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INTERTEXTUALITY FOR THE INTELLIGENTSIA:
FURTHER PARALLELS BETWEEN ARISTOPHANES’ CLOUDS AND BANQUETERS
В статье рассматриваются параллели между двумя комедиями Аристофана «Облака» и «Пирующие» на примере диалога Стрепсиада и Фидиппида («Облака», ст. 820-865) и диалога отца и испорченного сына (фр. 205). Аллюзии на более раннюю комедию о софистах и проблемах поколений отцов-сыновей неслучайны в «Облаках». Как и отсылки к «Пирующим» в парабазе комедии, их можно считать частью поэтической техники Аристофана, адресованной аудитории афинских интеллектуалов.
Ключевые слова: Аристофан, древняя комедия, «Облака», софисты, интертекстуальность, «Пирующие», фрагменты.
1. Clouds, parabasis
The parabasis of the Clouds opens with Aristophanes’ address to the audience in pursuit of their favour and goodwill, v. 520-537:
So may I be victorious, so may I be thought a true artist, I took you for an intelligent audience and this for the most intellectual of my comedies, and therefore saw fit to give you the first taste of it, a play that cost me a great deal of labour; and then I retired defeated undeservedly by vulgar men. For that I hold you intelligent people to blame, for whose sake I was taking all that trouble. But even so, I will never willingly desert the bright ones along you. For since the time when this place my virtuous boy and my buggered boy were extremely well spoken of by certain men whom it is a pleasure even to mention, and I (being still unmarried and not yet supposed to give birth) exposed the child, another girl picked it up, and you generously reared it and educated it - since that time I have held sworn pledges of your good opinion. So now, like Electra of old, this comedy has come seeking and hoping somewhere to find spectators as intelligent; for she will recognise, if she sees it, the lock of her brother’s hair (tr. Sommerstein).
The phrase ‘virtuous boy and buggered boy’ is recognised by the scholiasts as a reference to Aristophanes’ earlier comedy, the Banqueters. Apparently, the comedy featured two sons, as well as
their father who is not mentioned in the Clouds, but appears in other fragments and testimonies of the lost play. The Banqueters, produced in 427 BCE, was Aristophanes’ debut on the Athenian stage and, as the poet himself claims, received high esteem from his patrons and the public1.
The context of the allusion to the Banqueters is remarkable. The parabasis of the Clouds belongs to the new revised version of the play, that was written by Aristophanes after the failure of the first production in 423 BCE. The poet discusses his defeat, praises his comedy and expresses his hopes that the new version will be more successful. The pledge of its success is the intelligence of the audience. This is the central motif, around which the parabasis is structured. Aristophanes stresses that his play is designed for witty people, men of culture, the Athenian intellectuals, whom he calls Se^iol and 00901.
The passage is charged with self-irony and puns on Aristophanes’ own dramatic art. The playwright makes jokes about the new version of the play, the revised text of which is supposed to be completely new. His personified comedy is confident and trusts her own script, while the poet declares, that he will not try to pretend to be with hairs, being bold, or to cheat the audience by presenting the same things for the second and third time (vv. 544-548):
aXk’ asi Kaiva^ i5sa<; sia^sprov oo^iZopm, ov5ev aA.X'qXaiaiv op^a<; Kai rcaaa<; 8e^ia^
‘rather I always apply my skills to introducing new forms of comedy, quite different one from another and every one full of ingenuity’
(tr. Sommerstein)
I believe that this claim should not be taken at face value2 but rather as Aristophanes’ ironical consideration of his own poetic techniques, particularly, of the intertextual references and reworking of his own comedies3. The allusion to the Banqueters in this context is an immediate illustration of this technique.
1 Aristophanes was a young man at that time and did not get a chorus in his own name, so the comedy was offcially produced by Callistratus, see Halliwell (1980).
2 As, for instance, Dover does in his commentary on the play, ad v. 547: ‘Aristophanes was ready to adopt a conservative standpoint, for comic purposes, towards tragedy and philosophy, but in his own craft he prided himself on his innovations’.
3 Other claims that Aristophanes does in the parabasis likewise contradict the actual disposition of the play. For instance, the claim in v. 543 is untrue,
In fact, I suggest that the joke about the new ideas that the poet devises refers not only to his own work, but also to the thematic content of the Clouds, namely, the new ideas of the sophistic movement in Athens. This makes the Banqueters a very suitable reference, since the main themes of the play are the same as in the Clouds: the corruption of the youth, the conflict of the old and the new, the father and his sons, the new sophistic education and, perhaps, religious innovations4.
The parabasis of the Clouds, therefore, works on several levels. It flatters the audience by calling it wise and intelligent and secures the spectators’ benevolence. It makes fun of the play’s failure some years before and assures the audience of how different the new version is. It also implies that the wittiness of the play consists in the interplay of allusions to the previous versions and to earlier Aristophanes’ comedies, among which the Banqueters is one of the closest parallels.
2. Banqueters, fr. 205 K-A. (= Cassio fr. 1)
Taking into consideration the special status of the Banqueters as the intended model for the Clouds, I shall demonstrate that there were other textual parallels between the two plays which the intelligent audience was supposed to spot. Unfortunately, those few fragments of the Banqueters that are available to us are very short and lack context and, therefore, all the hypotheseis remain more or less speculative. Nevertheless, I believe that even small snatches of text such as fr. 227 and fr. 238 allow to assume the conscious use of the Banqueters in the text of the Clouds . In fr. 227 someone
as in the end of the Clouds there is the cry iov iou The claim about the absence of the old man hitting with the stick contradicts vv. 1297-1300 where this is exactly what happens.
4 The Clouds portrays Socrates’ philosophical school as a private religious association, a sect, and their activities are parodied as religious worship. On Socrates’ school as thiasos see (Jones, 1999, 39). The chorus of the Banqueters is also a private religious club, based in the temple of Herakles. Temples of Herakles in Attica were known to be centres of physical athletic training and intellectual instruction of the youth and many of them had gymnasia, adjacent to their territory. Major philosophical schools of the 4th century, such as Plato’s academy, Lyceum and Cynics school chose temples of Herakles as their headquarters.
5 These parallels among other arguments led Segoloni (1994) to suggest that the Banqueters was another play about Socrates and featured him as a character.
mentions the observation of the atmospheric phenomena, Td ^exeropa which are an important feature of the Socrates’ education in Clouds, v. 228. Fr. 238 contains the word napavola, madness, that is encountered in Clouds, v. 1476. Both words do not occur in any other texts of the comic corpus.
The longest fragment of the Banqueters consists of nine lines and comes from Galen’s commentary on Hippocrates’ vocabulary. Galen discusses various linguistic issues, such as invention of words by the ancient authors, and cites Aristophanes’ Banqueters twice (fr. 205 and fr. 233). Parallels of the fr. 205 with the Clouds have not been studied before. It represents a conversation between the father and the buggered son6.
- aAA’ ei oopsAAn Kai pvpov Kai xaiviai.
- iSov, oopsA.^ tovto napa Auoioxpaxou
- ^prov toroq ov KaxarcAay^oei xro
- xo KaxanAay^oei xovxo napa xrov pnxoprov.
- anoP^oexai ooi xavxa no! xa p^paxa^
- nap' ’AAKiPiaSou xovxo xarcoP^oexai.
- xi vnoxEKpaip^ Kai KaKro<; av5pa<; Aeyeiq
- KaAoKayaGiav aoKovvxa^; - oip’, ro ©paovpaxe^
xi<; xovxo xrov ^uvnyoprov ynpevexai;
(A) But you are just a wee coffn, and unguent, and wreaths.
(B) Right, a wee coffin! You got this from Lysistratus.
(A) One day you will be impressed by us.
(B) This “impressed” you got from the orators.
(A) What are these words of yours getting at?
(B) This “getting at” from Alcibiades.
(A) Why do you insinuate against and slander gentlemen for cultivating fine-and-dandyhood?
(B) Well, my budding Thrasymachus, which of the lawyers talks utters this awful talk?7
This fragment has a number of similarities with a scene in the Clouds, vv. 814-865. The dialogue in the Clouds also represents an argument between the father and the son about the new rhetorical
6 It has been argued by Fritzsche (1831) that there are three characters in this scene, the father, the bad son and the good son, to whom the father addresses by name in the last two lines, see the discussion in Storey (1988).
7 I follow the text in Cassio (1977). The translation is by Henderson in the Loeb edition with changes according to the Cassio’s text.
education which one of the characters has received. However, the later play represents the reversal of the situation in the Banqueters. It is not the son but the father who has gone through sophistic instruction and tries to persuade his son to go to Socrates’ school. This reversal shapes the humour of this scene through the inappropriateness of the roles attributed to an old conservative farmer and a young aristocratic man . On a more ‘intellectual’ level, the scene in the Clouds refers the spectator to the Banqueters and is likely to be a parody of the argument about sophistic education in fr. 205.
Other parallels include:
1. When Pheidippides expresses his contempt of Socrates’ students, Strepsiades bids him to mind what he says about the intelligent (Se^iou^ people (v. 834). In the Banqueters a reverse situation can be seen: the son protests against accusations of his friends-sophists who practice KaAoraya0(a.
2. In both conversations there are references to the death and burial of the old man. Strepsiades complains that his son wishes to wash his father’s fortune and life away with frequent and luxurious baths (vv. 837-839). The old man is bathed as if he were dead, which alludes to a funeral practice of washing the dead body. In the first line of the fr. 205 the son insults his father calling him a coffin and reminds him of unguent and wreathes hinting at the burial of the old man. The word which is translated as coffin, oopeAAn, is an invented word composed of oopo^, vessel, coffin, and TopeAAn, funerary lament. A few lines further in the scene in the Clouds, Pheidipiddes asks himself whether he should actually warn the coffin -makers ooponnyol that they might have a job soon (v. 846).
3. The linguistic matters are important for both scenes9. New language invented by the sophists is the main theme in the fr. 205: The son uses a new word or term in each line and the old father responds, making fun of them. In Clouds, on the contrary, Strepsiades, equipped with Socratic knowledge, instructs his son about the correct word which should be used for a female rooster (vv. 847-853).
4. When Pheidippides yields to Strepsiades’ demands to go to Socrates’ school, he warns his father that later he will regret this (v. 865). This phrase is reminiscent of the son’s claim in fr. 205, 3, that his father will later yield to the new ideas.
8 A similar paradox can be spotted in Wasps where the chorus of old men show excessive affection to law-courts.
9 Discussion of linguistic issues is present also in the fr. 233 K-A.
To conclude, the parallels show that the scene in the Clouds refers to the transmitted passage of the Banqueters in a special way, reworking and reversing the ideas of the new and the old. In a certain sense, Aristophanes fulfils his literary programme, inventing new ideas, although at the same time he alludes to his own earlier comedy. Certainly, the Athenian intellectuals would appreciate such a sophisticated literary technique.
References
Cassio 1977 - Cassio A. C. Aristofane Banchettanti (Daitales): i frammenti.
Pisa: Giardini, 1977.
Fritzsche 1831 - Fritzsche F. De Daetalensibus Aristophanis commentatio. Lipsiae, 1831.
Halliwell 1980 - Halliwell S. Aristophanes’ apprenticeship // Classical Quarterly. 1980. Vol. 30. P. 33-45.
Jones 1999 - Jones N. F. The associations of classical Athens. The response to democracy. Oxford University Press, 1999.
Segoloni 1994 - Segoloni L. Socrate a banchetto. Roma, 1994.
Storey 1988 - Storey I. Thrasymachus at Athens: Aristophanes fr. 205 («Daitales»). Phoenix. 1988. Vol. 42. P. 212-218.
E. Yu. Chepel. Intertextuality for the intelligentsia: Further parallels between Aristophanes’ Clouds and Banqueters
The paper examines intertextual parallels between Aristophanes' Clouds and his earlier fragmentary play, the Banqueters. It is stated explicitly in the scholia to the parabasis in the Clouds that Aristophanes refers to the Banqueters, apparently as to a model for the revised version of the Clouds. I consider some further parallels between the two plays and argue that the dialogue between Strepsiades and Pheidippides in vv. 820 - 865 draws upon the Banqueters as well. It explores the same themes of sophistic education and father-son relationship, but reworks them in an innovative way. This can be shown, in particular, by comparing the passage in the Clouds with fr.205 K.-A. of the Banqueters. It is concluded, therefore, that Aristophanes expresses his literary programme in the parabasis, namely, to introduce new ideas and at the same time to refer to his own comedies through intertextuality. This sophisticated technique is intended for the audience of the Athenian intellectuals, the clever ones, whose intelligence secures the poet's success in the dramatic competition.
Keywords: Aristophanes, Old Comedy, Clouds, sophistic movement, intertextuality, Banqueters, fragmentary comedies.
