roman poets even more freedom. Yet Cicero (106-43 BCE) in the late Republic already commented on the odd situation that the characters shown on stage are meant to be Greeks, but speak Latin, and talk about 'the Greeks' and 'us' (Cic. Nat. D. 2.91).

There is thus a history of adapting plays within the development of ancient drama. It is again Cicero who reports that in the first century BCE lines in dramas could be interpreted out of context and applied to the contemporary world. For instance, he mentions the performance of a drama by Accius in which the verse Tullius, qui libertatem civibus stabiliverat - 'Tullius, who had established liberty for the citizens' (originally presumably referring to the early Roman king Servius Tullius [6th cent. BCE]) was applied to Marcus Tullius Cicero when the actor delivered it in the appropriate tone (Cic. Sest. 123). Such a procedure shows that the texts of plays in the ancient world were regarded as scripts that could be adjusted to the current demands of the audiences, organizers and performers.

These observations may prompt the conclusion that there are different ways of approaching an ancient comedy today: we can read the surviving text carefully and try to find out what was intended at the time when it was written and first performed and how the contemporary audience might have reacted; we can follow the main plot and ignore allusions to details that are not immediately recognizable; we can consider the reception history of the play and consider how audiences in different time periods might have reacted to it, what they will have understood and what they might have changed or would have liked to change; or we can create a modernized version that deviates from the transmitted text in details, but aims to be true to its spirit by transposing the plot and its jokes into something that might be more easily accessible for modern audiences.

This year's production of Lysistrata has chosen the last option. Purists will say that such a modified performance is inaccurate and interferes with the poet's original text. This view is obviously valid, but the procedure may be justified (if acknowledged) as being in the tradition of ancient comedy and a possible way of making ancient plays more immediately accessible to a wider modern audience. Hopefully, you will enjoy this performance!

Essay questions / points of discussion

1) How does ancient Greek comedy compare with any contemporary comedy that you are familiar with? Is it completely different, or are there points of overlap?

2) What lines from Lysistrata could be adjusted to refer to current political circumstances? Explain your reasons for your choice, and how you would adapt those lines.

3) Is ancient comedy harder to adapt to modern contexts than other genres (such as epic or tragedy)? Why, or why not?