Forgotten Thinkers: Aristophanes

all right well thanks for coming out tonight last lecture of the season is Aristophanes now several people have commented to me that well everyone remembers Aristophanes more or less right we haven't forgotten Aristophanes but i think what we've forgotten or has been overlooked is that Aristophanes is a significant thinker he's not just one of the great comic playwrights in history I would say one of the top I mean just what he's just one of the greatest comedic playwrights on just the merits of his comedy his plays are unbelievably funny even you know 2,000 years later but significantly I think what has been forgotten and hence part of the Forgotten thinker program is that Aristophanes was an insightful in fact incredibly precise careful and humane thinker about the condition of man in his time and how we should reflect on that and what we should do about it and this gets lost I think because we have a hard time taking comedy seriously which you're not supposed to take comedy seriously right so but but wrapped in his comedy was a lot of very insightful and I think what his history has proven to be correct insight about his own times of problems and and how they could or should have been addressed so one reason I think that we forgotten him is we tend to look at philosophical history through the lens of our own concept of what philosophy is and that is that is a take of academic philosophy and academic philosophy really gets kicked off mostly with Conte and it's not that that's wrong but Cohn and Hegel set a pattern for what it means to do philosophy and that was widely adopted both in content and informed by almost everybody who came after and so it meant you know you had to have a system it had to be rigorous and had to be organized it had to be correct you were trying to get big truths capital T truths ontological e accurate claims you know demonstrable for all times all space and all dimension when the Scientific Revolution kicks off not too much later than that if really becomes important because all of a sudden science does 10 seem to be delivering the truth so science can deliver truth what is philosophy for will that philosophy has to deliver even more truth and so the sort of truths arms race between philosophy and science gets kicked off which is which I think is pointless and unhelpful and in fact poisonous and so retrospectively we look back at philosophy from that viewpoint we say what philosophy is supposed to be doing is presenting a system it's got to be highly organized and it has to be you know rational and logical and it has to be advocating or demonstrating or claiming to provide their revocable absolute truths which is again there is a part of philosophy that does that but this is a very narrow view of what philosophy could or can be and certainly is it's an inaccurate view on what it was Socrates had no system Plato claimed to have a system is not clear he did have a system he had a lot of systems one could say eros tall certainly did have a system but not not of precisely the same kind that we get later and so all kinds of philosophers from all kinds of Ages sort of have gotten pushed out because they don't conform to what we now think of as philosophy but but thinkers throughout the ages have done a lot of serious thinking without having the burden of large systems or significant contemplation of ontology generally speaking they're really interested in the question of you know what can we do to live better and and and in a given time in a given place facing a given set of problems and so we look back at someone like Aristophanes who certainly does not have a system by the way he's not a snake he's a comic playwright but he is more than that and I think that's what's key I think it's one reason his plays hold up for thousands of years is because he wasn't just funny he was funny with an edge and there's always something there that carries more weight than his plays ought to have considering that they're incredibly farcical which we'll also talk about one thing we forget and this is this I think gives us an idea that he was in fact serious is that the most famous dialogue or the most famous sort of work in philosophical history of the West is almost certainly the symposium by Plato everybody remembers that Socrates is there nobody remembers that anybody else was there right it is a conversation amongst several people one of whom is Aristophanes and as far as I'm concerned Aristophanes gets the best line because he's Aristophanes it's funny and because he's Aristophanes he's also incredibly human so I want to read this because I believe this is the first historic example of the argument we're about to read so this is where I want to start from it's an extended quote but it's significant because it tells us a whole lot about Aristophanes but it also tells us that Plato thought enough of Aristophanes as a thinker to include him in the symposium he could have edited out he did not have to have them there but he thought Aristophanes was a significantly important person to include his presence and his argument so here's I had to edit down a little bit but this is roughly and it's not too much longer than this so they've been arguing about love the nature of love the nature of attraction the nature of who you should be attracted to and the first couple of speakers have delivered these sort of complex invocations of eros and Aphrodite and the spiritual and and the incredible power of the gods and the inspiration that they provide and later on Socrates will do something similar to that except for much longer and much more involved right the big Socratic reflection on this and in between it all Aristophanes apparently sort of raised his hand and says yeah that's all very nice and well and good so let me tell you a story about how it really happened back from where mankind came from the beginning from the gods so one thing he's mocking their invocation of the God which is important to remember but but here's what he says he says originally the sexes were not - as they are now but originally three in number there man woman and the union of the two having a name cuz corresponding to the double nature which had once a real existence but is now lost and the word androgynous is only preserved as a term of reproach in the second place the primeval man was around his back and his sides forming a circle and he had four hands and four feet one head with two faces looking opposite way he's set on a round neck and precisely alike also for years to privy members and the remainder to the correspond he could walk upright as men do now backwards or for as he pleased and he could also roll all over and over at a great pace turning on his four hands and four feet eight and all like a tumbler going over and over with their legs in the air and this was when he wanted to run fast at this point he goes to this dialogue about how then we got her again and decided to make war on the gods cuz we could just roll around and make all this noise and we're so powerful we're so fast this is hilarious by the way there's no there's no evidence that anybody ever believed this ever in the history of anything that we were stuck together we had four arms four legs for me you know is this is crazy but he's doing it you're sort of delivering on that serious Aristophanes way whoa let me tell you this is what happened this is really what happened guys at last after a good deal of reflection Zeus discovered a way to defeat the humans he said methinks I have a plan which will humble their pride and improve their manner men shall continue exist but I will cut them in two and then they will be diminished in strength and increase in number that's why I have the advantage of making them more profitable to us so ancient is the desire of one another which is implanted in us reuniting our original layer making one of two and healing the state of man it's argument here is straightforward we used to be joined when we got cut in half we developed this longing to gain our lost part to regain what we had by the union with another person who makes us for the half that is missing originally we have two parts now r1 and we desire strongly to reunify with what was cut away from us ABBA what was the cut away from us each of us went separate has one side only men who are a section of that double nature which was once called androgynous are lovers of women because they originally a man and a woman stuck together hint androgynous out lovers of women adulterers are generally of this breed also adulterous women who lust after men the women who are a section of the women do not care for men but have female attachments if originally you were stuck together as two women then you're gonna long for a woman's of course similarly but they who are a section of the male fall of the male wherefore let us exhort all men to piety that we may avoid evil and obtain the good of which love is to us the Lord administer and led us to no one oppose him he is the enemy of the gods who oppose him for we are Friends of God and at peace with him we shall find our true love's which rarely happens in this world at present to not allow people to join with those with whom they are naturally attracted is a sin against the gods it is in our natures to love those to whom we are attracted to and that is a gift from the gods whomever you're attracted to is who you should be with because this makes you complete to do otherwise is impious to sin against the government's it's a beautiful I think metaphor and it invokes a very sort of modern sentiment but notice he does it in this hilarious way everybody else is invoking the God so he's going to invoke the gods everybody else is creating or reciting these ancient mythos so he's going to create his own ancient mythos and which human beings used to be stuck together with eight legs and they rolled around and they were so scary and powerful the gods cut him in half which is whole era I do think I just think this is hilarious particularly when it's in them sort of not the middle but sort of the middle third of the simple weighed between these very serious areas of diet you know pious and deep philosophical arguments Hera stop he's like Oh God really guys no time not that complicated some men love men some men love women some women love men some women love women what's the problem love is a joy it's great it's a gift from the gods it's impious to interfere with that everything else nonsense so if this is his model hilarious but with this humane and I think essentially correct and beautiful underpinning and it comes up over and over again he doesn't like abstraction he doesn't like excessive of crazy which is the structure of a lot of Greek argument is the invocation of all these crazy myths and gods Socrates does this all the time to make these long drawn-out you know if Furio you know there's a soul and there's a higher plane and there's a plane above that and the souls go up and they like I don't know come on forget that no no it's not that complicated let people love who they want because that's what the gods want because love is a wonderful thing it's a gift from the God in pious not to enjoy it in pious to interfere with other people so that's his argument in the symposium you can read 10,000 pages of comment on the symposium they'll never mention Aristophanes he's just been written out and I think he's written out consistently for the same two reasons one he's funny and so we go come on what is this from a frenetic and vamped raja'na Sting's rolling about scaring the gods I don't know and then - then he's just very simple and down-to-earth and straightforward and this pattern just repeats throughout that pretty much the entirety of his works which are by the way even again I just removed hilarious Oh we'll talk about that so that I just want to open with that to remember that he's in this posing for a reason Plato put him there for a reason we've forgotten that he's there culturally maybe not individually but as a culture we do not remember that he's there anymore she's just been vanished off of off of the stage because he's not Socrates it's too funny and too simple but if you if you read any of his plays you could break them down I wasn't trying to organise this so I decided I would just go with his some of his central arguments that recur in more than one play and then sort of give you an outline of where you could look at this so one of his big ones is the pleasures of peace and his opposition to war in a sort of dual argument here and it's important to note that that most of his adult life Aristophanes lived at the time of the Peloponnesian War that the sort of ruinous war between Sparta and Athens that ended up with the conquest of Athens and the destruction of of much that was good and Noble in the Athenian culture he was opposed to this war he thought this war was stupid and he did not hold back on this very much at all his fundamental reason is not that he was a pacifist he just thought it was ruinous and wrongheaded for Athens and Sparta two Greek cultural entities to fight what he considered to essentially be a civil war while the enemies the real enemies of the Athenian world of the Greek world more broadly were lurking out there to conquer them he thought it weakened Athens interior and inside of Athens it weakened them and made them subject to be overtaken by an oligarchy or a tyranny by the way exactly what happened and also weakened them externally making them prey to two forces that might be aggressive and want to conquer Athens or the Greek world which is of course exactly what happened so he's right and right so that sort of plays to look at here for the pleasures of peace but I mean there's a lot of them but the most famous is the lies estrada the car hands and peace this wild like one called peace right that's very subtle of him so if the armies of poppies famous play is lysis trata people are familiar at all with wisest struggle so this is this is a again an unbelievably hilarious and body work I think virtually unprofor Mille I've never seen a convincing performance I've never read of a convincing performance because what the two trends here very modern play in some ways is the women of Athens want to stop the war with Persia and they want I mean the first strike that was sparta and they want to stop the war because all of their husbands and sons are being killed this is important to note that this is a there's a serious underpinning despite the fact that there's this hilarious body exterior so they have a two-fold plan what we're gonna go on a sex strike and two we're gonna see that the temple of Athena essentially the Bank of Athens that's where all the money is and they figure if we seize the cash and give them in know sex they're certainly going to give in and they're gonna give him fast right that that's the so all of the action of the play revolves around those two themes and they are all mixed up and it's hilarious so on one hand it really is funny because you get this sex strike play which means that for much of the play the women are making sex jokes and sort of posing in the temple where the money is and exposing themselves and making all these innuendo to the men who all around wander around with huge erect phallus is because they can't have sex right and they're always grabbing each other's phalluses and so it's just x-rated and adjust and body beyond belief and every lie swear well and say every second line is a sex joke and I think every other line we're missing it because we don't know what that was referring to at the time I mean it is it at some level it's double and triple entendre the entire time it's not subtle most of the time and we know we're missing a lot of it which means it's a hundred percent sex jokes and very graphic sex jokes at that the same time it's important to remember this the setting of this that these plays were performed at Dionysian festival at which every significant member of the Athenian system ale society of course forget women all the significant men would be there all of the generals who are leading the war who weren't currently on the battlefield the Admirals the the most important elected officials the people who had voted for the war the people are gonna have to fight in the world people were just back from fighting in the war would be sitting in the audience and so when licensed trauma comes out and says look we've got to stop this ridiculous war it's then it's the people in the audience it's not like there's no remove it's not like a show that's on TV then someone in the White House might hear about oh you're being criticized over there no they're sitting in front of them there are many places where they actually name specific leaders the characters in the play yell at them because they're in the audience which is incredible I mean it's just so weird for us to think about it's as if you have all of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the president the vice president the heaviness in heads of Congress and there's a play going on where all the people in the play are yelling at the people in the set at the people attending here and Aristophanes wasn't shy about this if you look at some of the quotes he says about himself on the front page he says for even a comedy knows what is right and what I'll say though startling is right this is from one of his plays even now you silly minute is not too late to change your ways the poet declares he deserves to receive rewards for the good he has done you in the plays itself he tells the people look I know this is a comedy but pay attention this is important they're doing wrongheaded dangerous painful things so we have this great quote from the last estrada here where she says what matters that I was born in women if I can cure your misfortunes I pay my share of tolls and taxes by giving by giving men to the state but you both graybeard you contribute nothing to the public charges on the contrary you've wasted the treasures of your forefathers as it was called The Treasures of mass in the days of the Persian works you pay nothing at all on return and into the bargain you endanger our lives and liberties by your mistakes have you one word to say for yourselves ah don't irritate me you there or I'll lay my slipper across your jaws and it's a pretty heavy slipper you there this is out did the audience - fraud is not talking to people on stage she's talking to people in the audience look you old bastards you're stealing our money you're ruining the state your she actually it's at one point turns the audience and says you're killing my children it's a very direct charge because they are so one hand funny on the other hand not so funny incredibly body and it seems to be the way he got away with us it's just because he was the funniest playwright ever I mean he wasn't he was just he's just whole areas and so people were laughing but it was always a painful laugh or often a painful laugh so that's one of them another example is the Guardians in which shockingly one citizen decides whose name I always guess dick dick died at Columbus I always get it wrong anyway once it is said that the main character of the play he says well forget this war I'm gonna make my own separate peace so he goes in negotiate successfully peace for himself and his family it's just that's not the whole theme of course this is treasonous right I mean everybody's clear this is you can't do this this would be treason but that's the whole subject of the play but it really is just an opportunity to say look this is route you're destroying our families were starving in this case the main characters big problem is he's rural he's not from the city and because the Athenians could not match the Spartans on land they just told everybody who lived in the country to move to the city abandon your farms abandon your houses live in the city and and will you'll be protected by the walls and we'll fight them with our Navy and so there's these recurrent marches of the Spartans who would sort of go through about half of the Athenian territory burned the farm to tear down the grapes fill up the soil and ruin everything and they'd leave well if you're a farmer this kind of is not fun right it's like look I just want to go back to my vineyard don't want to go back to the I want to go back to the rural life and I can't because I'm stuck here in this city because of this ridiculous ruinous war with the Spartans themes is like look you know our whole way of life this is being destroyed not just our wealth not just you know our children but a whole like art or rural existence it's not just under threat it's actually being burnt down and it's easy for people in the city to vote for the war and to say oh we should keep fighting but how about the people who are bearing the burden of it so Aristophanes actually puts a guy on stage who can vocalize that and he's the centerpiece of the plate again a hilarious play by the way but this is the central tenor of it who's paying the price the people who don't have the voice I'll give them the voice get the city thinking about this once again a second one that's also peace but you know the names pretty obvious they're also war I mean a play about peace a second one is he had a lot of warnings about demagogues and sophist one in particular Cleon he did not like there are several plays the horseman in particular that are structured entirely as assault on one person who was in the audience so imagine you've gotten to see a play and you're like wow Aristophanes he's funny sometimes have been edgy politically daring but I'm gonna go see his play and you're sitting there and you realize oh this is just about me and everybody in the audience knows it's about you and he's the entire play is an abuse essentially of one person and that person the person he made most disliked was Cleon in fact he was so oppressive against Cleon is that the evidence suggests that Cleon took him to court and that you accused him of treason against the state now if Aristophanes had lost this case he would have been exiled potentially killed but probably just exiled and so having apparently won the case because he was not exiled we don't actually have the notes from the case but we do know that he didn't you didn't lose the case otherwise he would have been exiled he wouldn't have all the plays he comes back and writes the horsemen a play we do have which is even more brutal than the previous plan I mean he just goes after him hammer and talks and but his charges are clear again it's a hilarious play the character of Cleon has cast as the smart slave who is abusing the noble citizen and tricking him in every way and taking his money and beating him and doing it you know he is the he's the slave who gets on top but he's a crude nasty vicious perverted self-interested slave and it goes on and I can't imagine being Cleon it seemed shadi 'its with 10,000 like ten thousands of people attended these I mean huge audience ten thousand people saying they're going Wow Aristophanes is just beating Cleon with a stick how much more of this do we get yes and the evidence by the way is that it worked that he did help Athens over it's admiration for Clio but there is evidence that cleon's influence faltered in part not solely but in part because of the assaults led by Aristophanes so I mean there was an influence here but his charge was very straightforward Athens is a democracy but if a peculiar kind as all democracies are and Cleon seemed to have mastered the art of swaying the masses he's what we would call a demagogue and he would pack the votes that he needed to win to take power and then he would make sure that there wasn't anybody there for votes that he needed to then continue holding his power and so it was a very careful manipulation both of the ideals of the people with with demagoguing speeches and also of the methods of voting so he had mastered both the machinery and the demagoguery to keep the war going he was specifically we know this at Cleon was centrally responsible for not making peace probably twice that if the Cleon and the faction that he represented had said yeah you know this war is over list let's make peace there would have been peace but he consistently resisted that because if the history shows us is probably true is that if once there was peace they were gonna get rid of Cleon right so there's a very you know treacherous water he's sailing it his life is literally at stake at least exile would so he writes an entire play that just assaults him a couple of the specific charges are hard to understand now but let me just give you an example one is that he used his arms to gesticulate when speaking this was apparently an innovation and the idea before this is that a true that a true person who's to the mind who's trying to reason with the populace wants to be mostly still waving your arms around gesticulating making a lot of faces that's what actors do but if you want to reach the people if you want to reason with them as equals the whole notion of engaging with a dialogue which is so strong in the philosophical tradition of Athens at this time Aristophanes feels that is a fundamental violation of principle you're not reasoning you're waving your arms about right it's it's one of the original notions of like an attack ad right where are these where are the facts where the where's the truth no you're not trying this is not the point of the attack at the tack ad is to run down your enemies make them look bad who cares wave your arms about until something till you win and Aristophanes felt this was a fundamental violation of democratic system because it treated the voters like they were ignorant cattle and misled them and he hated this he wanted to appeal to the better nature's of the citizenry so by the way so these sorts of problems are not new to democracy they have they have been with us since the inception of democracy so and they show no signs of going away but this is so in many of the jokes in the play are hard to get until you realize that oh this is an innovation because to be stately and to speak clearly and convincingly without raising your voice and doing lots of gesticulations and all kinds of crazy you know vocal phases you're just all the emotional we were supposed to have that pretty low boil and it was supposed to be the reason and the facts that we're supposed to try and ideally but but Klien was one of the first who apparently just violated that completely along with buying factions and and all this other manipulation of the democratic process with which we were quite familiar today so he this he also disliked sofas tree so another one of his but long the demagoguery was the idea of convincing people by appealing to their emotions their fear their hopes rather than facts and reason and being grounded in the truth the second one is he disliked the Sophists which are the people who could argue anything right you could just argue every side of everything and make them make the weaker argument the better I think I have that quote here yeah the horseman this is from the horseman you demagogues are like oh and I'm sure this is from the horseman by the way this is the abuse of Cleon you demagogues are like the fishers for eels and still waters they catch nothing but if they thoroughly stir up the slime their fishing is good in the same way it's only in troubled times that you line your pockets so this is a double charge one if the water is still and you're calm and clear no one will vote for you so you're waving your arms around to mix it up two men get the slime I'll break it the Eels up that's the good stuff and two if it's peaceful and calm and there's no war on well people don't fall for this crap it's only when we have fear only when you are uneasy and scared that these appeals to our emotions work so this symbolism works on both levels and mutton lay or at least two levels three levels actually in the play at this point but that's the power of this plays consistent and then from the clouds which I'll talk about next which is about the Sophists a similar idea which is to invoke solely the weaker argument and yet triumph is an art worth more than a hundred thousand drachma this is what he thought of sophist tree in the clouds the king of the sophist is Socrates and so a father has a son who has been racing horses and owning horses it's not so much gambling on horses as Jesse loves beautiful horses he's been spitting all his money on horses and so he's deeply in debt and the father comes up with this plan to say let's go to the philosophical school of sofa Street and then you can learn how to argue her way out of your debt and won't that be great and so the father of the son they end up going to to the school which is sort of the thinker Emporium or somehow this is this made-up Greek word that means something like you know a thought room or thinker thinker area my think might be close to it and he says if he goes in and up in the air as Socrates floating around in a bucket so yeah obviously it's just this great visual image so on stage they have Socrates up floating around in this bucket and they're doing all kinds of experiments one of which is they're trying to determine whether a gnat makes a noise from its mouth or its butt right and then they've determined that in fact it is that noise that noise of the mosquito or the gnat comes from its buck because you know because of the direction of doing that this long like beautiful chain of reasoning that means that of course the the buzzing sound you hear is it farting its way through space not humming its way through space and then Socrates is up in this bucket sort of talking about how he's up in the sky is observing the Stars and if you're too close to the earth and again this beautiful sort of to Posterous reasoning about the world and it is an assault by the way not so much on Socrates Socrates is just the the guy that everyone would recognize as it is on the notion of using seeming logic and seeming reason to produce any possible outcome and at this time the law courts in Athens anybody can basically charge anybody with anything at any moment right and so there was constant turmoil of people bringing charges against other people but pretty quickly that they people realize that wow it's not so much the evidence that wins a day as the clarity of the presentation of the evidence as the power of the sophist tree and so people began being hired essential as the first lawyers they say look I'm guilty as hell all the evidences against me now help me out and they would go in and produce the most beautiful amazing preposterous sophistic is where the word sophist tree comes from argument to make the lesser argument look the stronger to eliminate the debts to get out of the charge of which you're guilty so on one end is funny because everybody knew this was kind of going on to the other hand Aristophanes felt this was actually a true threat to democracy it's a true threat when your legal courts are overthrown by this just crazy nonsense where there's no actual truth being socked the powerful who can hire the the supposedly wise simply talk their way out of whatever finally in the course of the play that starts to work for the father and the son kind of gets into it and they get some of the debts removed but then the Sun beats up the father by the way this is a huge violation all the civil codes of Athens right you children Revere the parents the father in particular fathers beat shoulder and children don't beat their father so the Sun the Sun beats the father the father's like what are you doing you can't beat me and he produces this beautifully reasoned argument about how well certainly you beat me when I was a child the father says yes well I know you beat me because it was good for me for you to beat me and so if beatings are there for good minutes would be good for me to return the favor of your goodness on to you you know tenfold and to beat the hell out of you right and so the son has learned the arguments only too well as I guinness did there there's a series of these hilarious scenes but the implication is quite clear which is if you allow this sort of reasoning to go on reasoning in quotes if you allow sophist to just prove anything and what you're gonna get is chaos children beating parents debts not being paid masses being led democracy and the courts ruined I'm you see another version of this and the wasp which is again it's just I should stop and say these plays are just so damn funny I'm making them sound way too serious because they have this serious component but I'm over emphasizing because it's been under emphasized for roughly the last thousand years but just as an example there's a chorus in the Greek plays oh by the way I should mend it done imaging comedy comes from the Greek word Como's which is to revel or riot or party and and daya which is to sing so it's it's a a rebel with songs it's it's a singing party it's a festive occasion so they have these big courses that would sing and the evidence suggests that the audience would know the songs or there would be songs to common tunes and so everybody would sing along but in the wasps or the Hornets as it's sometimes translated the chorus is dressed as wasps with big striped suits on and they have stingers and they go walk around stinging everybody with their butts all the time right this is and they keep entering as this big mass of wasps and hornets but but in in this play the central concept is there's a father who loves to go to the trials which is where all the big cases are decided which is great because this is participatory democracy at its finest but as some points out correctly as it turns out look dad 1 you're wasting your time and you're being misled and misused by the system you think you're making the decisions you think you have power you think you have control but in fact and Aristophanes gives this brilliant critique through the voice of the son you're just being used as a lever to get the votes that the oligarchs basically want anyway it's just again is this powerful critique of how people in democracies are misled but because it's Aristophanes you also get the counter critique we actually like the father much better even though he's wrong in the play he's a great character because he's like no I love to go to trials I love to serve the state I'd love to participate you know it's something for me to do now I'm an old man I can I can do my part the Sun says no stop that you're wasting your life you don't really have any power but what is the Sun offer nothing he actually is just a like a basically a drunken bastard right and so this is Eris you know that the Aristophanes he's not gonna just go he's like you know you can either be misused or a drunken bastard no we gotta be able to do better than that he's saying yeah the courts are corrupt but that doesn't mean you just leave the courts you don't just throw up your hands and say well that's it forget it it's just stupid like no no no we need more participation not less participation and so as yet all these hilarious scenes that I think maybe that one of the funniest ones in all of his plays is the father is so addicted to the courts that the son barricades him in his house so the opening scene is him like coming up through a chimney and coming up through roof tiles and trying to climb out windows so that he can get to the trial because he's so much wants to participate so the Sun finally holds a trial of a bucket now I'm trying to remember anyway all of the furniture is comes to life and so the bucket is being tried by a chair and they're all but they're people dressed up as buckets and chairs you know and so they're all on stage dancing around and there's this big mall these speeches are given in defense and then you know and the broom is you know arguing with the bucket and it's this whole like sort of flow show trial of furniture with the father they're sitting in in the jury and he's loving to participate in you know it's just these beautiful crazy madcap scenes but again on a serious subject another one or one of the last ones here is his support for democracy and you see this in the frogs wasps women at the assembly and again the carny ins one of the challenges in any democratic system is who gets to vote what do they have to do to vote how often do you vote and what do you get to vote on we did not to think about these things do we say oh we have a democracy well that's great and then hey there you go who gets to vote how many votes are there how many votes do you need when do you vote so one several of the jokes that they have which were apparently quite serious is they would schedule votes often walnuts get them early in the morning because you know what time it is but they would also schedule Monday's when not a lot of people could be there so if you want to pass a vote you just voted when nobody would be there or very few people could show up and then you voted on whatever you wanted whether people packed that packed this assembly and then boom you're done is that fair is that good is that democracy and what who can afford to vote so we say oh you can participate in democracy but if you have to stop work and travel to Athens to stand in an assembly for half a day to vote on something that's very expensive except for the people who happen to live in Athens and have nothing to do so so so on one hand yeah everybody gets to participate on the other hand some of these rules were not necessarily real helpful towards participation I was actually thinking of this because I don't know if people know there just have to be sort of political turmoil in Brazil recently but Brazil has mandatory voting they're a democracy but you have to vote you have no choice compulsory voting you have to vote and what an interesting idea right that if everybody has to vote and you get you know ninety or a hundred percent participation because it's required it's manded you can in theory get in trouble if you don't wow that's very different from the system in which well you have your paperwork filled out you can vote but you don't have to but ancient Greece it was much either there were barriers to voting and throughout Aristophanes life he argued that these barriers should be lowered and that the franchise should be increased first he argues this you see this in the frogs and particularly by the that resident aliens in Athens should be given the right to participate in the democracy because these are people have been there for generations and generations these aren't people who just showed up ten days ago so just imagine I know it's hard to imagine let's imagine you had a lot of people who came to your country who weren't necessarily citizens and he didn't become citizens but they had children in your country right let's I know it's hard to imagine this would happen but let's just imagine that happens and there's a lot of them around maybe a few million in today's demographic terms relative Athens would you want them to participate in your democracy Aristophanes said yes because the larger the franchise the more people are invested in your democracy the better it is it's a counterbalance to what they thought he thought was both demagoguery and tyranny and the oligarchs it goes so far finally to argue look we should let freed slaves vote now this is a big step forward that the the Athens suffered a serious naval setback against the Spartans which means now they're doomed because if they're not going to run on land and if they're not winning on the sea they're in trouble so they needed to get rowers and they need to get rowers right now and so they offered slaves a deal and they said if you will come row because citizens did this before if you will come row in the Navy and basically risk your life and fight for the city if we win we'll make you free and if you become free you should get the vote right and so this was a huge potential increase in the franchise and Aristophanes pushes us very hard in his plays it's again you know it's a real issue facing the city of athens facing the Greek culture and Aristophanes was again I would say right I mean history proof he was right this turned out to actually be a pretty damn good idea and staved off the inevitable at least for a little while although not forever women at the assembly is exactly what you would expect it to be the joke of the play as the women gets so sick of the men running the place like in Vice Estrada that instead of going on a sex strike and taking the bank they dress up as men and they go to the assembly to vote in the place of men so they're gonna pack the assembly to vote for good things rather than the crap that the men have been passing and though one of the jokes of the play is they didn't really let women onstage in the Greek theater so the female parts were played by young men dressed up in women's suits clothing with breasts and everything so now you have young men dressed as women dressing as men right so there's this whole double set of costuming things going on here which is just gonna be hilarious right and then the women of course have no concept of how the assembly works and so much hilarity ensues but the big joke is how crazy this would be the people have argued that all Aristophanes was really a big proponent of women's rights evidence for that is not very strong it's just that in his time it was so hilarious to think that women would be in the assembly that it makes the thing funny imagining his real message though not real message part of the message though is look it's so bad we're being so badly led that we would be better off if the women ran it which is both a joke and a threat good lord how badly off do you have to be when you would want women to participate you know and so that it some of this place seemed like to have this feminist overtone there's yeah I'm not sure very scant evidence of this but there's a lot of evidence of you know again his his proposals for peace he was sensitive to the position women were in again in Lysa strata believe it's licensed Rhonda who says look men go to war maybe they died once maybe they don't women won't we lose our husbands too we lose our children and if you're a young woman who are you supposed to marry as you get old your spring is done the men come back they can marry anybody they want because there's so few men and so many women we are losing over and over and over again it's a very sensitive recognition that the problem women have is very different very unique not the same problems that men have in the war and so this you know he does have that outlook but but not not easier I guess it's a very weak that he's he's sort of a proto feminist but it's very strong that he recognized the issues that faced his country yeah and then and then the frogs which is beautiful baguette uh-huh see how che boy that's a tough one too well the frogs Dionysus goes down to hell to get guripa tees and and Aristophanes spends lots and lots of time in his plays assaulting Euripides because he thought your impotence was hilarious because they often wrote about similar things but in your rip ities plays were horrible and he never won the top prizes right that the Athenians hated your remedies this place and so a lot of Aristophanes jokes are you rip ADIZ you know come on you can't do it this way your buddies wrote tragedies like well that we're horrified sort of for instance the classic what is the Medea where at the end of the plate Medea kills her own show the poisons the girlfriend of her husband kills the queen of the colony therein and escapes and lives at the end which violates essentially all the rules of tragedy and right and everything is just it's a hobby it's like horrified it's a great play by the way media my ideal woman she was the business but you just didn't want to you didn't want to cross her this is the thing you wanted students just can't be careful if your wife is Medea Jason is just beautifully awful as a husband he's wonderful character but so he do it rip ADIZ didn't I don't think he may have won won first prize but he often did not win first prize these were a competent competitive plays by the way they were done like a sporting event so to give three or four of them in a row that people would vote when you whoever got top prize that was great but your rivet ease was consistently not getting top prize mr. Aristophanes sort of makes fun of them but after Euripides dies he has a play in which he sins Dionysus to hell to get Euripides back because there's no good playwrights left now that your rip ADIZ is dead which suggests as much as Aristophanes loves making fun of him he really did like Euripides work he's just like look you're not gonna win if you do it this way you want to make a laugh not make them weep or be terrified you know I think this is one of the messages but a big part of the play is them like growing across the river Styx and and the meeting of the old values of the Athena Athena and civilization that fought successfully against the Persians allied with the Spartans they were allied with the Spartans against the Persian invasions not the new world where we're fighting the Spartans and so there's this whole undertook current in this of yeah I'm going to get your Ripa teas what I'm trying to do is get the old world back bring it back with me so we can go back to the old values back to the way things were before we just started to destroy it with demagoguery it's also in the frogs where he brings up the threats quite specifically of an old gardener or a tyranny taking over Athens his timing was very very precise I mean he missed it by a little bit but it wasn't too long this that in fact they were the tyranny of the 500 and then the 4000 takes over so as it's you know a strikingly clear view of the threats that Athens was facing once again and his solution or the solution to the extent that he offered solutions he mostly offered critiques and prize for hey let's do something different was look let's expand the franchise let's include more people let's bring about peace let's negotiate let's work out our problems I'll just continue what we're doing and so you get these just real again pointing it funny I mean one of the great scenes in there I guess I should mention I'm sorry I guess I'll go back to the humor so Dionysus is Hercules his brother Hercules has gone to hell and come back nobody else has and so Dionysus who is sort of wears long flowing robes like a woman and big hat this is how you recognize Dionysus on the stage dresses up as firk Uli's who wears like a tiger skin and has a club that's how you recognize Hercules onstage and goes to knock on Hercules this door and so Hercules answers the door of like holy what that was at right so there's Dionysus and Hercules Garvin's it's just this repeatedly hilarious encounters because Dionysus is not Hercules Dionysus is is fainting away at best you know he's just not the warrior type and so he's trying to avoid battle all the time and it turns out to be all these jokes about generals who don't fight and you know sort of politicians who are very leading very strongly from the rear and you know it's it's it's subtle but it's consistently there and so through our Aristophanes you get this again consistently hilarious and consistently powerful critique of Athenian society and I wouldn't say he was a great thinker except for he was right all the time history proved that Aristophanes was right Cleon was a dangerous demagogue who got them into all of trouble there war with Sparta was ruinous and did lead to weakening the entire Greek world and opening up to conquest from the outside the threats of internal oligarchy were very strong the the ripoff of the people and the jury-rigging of the franchise created all kinds of Democratic problems the whole structure had these issues and he labeled them he identified them he screamed them again it's important remember that these hilarious plays were performed in front of the most important people in Athenian society and he's again in plays he named Cleon and then later instead of naming Cleon he just made it clear that the guy was Cleon who he was mocking he turned wisest Ronald over the line I quote turns to the audience and says don't laugh I'll hit you with my slipper you know which is very rude by the way it's an incredibly rude gesture but also being threatened from a woman from stage all I hate you I'll come out there and hit Jesus shut up right you know it's a it's a direct assault on the audience but again funny I was trying to think of the close analogy I could come up with and it would sort of be I was thinking maybe like mash which was kind of a show that was funny and it was set in Korea to critique America's involvement in Vietnam you know this is this is that that that was it the only difference would be is the war was going on Athens was often you know threatened by Sparta while the play was being performed and the actual generals and leaders were there when Aristophanes assaulted them and in a hilarious entertaining fashion you won over and over again by the way he wrote something like forty four plays 11 of which are extant we still have so when you think of Aristophanes if you think of Aristophanes first think of them as one of the top playwrights of all time particularly for comedy if you want to read a couple of them the frogs is a great place to start lysis draught of course a classic wasps hilarious but you also have to remember that we're missing a lot what exactly chorus and the dancers were doing all the top I mean we know they were doing funny stuff because it's Aristophanes but exactly what that was we don't know a lot of evidence that there were audience was singing along like drinking songs right they're all a distance there would be breaks for musical numbers right sort of big musical interlude now and then they would go it's clearest in the frogs there's a whole section of the frogs where it's pretty clear that this was a musical number that and the audience would sing that we're all singing together here so there's a whole musical element there as well to sort of bring people crazy costumes I mean hilarious he had John's he had people in buckets he had going to the underworld he had lions and tigers on stage he had the sort of famous you know two people and the horse's body thing he had one of those it goes all the way back you know it just it seemed newest but it's not it's ancient but he didn't have a system and I think this is a good to go back to where I started Aristophanes doesn't seem like a thinker in the sense of wow he didn't create a model government which he suggested that Athens should adopt he didn't say here's a new constitution which I feel should be voted on by the citizens because a this would be boring and unfunny and he was going to be funny at all costs but to is not clear that that works in any case he wasn't a revolutionary right he didn't say oh I want to overthrow a they want to destroy they were breathing now we're gonna start anew that was Plato Plato in the Republic right level this the top something new and ideal and terrifying by the way my god is a terrifying idea Aristophanes on the other hand look we've got a pretty good system it's not all bad but we have a problem I'm gonna lay him out for you again where I read before even a calm at the comedy knows what's right and I'll say though startling is right I'm gonna tell you what's right you know what I'm right laughs along but you know I'm right it just says it right there right in the middle of a play even now you're silly man it is not too late to change your ways we could still fix this don't want to overthrow it don't want to burn it down want to create an ideal state just wanna fix the one we have we can do this the poet declares he deserves to receive rewards for the good he is done you I've done you so much good you should reward me by the way this is precisely the line that Socrates takes in his trial he says look I've done so much good to the city what if my punishment be my punishment should be you should pay me tribute put a statue up to me because I'm such a great guy and I've helped the city out so much I mean semi convinced he stole it from Aristophanes because this is because the Aristophanes said it first and their esophagus was put on trial he was threatened Cleon Cleon was not his friend he did that he did risk a lot to do this and he did it for years and years and years so here's a humane person who was right who wanted to uplift entertain and reform his society that we've forgotten because you know we don't think of comedy as sufficiently serious so anyway Aristophanes forgotten thinkers thank you very much

Channel: Wes Cecil

Views: 24,066

Rating: 4.9228916 out of 5

Keywords: Wes Cecil, Humane Arts, Aristophanes, Ancient Greece, Comedy, Lecture, Philosophy

Id: 9Q9G95I_WZ0

Length: 57min 50sec (3470 seconds)

Published: Sat May 21 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/tedemang]

This series is just plain awesome. ...and I've started to become in awe of the lecturer., Wes Cecil, who deserves a lot of credit for summarizing all the background of these.

Also recommend his talks on:

• Cicero
• Mencius
• Al-Ghazali & Averroes

[u/cantstoplaughin]

Anyone else a bit surpsied such an important talk only has under a thousand views?