I saw this article in a London paper this summer; it is dated August 15.

Four English tourists have been jailed for showing disrespect to a Greek national monument when they were photographed displaying their buttocks in the ruins of an ancient palace. The display was captured on film by a government worker at Knossos on Crete. She immediately took her evidence to the police. The four were arrested on Thursday afternoon at the archaeological site on charges of "causing a scandal by engaging in obscene acts." Shiva Mahalingham and Mit Kopeha, both 22, and Daniel Maher, 26, were jailed for ten months. Vimal Patel, 23, was jailed for seven months.... Speaking from his prison cell last night, Mr Mahalingham, an accountant, said: "We were just having a bit of a laugh. We never thought it would escalate into something like this. We have never been in trouble with the law before anywhere."... The tourists apologized to the court, describing their actions as "a moment of foolishness." "Things like this happen all the time," Andreas Valhakis, a retired archaeological site guard, said. "The ancient sites are not guarded well enough." (London Times, 8/15/98, "Greece Jails Mooning Britons")

I wonder if Aristophanes would have appreciated this gesture. What is interesting about the gesture is that it means wildly different things to the performers and the police and site guards. What the young men see as nothing serious, just "a bit of a laugh," the Greek police see as an "obscene act," a show of "disrespect to a Greek national monument;" in fact, they consider it to deserve seven to ten months jail (you will be relieved to know that the sentences were expected to be reduced to fines of about $650 on appeal). But such discrepancies often characterize comic moments. The anecdote illustrates how slippery the relation typically is between comedy and authority: one person's innocuous laugh is another person's threat to the establishment and the established laws. In this lecture today I want to look at the relation between comedy and authority in Classical Athens.

I called this lecture "The Comic City," because all Aristophanes' plays contain some version of a topsy-turvy city: perhaps it is run by birds, by a rustic simpleton or by a venal philosopher obsessed with the bodily functions of animals; or perhaps it is run by women, as it is in the Lysistrata; but these comic cities are still related in some way to Athens, and so what I want to ask today is how serious the comic city is. Is it just "a bit of a laugh," not worth the attentions of the police and courts? Or does it offer serious criticisms of, and even a serious challenge to the social order of Athens? And if so, what is the nature of this challenge? What is the relation between the comic portrayal of the city and the actual city's social order? In the course of this lecture, I will examine four different theories as to the relationship between comedy and the social order of Athens, and argue for the particular understanding that I find most appropriate to the fifth century Athenian institution of comedy.

I. Window-Dressing

The first theory has the merit of recognizing that Athenian Comedy offers concrete political advice on specific contemporary issues of great importance to the audience. This is the theory I have referred to on your handout as the window-dressing theory: it argues that the comic moments are added to aid the digestion of political advice. The theory is most closely associated with Geoffrey De Ste Croix, the foremost Marxist historian of Classical Greece in the postwar period -- but it is not exactly his theory. He in fact sees some of the comic moments as serious in themselves, but at the same time he chooses to focus on those moments which are not actually funny, seeing these as most likely to contain political advice:

[G]iven that even intrinsically humorous material may be making a serious statement..., we must keep a careful watch for passages which express serious opinions and which are not funny in themselves: these are particularly likely to express the poet's own views. He may have found it desirable to keep them fairly brief and to sandwich them, so to speak, between lines which are fairly comic; but if the bread in which the meat is delivered is clearly separable from it..., we may have no difficulty in recognizing the meat for what it is. (De Ste Croix, 44)

De Ste Croix' vision is thus one of the comic poet hectoring his audience with advice they do not want, but throwing them a few scraps of things they do want (i.e. jokes about genitals and bodily functions) so that they do not simply get up and leave the theatre. De Ste Croix offers Lys. 1114-1148 as an example:

Lys: Now Spartans, my next reproach is aimed at you.
You must remember, not so long ago,
you sent a man to Athens begging us,
on bended knee and whiter than a ghost,
to send an army? All your slaves were up
in arms when that big earthquake hit you.
We sent you help, four thousand infantry,
a force that saved your entire country for you.
And now you pay back the Athenians by ravaging
their country, after all they did for yours?
<Ath: That's right, Lysistrata, they're in the wrong!>
<Sp: We're wrong, but take a look at that sweet ass!> (Lys. 1137-48)

In this section Lysistrata offers some serious criticism of both Spartans and Athenians. Prior to this passage she states that the two foes should be friends; they sacrifice to the same gods, share the same festivals (where they mingle together peaceably). She then goes on to give examples of how they have helped each other in the past (in this passage she gives an example of the Athenians helping the Spartans). The advice that they should reconcile and make peace cannot be ignored -- and indeed must be particularly pointed in the present situation. The play was performed in 411, two years after the failure of the Sicilian expedition, when, despite some recent successes, things are still looking pretty poor for the Athenians. But the uncomfortable advice is dressed up in the usual comic garb: Lysistrata brings the two ambassadors together on stage by tugging on their erect phalluses, while the ambassadors themselves have no time to listen to her counseling as they are admiring her anatomy.

There is plenty in this theory that should be kept (not least, that it insists that comedy engages with real political issues, and tries to convert the audience to certain views), but there also seems to be something fundamental missing, the comedy itself. It relegates comedy to the role of a mere facilitator; and fails to take account of the specific form this comedy took. On De Ste Croix' theory, the use of comedic interjections on phalluses and excretion is equivalent to any sort of effort to win an audience's attention: one of Al Gore's jokes, perhaps, or enlisting a World Wrestling Federation Wrestler to deliver your message. But there is surely more to be said about this type of comedy, and we need to examine its specific form in the Athenian institution of Comedic performance if we are to understand its relation to the polity better.

[I also wonder if the vision of an electorate that needs gimmicks to keep its attention is not anachronistic: in Thucydides, we see that the Athenian electorate changes its mind and fails to take proper responsibility for its decisions, but there is no suggestion that it is disaffected by the political process or needs to be more involved. On the contrary, we hear that it loves the assembly, where for all the tricks and trappings of the speeches, their political content is surely far higher and more sustained than that of Aristophanes' comedies. Cleon, after all, derides the demos for becoming "regular speech-goers," and being "victims of their [own] pleasure in listening, ...more like an audience sitting at the feet of a professional lecturer than a parliament discussing matters of state" (Thuc. 3.38).]

II. Carnival

A theory that takes account of the specifics of Aristophanic comedy is that Aristophanes' comic cities are part of the wild and rebellious world of the carnival, and as such represent a complete rejection of social order. The notion of the carnival is one particularly associated with the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, and it is with him that we should begin an effort to define it. Bakhtin focuses on the carnivals of Medieval Europe, and, for Bakhtin, these carnivals served as a critique of the social order seen from below, a suspension of the rules and laws set in place by the ruling class:

The laws, prohibitions, and restrictions that determine the structure and order of ordinary, that is noncarnival, life are suspended during the carnival: what is suspended first of all is hierarchical structures and all forms of terror, reverence, piety, and etiquette connected with it -- that is everything resulting from socio-hierarchical inequality or any other form of inequality among people (including age). (1984, 123)

Using Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel as his prime example, Bakhtin analyses the tropes and images that expressed this suspension of the normal social order, and these turn out to be the typical tropes and images of Aristophanes' comic cities. First, in a carnival, the body itself is as disordered as the new anti-society of carnival. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White summarize:

[The carnival] images the human body as multiple, bulging, over- or under-sized, protruberant and incomplete. The openings and orifices of this carnival body are emphasized, not its closure and finish. It is an image of impure corporeal bulk with its orifices (mouth, flared nostrils, anus) yawning wide and its lower regions (belly, legs, feet, buttocks and genitals) given priority over its upper regions (head, 'spirit,' reason). (Stallybrass and White, 9)

This analogy between body and city can also be seen in Plato's Republic, but the hierarchy of the parts is reversed. Appetites dominate over reason, stomach and genitals rule the spirit and the head, and the low class artisans at the base of Callipolis find themselves raised above the guardians and philosopher kings. The bodies that populate Aristophanes' comic cities are, therefore, the incomplete carnival bodies, not the disciplined bodies of Plato's Beautiful City, with their careful regimens of gymnastic and musical training. The phallus is the central organizing force in Aristophanes' Athens: war becomes a question of how much sex one is getting, and decisions on peace are determined by the phallus' needs. In organizing life around the lower regions of the body, the Lysistrata is a typical fifth century Athenian comedy. This emphasis is revealed by the basic comic costume: a tight-fitting leotard with a Falstaffian padded belly and large leather phallus attached. The phallus may often have been hidden from view, by tunics and cloaks, but, as in the Lysistrata, it was often fully revealed to the audience's view, making the characters' inability to control their appetites particularly clear.

[It is interesting to note that very few modern comedies are organized around the phallus and the stomach. Rather, as we can see from Shakespeare, Sheridan and Molière, the main motivating factors have become money, class status and love. In fact, this change happened in Aristophanes' own lifetime; he himself seems to have been one of the last poets holding out against the new, bourgeois style of comedy, and indeed eventually composed such comedies himself.]

A second carnival trope is inversion: just as the head is brought below the genitals and stomach, so all hierarchies, social and symbolic, are reversed and confused during the carnival. Kings are deposed, men are dressed as women, masters wait on their slaves, and the high and proud are brought down to the level of the low and dirty. This basic trope structures almost every action in the Lysistrata: the serious business of war and civic administration is not just relegated to the low business of sex, but also to the female, domestic art of weaving:

First you wash the city as we wash the wool,
cleaning out the bullshit. Then we pluck away the parasites;
break up strands that clump together, forming special interest groups;
Here's a bozo: squeeze his head off. Now you're set to card the wool:
use your basket for the carding, the basket of solidarity.
There we put our migrant workers, foreign friends, minorities,
immigrants and wage-slaves, every person useful to the state.
Don't forget our allies either, languishing like separate strands.
Bring it all together now, and make one giant ball of yarn.
Now you're ready: weave a brand new suit for all the citizens.
<Mag: War is not the same as wool-balls. What do women know of war?>
Even more than you do asshole... (Lys. 573-590)

[We may recall here Alcibiades' sneer, recorded by Thucydides, that those who own empires "cannot calculate, like housekeepers, exactly how much empire they want to have," Thuc. 6.18.] The whole scene with the magistrate is an extended up-ending of the male world. First the soldiers are defeated by the women, then they are described as using their arms not to fight, but to shop: armour helps you push to the front, helmets are filled with liquids, and shields are stacked with burgers (557-62). Meanwhile the magistrate himself is brought low by being stripped of his insignia: first, he is dressed as a woman (532-538), and then later his final claim of dominance ("Lucky men! For us it's easy: all we need is in our pants," 598-99) is answered with a mock funeral in which he is prepared as a corpse and stuck in a coffin. In this inverted world, he gets, as he says, "screwed by women" (450).

A third characteristic of the Bakhtinian carnival is a mixture of languages, the kind of mixture you get in a typical marketplace, where foreigners meet to trade, village idiots gibber and, in general, the usual restrictions on speech are absent so that swearing and obscenity are rife. In Aristophanes, we can see this mixture not only in the lowness of language used, but also, for example, in the Spartan Lampito's dialect. Here she is represented as a kind of Sylvester Stallone figure, about half way through Rocky IV; one of my favorite representations has her as a Scotswoman.

For Bakhtin, the phenomenon of the carnival as here represented constitutes a critique of official culture wherever it appears:

Rabelais' images [i.e. carnivalesque images] have a certain undestroyable nonofficial nature. No dogma, no authoritarianism, no narrow-minded seriousness can coexist with Rabelaisian images; these images are opposed to all that is finished and polished, to all pomposity, to every ready-made solution in the sphere of thought and world outlook. (1968, 3)

Bakhtin's carnival is an outright denial of and rebellion against official culture. Yet it is hard to accept that this can be the case with Athenian comedy. Like tragedy, comedy was sponsored by the Athenian state. Financing came from the state, the state provided the theatres at which they were performed, and the state helped poor citizens attend by subsidizing their tickets. Comedies were performed together with tragedies at the various festivals of Dionysus during the year. This means that they were framed by the same official pomp and ceremony as tragedies: the tribute paid into Athens' state coffers by the allies was displayed; the orphaned children of war dead, now old enough to leave the care of the state and enter adult life, were presented; and civic benefactors were honored. Further, the audience, as a tragedy, was divided into groups by their seating: councilors sat in the middle and special seats were reserved at the front of the theatre for important officials and benefactors of the city. Thus, while the magistrate is stripped of his clothes and dressed as a woman, we must also remember that in other parts of the dramatic space, the same status boundaries remain strongly and visibly intact.

We may also note the conservative tone of the advice that Lysistrata gives. Look again at Lys. 573-590. What does Lysistrata advise? She suggests a more inclusive definition of citizenship, including most prominently, the resident aliens, who already fought for and paid taxes to the city. But what is missing? Lysistrata nowhere suggests that women be included. The comic city of Lysistrata has, it turns out, a pretty serious side.

Similarly, the female body remains objectified and depersonalized in this comedy. In fact, Reconciliation is achieved through dividing up different parts of the female body among the warring soldiers. One body, the soldier's body is spared, but at the cost of another body, that of woman:

Sp: We must demand this [port of entry]* here
return to us. Ath: Which one? Sp: This one in back:
we count on having, we can almost feel it.
Ath: By the god of earthquakes, that you'll never get!
Lys: You'll give it up, sir! Ath: What do we get, then?
Lys: You'll ask for something that's of equal value.
Ath: Let's see now, I know, give us first of all
the furry triangle here, the gulf that runs
behind it, also the two connecting legs.
Sp. My dear ambassador, you want it all!
Lys: You'll give it. Don't be squabbling over legs.
Ath: I'm set to strip and do a little ploughing!
Sp: Me first: before one ploughs one spreads manure.
Lys: When peace is made, you'll both do all you want. (Lys. 1162-75)

(Henderson translates 'port of entry' promontory, which seems rather obscure; literally gate is the translation.) For all the questioning of certain parts of official policy, certain aspects of Athenian ideology remain intact. This is hardly a Utopian vision of total equality, or a suspension of all "hierarchical structures and all forms of terror" connected with them. Reconciliation turns out to be predicated on the brutal division of woman into vagina and anus, and the consequent ability of the ambassadors to divide her up between them. This is not a feminist play.

Moreover, the plea for reconciliation is hardly an expression of the popular opinion on the Peloponnesian War. The War has been good for the lower classes, despite the mortality rates: as Thucydides sardonically notes in the debate on the Sicilian expedition, war meant that good pay was available; he tells us that "the general masses" voted for the grander version of the Sicilian expedition because they "saw the prospect of getting pay for the time being and of adding to the empire so as to secure permanent paid employment in the future" (6.24). In contrast, it is the wealthier classes who are the ones who have been suffering; it is their estates that the Spartans have ravaged by their incursions into Attica, and their taxes that have financed the war. Moreover, peace with Sparta had always been the hope of the more old-style aristocrats (in contrast to the demagogues like Pericles and Alcibiades), so that Aristophanes' plea here is far from neutral. Not only is this a reconciliation organized around the objectification of the female body, but, one might say, it is one aimed at saving the estates of the wealthy from greater depredation.

Thus, although Bakhtin's vision of carnival works well to delineate the central motifs and structures of Athenian comedy, it is, in some ways, too hopeful to fit it well. It fails to recognize the operation of state power in and around the dramas, the fact that certain aspects of state ideology are not challenged, and the fact that it supports the interests of a particular, well-born class. Aristophanes' comic cities are not a total rejection of the Athenian political system; they do not seek to pull the whole thing down from its foundations in an orgy of utopian class solidarity, but engage in the contemporary political debate in concrete ways.

III. 'A Ruse of Power'

Bakhtin has been much criticized for his vision of the carnival's politics, by, for example, White and Stallybrass. Just as Aristophanes' comedies had a more complex relation with the state, so too did medieval fairs and carnivals, which were sponsored by, for example, the Catholic church. A third model suggests itself at this point, and it is one that owes much to anthropology. It takes account of both the inversions that characterize the Bakhtinian carnival, and the political superstructure that often seems to organize, promote and sustain it; it sees carnival as a licensed transgression, an "allowed fool," that allows any genuine oppositional forces to be controlled and exhausted. In a formulation that has become much quoted, Georges Balandier, an anthropologist, put it thus:

The supreme ruse of power is to allow itself to be contested ritually in order to consolidate itself more effectively. (Georges Balandier, Political Anthropology, 41, quoted by Stallybrass and White 14, and Goldhill 177)

Far from being rebellious, therefore, comedy would then appear conservative, a method of containing dissent in a manageable and unthreatening form. Athenian comedy was part of a holiday, part of a series of festival days when business was suspended and normal protocols not enforced: the inversion of the social order was, therefore, to be expected in the comedies, but it would not leak out of the festival into normal life. The social order allowed its nose to be tweaked to prevent any more sustained challenges.

But this theory of the role of comedy in Athenian society also seems to have problems. First, Athenian holidays and festivals were not rare occasions. One third of the year was holiday, and the city spent considerable amounts of its revenue on them. Holidays were thus an integral and normal part of Athenian life. Second, as we have seen, Athenian comedy does not represent an entirely separate and detached comic world; it engages specific issues of contemporary politics, as, for example, the Lysistrata suggests that the franchise be extended and efforts be made to make peace with their old allies, the Spartans.

Moreover, there is very good evidence that these comic suggestions affected the policies and procedures of the real, serious city. When in 406, in the Frogs, Aristophanes again suggested, as he had in the Lysistrata, that the franchise be extended to include more of the residents of Athens, the city, adopted the policy, probably in the following year; Aristophanes himself was awarded, according to his ancient biography, a civic crown, "a crown of sacred olive, reckoned equal in honor to a golden crown," and the Frogs was given the very unusual honour of a second performance (Ar. Life 35-36). For a second example of comedy influencing the demos' decision in the assembly or lawcourts, we can look to the example of Socrates. As we have seen in the Apology, Plato holds the comic poets, not the actual prosecutors in his trial, primarily responsible for Socrates' death:

There have been many who have accused me to you for many years now, and none of their accusations are true. These I fear much more than I fear Anytus and his friends, though they too are formidable. These earlier ones, however, are more so, gentlemen; they got hold of most of you from childhood, persuaded you and accused me quite falsely... What is the accusation from which arose the slander in which Meletus trusted when he wrote out the charge against me? What did they say when they slandered me? I must, as if they were my actual prosecutors, read the affidavit they would have sworn. It goes something like this: Socrates is guilty of wrongdoing in that he busies himself studying things in the sky and below the earth; he makes the worse argument into the stronger, and he teaches these same things to others. You have seen this yourselves in the comedy of Aristophanes, a Socrates swinging about there, saying he was walking on air and talking a lot of other nonsense about things of which I know nothing at all. (Plato, Apol. 18a-b, 19b-c)

The comedy referred to here is the Clouds, which was produced in 423, and which survives in a second edition. For Plato, Socrates was effectively on trial in Aristophanes' comedy, and the comic poet was effectively his "actual prosecutor." The accusation, at least in the Athenian Plato's eyes, does not belong to a world which is quickly forgotten when the holiday is over, but goes on to define the public debate over the sophists, and over Socrates in particular, for a quarter of a century, issuing finally in Socrates' death sentence.

In these two examples, we see a huge amount of leakage between the comic city and the real city; policies which are articulated and promulgated in comedy become law in the assembly and the courts. If this leakage was minor, then I think we could still use the model of comedy as 'a ruse of power,' but the leakage seems so extensive that 'leakage' seems like the wrong term for it. There is no leakage, because the spheres of public policy and comedy are not kept separate. To think of comedy as a sphere kept intentionally closed off from public debate, where strange and utopian notions about removing hierarchies of all sorts can be floated without fear of any political consequences, does not do justice to the real interchange between the ideas of comedy and the policies of the city.

IV. A Comic Politics

So what are we left with? We need a theory of Athenian comedy which takes account of both its engagement in Athenian politics, as de Ste Croix' idea of 'window-dressing,' and the fact that it is comedy, as the 'carnival' and 'ruse of power' theories. The fourth theory I will look at today is that comedy represents a "comic politics," a term I have borrowed from Jeffrey Henderson. Henderson too insists that we should not lose sight of the comedy when we see the political engagement of the plays, and he argues that the whole institution of Athenian comedy represents a form of politics, but a form unlike the other forms of debate and decision making in the city because it operates through a different mode, the mode of comedy. How are we to understand this?

First, we need to set comedy more fully within the context of the other organs of democratic government in the Athenian polity. The two central political structures were the lawcourts and the assembly. These two political organs have a remarkably similar structure. In both, decisions are made on the basis of a debate between two sides. In both, the decision is made by a considerable proportion of the demos: a basic quorum in the assembly seems to have been 6,000, roughly a fifth of the citizen in this period (ie there were roughly 30,000 citizens left after the Sicilian expedition), but juries too were big affairs: while more than 200 jurors decided small cases, and as many as 1000 and sometimes even more, decided important ones; being a juror in the law courts must thus have felt much like attending the assembly. Further, both institutions, although perhaps through different means, are concerned with Athenian government policy, what the laws should be, how they should be interpreted, and how they should be carried out. Thus, when Cleon squares off with Diodotus in an effort to define Athens' relation with its allies, the resulting debate is not so different from the debate between Meletus and Socrates over the rights and wrongs of the latter's behavior. This trial forces the demos to articulate a general position on such behavior, just as the debate in the assembly forces the demos to take a position on its relations with its allies.

Yet, once we look at the assembly and the courts in this way, it becomes very clear how similar comedy is to them. The audience of comedies was very large. The Lysistrata was performed during the festival of the Lenaea in the Theatre of Dionysus. The capacity of this theatre was about 14,000; not all of these would have been citizens, since it seems certain that children, women, resident aliens, and even some slaves attended, but it is clear that at least as many citizens were present in the theatre for a comedy as attended the big votes in the assembly. The subject of comedy, as we have seen, was in some sense the governance of the city; indeed Aristophanes argues for legislation in much the same way that a speaker in the assembly might do so -- and as we have also seen was rewarded for good advice much as a speaker at the assembly would have been. And, of course, his advice comes up for a vote of sorts; for a winning comedy is chosen at the end of the festival, out of perhaps five competitors. Victory brought great honour and influence, while defeat brought great bitterness. The decision was nominally made by a panel of judges, but most commentators (as MacDowell) think that their decision was based on the popular favour each received in performance: when in later plays Aristophanes reflects bitterly on his lack of success with the Clouds, he blames the audience, not the judges, for his defeat. Thus comedy could be described as just another arena in which politicians use their rhetorical skills to argue for particular positions before the mass of the demos in an effort to win their votes and so influence the policies of the city.

One conventional feature of Athenian comedy makes it seem even more like a speech in the assembly or the lawcourts: specific individuals were picked out for special ridicule by the playwrights. When the magistrate is complaining about female licentiousness, Aristophanes takes the chance to sling some mud at another politician, Demostratus, while also getting in some barbs against his wife (I have added in his name):

I hear our spoiled wives are out of hand.
Another phony festival for their wine-god,
a noisy rooftop party for Adonis,
just like the one that spoiled our assembly.
That ill-starred, foolish politician [Demostratus] moved
we sail to Sicily, while his wife was dancing
and yelling for Adonis. When [Demostratus] said
let's muster allied troops [from Zacynthus] for this armada,
his wife was on the rooftop getting drunk
and yelling 'Oh, doomed youth!' But he persisted,
the goddamned stubborn, hotheaded son of a bitch! (Lys. 387-98)

Demostratus seems to have been the primary advocate of the Sicilian expedition (though not named by Thucydides, he does appear in Plutarch's account), and here Aristophanes attacks him on two grounds, first for proposing a bad policy, and second for doing so at an inauspicious time, when the wives were off lamenting dead youths as part of the festival of Adonis. Omen-conscious Greeks would have recognized the faux-pas here.

Demostratus must still have been of influence in 411, and in taking a stand against him, Aristophanes shows that he shares Thucydides' opinions about those who wished to extend the empire. [Thucydides, you will remember, saw the Sicilian expedition as a mistake caused by the demagogic methods of Athens' leaders in this period (2.65).] In opposing these politicians, Aristophanes has been consistent throughout his life. His most famous series of attacks was against Cleon, the brutal star of the Mytilenian debate, but these attacks also illustrate that the victims can fight back. Cleon sued Aristophanes on the grounds that he had slandered the people and the councilors in the presence of foreigners (schol. ad Ach. 378), thus pursuing in the lawcourts a debate that began in the theatre. In a later play, the Acharnians, one of Aristophanes' protagonists keeps the debate going by claiming that this claim is slander, and expresses relief that there are no foreigners in this audience.

What we see here is the sort of competitive display that Cleon complains, in Thucydides 3.38, is one of the 'stupid institutions' of Athenian public debate. The demos look on while two leading public figures tear into each other in the various forums available to each. Note also that Cleon's suit implies that, however much mud was slung at the politicians, none could be slung at the demos. Comedy thus allowed debate and criticism, but only if it was not directed against democratic power. A fascinating contemporary work on the Athenian constitution recognizes the deeply political nature of comedy and its deeply democratic bias. The author of the commentary is unknown, but we speak of him now as the 'Old Oligarch,' because he hates democracy and seems like a classic old curmudgeon. His basic line throughout this short, but supremely perceptive work is that democracy is a terrible thing, but if you are going to have one, you have to admire the Athenian democracy, because it really does give the high-born and wealthy the short end of the stick. Concerning comedy, the Old Oligarch observes:

And again, [the demos] does not tolerate comic ridicule and criticism of [itself], so that it does not itself get a bad reputation. But if anyone wants to ridicule a private person, they bid him do so, knowing perfectly well that the butt of the comedy will not, for the most part, come from the demos or the mass of the people, but will be a man of either wealth, high birth or influence. A few poor, demos-types are ridiculed in comedy, but only if they have been meddling in others' affairs or trying to have a greater share than the demos [i.e. climb the social ladder], so that they are not upset when such people are ridiculed. ('Old Oligarch,' ps.Xen, Constitution of the Athenians 2.18)

Comedy is a method of calling the few, the politicians to account, and of forcing them to compete against each other for the favor of the demos.

But how then is comedy different to these other organs of democratic power? What makes comedy comedy? The answer is that it was a form of debate carried out with a different mindset, and with different rules, a form of debate that appealed to a different kind of wisdom (or folly). In this different kind of debate, there were fewer restrictions on what you could say; mockery and abuse were not only allowed, but were de rigueur. Second, the focus of the comic theatre was less on the strictly legal or illegal, than on the socially disruptive or irritating. Comedy offered a chance to tap those parts of the demos' displeasure that were not necessarily addressed by the lawcourts or the assembly, or perhaps had not yet been addressed by them, as we see in the case of Socrates. To some extent, as Prof. Anderson argued, even the courts themselves were not really so tied to law either, but they were still more tied to it than comedy -- after all, charges had to be brought, and defences could be offered in the courts. Third, the comic form of debate offers a way of circumventing the logic that the speakers tried to hold the demos to in the assembly or the courts. I think here of the famous Persian custom related by Herodotus, in which the Persians always make sure that they consider a decision both when they are drunk and when they are sober (Hdt. 1.133). This may seem silly, but I take that, if this is not complete fabrication, the point is similar to that of debating public policy through comedy: a drunken state may introduce factors which the rational mind ignores but which are nevertheless of considerable importance. Similarly, it is often easier to laugh someone off the political stage than actually to prove their positions wrong. [Note that I am not saying this is right or wrong; much of Prof. Anderson's lecture on Socrates speaks to this issue. I am only seeking to understand what comedy was and what function it performed within the city.]

Conclusion

There is an old anecdote recorded in the ancient life of Aristophanes that when a Sicilian tyrant told Plato he wanted to study the government of the Athenians, Plato sent him some Aristophanes (Ar. Life, 42-45). This may not have actually happened, but I think we can now understand why the story at least makes sense. Aristophanes' comedy contains specific policy suggestions for the running of the city, comments on contemporary issues, and tries to incline the demos' opinions towards or against particular politicians. But more than that, comedy is part of the very fabric of the democratic city, an integral cog in the demos' power, a mechanism through which the few are forced to compete against each other, while being reviewed by the demos.

I have looked at four ways in which we might understand the relation between Aristophanes' comic cities and the real city of Athens, and suggested that we must see the comic cities both as fully engaged in the details of the political process (rather than an outright rebellion or a type of safety valve to let off the demos' opposition), and as comedy also (not politics as usual, with a few jokes thrown in). I have tried to bring these together in the notion of a comic politics, a politics that is as much a part in the decision making process as the normal politics of the assembly, but which is played with different rules and refereed by a different wisdom.

Plato understood the notion of a comic wisdom. Although the spirit of his dialogues seems so different, the tracks of Aristophanic laughter can still be seen. Socrates is much like Lysistrata, or any other of Aristophanes' comic heroes: people whose lack of ordinary knowledge, symbolized by their exclusion from high rank, turns out to be wisdom. Socrates' new city emerges, like Lysistrata's, from a festival, in Socrates' case, the festival of an eastern goddess Bendis, as we learn in the opening lines of the Republic. Yet Socrates' Callipolis really does belong in the margins of Athenian politics; while Lysistrata's city, run by women who wield sexual abstinence as a weapon, is a central part of the Athenian political dialogue.