Rituelle und kultische Elemente in der Aristophanischen Komödie (German Edition)

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Jahrhundert vor Christus wurde er wohl in ganz Griechenland gepflegt [11]. Dem Mythos zufolge wurde Dionysos zwei Mal geboren: Geschichte - Weltgeschichte - Altertum. Theologie - Historische Theologie, Kirchengeschichte. Theologie - Biblische Theologie. Philosophie - Philosophie der Antike. Klassische Philologie - Latinistik - Literatur. Fordern Sie ein neues Passwort per Email an. RE IX,1 , Sp. Der Melierdialog und seine Interpretation in der modernen Politikwi Das Wirken des Perikles.

Politik, Demokratie, Krieg und Frieden. Polnische Lyrik zwischen Antike und Moderne. Politisches Theater oder theatrale Politik? Prostitution und Kult in der griechischen Antike. Der Zusammenhang zwischen der Intensit Matters are not, however, so simple. What Dicaeopolis does is, I shall argue, highly ambiguous.

The simple mythical opposition between the Just and Unjust Cities can be deconstructed first through the figure whose rags Dicaeopolis uses to win the sympathy of listeners to his discourse on war and peace, and then by other considerations in which reference to ritual plays a central role. The rags of Telephus fit the bill best, and the costume that trod the boards thirteen years before steps forth again. Despite the existence of a number of papyrus fragments and ancient quotations, not least in Acharnians and Thesmophoriazusae, of fragments of Latin versions and summaries in the mythographers, it is not yet possible to give a certain account of the Telephus of Euripides, but the outline of the story is roughly as follows.

While there he made a speech defending the Trojans and in another? Odysseus announced the presence of a spy and Telephus was forced to seize the child Orestes in order to save himself, as Dicaeopolis seizes the Acharnians' coal-basket ff. Somehow it was revealed that Telephus could help the Greeks to reach Troy. Achilles entered in haste and expressed anger at having to serve under a foreigner; he was however placated and, after initial perplexity that medical skill should be required of him, cured Telephus with rust from the spear that had wounded him.

As a device for generating sympathy, Telephus is well chosen. A king reduced to pain and beggary for defending his homeland, he is further threatened by his willingness to give a balanced view of the situation, despite being of great potential benefit to his opponents. He is thus emblematic of other such people throughout the play.

Amphitheus tried to make peace for the city but was ejected;38 Dicaeopolis tried to do the same, but despite his eloquent defence, he too was not listened to; Thucydides and the Marathonomachae were not rewarded for their pains. Aristophanes himself, though speaking 'justly' , was prosecuted by Cleon, as he says in a passage in the parabasis that appears to come from the Telephus itself — Although comedy comes before the people with a just claim and with a didactic mission, it can only do so in disguise.

Telephus 29 dangerous simplification to use the similarities between Aristophanes and Dicaeopolis to suggest that the hero 'speaks for' the poet. By linking his comedy and Euripidean tragedy. The comic injustice of the hero. All of this is true, but it should not lead us to neglect the negative side of Dicaeopolis and his private peace. The figure of Telephus also articulates these less agreeable aspects of Dicaeopolis. We have already noted that Telephus brought the Greeks victory in war, by showing them the way to Troy in return for the curing of his wound.

A fragment of the exchange over this appears to be preserved in a papyrus, of which Lobel suggests the following interpretation: Each thus puts himself before a community to which he might be felt to have strong obligations. At the end of the tragedy, the hero is recognised as a fellow-Greek and becomes their guide against his own relations, but the ending of the comedy is even more ambiguous: In the earlier part of the play, Telephus is used to generate sympathy for Dicaeopolis, but in many recent discussions of the comedy, it has been forgotten that reference to Euripides' play does not cease with the parabasis.

When, at the end, the wounded Lamachus is borne on stage, the scene not only has obviously tragic affinities, but also relates closely to Telephus. The servant quotes from it in , describing Lamachus as 'driving off the robbers and scattering them with his spear'. There appear to be two versions of Lamachus' misfortune in the comedy: According to a commentator on the Iliad, 'as he ran, he was entangled in a branch of a vine and wounded in the thigh; Dionysus was angry with him, because he had deprived him of honours.

There is an echo too of Dionysus' displeasure: Denied without discussion by Rau CA 76 ; Lycophr. It is worth noting that the Acharnians have Dionysus as ancestor through Oeneus, eponymous hero of their tribe Oeneis: Telephus 31 When the wounded Lamachus comes on, we have a reversal of the scene before the parabasis, in which a 'sick' Dicaeopolis confronted Lamachus with his gorgon and feather; gorgon and feather figure prominently once again, but now Lamachus is ailing and comes to Dicaeopolis for healing. In the tragedy, Achilles is slow to heal Telephus, but only because he claimed no knowledge of medicine;51 Dicaeopolis by contrast shows no inclination at all to heal Lamachus; when he cries to Apollo Paean, Dicaeopolis dismisses him with the joke that it is not the Paeonia festival i2i2f.

This refusal is all the more shocking in the light of the Telephus. This reading of the play can throw some light on the problematic scene with Dercetes the farmer. His request for some of the wine meets with the same reply as Achilles initially gave to Telephus, but it is expressed in a more dismissive tone: He too is packed off to Pittalus to whom Lamachus will turn. This scene is thus a precursor and doublet of the later one, repeating its message, and the two of them firmly establish the change that has come over Dicaeopolis: MacDowell and L.

For the public doctors, see Hdt. If Dercetes may be viewed as in some ways a sympathetic figure, it would demonstrate the dangers inherent in trying to posit actual historical events discreditable to a character behind passages whose meaning is not clear, as is done for Dercetes by MacDowell His private treaty frees him from the constraints both of traditional politics and of traditional drama.

Another view of Dicaeopolis The ambiguity inherent in the use of the myth of Telephus suggests the possibility of a revaluation of Dicaeopolis' activities. In the earlier section, we were essentially considering them from the point of view of the individual, Dicaeopolis; if we now change our viewpoint and look at them more from the perspective of the polis, they take on a rather different moral hue. Dicaeopolis' first act after the parabasis is to set up the boundary-markers for his private market and announce the assumption of their powers by the officers elected by lot These actions give graphic expression to the separation that now exists between himself and the rest of the polis: By excluding the Athenians in this way Dicaeopolis in effect reduces the status of his former fellowcitizens below that of xenoi, who were allowed to trade in the agora, on payment of the xenika tax;55 they thus become like the Megarians under the Decrees, forbidden to use Athenian markets, or indeed the atimoi who were forbidden even to pass the perirrhanteria at the Agora's boundaries.

In his dealings with his visitors, Dicaeopolis is no paragon. The Megarian is allowed to trade, but on unfavourable terms. This is 55 56 57 Ach. Another view of Dicaeopolis 33 perhaps excusable, since Dicaeopolis is a peasant, but one might ask what sort of a world it is in which a man has to sell his daughters at all. It is true that enslavement of Greeks by Greeks was not exactly unknown in the fifth century, but Solon had long ago forbidden by law the sale of free children by their father. As if to provoke uncomfortable feelings in the audience, the girls are twice referred to as 'mystic pigs' , , the pigs with which the initiates first bathed in the sea and then killed as a purificatory sacrifice before going to the Eleusinian Mysteries.

This reference to Eleusis to characterise an action in a negative manner is thus like the use of spondophoros of Amphitheus at the start of the play. The refusal of the thrushes and eel to Lamachus is, given the state of relations between them, quite comprehensible,62 but, as we have seen, the Dercetes scene is more worrying. In addition to the questions raised above, one would ask of Dicaeopolis here why he mistreats a countryman, especially when there are significant parallels between Dercetes and Dicaeopolis' helper, Amphitheus.

Dercetes has lost his yoke of ploughing-oxen and Amphitheus traced an elaborate genealogy back to the patrons of ploughing and agriculture 59 60 61 62 Plut. Radermacher ; Delcourt Pigs were not usually sacrificed to Aphrodite, though there were rare exceptions: The scene with the Boeotian is less morally problematic than that with the Megarian, though the stopping of the sycophant's mouth and his manhandling are uncomfortably reminiscent of the similar treatment of Amphitheus.

Both of these agricultural figures make a reasonable request of the powers that be, and both are refused: Here we can see the other side of the absence of legal activity which we noted above as an apparent benefit of Dicaeopolis' new world: In Athens, the impartial administration of the law was seen as a guarantee of freedom from tyranny. What an amusing request the bride is keen to make of me!

She wants me to see that her husband's cock is a stay-at-home' — Amusing he may find it, but from the city's point of view the war-effort would not be much advanced if all young men behaved thus. The choice of the verb oikourein is notable: It is to no avail: Fundamental Greek notions of hospitality are being ignored. Crito and passim in the orators, e.

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When they remark that he has thrown all the feathers into the street to show that he has dined on game , one is reminded of Theophrastus' 'Man of Petty Ambition', who puts the garlanded skull of an ox outside his front door as a sign that he can afford to sacrifice one. The contrast with Trygaeus in Peace, who is also praised by the Chorus and with greater justification, is instructive. The choice of this festival can however also be given a more negative significance. This was not a polis festival, but was celebrated by individual demes under their demarch: The celebration of this Dionysia by one family is highly anomalous, given that it was a public rite 67 Thphr.

On deme religion, cf. For one family to arrogate the whole festival to itself as opposed, say, to always supplying the main officials was a denial of the nature of the festival and an act excluding all others from the rites. Dicaeopolis in effect moves back not just to his deme, but to a deme that has now become his own private kingdom: He is a kind of demarch, but one with sovereign powers somewhat wider than that office normally enjoyed.

The Rural Dionysia was held in the winter month of Poseideon, but by the end of the play we have moved forward two months to Anthesterion and the 'Choes', the second day of the Anthesteria festival, to which attention is repeatedly drawn. The Anthesteria was a festival of ambiguities,73 in that it combined the celebration of the opening of the jars of new wine with the presence of ghostly figures in the city; it involved the competitive drinking of good quantities of wine with commemoration of the survival of the flood.

Choes was an 'ill-omened miara day' on which doors were daubed with pitch and buckthorn leaves chewed; all temples were closed except that of Dionysus 'in the Marshes'; slaves were allowed a certain freedom and the city was full oiKares, foreigners or destructive spirits;74 business involving oaths was forbidden. It was on this day that, in mythology, Orestes came to king Demophon to ask for purification from the murder of his mother. His arrival posed a problem for the king who wished neither to reject a suppliant nor to pollute the city by inviting him to join the celebrations.

The solution to the dilemma was imitated ever after: Orestes was given his own table and wine-jug, and so, to avoid offence, was everyone else. At a trumpet-signal sounded on the orders of the Archon Basileus, there was a competition to see who could empty their wine-crater first. Given the presence in this myth of the hero Orestes, it is interesting that the Chorus should end the lyrics preceding the arrival of the wounded Lamachus with curses upon Antimachus, expressing the hope that he might at night run into the notorious 72 73 74 , IOOOff.

The Anthesteria 37 Athenian mugger who went by the name Orestes,75 and especially significant that they refer to this Orestes as 'mad' 1 i64ff. It will be instructive therefore to compare Dicaeopolis' treatment of Lamachus, who arrives back during the Choes festival, with Demophon's of Orestes. This comparison, like that of Dicaeopolis with Achilles discussed above, works in two ways. First, it gives a negative view of Dicaeopolis in so far as he again falls short of the figure of authority in the mythical exemplar.

Demophon solved the problem of what to do with a polluted matricide, but Dicaeopolis will have no truck with a man wounded in the course of duty. It is worth remarking that when Lamachus first appears it is in response to a call of the type used to summon a hero from the ground: In this guise as a heroic defender of the city, he is not unlike Orestes, who in Aeschylus' version of the story offered Athens protection from attack after his death. Secondly, Dicaeopolis, as one who has separated himself from his community, has affinities also with the outsider: Heracles functions in the same way in Euripides' Heracles 49off.

Lebensqualität im Theater des demokratischen Athen

The 'King' Archon presided over the Lenaea: The city's apparent acceptance of Dicaeopolis here may also of course be taken as another example of their blindness last shown when they invited the embassy to enter the Prytaneum i24f. The day after this, the Chytroi, began the process of restoration: The community re-establishes and redefines itself. It is interesting that Aristophanes stops the play at the ambivalent day of Choes: Dicaeopolis declares himself an Olympic victor with the cry tenella kallinikosl , , traditionally sung to mark an athletic victory.

Again there is irony, since this evocation of a major pan-Hellenic festival serves to highlight the difference between the athletic victor who is celebrated in a komos as the pride of his community and Dicaeopolis who triumphs in despite of his. Even his performance of the drinking competition is anomalous, since, instead of mixing his wine with water in a crater as was the convention, he claims that 'I poured it out neat and knocked it back in one gulp' Even the relationship between Dicaeopolis and the Chorus is uncertain.

Dicaeopolis calls on them to sing the Olympic hymn to celebrate his victory, and they agree to do so 'if you really do invite us' Chorus and protagonist go off together, perhaps singing Archilochus' hymn,85 but this combined 81 83 84 85 82 Scholia. Where earlier it was idle ambassadors who drank neat wine , it is now Dicaeopolis.

This phrase is taken to mean 'since you do invite us' by for instance Starkie On these two senses of ge, cf. Polls and deme 39 exit does nothing to answer the questions or allay the doubts that the last part of the play has raised. We appear to have the integration of Dicaeopolis into the city, but this is so hedged about with ambiguities through the references to the Anthesteria that one cannot be sure. Dicaeopolis' private treaty and its consequences are thus presented through a number of filters; so that they appear in different ways depending on whether the viewpoint is that of the individual or the city.

The actions of Dicaeopolis, which might, at first sight, appear to be laudable and an example to others, appear very differently when viewed through the mythical and ritual filters of Telephus, Rural Dionysia and Anthesteria, so that the characters take on a variety of different moral hues, depending on their conformity or otherwise to the stereotypes. The play does not convey any final judgements, but keeps in a careful balance the rhetorical and visual stimuli to one opinion or another.

The first part of the play shows the effect on the individual of a corrupt and violent state, but this is set against a world in which the satisfaction of individual desires is pursued without regard for those of the state. The city's refusal to discuss peace is complemented by Dicaeopolis' refusal to share it. Polis and deme We may conclude this chapter with a broader consideration of the political issues raised by the play, especially in so far as they affect recent Athenian history.

Acharnians does not look only at the relationships between individual and state in Dicaeopolis' relationship with the polis, but also at those between deme and polis and the demands each could make on the other. But if Dicaeopolis saw life back in his deme as symbolic of a peaceful existence, the Chorus come from another very important deme with a very different outlook. The question needs to be asked why Aristophanes chose the men of the deme of Acharnae, and the political and military events of the years before provide an answer.

Osborne a; Whitehead Parker a; Wood Thucydides gives his thinking: Acharnae itself seemed to him a good position for a camp, and at the same time he thought it likely that the Acharnians, who, with their three thousand hoplites, were an important element in the state, would not allow their own property to be destroyed, but would force all the others as well to come out and fight for it. If, on the other hand, the Athenians did not come out and fight during this invasion, the Peloponnesians would in future invasions have all the more confidence in laying waste the plain and advancing right up to the walls of Athens.

By that time the Acharnians would have lost their own property and would be much less willing to risk their lives for the property of other people; consequently there would be a lack of unity in the counsels of Athens. The Acharnians therefore were not unjustified, at least in , in demanding the chance to use war to protect their property.

Furthermore, Acharnae was the largest of the demes,89 so it is not surprising that the Acharnians 'seeing that they formed an important part of the whole state and considering that it was their land that was being laid waste, brought particular pressure to bear in favour of marching out'. It was unusual in several ways. It formed a whole trittus, which gave it 'more institutionalised power than simply a large deme'. Pindar, celebrating Timodemus of Acharnae, says 'that the Acharnians are brave is proverbial'; 93 we have already quoted Amphitheus' description of them as being like 88 89 90 91 93 2.

T h e Chorus state that destruction of their vines , a n d of their lands is t h e reason for their raising 'hate-filled' w a r Polis and deme 41 holm-oak and maple i8of. Andocides speaks of the hope of not seeing 'charcoal-burners coming to the city from the mountains',99 and there was a proverb about 'Acharnian asses'.

Thucydides says that in 'there were constant discussions with violent feelings on both sides, some demanding that they should be led out to battle, and a certain number resisting the demand'; it may be that things were slightly different in , but, if the problems were more acute earlier, they reflected continuing tensions within the various parts of Attica.

Thus, it would have been possible for the audience to consider the Acharnians as a deme that had a right not only to want war because of the attacks on its land but also to expect the city to provide help in the defence of that land.

On the other hand, the marginality of this deme would allow those from more 'central' areas or of more eirenic dispositions to feel a certain distance from a deme that was noted for 94 95 96 97 Com. In other words, any suggestion that peace should be made would not have been an unproblematic one, because there were people in Attica who, in certain circumstances, had a justifiable right to demand that Spartan fire be met with fire: In the same way, many must have sympathised with Dicaeopolis' strongly expressed feelings about the wearisomeness of war, and with his desire to return from the cramped and crowded city to the familiar ways of his deme.

It was membership of one's local deme that made one a citizen and, as Osborne writes, 'Kleisthenes' reforms politicised the Attic countryside and rooted political identity there. Dicaeopolis' peace may be attractive, but when he expresses his contempt for the city and retires to his country deme to celebrate his own Rural Dionysia, it might be argued that his actions are in danger of disturbing that balance between 'city' and 'deme', which was maintained remarkably well in Attica, but was not absolutely stable, as showed.

What is striking, too, is the absence of any character who stands for a single polls viewpoint, whether that be deemed to be in Polis and deme 43 favour of peace or of war. The views offered are of the contrasting extremes of peace at any price, in Dicaeopolis' determination that peace shall be discussed in the Assembly 38f.

Indeed, although the city as a whole is bathed in an unalluring light in the first part, it is made plain that only certain elements are at fault: Like Dicaeopolis disguised as Telephus, the city does not speak with one voice. The attitudes of individual demes and men are displayed on stage: That Dicaeopolis comes from Cholleidae, a deme which seems to have been next door to Acharnae, shows that geographical location need not determine attitude to the war. The confrontation at the end between the hedonism enjoyed by Dicaeopolis and the civic duty performed by Lamachus crystallises the problem: These differences of attitude may, as Thucydides and indeed Dicaeopolis say, depend not just on emotion but on age.

Furthermore, the use of the figure of Telephus prompts further reflection: Thoughts about his subsequent condition might deter some of the more lukewarm supporters of war; peacemakers could say that his curing by Achilles and the subsequent victory at Troy was an allegory of the way in which the wine of a treaty between Sparta and Athens would heal the wounds caused by the destruction of the vineyards of Acharnae and lead to joint hegemony over Greece. This presentation of contrasting viewpoints is further carried out in the minor characters.

The farmer Dercetes is a blend of the Acharnians, who have suffered in raids, and Dicaeopolis, who wants peace. The newly-weds put forward a rather more personal reason for peace, which deserves sympathy - the death of a warrior soon after marriage or even before its consummation is a topos of Homeric battle-scenes and it will have been a not uncommon experience; but such sympathy cannot be the basis of a general dispensation from military service for such young men. The use of these minor and major figures in the play is complicated by the comic distortions, in the form of exaggeration, bawdy, disguise, to which the scenes are subject.

Acharnians therefore offers its audiences a kaleidoscopic variety of ways of viewing not only the broad question of peace or war, but also the more complex problem of how to reconcile the competing claims of individual, deme and polis, young and old, countryman and city politician and so on.

There is no paradigmatic narrative of what should happen, but a series of vignettes containing a range of more or less justifiable reactions to the political and military situation. The decision on what course of action to take is left to the spectators, who must check and evaluate their own strongly held opinions against the equally strongly propounded views of the characters. Such evaluations may not all have been possible during the course of the original production: For these theatres, cf. For enthusiastic attendance at such performances, cf.

In Knights, myths and rituals will play an equally important role but as elements which form the structure of the plot, without being introduced in so overt a manner as in Acharnians. Rites of passage Knights, and the two plays that follow, all make use of the myths and rituals concerned with passage from one status in life to another, the so-called 'rites of passage'. Our particular concern will be with the passage from youth to maturity, citizenship and political rights, and I shall devote the first section of this chapter to a general discussion of the institutions involved in this process in ancient Greece.

The bibliography is now considerable. For women's rites, cf. Calame ; Dowden ; Sourvinou-Inwood ; for evidence of vases, Neils Myths and rituals of passage from youth to maturity articulate the transfer of the youth from the oikos or household, where he is in the sphere of influence of the women especially his mother , has no political status and is often conceived of as 'uncivilised' or as an animal, to the polis, where he joins his father and the other male citizens, takes his civic responsibilities in the lawcourts, assembly and hoplite-phalanx, and marries a wife for the procreation of children.

This change is dramatised in a wide variety of ways, but usually involves a period of withdrawal from the community to a 'marginal' world.

These marginal periods can be characterised by an inversion of normality or by a mixture of the normal and abnormal. In mythology, the examples of Theseus, Jason and Perseus provide a clear illustration of the pattern. Theseus is brought up not in Athens but in Troezen, Jason is sent to the country to the centaur Chiron and Perseus is expelled from Argos. Before they can attain their proper status, they must visit a land that is marked as marginal, either because it is far away on the edge of the world or because it combines the human or 'real' world with the nonhuman and monstrous: They undergo various trials which are manifestations of the marginality of these worlds: Theseus kills a minotaur, which is half man and half bull, in the Labyrinth, which is a house, but not one in which one can safely reside; Jason ploughs with firebreathing bulls; and Perseus kills both a gorgon whose gaze turns men to stone, and a sea-monster.

In these trials, the youths regularly make use of trickery to counteract the heavy odds against them: Theseus has a ball of thread, Jason a magic chrism and Perseus 3 4 On the term 'marginal', cf. See especially, Jeanmaire Dillon who shows that though they share a basic pattern, these myths are not exactly parallel. Rites of passage 47 Table 3. These bring victory, kingship and a wife, though there can be variations at this point. In ritual, the neatest demonstration of the pattern is to be found in Sparta. That city divided its youths into groups described in terms like 'herd' appropriate to the beasts of the field, such as agelai, bouai, bouagoi, etc.

The relationship between kruptos and hoplite may best be expressed as a table: To borrow LeviStrauss's terms Here they hunted and dined together for two months in a kind of brief homosexual 'marriage', which reversed the heterosexual one for which the boy became eligible after the rite. The lover then released the boy and gave him a suit of armour to mark his attainment of adulthood; a similar custom obtained in Thebes , a bull an animal regularly connected with initiation, as shown by the Minotaur, Jason's ploughing, Hippolytus' death, ritual activity with bulls by Athenian ephebes etc.

For the rest of his life, the boy wore special garments and was known as aparastatheis probably 'helper' and a kleinos 'famed one'. The ephebes in Athens wore black cloaks, which they changed for white ones on becoming citizens, and which commemorated Theseus' failure to change his black sails to white. In Sparta, brides had their hair cut off by a numpheutria 'bride's attendant' , were given men's clothes and shoes and made to sleep alone in the dark15 and in Argos, women who had just married 10 11 12 13 14 15 Compare also the Cretan myth of the birth of Zeus, in which the god is taken from his mother Rhea and hidden in a cave on Mt Aegaeum, where he is suckled by animals and attended by the Curetes or 'Youths' cf.

Hymn to the Curetes CA pp. Roussel ; Maxwell-Stuart ; Vidal-Naquet b: Rites of passage 49 had to wear a beard to bed with their husbands. A myth was told of a border dispute between Athens and Boeotia over Melania 'the Black Land' , which was to be settled by a single combat between the two kings, Thymoetes of Athens and Xanthus of Boeotia. Thymoetes, too old to fight, offered his kingdom to the champion who would take his place. Melanthus, a descendent of Periclymenus, son of Neleus from Pylos, did so and defeated Xanthus 'the Fair Man' by a trick: In some versions, Dionysus Melanaegis appeared beside Xanthus.

Ancient etymology derived the name Apaturia from this trick [apate. The fight thus reverses the face-to-face combat of the hoplite, in a manner reminiscent of the life-style of the kruptos. It also provides for the surprising victory of 'the Black Man' with chthonic connections over 'the Fair'. Initiation into the deme and so citizenship became the more important after the reorganisation of Attica by Cleisthenes, which made the demes the most important division of the citizenry. When precisely the training of youths by the state was introduced we do not know, but it would not be surprising if Cleisthenes, having reduced the power of the traditional political groupings by redrawing the political geography of Attica, also introduced some sort of city-based military training and initiation into the new demes in order to lessen the importance of initiation into the phratries.

It is unlikely that this introduction was a single process. Italian cities in the Renaissance similarly assumed the training of soldiers from the 16 17 19 Plut. Compare also the presentation of a new robe to Athena at the Great Panathenaea, and the new red cloaks for the Furies turned Semnai in A. Labarbe ; Golden The sources are collected in Vidal-Naquet b: See also Deubner Chapter 42 of the Aristotelian Athenaion Politeia describes the elaborate training given to Athenian youths as it was at the end of the fourth century; this was by then known as the ephebeia 'training of those on the verge of manhood'.

Grouped together under a kosmetes and ten sophronistai responsible for their discipline, they toured the sacred places of the city, having first sworn the Ephebic Oath in the sanctuary of Aglaurus on the Acropolis. They then spent their first year in the garrisons at Munychia and Acte being trained in military arts by the paidotribai and didaskaloi. They ate together in sussitia.

At the start of the second year, they displayed their skills at an assembly in the theatre, and were presented with a spear and shield by the city. They then garrisoned the frontier posts as peripoloi. Their dress was a black chlamus 'cloak'. Lest they should be distracted from training, they were exempt from taxes and were permitted only exceptionally to take part in lawsuits.

At the end of the second year, they joined the ranks of the citizens with full rights. There is no evidence that such a highly-organised system existed in the fifth century, but one need not go so far as did Wilamowitz in denying the very existence of anything that might be called an ephebeia until the late fourth century. However, there is a certain amount of evidence to suggest that we would not be wrong to talk of some kind of ephebeia in Aristophanes' time. One would after all expect a priori that there was some training for youths in hoplite tactics, which were by no means simple,22 and some ceremonial marking of the membership of the deme and so accession to full political status of the next generation of Athenians; the dokimasia 'examination' of the youths is datable to the fifth century.

Pelekidis is a full reply; see also works in Winkler Rites of passage 51 definition here: Even if nothing like the ephebeia existed in the fifth century, the argument of these chapters would not be substantially affected: The main military training of the ephebes appears to have been in forts on the boundaries of Attica as peripoloi 'those who go round' and neotatoi 'the youngest'. Theseus appears to have been the hero par excellence for the ephebes, and the myth of his voyage to the 'margins', and his return to the city was probably the aetiological story that explained the rites undergone by the young Athenians.

In the autumn, the traditional time for the 'return' of troops to the city, there were three festivals relating to Theseus, which would have provided a ritual movement of the ephebes from margins to centre. Theseus had disguised two extra youths as girls when he took the tribute of nominally seven youths and seven girls to Minos. Having killed the Minotaur, he returned to Athens and sacrificed in thanksgiving at Phalerum, making a procession headed by the two disguised youths.

The herald sent to Athens to announce his arrival returned with news of Aegeus' death, caused by Theseus' failure to change his sails.

Grief was thus mixed with joy and the herald put his garlands on his staff, not his head. This was imitated in the Oschophoria, where a procession was led by two youths, dressed as girls 24 25 Pelekidis For the peripoloi on the frontiers compare Aeschin. Gomme says that the peripoloi 'seem in Thucydides' time and later to be a special mobile force, in peace time at least probably already formed of epheboi who got their training partly.

The festival's marginality is also shown not only by the transvestite youths Plutarch describes them as subject to 'training in the shadows' Thes.

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It was accompanied by a herald with garlands on his staff, and cries of joy were mixed with those of grief. The black sails were reflected in the black cloaks of the ephebes. Next day, the Pyanopsia was held in honour of Apollo. A large pot of vegetables was cooked and eaten by the celebrants in imitation of a similar meal eaten by Theseus and his companions in fulfilment of a vow. The reward is integration into a new place in the community.

Knights and ephebeia The Sausage-Seller conforms to the pattern of the various ephebic myths and rites that we have discussed. He is of an age with the ephebic heroes of mythology and the youths of Athens or Sparta, in that he is neanikotatos 'most youthful', and on the verge of manhood ;28 he doubts that he can become an aner, a full citizen , but after his victory the Chorus remind him that he has become one through them Like the heroes, this is his first exploit: He is also characterised in ways that tend to separate him from what for convenience one might call the 'ordinary citizen', in other words, marginal.

He does not aspire to a reputation for kalokagathia 'excellence and virtue' , as a citizen might,29 but prides himself on low birth His reference to self-prostitution shows him to be sexually marginal: At , the Sausage-Seller is said to need a paidotribes. De Ste Croix Knights and ephebeia 53 have brought the penalty of atimia. He belongs furthermore to the class of small traders, amongst whom there certainly were citizens, but who were more often foreigners: It is literally on the edge of the city and the Sausage-Seller emphasises that he worked at the very gates , It was the home of the more 'marginal' elements of society, of prostitutes and sellers of dog- and ass-meat;33 the first public baths, an institution of low status, were built outside the Dipylon gate.

The Sausage-Seller is therefore very different from the citizen at the centre of power in the Agora or on the Pnyx. Just as the ephebe undergoes a number of role-reversals, so the saviour of Athens lives through a period when he is the lowest of the low, the worst of a line of degraded politicians i28ff. The ephebic heroes of mythology receive divine help, as does, despite his villainy, the Sausage-Seller. A number of omens also portend his final success. He is the subject of the crucial oracle stolen from Paphlagon i43f.

Passwort vergessen?

Apollo, the god who regularly presides over ephebic rites of transition,36 is 30 31 32 33 35 Hansen Wasps ; Pi. For gates as an important marginal area, cf. Traditionally heroes appear at crucial moments: Burkert ; Graf In addition to help from the gods, the heroes need to make use of cunning. This is especially true in the case of the Sausage-Seller, because Paphlagon excels in this area.

To be precise, the play is more than a series of contests in low deceit: They are both adept at theft and both merit comparison with the arch-trickster Themistocles ; f.

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Paphlagon 'has come up with a clever plan' 63 for dealing with slaves, and the Sausage-Seller has a 'remarkable craft' , cf. Furthermore, the imagery of the contests not infrequently draws on various crafts, such as leather-working —72 , navigation , , or wood- and metal-working The Sausage-Seller is also supreme in the art of oratory,43 and Aristophanes sometimes groups together three or four examples of the same rhetorical skill, as for instance in ff.

Compare the way Athena attributes victory to Zeus Agoraeus in A. His final victory is won when, by a neat conceit, he turns the emptiness of his hamper to his own advantage: So, a house where the Athenian Demos is an old fool dominated by a slave and a foreigner, who prevents the attentions of the Athenian 'slaves', is obviously disordered. Zeus' opponent Typhoeus came from Cilicia.

We shall look more fully at the monster-killing aspect of the play in the next section of the chapter. Especially noteworthy in the context of the ephebe are the two occasions on which the Sausage-Seller employs the same 'Look behind you' trick that brought Melanthus victory in the Apaturia myth. When stealing meat in the agora he tells how 'I used to fool the cooks by saying, "Look boys, there's a swallow, it's the new season.

Just before his final victory, he uses it again to purloin the hare from Paphlagon I'm not worried because, look, there are some ambassadors coming to me with purses of silver. What's that to you? Won't you leave the foreigners alone? Dear Demos, do you see the hare I've brought you?

The Sausage-Seller's victory over this chaos-monster brings him a new position, as he moves from the lowest status to be the prostates 'leading citizen' of the Demos,45 operating no longer at the gates of the city but enjoying the sitesis in the Prytaneum, the 'ceremonial headquarters of the state' ,46 wearing as the symbol of his office 44 45 46 I see no reason not to name these slaves Nicias and Demosthenes, in inverted commas if necessary.

References to Pylos esp. The slaves 'are' the two politicians as much and as little as Paphlagon with his tanning 'is' Cleon. In the myth, Theseus also becomes king; in the play, it is Demos who assumes this role as monarchos and basileus 'king', There are two further marks of the Sausage-Seller's status. First, there is the frog-green cloak The precise significance of this garment and its colour is difficult to pin down, but we have noted the importance of a change of clothing in expressing the meaning of the myths and rituals: It is interesting to note that, as Sommerstein says, the batrachis is sometimes found among the garments dedicated to Artemis Brauronia, the goddess who presided over transition rites for Athenian girls, but it is not necessarily the case that these garments were actually dedicated at the end of the Arcteia, and other garments are more frequent.

Secondly, as he is hailed as victor he is finally given a name, Agoracritus , which he interprets as 'he who was tested in the agora': In the same way, Odysseus, whose exploit with the Cyclops has a number of ephebic overtones, reveals his true name only when his cunning has enabled him to escape from the monster and Polyphemus realises he is the man of whom the oracle 47 48 49 50 Cf.

In the fourth century and later, ephebes are given garlands at the end of their training. Compare the similarly named Polycrite, who also saved her city: Knights and ephebeia 57 had warned him. The Chorus were presumably equipped with some kind of horse, if not other actors suitably attired, as on the famous blackfigure amphora in Berlin. The youthfulness of at least some of the Chorus is clear: Furthermore, Siewert detects a quotation from the Ephebic Oath in their words at f.: Theseus is both an ephebe and king of Athens. The Knights would thus be doubly appropriate 51 53 54 55 57 58 59 60 52 Od.

Martin ; Helbig ; Rhodes Dumezil ; Kirk Knights and the succession This rise of the Sausage-Seller from obscurity to prostates of Demos is structured not only by the ephebic mythos but also by a 'succession myth', in which, by a kind of priamel, a list of rulers or gods climaxes in and legitimates the power of the current lord: The oracle clearly says that first there is a hemp-seller, who will control the city's affairs.

After him, there will be a second ruler, a sheep-seller. Then he's lost, for his successor is the leather-selling Paphlagon, a thief and shrieker with the voice of Cycloborus. There is still one more man, with an amazing craft These myths, like the ephebic ones, regularly involve a battle between the god or hero, who represents civilisation and cosmos, and a monstrous figure representing chaos.

Indications that the audience is to think of Knights in terms of such gigantomachic succession myths are to be found in the parabasis. There are echoes of the Gigantomachy in the syzygy too, when the Knights praise their ancestors as 'worthy of the peplos' , thus ranking their deeds alongside the Gigantomachy which was depicted on Athena's peplos at the Great Panathenaea.

This battle was often 61 62 See esp. Fontenrose , but more for the material collected than the methodology: See also Vian ; Trumpf ; Eliade ; West For Knights and apocalyptic literature, Burkert b: On the question of the origins of such myths, Kinnier Wilson Identified by the scholia vetera with Cleon and Typhon; for Cleon as a monster, Wasps , Peace Knights and the succession 59 accompanied on temple decoration by another cosmic struggle, between the Greeks and Persians, to which reference is made in the description of Agoracritus' deeds as 'worthy of the trophy at Marathon' and, in a more comic fashion, in the horses' eating 'crabs instead of Medic grass' i.

The similarities between Theogony and Knights are striking and can best be seen in tabular form see table 3. The parallels with Zeus thus justify the language of divine epiphany that accompanies the Sausage-Seller's return with the newly-boiled Demos. Central to this type of myth is the battle, which we have seen is also a feature of our ephebic myths. There are many similarities between the play and the Hesiodic and other versions, and Paphlagon is a good substitute for Typhoeus.

Indeed, the Paphlagonians are a suitable race to typify our villain. In ancient tradition, they form part of a group of peoples on the Euxine coast with characteristics that mark them as separate from the Greek world. Homer describes the former as living at the 'limits' of Ocean, forever wrapped in night, mist and cloud,66 and the latter are the neighbours of the Paphlagonians and named after a son of Cimmerius. Tradition placed the Cerberus story at this promontory, and Xenophon says the 'signs' of Heracles' descent are 63 65 66 67 Lucerne was introduced into Greece during or just after the Persian Wars Sallares Zeus's Gigantomachies are the climax of a succession myth, Uranus-Cronus-Zeus.

The comic hero's battle is the climax of a succession, hemp-seller, sheep-seller, leather-seller, sausageseller I28ff. Warned by an oracle from Bacis that a sausage-seller will replace him, Paphlagon keeps watch and oppresses his fellow-slaves, letting none of them near Demos Zeus and the younger Olympians revolt and fight a ten-year war with the Titans; an oracle from Gaia says they must free the HundredHanders from Tartarus to be successful Nicias and Demosthenes decide to run away,68 but the oracle from Bacis says they should find a sausage-seller Nectar, ambrosia and the excellence of Zeus' intelligence persuade the Hundred-Handers to help The prospects of great political power and the help of the agathoi and dexioi the 'good' and 'intelligent' persuades the SausageSeller i - 5.

Battle begins between the Hundred-Handers and Titans; Zeus enters combat, which involves thunder, lightning, storms, and turbulence of land, sea and air Battle begins between Knights and Paphlagon ff. The Titans are sent to Tartarus with its decay and storms, and sealed behind bronze doors - 6. Paphlagon is sent down to Ceramicus cemetery to be taunted by harlots and to drink bath-water ; cf. Zeus inaugurates his reign with figures allegorising its peace and prosperity: Metis, Themis, Eunomia, Eirene, etc. The Sausage-Seller inaugurates Demos' reign with the allegorical figures of the Spondai.

Knights and the succession 61 still shown. There is a tradition too that the Mariandyni became the voluntary slaves of the people of Heraclea. The 'race of wild mules' also indicates the unusual nature of the Paphlagonians: He is of monstrous appearance I shall come out against you like a wind set fresh and mighty, stirring up alike the earth and sea in confusion.

And I shall shorten my sausage-skins and sail before a favourable wave, as I tell you to go to hell. I'll look after the bilge, in case we spring a leak. By Demeter, you won't run off with all the talents you stole from the Athenians.

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