Outline:

I. Introduction & Goals

II. The Cultural Work of Comedy

A. Comedy and the City

B. Ritual Humor

C. Laughter and Dialogue

III. The Clouds and Initiation Rites

A. Strepsiades as ephebe

B. Pheidippides as ephebe

IV. Did Socrates Corrupt the Ephebe?

C. The Thinkery as initiation site

D. Socrates as goes (wandering miracle-worker/priest)

V. Conclusion: Is Aristophanes to Blame for Socrates' Death?

Illustrations:

Terms:

Ephebe: initiate into deme and citizenship.

 

Deme: a political unit based on a limited geographical area, a parish or a borough.

 

Goes: wandering miracle-worker, healer and purifier, or priest.

Quotes:

1. Barry Strauss's Fathers and Sons in Athens: 5.

To be young and rich and to come of age in Athens in, say, the 420s, was to be part of a generation that had a taste for luxury, the money to pursue it, and the imperial swagger that came from that generation's leading position in the leading power of Greece. Yet their fathers too had been rich, luxury-loving, imperialist youths in their day (in spite of later protestations of purity). Two things made the generation of the 420s different from its predecessor: the training of the sophists and the brutality and upheavals of the Peloponnesian War, which freed the young to parade their power without inhibition or modesty.

People noticed. At first they may have been willing to wink at boys who were being boys. As the war dragged on, though, and as Athens began to lose the war, people lost their patience with the young and arrogant.

2. Strauss's Fathers and Sons in Athens: 8.

[E]very man...prided himself on being the kyrios [lord, master, someone holding power or authority] of the other human beings in his own household: that is, the kyrios of his slaves, wife, daughters, and sons under the age of eighteen....[A] man's mastery of his household was considered both to attest to and to mirror the mastery required of an Athenian citizen. A man who could not rule his wife could hardly rule Athens or the Athenian empire.

3. Strauss's Fathers and Sons in Athens: 65-66.

[T]he Athenian father was his son's legal master [or kyrios] until the boy turned eighteen. He was his guardian and representative in any judicial transaction. He had legal control of the ancestral estate and his wife's dowry even after his son's majority, but he was required to bequeath this estate to his son(s) and he could be sued for squandering it. He had the power to reject an infant, but only in the first week or so of its life. He also had the power to sever a son's ties with the oikos and hence to disinherit him, but this may have been more theoretical possibility than practical reality.

Timeline:

534 BCE Thespis first distinguishes the actor from the choral group: this is the basis of tragedy.

472 Earliest surviving Greek tragedy

427 First performance of one of Aristophanes' plays

425 Earliest surviving Greek comedy (Aristophanes' Archarnians)

423 The Clouds were presented in March at the Great Dionysia and place third.

422 Cleon (enemy of Aristophanes) dies; focus of Aristophanes' comedies changes.

405 Latest surviving Greek tragedy

404 End of Peloponnesian War

404-403 Thirty Tyrants rule

399 Socrates tried and condemned to drink poison

399-47 Plato writes his philosophical dialogues

388 Latest surviving Greek comedy (Aristophanes' Plutus)

Selected Bibliography:

Bakhtin, M.M. The Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, ed. and tr. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

Bowie, A.M. Aristophanes: Myth, Ritual, and Comedy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.

Croiset, Maurice. Aristophanes and the Political Parties of Athens, tr. James Loeb. New York, Arno Press, 1973.

Green, J.R. Theatre in Ancient Greek Society. New York : Routledge, 1994.

MacDowell, Douglas. Aristophanes and Athens. New York : Oxford University Press, 1995.

Roberts, Edgar. Writing Themes About Literature, 5th ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1983.

Strauss, Barry. Fathers and Sons in Athens: Ideology and Society in the Era of the Peloponnesian War. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Up, 1993.