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Venom in Verse

PRINCETON MODERN GREEK STUDIES

This series is sponsored by the Princeton University Program in Hellenic Studies

with the support of the Stanley J. Seeger Hellenic Fund.

Firewalking and Religious Healing: The Anastenaria of Greece and the American

Firewalking Movement by Loring M. Danforth

Kazantzakis: Politics of the Spirit by Peter Bien

Dance and the Body Politic in Northern Greece by Jane K. Cowan

Yannis Ritsos: Repetitions, Testimonies, Parentheses edited and translated

by Edmund Keeley

Contested Identities: Gender and Kinship in Modern Greece edited by Peter Loizos

and Evthymios Papataxiarchis

A Place in History: Social and Monumental Time in a Cretan Town by Michael Herzfeld

Demons and the Devil: Moral Imagination in Modern Greek Culture by Charles Stewart

The Enlightenment as Social Criticism: Iosipos Moisiodax and Greek Culture

in the Eighteenth Century by Paschalis M. Kitromilides

C. P. Cavafy: Collected Poems translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard;

edited by George Savidis

The Fourth Dimension by Yannis Ritsos, Peter Green and Beverly Bardsley, translators

George Seferis: Collected Poems, Revised Edition translated, edited, and introduced

by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard

In a Different Place: Pilgrimage, Gender, and Politics at a Greek Island Shrine

by Jill Dubisch

Cavafy’s Alexandria, Revised Edition by Edmund Keeley

The Films of Theo Angelopoulos: A Cinema of Contemplation by Andrew Horton

The Muslin Bonaparte: Diplomacy and Orientalism in Ali Pasha’s Greece

by K. E. Fleming

Venom in Verse: Aristophanes in Modern Greece

by Gonda A. H. Van Steen

Venom in Verse

ARISTOPHANES

MODERN

GREECE

Gonda A. H. Van Steen

PRINCETON

UNIVERSITY

PRESS

PRINCETON

NEW

JERSEY

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,

Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Van Steen, Gonda Aline Hector, 1964–

Venom in verse: Aristophanes in modern Greece / Gonda A.H. Van Steen

p. cm.—(Princeton modern Greek studies)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Aristophanes—Appreciation—Greece, Modern. 2. Aristophanes—Stage

history—Greece, Modern. 3. Greek drama (Comedy)—Appreciation—Greece,

Modern. 4. Greek drama (Comedy)—Presentation, Modern. 5. Theater—Greece,

Modern—History. I. Title. II. Series.

PA3879.V34 2000

8828.01—dc21 99-039767

Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Princeton

University Program in Hellenic Studies with the support of the Stanley J.

Seeger Hellenic Fund

This book has been composed in Galliard

http://pup.princeton.edu

eISBN 1-4008-0819-7

To Greg Terzian and Dimitri Gondicas

Contents

List of Illustrationsix

Prefacexi

Acknowledgmentsxix

Prologue3

HAPTER

Poisoned Gift from Antiquity: Aristophanes as Paravase of

Koraes’ Nationalist Ideology16

HAPTER

Aristophanes in Modern Greek: A Demotic, Satirical, and

Theatrical Paravase43

HAPTER

The Lysistrata Euphoria of 1900 to 1940: Sexual and

Antifeminist Paravase76

HAPTER

Koun’s Birds of 1959: Paravase of Right-Wing Politics124

HAPTER

Framing, Clowning, and Cloning Aristophanes190

Epilogue224

Notes231

Bibliography259

Index275

Illustrations

IGURES

1. Phasoules takes Aristophanes up into the clouds (Clouds)98

2. Cartoon of Tsatsos by Makres 134

3. Cartoon of Tsatsos by Phokion Demetriades 136

4. Caricature of Tsatsos by Geses 137

5. Drawing by Elly Solomonide-Balanou of the 1997 memorial

production of Koun’s Birds 146

6. The Lysistrata of cartoonist Bost 207

ABLES

1. Modern Greek Stage Productions of Aristophanes, 1951–74 226

2. Modern Greek Stage Productions of Aristophanes, 1975–98 227

Preface

People say that when the tyrant Dionysius wanted to familiarize

himself with the political system of the Athenians, Plato sent

him the work of the poet Aristophanes, ... advising him to

study his plays to gain insight into the Athenian state.

—Aristophanes, Vita 42–45 K-A

RISTOPHANES

is vitally important reading for students of modern as well

as ancient Greek politics. The playwright matters, not only as the sole

preserved source of Attic comedy but also because his work and the his-

tory of its reception help us understand Greece today. I have written this

study with Plato’s legendary recommendation in mind: if he had been

around, he would have promoted Aristophanes once again. But since he

is not, this book must make the introduction.

OTHING

WITH

RISTOPHANES

Symptomatic misconceptions have spurred me to remedy scholarly disre-

gard of Aristophanes’ reception in modern Greece. Many classicists seem

to agree that Attic comedy never sustained a rich theatrical revival tradi-

tion in Europe. Misled by this Western-oriented consensus, they have

also constructed the genre’s at best marginal existence in Greece. Gilbert

Murray’s oft-quoted conclusion that “Aristophanes died intestate” is

based solely on the experience and knowledge of translations, adapta-

tions, and productions in mainstream English-speaking countries. The

persistence of such inferences qua value judgments has inspired faulty or

reductive statements even in recent works on ancient drama. Graham

Ley, for instance, claimed in 1991: “With the exception of Lysistrata, and

on occasions Frogs, and apart from regular productions by the Greek Na-

tional Theatre, there have been relatively few performances of Aris-

tophanes’ comedies, and few directly commissioned scripts.”1 Yet any in-

vestigation of the poet’s contemporary Greek tradition beyond the

National Theater’s contradicts this assertion. Aristophanes is the coun-

try’s most popular and one of its most political playwrights, surpassing all

other authors, ancient or modern, native or foreign. The large number of

scripts directly commissioned from prominent Greek literati, eager to

xii · Preface

shine in a ﬁeld as competitive as Attic comedy, is only a small indication

of the poet’s enduring appeal. Perhaps more telling, recently as many as

six to a dozen new comic revival productions (that is, excluding repeat

performances) have been presented each year at the annual summer festi-

vals of Athens and Epidaurus and in the provinces. These productions

have covered Aristophanes’ entire corpus, and their styles, diversiﬁed by

different personalities and drama schools, and even by singular perfor-

mances, have ranged from philological and archaeological ﬁdelity to ex-

treme modernization.

Niall Slater showed signs of the common misunderstanding of Aris-

tophanes’ reception in modern Greece. He maintained in 1993: “Cer-

tainly the National Theatre of Greece has reclaimed its national heritage

and has, for much of this century, been staging that heritage at Epidaurus

and more recently in the Odeon of Herodes Atticus in Athens.” Ignoring

the achievements of the modernist Karolos Koun in reviving ancient

drama since the early 1930s, he continued:

Yet even if there were not lingering questions about the inﬂuence of French

staging and acting style on the history of the Greek National Theatre, we

would still need to acknowledge that even in the days of easy air travel such

performances are relatively inaccessible to us. When the Greek National The-

atre tours, moreover, it is still a matter of putting square plays in round the-

atres, as Peter Brook has termed it. In other words, there has been no great,

internally driven movement in the staging of classical drama as there has been

for Shakespeare; such performances as we have seen are much more parasitic

upon other developments in theatre.

My analysis of the pioneering work of internationally renowned Greek

stage producers, such as Koun, Alexes Solomos, and Spyros Euangelatos,

refutes both this negativism and the unfair comparison with the Shake-

spearean tradition. To a varying extent, Aristophanic comedy has been

the mainstay of these directors’ innovative work. Moreover, extraordinary

productions, such as Koun’s Birds, have changed the course of Greek

stage interpretation of contemporary and ancient drama, and even of re-

vival theater abroad.

In examining Attic comedy’s modern readings, this book taps unusu-

ally rich sources of Greek literary and theatrical culture and makes them

accessible for the ﬁrst time in English. My strategy has been to leave the

ground open for new interpretations of the ancient and the contemporary

Aristophanes alike, unburdened by the baggage of standard philological

scholarship or by arguments about controversial side issues.3 Instead of

referring to the past or to secondary literature to validate a particular

reading, I analyze the consequences of conscious artistic and directorial

decisions and the ways in which these have affected later interpretations.

Preface · xiii

I have discussed textual and historical details only when a modern read-

ing called for them. This deliberately unencumbered approach does jus-

tice to the lay or pragmatic mind-set that Greek artists and consumers

have brought to the comic revival stage. It also helps to re-create (and

rehabilitate) both the personal and the collective experience of perfor-

mance in a new classical moment, as it were. This freedom will in turn

enable the reader to observe the scene and to reassess the ancient text as

both a play-act and an act of communication.

THER

EOPLES

’ A

RISTOPHANES

The following comparative outline, for which I am deeply indebted to J.

M. Walton, shows that the earliest modern Greek stage tradition of Attic

comedy differed, both in quantity and in quality, from its initial reception

elsewhere in Europe and in the United States.4 In Greece, the leap from a

text-based to a performance-oriented Nachleben of Aristophanes took

place in 1868, when the ﬁrst popular adaptation and production of the

Plutus established a permanent taste for contemporized satire. Both the

early date and the results of this shift are impressive when compared with

the corresponding initial developments in Western Europe or North

America.

In Renaissance Italy, ancient Greek theater did not see a lasting stage

revival of its own, but it inspired the conception of Italian opera. In

seventeenth-century France, Greek tragedy was honored more than

Greek comedy primarily for its inﬂuence on neoclassical drama—in par-

ticular on the plays of Racine, Corneille, and their followers. Heralding

Weimar classicism, Goethe and Schiller brought ancient tragedy to the

forefront of German theater. Apart from Goethe’s amateur production of

Aristophanes’ Birds (1780), Attic comedy was overlooked in Germany

until 1908, although more or less liberal translations were available. In

1908 the famous Austrian director Max Reinhardt put on the Lysistrata

in Berlin. Despite its immense success, it was not followed by any other

signiﬁcant pre-1950s attempt to reinterpret the Aristophanic repertoire,

let alone to establish a tradition of comic revivals. The classical drama

festival regularly held (since 1921) at the ancient Greek theater of Syr-

acuse in Sicily featured a 1927 production of the Clouds, but its next

Aristophanic comedy, a modern version of the Frogs, was not performed

until 1976.

In Great Britain, an 1883 revival of the Birds at Cambridge claimed to

be the ﬁrst complete play production since Aristophanes’ death. This

claim perhaps underestimated J. R. Planch´e’s free adaptation The Birds of

Aristophanes, staged at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, in 1846. It cer-

tainly ignored two Athenian productions of 1868, the Plutus and the

xiv · Preface

Clouds. The Cambridge Greek plays included other early revivals of Attic

comedy as well, namely the Wasps (1897, 1909), and the Birds again

(1903).5 Only since 1954 has King’s College, London, presented annual

productions of ancient tragedy and occasionally comedy. Nearly all Brit-

ish revivals were conceived in academic circles, and they never attained

the broader outreach characteristic of even the earliest modern Greek

stage interpretations. For many years professional British theater dared to

invest only in the Lysistrata and the Birds, regarded as Aristophanes’ most

universally popular plays. Terence Gray, for instance, produced the Lysis-

trata in an interesting 1931 double bill with Sophocles’ Antigone. As

director of the Cambridge Festival Theatre he also staged two versions of

the Birds (1928, 1933). Norman Marshall’s Gate Theatre presented an

unexpurgated Lysistrata in 1935. But it took a Greek producer, Minos

Volanakes, to introduce the larger British public to Aristophanes. His

1957 Lysistrata at the Royal Court won great success and soon moved to

London’s West End.

The prevalence of Aristophanes’ most popular plays showed also in the

North American stage reception, which also was driven by academia. The

Greek Theater at the University of California, Berkeley, for instance,

housed an early-twentieth-century revival of the Birds in the original lan-

guage. The year 1930 saw the ﬁrst American Lysistrata, a turning point

in the United States’ popular acceptance of classical drama. The produc-

tion of Norman Bel Geddes in Gilbert Seldes’s adaptation had been in-

spired by the touring 1923 Lysistrata of the Moscow Art Theater. Not-

withstanding some negative reviews, the show ran for more than 250

performances. In the mid-1930s the Federal Theater Project, the artistic

offspring of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration

(WPA), sponsored the creation of an all-black Lysistrata adapted by The-

odore Brown. But its premiere at the University of Washington in Seattle

was closed by the WPA for being too risqu´e. The war years witnessed

further attempts to revive the Lysistrata. Aristophanic comedies that are

typically less popular with modern audiences than the Lysistrata and the

Birds were ﬁrst staged in the United States, as in most Western European

countries, after 1950.6

ESEARCH

AND

ROGRAM

OTES

Aristophanes’ revival history in modern Greece has received very little

attention thus far in local and foreign scholarship.7 Anything other than

the parastasiographia (the simple listing of productions) of his comedies

has remained nearly unexplored.8 Hardly any theoretical writings have

been published by directors, and the quality of the rare exceptions leaves

much to be desired: they are closer to personal memoirs than to critical

Preface · xv

essays. The same holds true of the scarce source material in the form of

rehearsal notes, promptbooks, a mise-en-sc`ene, or any other technical

information about productions. Very few ﬁlms, videos, and recordings are

available (and those practically inaccessible) to re-create the original

modern performances. The few historians attempting to broaden the

monoculture of the local stage and its observers have published biased or

incomplete accounts. For instance, the agenda of Giannes Sideres in The

Ancient Theater on the Modern Greek Stage, 1817–1932 was to argue

classical drama’s importance as the literary bedrock for much-needed

Greek unity and continuity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth

century. This mental framework left little room for analyzing the Aris-

tophanic productions of that time. Also contributing to the obvious lack

of substantial regular sources is the common Greek preference for sup-

posedly higher-quality theater bearing a foreign signature.9 Greek audi-

ences themselves, considered more broadly, have left in writing very few

personal impressions or critiques of actual stagings. Oral descriptions

tend to vary greatly according to the speaker’s age, sex, education, and

socioeconomic background. My own study therefore draws heavily on

the more ephemeral materials to which contemporary Greece has inevita-

bly restricted the student of revival and native drama: it relies not just on

statistics and other historical documents but on newspaper articles, cri-

tiques, and playbills, as well as on interviews conducted with people ac-

tive in theater, journalism, academia, and politics. To aid future scholarly

analysis, I have inserted extensive translations of a few texts that are not

readily available even in Greek.10 These will also allow the reader to fol-

low my argument better and, perhaps, to experience some aspects of the

playscripts as the original Greek audiences did.

Researchers of modern Greek stage productions necessarily start from

secondary and often very subjective judgments of the quality of these

interpretations. Most nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Greek the-

ater critics offered only rudimentary performance criticism of the Aris-

tophanic revivals they claimed to evaluate. Even the established critics of

the pre-1970s generation tended to be inarticulate and unsophisticated

on this topic. Greek critics have often limited themselves to analyzing

comic performances philologically, narrating the contents of the original

plays instead of discussing productions from a theatrical viewpoint. They

essentially commented on the text as the basis of a performance but ne-

glected the issues and tensions raised by the performance itself. Also,

most Greek critics past and present have not been free from a certain

degree of positive or negative prejudice. They have let themselves be

tricked into either praising or loathing a given production, thereby pro-

nouncing the verdict on its commercial success or failure. I have not

followed (or tried to establish) an aesthetic canon for deciding whether

xvi · Preface

to include certain interpretations and their relevant sources as parts of this

study. On the contrary, I have omitted nearly all aesthetic judgments and

facile labels, especially from my discussion of recent translations and stage

productions.

The translations and performances discussed in chapters 2 and 3 are

presented as historical events, but stagings of chapters 4 and 5 have been

selected based on reception, a criterion I revisit in the epilogue. Most

productions were launched via the ofﬁcial channels of the Athens and

Epidaurus Festivals, and thus received enough public and critical atten-

tion to generate multiple—often discordant—opinions and reviews.

Their exposure to much larger theatergoing audiences is particularly

helpful for the researcher who aims to reconstruct the expectations raised

by, and the responsibilities assigned to, Greek professionals staging Aris-

tophanes today. In following these logistical criteria, which do not neces-

sarily reﬂect the quality of performances, I do not intend to imply per-

sonal indifference to theatrical aesthetics or to the value of critical

evaluation in the study of drama. My purpose has rather been to provide

readers with the necessary data to help them form their own criteria by

which to assess modern productions of both Aristophanes and classical

tragedy staged in Greece or abroad. My aim is not to propose a ready-

made canon but to supply the background for the reader’s own informed

judgments. Nor can this analysis substitute for reading the texts ﬁrsthand

or seeing the plays in performance.

In a broad survey such as this, it would be both redundant and imprac-

ticable to discuss in detail all Aristophanic performances presented at the

dramatic festivals. Therefore, at the risk of oversimplifying, I have chosen

to highlight those productions that best sum up dominant practices in

any given era, even if they are not the most prestigious ones. For further

data on the spread of Aristophanic stagings since 1951, please refer to the

charts in the epilogue. I completed this book in 1999, which allowed for

the scope of nearly ﬁfty years of comic revivals, and of a quarter century

of artistic freedom following the 1974 abolition of the Greek military

dictatorship. For more detailed theater-historical information and for

more extensive bibliographical and other references, the reader may con-

sult my doctoral dissertation.

No knowledge of either ancient or modern Greek is assumed in this

book. All quotations from Greek sources have been translated. Most

translations are my own; a few, as indicated, have been taken from the

standard published translations. I have also translated or transliterated the

original titles of modern Greek primary and secondary sources in order to

facilitate a critical rereading of the given materials. On the vexed problem

of transliterating from the Greek, I adhere to the main principles issued

Preface · xvii

by the Library of Congress unless a Greek name has a well-established

form of its own in English. For ancient Greek and Latin proper names, I

adopt the conventional Latinized forms broadly used in the English lan-

guage. Both systems work better together without diacritics in a book in

which ancient and modern Greek names occur side by side.

Acknowledgments

The completion of this book provides a long-awaited opportunity to

thank publicly the people on whose expertise, guidance, and support I

have relied. I owe a tremendous debt to my long-term advisors, Dimitri

Gondicas, Richard Martin, and Josiah Ober, who engaged this new mate-

rial with great enthusiasm and interest. They have generously given of

their time and energy to discuss practical and theoretical issues with me,

and they have presented challenging fresh approaches to matters I had

considered closed. I have learned much from them and count on their

enduring friendship.

For welcome criticism and vivid discussion, I am also grateful to the

faculty of the Classics Department and the Program in Hellenic Studies

at Princeton University, and of the Classics Department at Cornell Uni-

versity and at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Alexander Nehamas,

David Ricks, Helen Kolias, Jeffrey Rusten, David Konstan, Frank Romer,

and Christopher Trinacty have provided me with valuable feedback and

thoughtful comments on early, often rough versions of the manuscript.

Their expert help resulted in many useful changes and new insights,

which have greatly improved the ﬁnished product. Edmund Keeley,

Froma Zeitlin, and Michael Herzfeld shared their critical acumen with

me and have always expanded my horizons. I express special gratitude to

Oliver Taplin and Stratos Constantinidis, the readers for Princeton Uni-

versity Press, for their incisive and helpful assessments of my work.

Stratos has shown a responsiveness to all aspects of my topic that is more

than noteworthy. To all these scholars, and to many others whose contri-

bution is less easy to isolate and identify, my profound thanks. I am, of

course, solely responsible for whatever deﬁciencies remain despite their

best efforts.

I thank Elly Solomonide-Balanou for granting me permission to re-

print her drawing of the 1997 memorial production of Koun’s Birds. I

am also indebted to many Greek theater professionals for granting me

interviews and access to new or obscure source materials. I owe a further

note of gratitude to the librarians and staff members of numerous institu-

tions, research libraries, and archives, for their prompt and unstinting

assistance. Jochen Twele, Eleni Konstantaki, Ronnie Hanley, and Claire

Myones were invaluable to me during my years at Princeton University.

At various stages in its development, this book was advanced by gen-

erous grants, for which I thank the following foundations: the Alexander

Papamarkou Fund, the Center of International Studies and the Council

xx · Acknowledgments

on Regional Studies at Princeton University, the Gennadeion and the

American School of Classical Studies at Athens, the Dr. M. Aylwin Cot-

ton Foundation, and the Provost’s Author Support Fund at the Univer-

sity of Arizona. I am indebted to the Modern Greek Studies Association

and its committee of readers for the award of its inaugural Ph.D. Disser-

tation Prize, which I used to make the ﬁnal revisions to this text. Here I

single out, however, the Stanley J. Seeger Hellenic Fund and the Com-

mittee on Hellenic Studies at Princeton University, whose representatives

work nothing short of magic.

Mary Murrell and Molan Chun Goldstein, my editors at Princeton

University Press, have embraced this project with great enthusiasm and

professionalism. They and their support staff edited the manuscript with

skill and sensitivity. I also gratefully acknowledge the help of my copyedi-

tors, Madeleine Adams and Alice Falk, in eradicating mistakes and inel-

egancies from my English.

A warm word of thanks goes to Richard Burgi, who ﬁrst introduced

me to modern Greek theater and who remains an unfailing source of

information and kindness. Barry Goldfarb opened new windows in guid-

ing me to graduate school in the United States. I mark my heartfelt

appreciation also to Herman Van Looy and Ria Verstuyft in Belgium,

where it all began. For the example of their treasured wisdom, their

sound pedagogy, and their collegiality, I am very grateful. Particular

thanks are due also to my cherished friends at the Athens Centre, Greece,

for their affectionate and abundant hospitality over many years. Rosemary

Donnelly, Griet Vankeerberghen, Kian Beyzavi, Shirley Stein, and Leigh

Gibson deserve special thanks: their congeniality, good humor, and en-

couragement never fail to sustain me. My husband, Greg Terzian, has

helped me draw the tables in the epilogue. Beyond practical support,

however, he has given me his invaluable love, his constant thoughtful-

ness, and his willingness to listen, read, and respond, even when he was

stationed in distant locations overseas. His own work and work ethic

have always enlightened me. His and Dimitri Gondicas’ conviction that I

could ﬁnish this book gave me the energy and the conﬁdence to do just

that. Their tactful patience and loyal trust are gifts they have freely given

and continue to give me. My debt to both of them is immeasurable.

Finally, a very special “dank u” to my sisters, Maria and Els, for what we

shared at home and in college, and to my parents, for giving me all the

opportunities they never had.

Venom in Verse

Prologue

HEN

THE

IGHTS

...

Aristophanes tumbles out of an ore cart and onto the stage. His white

robe is dirty and disheveled. He is bald, really bald, the classicist in me

notices before I even realize what is happening. And then Aristophanes

starts venting: the workers drilling the new Athenian metro lines have hit

his grave and disturbed his centuries-long rest. What do the Greeks want

from him? What more can they take!? They’ve abused his plays so much

and they continue to do so every summer, without ever paying him a

single obol in copyright money. He’d be rich otherwise, as rich as some

big shots out there. But now, no, now he is as broke and as disillusioned

with Greek government as the average Giannes in the audience.

June 1997: Greeks gathered in the Athenian Delphinario applaud the

opening scene with their favorite, Thanases Vengos, as Aristophanes.

Grouchy though the ancient poet may be at ﬁrst, he is ready to take on

the cause of the long-suffering fellow Athenian again, in this musical

comedy called The Enfeebled Greek (Ho Hellen Exasthenes). The revue

freely reuses themes from ﬁve of Aristophanes’ works to complain about

the austerity measures of Konstantinos Semites’ socialist government.

The Greek audience instantly plays along with the reincarnated, warm-

blooded Aristophanes of the producers’ lively imagination: the poet be-

comes the cumulative personality of his corpus, quite literally. While I am

recalling other theatrical ways in which Aristophanes has been brought

back from the dead, the Greeks go for the meat in the message.

Leave it to a playwright who has been dead for more than two millen-

nia to jolt Greece out of its political doldrums in the blink of a blackout.

Koun’s 1959 Birds, which galvanized the local public and spawned years

of controversy, and other revival productions tell the same unusual story

of how intensely alive Aristophanes is in modern Greece. Old Comedy is

no comedy of small talk; to the Greeks, it strikes home again and again

with direct, unprocessed power.

RISTOPHANES

Aristophanes provides a way to understand modern Greek society. Be-

cause his humor is so obviously vulgar and accessible, he brings ancient

and contemporary Greece together instead of prying them apart: the “no-

ble” but also “elitist” ancient civilization and the “popular” and down-

4 · Prologue

to-earth modern one. The plays of a long-dead comic poet with strong

opinions about state and citizenship, about language and literature,

about women, party politics, and modernization help illuminate Greek

culture of the nineteenth and twentieth century. On his living, interactive

stage, policies and personalities have been debated and derided in ways

that would have been unthinkable in more conventional public settings.

Aristophanes provided an alternative democratic forum in his own time,

and again today’s Greek comedy reaches beyond both mainstream and

marginal artistic forms, raising uncanny issues in its probing way. As

much as it is a fantasizing and utopian genre, Attic comedy has also been

exploratory and problematizing: it sets forth as many provocations as in-

genious solutions.

Aristophanes has been political in both text and modern Greek con-

text: he is the remarkable index of the “political venture of comedy”

because he blurs the boundaries between the ﬁctional play, often made

more satirical, and the country’s sociopolitical predicament.1 Compared

to other nationalities, the Greeks have consistently received “their” classi-

cal poet with a stronger sense of direct relevance, with a much greater

volume of translations, adaptations, and productions, and with more

heated disputes about intent and interpretation. Aristophanes has been

the Greek touchstone of political and linguistic progressiveness, of gen-

der transformation and social change, and of a modernist openness to

things new, whether innovative or “subversive.” His morality has been

viliﬁed, his language and humor bowdlerized. He has borne the brunt of

early-twentieth-century Greek feminist attack and he has been almost si-

lenced by censorship and right-wing political reprisal. Yet, since Aris-

tophanes established built-in name recognition, he has suffered equally

from overexploitation, institutionalization, and lack of purpose.

The playwright’s texts have been invoked to support myriad causes and

his name has been used and abused to sell a vast quantity of un-Aris-

tophanic goods. But beyond the poet’s impressive record of hits, reprints,

and ticket sales, he has been revived in the broadest sense. Every major

interpretation of Aristophanes was an act of rewriting—rewrighting—

and revision of the classical text in light of contemporary sociocultural

anxieties. In the nineteenth century this anaviose (revival) was a slow but

tenacious struggle that ran contrary to the desired “grand rebirth” of

Hellenic nationhood, morality, and language. From 1900 on, however,

Aristophanic performance, whether generated by linguistic inﬁghting

or—more surprisingly—by male transvestite pornography, persisted and

became a fact of Greek life. Right-wing governments from the 1950s

through the 1970s felt the modern Aristophanes’ presence with such dis-

comfort that they banned his comedies.2 The recent global culture of new

oral, aural, and visual media has again adopted the classical poet to great

Prologue · 5

effect, to decry matters as diverse as current Balkan friction or the exhaus-

tion of the domestic popular tradition.

To argue that only in Greece did the regular reception history of a

classic become, once again, a practice of engaged public performance, I

have used sources and techniques that rarely ﬁgure in conventional treat-

ments of Aristophanes, let alone in studies of Greek civilization and poli-

tics, whether ancient or contemporary. My conclusions cross boundaries

between classical philology, actual performance, and critical theory, and

they subvert a record of Attic comedy characterized by denial or distor-

tion (see my preface). The claim that an ancient author provides insight

into a modern society and vice versa might strike classicists and historians

as bold, whereas Neohellenists might perceive the argument for Aris-

tophanes’ broad presence in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Greece as

exaggerated. Nonetheless, comic revivals in contemporary Greece have

been as ubiquitous and politically motivated as were the original perfor-

mances in antiquity. Aristophanes has proved an ideal mirror image of the

ofﬁcial and unofﬁcial discourses of his modern homeland, and he has

opened the perfect site for cultural criticism across time and space. At

once classical (because of the long philological tradition) and popular

(because of his humor’s immediacy), the poet’s work has been a choice

battleground in the interplay between old and new.

Book after book has interpreted Attic comedy within its ancient con-

text, but none has focused on the meanings shared between adaptations

of Aristophanes and modern Greek civilization. Also, more than any

other sector of theater or performance criticism, criticism of revival com-

edy has remained complacently unmethodological. Therefore this study

tells not one but two stories of reception: it is an account of Attic com-

edy’s reinvention, of its time and place in modern Greece, but it also

presents a theoretically informed analysis of the genre’s reﬂection of the

contemporary Greek mentality. This book is the ﬁrst to deﬁne the rela-

tionship between Aristophanes’ plays and the tactics and antics of the

culture that spawned the comic revival tradition.

NTER

THE

UDIENCE

This book tries to read not Aristophanes’ mind but the mentality of

modern audiences, regardless of whether they were ever targeted by the

playwright. The Greek civic mind-set that has responded to revival com-

edy of the past decades is far more important to me than the author’s

historical intent. Directorial interference will also receive more attention

in these pages than Aristophanes’ presumed literary and theatrical aims.

In the modern Greek performance culture of Attic comedy, which often

plays to the audience’s rule, viewers do not remain passive but become

6 · Prologue

spect-actors. They act out the power of the public, in its double meaning

of the large majority in society as in theater. Theirs is the mass rule of the

“theater state” supported by the unruly, unpredictable Aristophanes.

Nonetheless, this is a case of mostly constructive “theatrocracy” when

measured against Plato’s deﬁnition (Laws 701a; cf. Republic 492b–c);

the philosopher equated the rowdy stage public with the voting majority

crowds of the open-air Athenian assembly, law courts, and army camps,

which were never insulated from surrounding outdoor activity. Greek

spect-actors form the critical civic gaze, an unstable given that extends

beyond the one-way direction of viewers watching players. Comic perfor-

mance and festival histrionics frequently move offstage. Critics, journal-

ists, and politicians who are normally assigned seats in the audience—

sometimes front-row display seats—often bring their own theatricality to

the real-world spotlight. Both directions of the gaze are operative be-

cause revival comedy contains so many recognizable cultural ingredients

and at the same time exposes the texture and dynamics of surrounding

Greek life.

“We’re not in any shape to be a harmonious thing, we’re just the audi-

ence,” a veteran theatergoer once told me, alerting me to the changing

identities of Greeks as postmodern subjects. Aristophanes’ revival engages

its far from homogeneous public in a diverse dialectical experience. His

eager “attendants” become partners in his unruliness because Attic com-

edy invites more than the usual dose of reaction, criticism, or friction.

While the modern Aristophanes freely mixes strands of past and present,

exalted myth and harsh reality, antiheroic selﬁshness and democratic

community, he asks individuals, groups, or classes to make choices and to

declare preferences, even if he is only seeking the afﬁrmation of con-

sumers’ hard-to-fake laughter. As revival comedy moves about the fertile

grounds of stage dialectics, role-playing and exchanging, and self-referen-

tiality, it asserts that the plays are never predetermined or closed; instead,

they constitute collaborative projects, not ﬁnal products, of performers,

public, and participatory environment. Aristophanes’ verbal, paraverbal,

and visual language through time offers its many recipients perks of rich-

ness and open-endedness: it posits again and again the poet’s centrality

to multiple circuits of meaning.

The Greeks’ cultivation of different interpretations of Aristophanes

challenges traditional modes of thinking about ancient text and perfor-

mance. The classical plays, even individual scenes and lines, in modern

Greek society have repeatedly acquired new meanings that were colored

more often by the recipients’ cultural lenses than by the transmitted or

received originals. This phenomenon helps dispel, from the very begin-

ning, the notion that objective and timeless readings, independent of a

wider context or receptive horizon, might be enshrined within the an-

Prologue · 7

cient texts themselves. Once the search for such positivistic, single, or

ﬁxed meanings has been abandoned, classicists may discover new ap-

proaches to long-standing philological and archaeological problems in

the study of Attic comedy. A theater practice as enduring as the modern

Greek revival stage can help scholars formulate new answers and adjust

prevailing attitudes and assumptions about language, verbal and visual

art, and the act of performance itself.

I have worked with the bare minimum of presumptions about the

meaning of Aristophanes’ plays, and I have consciously distanced myself

from hypotheses about (or criticisms of) the poet’s persona or his speciﬁc

political intentions. The comic revival tradition is political only in the

broad sense, in that it stages shifting ideological contrasts and contradic-

tions.3 The meanings attributed by contemporaries are only tentatively

objective, because they are the historicizing results or effects of modern

conditions and preconditions, not products of the singular true reading

of both the text and the narrow circumstantial context. In the ongoing

process in which today’s recipients become part of tomorrow’s received,

Aristophanes is not the unchanging carrier of either universal or uniquely

Hellenic meaning, but he is a function, crucible, or expression of the

mentality of Greek society in transformation.

ATCHING

OMEDY

ULTURE

Why is it that Greek theater directors vie to reinterpret Attic comedy?

What explains Aristophanes’ popularity across broad social levels of the

Greek population, past and present? What was the prehistory of this

breakthrough, so unusual for a corpus of eleven ancient texts? Why did

Greek politicians of the 1950s through mid-1970s feel threatened by the

voice of a playwright dead for more than two thousand years? Why is it

that only Greek theaters can hope to meet the formidable ﬁnancial prob-

lems of staging classical comedy regularly? The Greek reception of Aris-

tophanes differs from revival traditions elsewhere in that it has always

been predicated on creative forces rather than on imitation. Attic comedy

made contemporary has gauged and transgressed conventional cultural

norms and expectations. Although these violations have usually been only

temporary, given the limits of the performance act and site, together they

constitute Aristophanes’ function of revisionist “social drama” (to borrow

an anthropological concept), of comedy’s experimental politics and alter-

native culture.

Aristophanic performance has been a total cultural event, even in the

exceptional case of players and viewers withdrawing into a retrogressive

time capsule, as in the 1868 Clouds of director Rankaves (see chapter 2).

It has been a privileged site where ideology happens, where boundaries

8 · Prologue

between theatrical ﬁction and the real world vanish, where society pre-

sents and represents itself in a self-conscious, profoundly politicized prac-

tice. Sounding boards of cultural debate and negotiation, comic revivals

have been primary signals of the high stakes of neglected unofﬁcial tradi-

tions. Aristophanes has ﬁgured as a prominent exponent of noncanonical,

popular representation amid the rivalries of various socioeconomic and

intellectual classes, each of which has claimed the exclusive possession of

his classical texts, his imaginative stagecraft, and the “proper” Attic lan-

guage contrasting with the “improper” humor. The playwright’s uncanny

ability to enshrine and to stage a nexus of modern sociopolitical and

ideological constructs accounts for his lasting impact. Expressing and re-

sponding to each era’s complex needs, the poet belongs as much to the

Greek present as to the Greek past. Through Aristophanes’ voice the

Greeks rewrite the present in the context of the past. With the play-

wright’s help, they classicize and defuse current reality. Meanwhile, Aris-

tophanes also invites interpreters to reinscribe antiquity in the present, via

the eternal contemporaneity of his humor. Greek afﬁnity with the past

and its comic poet is a two-way street.

ATCHING

ULTURE

OMEDY

Greek theater practitioners have devoted much effort to bringing Aris-

tophanes home. They have drawn from native public spectacle while con-

fronting, not copying, revivals of ancient tragedy. Producers, translators,

actors, and artists have resorted to a gamut of formal and contextual

techniques to make classical comedy work again: adding verbal and visual

anachronisms; excising choral passages or setting them to popular mu-

sic—often incongruous, to heighten comic effect; reusing universally suc-

cessful recipes for humor, such as deliberate anomaly and the shock effect

of aprosdoketon, or the outwitting of the audience’s shared expectations.

Because revival comedy has always functioned as a testing ground and

ﬁeld of professional competition for local artistic and literary circles, its

performance criticism allows us to gauge the cultural activity of given

periods in Greek history. In fact, the names of Greeks committed to

translating and interpreting Aristophanes, theatrically or otherwise, read

like a who’s who of contemporary artistic, social, and political life.

In addition to this insiders’ reception, the occasional grappling of xenoi

(“foreigners” or “strangers,” in common parlance) with Aristophanes

helps demarcate the re-created public space reserved for “our great comic

poet,” with territorial claims of the type “the plays ‘R’ us.” Aristophanes

has been invested with both implicit and explicit deﬁnitions of Greekness

and the Greek sense of belonging. He has been recruited to endorse the

“other-than-classical” heritage: distinctly homegrown, popular, and still

male-oriented. I hardly need add that my own identity as a woman, as a

Prologue · 9

foreigner and outsider, and as a Western European classicist has made my

ﬁeld research and writing all the more challenging.

ECEPTION

OMEDY

AND

ULTURE

The isolation of different points of emergence does not conform

to the successive conﬁgurations of an identical meaning; rather,

they result from substitutions, displacements, disguised

conquests, and systematic reversals. If interpretation were the

slow exposure of the meaning hidden in an origin, then only

metaphysics could interpret the development of humanity. But

if interpretation is the violent or surreptitious appropriation of a

system of rules, which in itself has no essential meaning, in

order to impose a direction, to bend it to a new will, to force

its participation in a different game, and to subject it to

secondary rules, then the development of humanity is a series of

interpretations.

—Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” trans.

Brouchard and Simon

Why Aristophanes or any of his plays became especially beloved, how

that popularity evolved, and what factors conditioned this success are

questions that may be clariﬁed by the principles of “reception aesthetic,”

commonly referred to as “reception theory.” My study is informed by this

hermeneutic method promulgated by Hans Robert Jauss and the Kon-

stanz School, which from the late 1960s on has offered an alternative

approach to positivistic modes of mainly literary exegesis.4 Critical of the

theory’s text-based framework, however, I pay due attention to new pub-

lic interpretations of Aristophanes, repeat performances, audience interac-

tion, and metatheatricality. With Foucault, I also study the dynamics of

language and power play, as well as the use of canonization, whether of

drama or of individuals in real life, to legitimate knowledge and to en-

force an inherited status quo. Again, Neohellenists, historians, and classi-

cists will meet here a broader discourse on the Greek reception of cul-

tural phenomena beyond transmitted literature from the late eighteenth

through the twentieth century. I have dispensed with a strictly linear

chronological treatment of the various patterns in reading Aristophanes

in favor of a more nuanced analysis of modern Greek cultural exchanges

with key issues of (revived) Attic comedy, such as nationalism and revolu-

tionary politics, language and satirical humor, sexuality and changing

gender roles, moral and political censorship, stage competition, left- and

right-wing polarization, (neo-)Hellenic authenticity, and literary and the-

atrical creativity.5

Each historical phase of Aristophanes’ Nachleben has not only regis-

10 · Prologue

tered the imprint of ancient and modern alike but has also remained

inseparable from earlier processes and from the author’s greater di-

achronic and synchronic reception. Every new production has engaged in

a dialogue with the preceding plays of an ever-evolving Aristophanic tra-

dition, whether by choice or by chance, and each in turn has affected

subsequent productions. Thus, every stage revival has grown into an act

of (re)writing and (re)vision of both the ancient text and the added

weight of reception. Consequently, when the present-day maker or recip-

ient of theater reinterprets the Greek classics by the light of personal

taste, he or she often fails to realize that the classics themselves, in their

previous incarnations, have contributed to the formation of that taste.

These ongoing dialectics may tell as much about those who reacted to

the ancient dramatists, about their cultural and social values, as about the

poets themselves or the individual classical texts. Informed by reception

theory, then, my study places most emphasis on the modern pole of the

larger reciprocal relationship between past and present. My goal has been

not to understand Aristophanes per se, but rather to apprehend the use

of his comedies in modern Greek literature, theater, and society. There-

fore the pristine, classical moment of the original performance, the an-

cient playwright-producer himself, and his own historical audience all

need to be placed in a perspective illuminated by the later stagings, which

have commonly been denounced for their (allegedly) impoverished read-

ings of the old master.

ELLENE

AND

OMIOS

EBATE

A brief outline of relevant Greek historical issues may help to set the

stage for an agon between two opposing representations of local culture.

The Greek state of 1821 has frequently been proclaimed the successor to

the Golden Age civilization of ancient Hellas. Eighteenth- and nine-

teenth-century Western European intelligentsia and both foreign and na-

tive nationalists promulgated this ofﬁcial Enlightenment perspective so

actively that Greece sank into an identity crisis. At the heart of the West-

ern-Hellenic ideal of grand-scale cultural reception of the classical past

lay the myth of Greek continuity and, by extension, of indigenous purity

prior to and beyond corruption from the Orient—that is, prior to the

Tourkokratia, or the four centuries of Ottoman rule before 1821. In the

history of revival drama, ancient tragedy was tapped as the reservoir of

uncontaminated cultural grandeur and ethnic heroism, concordant with

the new state’s normative ideology. But because revival tragedy had to

function as a moral support for the nation, it remained for many decades

impermeable to experimentation with contemporary theatrical means and

ideas. The “unsuitable” Aristophanes, by contrast, beloved by all but

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