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Today I'm delighted to be chatting to Dr. Rosie Wyles of Kent University,

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who is an expert on Aristophanes and is going to be talking to us about the many and

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various Aristophanes passages which come up on the ancient history A-level syllabus.

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So there are a few important passages that come up in the period study for all candidates.

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And then if you're doing the Sparta study, there are one or two passages from Lysistrata.

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If you're doing the Athens study, there's a whole medley of different bits of things which we're going to be discussing.

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So, Rosie, welcome. It's great to have you on the podcast.

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Tell us a little bit about yourself and your work with Aristophanes.

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Thank you. Aristophanes I probably first encountered when I was studying classics at university, and since then it's become a little bit of a habit.

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You read one and you want to read more, and I certainly had to get into it when I was researching tragedy and interested in tragic costume,

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because there's so much where Aristophanes is responding to tragedy.

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Since then, my research has taken me to look at the way in which drama reacts with society.

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And again, Aristophanes was very prominent in that.

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And it's something I also teach for my undergraduates.

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I do a course which looks at Aristophanes and thinks about what it can tell us about the history of the period and vice versa.

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How the historical context makes the drama so enjoyable.

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Well, thank you.

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And I think that gets right to a point here, is that we are aware, perhaps that these plays are great works of art and to be entertaining and enjoyed.

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But for this syllabus, for the ancient history level,

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what we really want to know is how can they enlighten us about what's going on with the politics and the society of today?

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And so that's what our focus will be. Let's just start, though, a little bit with the background of that theatre context.

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If those who go on and do the Athens depth study will learn more about this.

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But the theatre culture in ancient Athens was quite different from ours,

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and I think you didn't just go to the theatre when you felt like it, as we might do, but there was a particular context.

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So tell us about that. Absolutely.

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So you would most likely go and see these productions of Aristophanes at one of two major festivals in Athens, either the Lenaia,

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which was held in January and was, if you like, a home audience, just the Athenians, because people can't sail in that month or the city.

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Dionysia or Great Dionysia. Yet both names refer to the same festival and that was held in March and that's a much bigger occasion.

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It involves ideas from outside of Athens. They come as part of the audience wants Athens as its empire.

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It's their opportunity to bring tribute. So these are both religious occasions celebrating the God Dionysius but they're

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also civic occasions and they're framed in that way to celebrate the city,

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to celebrate its achievements.

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And we can see in both the tragedies and comedies that they engage really closely with some of the concerns and preoccupations at the time.

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Okay. Thank you. So maybe tell us a little bit about the size of the audience and the the elements of competition.

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These playwrights were writing to win, and I think we're talking about an audience much larger than we would find in theatres today.

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That's absolutely right. So it's a matter of guesswork for academics for how big that audience was,

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because the stone remains that we have for that theatre of Dionysus in Athens.

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From a later period in the fifth century, the audience would have been sitting on wooden benches at the side of the hill beneath the Acropolis.

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And so in terms of how big it might have been, I think really safe guess is 10,000,

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which is really absolutely mind blowing when we think about it as the audience size in a standard auditorium for a theatre.

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You might think of a thousand, so you've got to think of it more in terms of maybe going to a music festival,

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maybe go into a concert, but you've got a really decent audience.

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Thank you. I think I'd be right in saying that the vast majority of the audience would be Athenian male citizens.

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And that's really important, because if Aristophanes is trying to make them laugh about public matters,

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the affairs of the state, then he's got to know what's going on and what their concerns are.

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This is a huge cross-section of the Athenian citizen body that we're talking about.

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Yes, I think it's helpful to think of that as being the target audience.

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So the evidence leaves it open to make a case for women being present in the audience.

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And it depends who you read on this. So if you read Simon Goldhill, the scholar, he'll argue that this was a civic occasion primarily.

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So we should think of a male audience. If you want to make a case for women being present and look at Henderson's work and he will make the case that,

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well, it's a religious festival, so they may have been involved. irrespective of whether you think women were there.

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It is still, I think, helpful to think of the audience that Aristophanes has in mind as the male citizen body 

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in Athens as they and the prime audience in mind when he's targeting pitching his work.

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And that's that is really important in terms of assessing.

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Attitudes he might be reflecting or attitudes he might be parodying in his works.

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So I think it's worth mentioning that we only have Aristophanes plays left.

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But he was one of many. He was perhaps considered in the ancient world the best, which is why his pieces survived.

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But we know the names and sometimes the titles of lots and lots of other playwrights, don't we?

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Tell us a little bit about that.

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So increasingly there's work now and research being done on what remains as comic fragments from other comic playwrights.

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So when we talk about attic comedy, fifth century comedy produced in Athens, it absolutely isn't just Aristophanes and Aristophanes.

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His own work gives away that rivalry that you mentioned, you know, as a competition.

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He's up against other comic playwrights. He's defining himself against these comic playwrights.

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And we have traces of that rivalry, traces of that identity that these playwrights are putting across in their work in Aristophanes, his own comedies.

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And also, of course, you can go off and look at the fragments and, you know, those are more accessible now as they're in translation.

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And you can start to get a sense, even from the play titles of actually the range of comedy that's being produced.

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And so I think when we talking about Aristophanes as a source, when we're thinking about comic style and comic implications,

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you have to think that this as Aristophanic comedy rather than generalising as Attic comedy.

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I think that's quite a useful way of handling that, acknowledging that, okay, there are other comic playwrights,

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but we're thinking about what Aristophanes is doing and how he is responding

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to his culture around him and transforming it or not in his comedy thinking.

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And then I think before we dive into these sources, we should probably just say when he is writing his play.

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So I think the first recorded play we know of by Aristophanes is in 427,

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but the first one that survives is 425, The Arcarnians, which we'll talk about in a moment.

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And then he goes all the way down to the 380s, which goes beyond our period study, which cuts off in in 404.

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So he's there for these last 20 years or so of our period study.

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I guess he's obviously then writing a lot during the period of the Peloponnesian War and he reflects a lot on that in his plays.

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I guess the final question then is how can we approach him as a source for ancient history?

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To what extent is he just massively exaggerating?

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To what extent can we say the must be some truth in this?

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I think we approach him as any source, as any historical source, every single piece of evidence that survives from the ancient world needs to be assessed.

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And you have to understand what the critical issues.

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But that might be with Aristophanes. We have to take into account that it's comedy.

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We have to understand that may be distortion, there may be exaggeration, and there may be even his own, of course, personal bias.

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But those issues with it as evidence could equally apply if we were looking at a historian like Thucydides,

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 with Aristophanes, the difficulties with it as an evidence is perhaps more evidence.

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I think with THucydides, part of what is really tricky is it looks like it's absolutely reliable.

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It looks like there wouldn't be anything without it looks like there wouldn't be anything distorted, and that's not the case.

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So they offer different things as evidence.

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We can't go to Aristophanes thinking we're going to get the same sort of evidence as we might get from Thucydides.

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But just because there's comic exaggeration,

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it doesn't mean that this is less valuable as evidence and maybe you have to work a little bit harder to

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extract what we can learn about society from it because of those questions that are a matter of judgement,

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such as How much is exaggerated? Is it funny because it's extremely far from the truth?

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Or is it funny because actually it hits home. And so that's the sort of balancing act that would apply to any kind of evidence.

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And I actually think Aristophanes is some of the very best evidence that we have for good century politics.

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That's really interesting to hear and to get students thinking that actually

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you probably need to be just as careful with Thucydides as Aristophanes.

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I think students are used to the idea that you have to be careful with Aristophanes,

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but you also have to be careful with all the other sources as well. Okay, well, let's dive in then.

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So we're going to start by looking at the prescribed sources in the period study.

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And the first one is just a short section of about ten lines from early on in Arcarnians and this is the start of Arcarnians

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 about this character Dikaiopolis who is fed up with the war.

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The play is set in 425 and at the assembly that day he wants to put a proposal to make peace with the Spartans, but before he can get up and speak,

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we have various other things going on, including this parody of a Persian embassy or an embassy coming from Persia.

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So tell us a little bit about what's going on here and what we might be able to infer from it.

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So we have an envoy coming back and reporting on this trip to Persia and that there

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are a number of aspects here where you can tell there is some exaggeration going on.

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So this envoy comes back and he says, well, you remember you sent us off 11 years ago.

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Right. So you are meant to imagine that had they been paid for all of that time?

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And Dikaiopolis is reacting to the sense that, you know, it's a little bit like expenses scandals.

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Now, the sense that that there's someone just taking advantage,

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spending all the public money and actually it sounds like having a pretty nice time, but all of it is presented as a hardship.

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But oh, it was awful. We had to lie down on some beds when we were going there.

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We had to drink wine. And meanwhile our face is reflecting on his situation, how terrible his conditions are living in the city.

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So I think there's a nice insight here to or useful insight here to the potential disparity within the democracy,

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a democracy where you apparently all have the same opportunity. And here is the sort of us and them attitude of Dikaiopolis,

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that these people have had this opportunity to go off and have a have themselves a good

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time in terms of what it might tell us in time for the political situation at the time,

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it might be initially surprising to people who could think about the rhetoric around Persia being the old enemy,

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that we've got an envoy going over to Persia,

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but actually we have evidence that both Sparta and Athens were sending people to Persia to try to potentially form an alliance,

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potentially get some funding for that side of the war.

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Right. So we can look to other sources for this.

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We can look to there's a passage in Thucydides Section 50, chapter 50, where you have a of police being caught.

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He's on his way to report to Sparta. He's coming from Persia to report to Sparta and he gets intercepted by the Athenians,

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who then after they found out what he was going to say to Sparta,

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and it's clear that there are some negotiations going on,

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try to take advantage of the situation and actually send him back with some of their own imports.

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So we do know that this isn't just coming out of nowhere in Aristophanes.

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Yeah, I think that's very interesting, isn't it? Thucydides typically considered this is very little about what's going on with the Persians.

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Yeah. In his history, he's very interested in the Athenians and the Spartans and their power blocs.

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But we do get this little quote or this little section in Thucydides, which is a prescribed source 450,

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saying that both the Athenians and the Spartans essentially were having back channels to the Persians.

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And of course, in the end it's the Spartans who end up winning the war because they get Persian funding.

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Thucydides doesn't give this any air time really in his history, apart from this reference, one or two others.

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Then we get this play in 425, which is also talking about Athenian contact with Persia.

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So we we have this sense that there's always this dialogue going on between Persia and Sparta and Athens individually,

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and that the Persians remain a really key player.

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And I think there's something else going on here as well in acknowledging that it may be latent anxiety about Medising

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So this is this serious political allegation you can make about someone

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maybe being she sympathetic with the Persians and giving way to their customs.

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We know it was taken seriously because again, Thucydides has a whole excursive on it about the fate of Themistocles and Pausanias.

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This is at the end of his first book in his histories.

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So it could have really serious consequences. It could be to extol what you have here, and this is quite typical of Aristophanes.

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It's you take something serious and you make it so ridiculous that we're all reassured, right?

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So here's this envoy. He comes back, he's in this outlandish outfit.

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You know that from Dikiaopolis saying, whoa, what a get get up. And we hear about how these envoys have been engaging in Persian customs.

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But because it's comedy, nothing bad comes of that.

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We just acknowledge that this is something that might happen, but it becomes something funny in a comedy.

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And that's quite an important way of understanding how Aristophanes works as

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a source that you understand what might be a cultural concern at the time,

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but we're going to have it diffused within the setting so that something that is serious actually presenting, though it's not really a problem.

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That's great. Thank you. Well, let's move to the next prescribed source for the parents study.

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And this is a big one, really, a colony and same plane.

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Five, two, four, two, five, three, nine. It's in the middle of a speech by Dikaiopolis

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And this is all about Aspasia and the Megarian Decree

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There's a lot that we could unwrap here,

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but for our students who are thinking about the causes of the Peloponnesian War, that's our second interpretation.

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Question This is a really key source. So maybe tell us a little bit about the context of the speech that Dikiaopolis is making

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and then what he specifically jokingly says is the cause of the Peloponnesian War.

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And then we'll think about how what we can read into that. Right?

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Yeah. So, as you say, there's a lot to unpack here.

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Well, maybe that's because of the interweaving of the poetic with the political in this section.

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And while we're focussed on thinking about what these can tell us in terms of politics and what's going on in Athens.

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At the same time, you can't quite escape the way in which it's framed within this part of the play.

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So. Dikaiopolis is making a speech in defence of the Spartans and he does this dressed up as a character from one of Euripides' play.

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the tragic playwright wrote a Telephus in which and it's fragmentary

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now but you know that the the character made a defence speech on behalf of the enemy.

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Right. And so that's the sort of premise for this, that he's dressed up, he's borrowed, the costume it's all very elaborate.

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But then you get to the speech itself and it becomes, of course, very, very contemporary.

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I mean, it's almost got a feeling of parabasis here.

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That is those sections where the chorus sort of step aside from their characters

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for a moment and speak almost directly to the audience about contemporary affairs.

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Now we have Dikaiopolis, the protagonist doing something similar here, and almost speaking as though he's Aristophanes.

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So that gives us pause for thought. All right.

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I'll be going to get a very serious analysis here of the causes of the Peloponnesian

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War in the way in which it's not entirely the Spartans to blame in Athens,

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have their own part to play. But then what he goes on to say is, well, we can unwrap in a moment how contentious that might be,

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that he says, in fact, the cause of everything really is the Megarian decree.

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And that actually the Megarian decree comes about because of a bit of women snatching.

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And it all comes down to Pericles and Asphasia. Right.

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So Pericles is the leading politician at the time in the beginning of the Peloponnesian War and his mistress,

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Aspasia, who has a reputation of having, in effect, a brothel.

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And so this is this serious.

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Can this be serious? That actually, this this comes down to, in fact, the sort of personal concerns or priorities,

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rather than these sort of much grander, complex reasons that we get to in in considerably.

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So, yes, the logic of this argument, if we kind of take it seriously, which you probably know,

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but the logic of this argument is as follows in The play, they said Megarian contraband.

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This is talking about Athenians who are trying to catch people who were disobeying the Megarian decree.

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And it goes on. Well, that was minor just on national sports, as you might say.

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But then some young chaps got drunk and for a law went to Megara and kidnapped the tart Samitha.

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So that is a theft of a Megarian woman by Athenians.

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Well, this raised the Megarian's hackles, and they stole two of Aspasia's girls in retaliation,

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meaning the prostitutes that she has in her supposed brothel.

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And that gentleman was the cause of the war that has been raging throughout Greece these six years.

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It was all on account of three prostitutes because Pericles,, apparently sent out thunder and lightning and threw all Greece into confusion.

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So essentially the idea is that the peloponnesian war started not for any grand geopolitical reasons,

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as you say, crazy, but simply because Pericles' consort.

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His common law wife, Aspasia, was put out by the theft of two of her working girls.

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Goodness me. How do we even start trying to interpret this as historians?

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Well, I think we might want to think about Herodotus and think about the way in which his histories begin with, in fact, not a dissimilar set up,

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where actually wars begin because all snapped and go right in the same way that you can

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make that reductionist argument about why the total war happened because of Helen.

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So if we think about that and think about that as a sort of filter,

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I'm not sure that it makes this more or less credible because it makes it playful, certainly, and it's engaging with a story.

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And yet, of course, that sort of distance,

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it's it because it becomes some some sort of potentially literary game where you have Dikaiopolis trotting out this analysis.

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And it's also very much in the comic frame to say that this is all down to women and all down to not just women,

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but down to a bunch of prostitutes, which is the cause of the trouble and.

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I think part of what we're wrestling with here is the wider historical question of what we make of the Megarian decree,

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and that is really contentious within scholarship still, how of how serious that was.

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And so when we're trying to analyse, for example,

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the later passage in this play where there's a Megarian and who is so, so poor that he has to sell his own daughters.

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Are we meant to be sympathetic? Is that a serious comment from Aristophanes?

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You know, again, is it having a bit of fun with the the sorts of things that people might say,

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you know, the sorts of exaggerations people might be making about what it was all down to them.

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You know, the simplistic oh, well, it's all down to the Megarian decree.

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And so I think those are the sorts of factors you'd want to take into account.

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I mean, trying to I don't think you can solve this.

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And I think it's a mistake in general to expect to sort of get the answer from a historical source.

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I think what you can do is weight it up and see what you can unpack from it and make

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a more or less plausible case in terms of what what you're unpacking from it.

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Because it would come down to the question of is this a parody of an overly simplistic view that people are actually expressing in Athens?

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Is it is there an element of fantasy where it could be that simple that, you know, this war isn't complicated?

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Actually, it's very, very simple. It's only because of this and is trying to do the right thing for Aspasia,

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or is this Aristophanes trying to present this sort of serious challenge to an alternative narrative which says it is really complicated and saying,

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No, no, no, this isn't complicated. This is something we can solve.

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Because actually it started from something simple.

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And so, you know, those are your choices, I think, when you're looking at it and it's you know, it's up to us to make a compelling argument.

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That's very interesting. And I think a couple of things also to throw in.

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The first thing is that this play is produced in 425, so that six years after the war started and four years after the death of Pericles.

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And so, you know, he's been dead for a while. And they're still saying Aristophanes is still presenting this view, oh, it was all parities.

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And then secondly, in the biography of Pericles by Plutarch, I think sections 3232,

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Plutarch actually says that the most commonly held view for why he apparently didn't want to

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rescinds the Megarian decree was that he had a lot of political troubles going on at home.

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His allies, including Aspasia, Aspasia, Anaxagoras, I think, and Phidias all being prosecuted for different things or being exiled in a vigorous case.

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And so going to war by using the Megarian decreee was a way for him to escape political troubles at home, to divert attention.

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And of course, we know from our history subsequently that that is sadly a familiar pattern, isn't it,

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that particularly leaders, you know, powerful leaders like to use war to divert from problems at home?

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Yes. And I think that's so helpful to have those other sources as a way of shoring up an analysis of what Aristophanes is up to here.

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And really importantly, we're getting a corrective to Thucydides again by, you know,

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if you read only Thucydides, you'd have such a different view on Pericles.

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And that's only the smallest hint, actually,

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I think in Thucydides where that policy of bringing everyone inside the city and

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there's resistance to it and Thucydides  does admit that there is this resistance,

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there is this group we want to go out and fight, and then Pericles is able to smooth it over and he denies them the right to express their view.

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And then somebody said, you know, that bears some strategizing, some manipulation.

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And I think it's interesting, as you say, six years on,

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as this play is really engaged with that idea of being stuck in the city and watching

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the Spartans invade the land around Athens and destroy your vines and thinking about,

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you know, what that does in terms of mentality. And it might be helpful to think about maybe a split in terms of when we think

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about the audience and the target audience and now your man Athenian system,

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you know, there's a split potentially in the demographic there and how this might play out to different sectors in the audience,

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whether your elite citizen who has always lived in Athens, in the city itself,

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might feel differently, for example, compared to those who have come in from the countryside.

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Okay. And actually, that discussion of the Megarian decree takes us nicely into the sections from Peace.

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Now the prescribed sections for Peace are 619 to 622 and then 639-648.

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But actually, I would like to look at the whole section 631-648 and I'll explain why in a moment.

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Before we talk about these sections, though, let's just say something about Peace.

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It's produced, I think, at the city Dionysia of 421, and it anticipates the peace of Nicias, which is also part of our course.

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It's the end of time span four. So it's a play which almost celebrates the coming of peace after ten years of war.

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Tell us a little bit about the plot of this place. It's quite fun, isn't it?

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It's great fun that you brought your comic hero going up to the heavens, flying up to the heavens.

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And again, a parody of tragedy.

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That's a story for another day.

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Going home to the heavens to retrieve Peace, the personification of peace, the goddess peace, and to restore peace amongst the Greek.

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So you have some magnificent staging and some wonderful passages to pick from in some of the thinking about attitudes.

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And I've been thinking about attitudes towards war, but this bit is all about, again,

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thinking about the causes of the war at the point at which you're then peace is in fact.

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Yes, thank you. Yes. So if we actually we're going to start, I think, line 601.

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And I would encourage students and teachers to read this whole section from 601 to 648

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And our hero is Trigaius. Yes. And this point in the play, he's gone up to the heavens and he meets hermes, is that correct?

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Yeah. The messenger God. And that early speech of Hermes at the start of that section, he actually says, I'm reading from a Perseus translation here.

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The start of our misfortunes was the exile of Phidias, very close associate of Pericles.

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And again, someone mentioned by Plutarch, Pericles feared he might share his ill luck.

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He mistrusted your peevish nature [that's talking to the Athenian people] and to prevent all danger to himself.

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He threw out that little spark.

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The Megarian decree set the city aflame and blew up the conflagration with a hurricane of war so that the smoke comes from all Greeks,

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both here and over there. At the very outset of this fire, our vines were a crackle, our casks knocked together.

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It was beyond the power of any man to stop the disaster and peace disappears.

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And then Trigaius replied that by Apollo is what no one ever told me.

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I could not think what connection there could be between Phidias and peace.

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So again, we get exactly the same view expressed certainly in 421 for years after Arcarnians that the cause of the war was the Megarian decree,

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which was a way for Pericles to divert attention away from his own political troubles at home.

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Exactly. And it's helpful to have it not only stated again, but also stated in slightly different terms here,

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so that we have another member of Pericles' inner circle coming into the frame.

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So this is not just a story about Pericles and his mistress.

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It becomes actually a story about Pericles and his associates.

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And you have this sort of sense of this inside politics that is motivating those decisions.

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And that is, you know, as I've enjoyed a very, very different view from Du Saturday's,

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who sees Pericles as acting from the best possible motivations and intentions, and for always putting the city first rather than in his model.

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It's the later demagogues who put personal gain first.

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And that's why, of course, everything according to thucydides goes wrong.

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But here we have in 421 B.C., so that that idea is out there and okay, your guy says, Well, I never figured that out,

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but I think we have to think of this in terms of Aristophanes expressing something that people are saying or that people have said.

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And that idea is out there. And of course, ten years in, you have space and distance from that original moment of war,

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the conflict beginning to actually be able to emerge and at least to come up with a narrative.

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I mean, who knows whether in a way, it doesn't matter how accurate this is.

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It's about what people think happened and why people think these things happen.

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You know, attitudes towards the war. You know, rather than trying to get to some kind of truth about that.

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Thank you. And then if we move on in that section, the, the two prescribed section say 619- 622 and then 639-648.

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What we've got there, I think, is a description of how the allied cities are looking to revolt.

305
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So the Athenian allied cities are looking to make deals with Sparta.

306
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And of course, again, he's reflecting on how the Arcadarmian in the first ten years of the Peloponnesian War has evolved.

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So we get allied cities wanting to revolt, and in particular in the section 639 onwards, we get mention of Brasidas.

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And so at this point, candidates, I'm sure, will remember Brasidas,

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is the Spartan sent up to fight and make ground in the northern Aegean and the thrace-ward region.

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And we get a description here of some of the cities up there who go over to

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Brasidas because they're so fed up with being part of the Athenian empire.

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Yes. And this is part of why it's possible to have peace in 421 B.C. because of the death of both Cleon and Brasidas in 421 B.C. with,

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you know, in that really strategically important city of Amphipolis up in the north region.

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So I think Brasidas is another key player here and it's important as well to appreciate the way in which actually both sides are using slogans.

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You know, so brasidas using that slogan of liberation for those allies of Athens.

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And then on the other side, you can see, at least according to this speech,

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the way in which demagogues are taking advantage of Brasidas' operations to make these allegations against which are lies and to extort further funds.

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So, you know, there's all sorts of politics at play in the Peloponnesian War and the different phases of it.

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And we should say that the reference to the tanner there at the end of that section, that is the one and only Cleon, isn't it?

320
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That was how Aristophanes often referred to him, because his dad, I think, owned a tanning factory and that's where they made their money.

321
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So he's always making jokes about leather and tanning and stuff. Yes.

322
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And he gives himself away a bit with that, I think, in terms of being aristocratic himself.

323
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You know, there is that sort of snobbery in his treatment of Cleon and how far that reflects the way in which the people of

324
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Athens thought about Cleon and how it was just a joke on the poets of Aristophanes is something to take into account.

325
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And I think it's interesting, isn't it, that this reflects much Thucydides' version of Cleon.

326
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We said that the sections talking about Pericles seem to be giving a quite different image of Pericles than Thucydides does.

327
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We know that Thucydides loves Pericles,

328
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but here we get a very similar picture of this kind of warmonger in peace claim being a warmonger, as we see in the pages of that these.

329
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Yes. So they aligned quite neatly, the two of them.

330
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And that whole idea of Cleon being violent and influential to the people and that's how Thucydides

331
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puts it when he first introduces Cleon in his works.

332
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And that's absolutely what you get from Aristophanes as well.

333
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Okay, Rosie, thank you so much. It's been really interesting way of looking at the period study sources for Aristophanes.

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And we will do a second part to this podcast, which will be looking at the depth study sources.

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But for now, thank you very much. Thank you.