[In the following essay, Solomos presents an overview of the Acharnians and explains why the political parody appealed to the war-weary populace of its time.]

In his plays he tried to show that the Athenian state was free and by no tyrant oppressed.

Ancient Life of Aristophanes

The Babylonians was produced five years after the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War and almost three after Pericles' death. Following the production of this play, Cleon brought an action against Aristophanes for insulting the State “in the presence of foreigners.”¹ In his next play, the Acharnians, the poet will recall:

                                                            … what I myself endured
at Cleon's hands for last year's comedy.
How to the Counsil House he dragged me off,
and slayed and lied and slandered and betongued me,
roaring Cycloborus-wise; till I well nigh
was done to death …(2)

Justice triumphed, however, and Aristophanes was exculpated. Yet this trial was only the first round of a long fight. The powerful demagogue re-attacked the young author some time later on the ground of his supposedly alien descent and his illegal claim to Athenian citizenship. “Twice and thrice accused,” his biographer says, “he was at last acquitted of all charges.”³

The Acharnians, besides being our most authentic document on Aristophanes' feud with the political leader of his day, is also the oldest surviving Greek comedy. As such, it represents the earliest known technique of comic playwriting. We find in it 1235 lines of verse.⁴ The parabasis is situated in the very middle, dividing the play into two equal parts. Here is a structural analysis of the comedy's form:

• A. The first part is composed of:
  • a) The prologue—a long comic sequence, with five speaking characters and many extras
  • b) The parodos—the entrance of the chorus and the first choral song
  • c) The agon—the clash between protagonist and chorus
  • d) Two comic episodes
• B. The parabasis, which comes next, is a choric interlude, containing the poet's message to the audience. It suspends the action half way through the performance.
• C. In the second part there are:
  • a) Four comic episodes, separated by
  • b) Three stasima or choral songs
  • c) The komos—general revelry of the chorus, glorifying the triumphant hero
  • d) The exodos of hero and chorus, singing and dancing

The sequence described above was not a canon, an obligatory pattern for the writers. The Aristophanic agon, for instance, is a movable part; some of his plays have a second parodos (metastasis); others, no parabasis at all; and very often four or five short episodes succeed one another between two stasima.

In this play, written in the summer of 426 b.c., the poet continued his antiwar campaign begun in the Babylonians. Up to this year many unsuccessful attempts had been made by Athens and Sparta to bring hostilities to an end; but, whichever of the two states happened to be the more favored on the battlefield at a given time would obstinately refuse to accept the peace terms proposed by the other. It seems that in the spring of that year it had been the turn of the Peloponnesians to show friendly dispositions. Aristophanes, therefore, becomes once more the advocate of Peace and, navigating against the current of Cleon's politics, urges his countrymen to vote for an armistice.

Callistratus, the faithful accomplice, willingly adopted Aristophanes' spiritual offspring and applied for the City Dionysia. Then, quite unexpectedly, a negative answer fell like a thunderbolt on both father and fosterparent. The archon eponymus, succumbing, no doubt, to pressure from Cleon, refused to grant the requested chorus, thus excluding the comic poet from the great international festival. The cause of this expulsion was none other than the previous year's rebellious comedy involving the State's defamation “in the presence of foreigners,” something that the irascible demagogue was unable to forget. And, since the playwright had been legally discharged, Cleon conceived this new counteroffensive.

One can well imagine Aristophanes' dismay upon hearing the news. For an up-and-coming dramatist, who had only recently won his first victory at the Great Dionysia, to content himself with the lesser Lenaea must have been distressing beyond measure. The only thing that may have cheered him up a little was the fact that his Lenaean rivals would be Cratinus, the grand sire of Attic Comedy, and Eupolis, a promising craftsman of the younger generation. These three comedy champions—whom Horace will squeeze one day into a famous verse (Satires, I, iv, i)—were facing each other for the first time. The eminence, therefore, of the contestants gave extra glamor to the local festival.

Cratinus' Chimazomenoi (Winter Men), Eupolis' Numeniai (New Moons) and Aristophanes' Acharnians were presented in early February 425 b.c. before, no doubt, a sparse audience, the war keeping many Athenians away from the theatre.

Aristophanes' hero—Dicaeopolis or Just Citizen—is the poet himself under a theatrical mask. More than once the hero refers to the author's political tribulations as if they were his own; and the famous legal battle with Cleon is narrated in the first person. In this respect, the Acharnians forecast the Knights, where the autobiographical element will be even more conspicuous.⁵

The prologue of the play is a miniature parody of the People's Assembly. The Just Citizen is the only Athenian to be on the Pnyx in time. The others arrive belated and spiritless. Their indifference to the fate of their city is more than exasperating. The session opens. Every time that Dicaeopolis or Amphitheus—another citizen who is a pacifist only because he is half-witted—attempt to condemn the war, the archers violently hush them up in the middle of a sentence. The Assembly has more important matters to attend to: the ambassadors have returned from abroad and will report on their missions. With mellifluous words they tell how laboriously they have been serving Athens in foreign countries—eating, drinking, and pocketing their fat fees for an indefinite length of time. “During the fourth year of my mission in Persia,” one of them says, “I arrived at last at King Xerxes' capital; but the monarch had gone, at the head of an enormous army, to excrete on the Golden Mountains, where he remained defecating for eight months” (80-82). The only tangible consequences of the ambassadors' deft diplomacy as far as military and financial aid to Athens is concerned, are some ludicrous Odomantian soldiers and a grotesque Persian prince, called the Royal Eye. The former, “the most war-like Thracian tribe” (153), prove at once the excellence of their war tactics by stealing Dicaeopolis' garlic. The latter is even more frank, as he admits in his broken Greek: “No penny for Athenian bastards!” (104) This monstrous, possibly one-eyed, foreigner belongs to the humorous gallery of Aristophanes' non-Attic characters, who use either an imaginary Graeco-barbarian language (such as the Triballus of the Birds or the Scythian of the Women at the Thesmophoria) or an exaggerated provincial dialect (such as the Megarian and the Boeotian in the present play).

While the Assembly exhausts its energy in various unnecessary deliberations, Dicaeopolis finally realizes that there will be no discussion about Peace. He decides, therefore, to send Amphitheus to Sparta, to conclude a private treaty with the Lacedaemonians. Amphitheus goes and presently returns, with a speed that is the very parody of theatrical time, bringing the Just Citizen of Athens a private thirty-year-peace with Sparta; Peace appears in the form of a wine jug. In utter delight, our hero hurries home to gather his family, to celebrate with them the Rural Dionysia—their beloved fête champêtre of the serene, bygone days.

When the hero leaves the orchestra, the chorus makes its entrance (204), a flute-player opening the march. This chorus is composed of twenty-four elderly coal-traders of Acharnae. They probably wear blackened chitons and lean on rough sticks. They march in single or double columns and arrange themselves geometrically inside the orchestra circle.⁶

In both comedy and tragedy, the basic arrangement of the chorus in the orchestra had a rectangular shape; three columns of five dancers in tragedy, four columns of six dancers in comedy; it was accordingly called “square chorus,” in contrast to the “circular” of the dithyramb. Yet the mention of a circular dance is very common in drama too, especially in those cases where religious feeling gives the stasima a dithyrambic flavor.⁷

Why did Aristophanes use the inhabitants of Acharnae as chorus? The reason is obvious. Those peasants of Attica were among the most fanatic enemies of the Spartans, who had destroyed their homes. Besides, they took a great pride in being the worthy descendants of the Marathon warriors. So, by opposing them to his peace-loving hero, the playwright enhanced the tension of the dramatic conflict in order to make the Just Citizen's final victory more effective.

In a fiery succession of trochees and dactyls, the chorus voice their hatred for the rascal, who “made peace with the loathsome enemy.” Their song is sadly reminiscent of tragic historical events, because Aristophanes had pitied the Acharnians in the time of their woes. Comedy, however, cannot stand to see its audience in tears. Consequently these chorus dancers are humorously pugnacious old men, who, for no other reason than their own stupidity, support the cause of war. Their mask and costume, their dance and mimicry emphasize the ridiculous. What the spectators see is a bunch of old gargoyles, with stuffed bellies, grimacing faces and, possibly too, leather-penises swinging like time-worn pendulums. No matter how desperately they moan, the public cannot help laughing at them. What they have already suffered from the war was a fatal calamity; but to ask for more such misfortunes is, the playwright believes, sheer idiocy.

When the parodos-song is over, Dicaeopolis and his family are seen coming out of their house, presumably through one of the two lateral doors of the proskenion, to celebrate Dionysus in the countryside.⁸

We have already made a point of the importance of this Aristophanic parody on the Rural Dionysia, in which the reveling company dances and sings the joys of Peace around the phallus-pole. The old Acharnians of the chorus watch all these activities in bewilderment. Soon, however, they recover from their stupor and begin to throw stones at the “traitor.” As it happens in all war-dances of primitive tribes, their movement is rhythmically synchronized with the stimulating repetition of the trochaic “beat him, beat him, beat him, beat him!” This physical clash is followed, as is more or less the rule in Greek Comedy, by a clash of ideas, known as the agon. Here the author's credo, expressed by the hero, is set against public prejudice, embodied in the chorus. The Acharnians accuse Dicaeopolis of having concluded peace with people who are vile and false, to which the Just Citizen replies: “The Spartans are no more responsible for our misfortunes than we are” (309-10).

We praised young Aristophanes' boldness for attacking Cleon in the Babylonians. That boldness fades, however, when compared to this new, almost suicidal one: to urge the war-stricken Athenians to “love their neighbors,” those neighbors who during five whole years had been killing their sons, burning their harvests, and wishing them every possible ill. In fact, the whole agon, as well as the hero's long speech (497-556), have no other reason but to prove to the Athenian people that they are more guilty of this destructive war than the Spartans. We are almost inclined to wonder why the spectators did not rise to liquidate not only the actor incarnating Aristophanes' idea of the just citizen but also the anonymous author who was hiding back stage. They refrained from doing it, because, in the first place, they respected a theatrical performance as a tribune of free speech. Furthermore, there must have been among them some adherents of peace, who probably hushed the protesting war-lovers. Last—and this is, I believe, the most important reason—by theatrical convention the chorus represented public opinion; consequently, the twenty-four Acharnians, who reacted to Dicaeopolis' arguments with insults and stones, fulfilled the unexpressed desire of every warlike spectator.

The Just Citizen, like many future Aristophanic heroes, is a militant ideologist with plenty of guts. He does not run away from the public turmoil with his private peace treaty in his sack. He stubbornly remains there to make the roaring chorus see reason. He is so sure of the just cause of his agon that he even agrees to have his own throat cut, in case he fails to convince them. “Although,” he adds, “I love my poor life!” (357).

As a shrewd entertainer, Aristophanes loosens for a while the tension of his political debate with two interludes of a somewhat lighter mood. Both of them are inspired by the Euripidean tragedy Telephus, produced thirteen years earlier. It must have been a very popular play, since the comic poet expected his audience still to appreciate comic allusions related to it. The first inserted episode (325-37) is a typical tragic parody. In the play of Euripides, Telephus had kidnapped the infant Orestes, threatening to kill him. Here, Dicaeopolis steals an Acharnian coal-sack and prepares to stab it, unless the noisy old men will let him speak his mind. The reaction of the chorus to this feat consists of a mock-heroic version of the traditional tragic lamentation (kommōs).

The second interlude (393-479) has larger dimensions, provokes a change of scenery, and introduces an important new character. In order to win the sympathy of the chorus, the Just Citizen decides to borrow a pitiful disguise from Euripides' reputed or, rather, disreputable theatrical wardrobe of shabby costumes. It was, it seems, one of the major innovations introduced by that poet to the Greek theatre: dramatic characters should not look like the imposing statues of the Aeschylean tradition, but rather like human wrecks.

Dicaeopolis knocks at Euripides' door, the central, most probably, of the proskenion. A servant appears, declaring in Euripidean language that his master is composing a play and that no one is allowed to interrupt him. Thereupon, our hero shouts at the invisible tragic master that, since he cannot leave his room, he may as well appear in it. Euripides is at once convinced and appears in his room. In other words, thanks to a mechanical device, known as the ekkyklema, the central part of the proskenion makes a 180-degrees revolution and reveals the interior of the poet's house. Aristophanes' aim is none other than to satirize the excessive “mechanomania” of his tragic colleague. How else could Euripides appear on the stage, if not equipped with one of his pet machines? Needless to say this scene offers theatre historians an almost irrefutable argument that the ekkyklema was functioning at least since 425 b.c.⁹

In that year, the youngest of the three tragic masters was in his middle fifties and had already produced more than fifty plays, including such imposing dramas as Medea (431 b.c.) and Hippolytus (428 b.c.). For Aristophanes, however, he is a preposterous personage. … this first appearance of Euripides in the theatre will by no means be his last. Its success will establish the tragic poet as a permanent stock-character in Aristophanic comedy.

The ekkyklema has revealed the dramatist in his study, his feet on the table, surrounded by papyri, tablets, masks, costumes, wigs, and a thousand little household utensils, indispensable to the realistic atmosphere of his plays. Dicaeopolis begs him to lend him some rags. “What rags?” Euripides shouts. “Those of Oeneus, Phoenix, Bellerophon, Philoctetes, Thyestes, Ino? …” Obviously, his ragged heroes are so many that it is not easy to choose. At last the rags of Telephus are discovered and the Just Citizen wraps them around him, while the machine sweeps the “patchwork poet” back into his adytum.

Now the comic interludes are over and Dicaeopolis is standing alone in mid-orchestra, facing the chorus. Well disguised in his disarming rags, he whispers to himself: “Do you realize what an adventure you are up to? … To defend the Spartans! … Courage, my soul! …” (481-83). Let us try to imagine this crucial moment in the ancient performance, when all of a sudden laughs are muffled and in a deathlike silence all eyes are fixed on the hero, anticipating his apology.

Dicaeopolis' “long speech” is a masterpiece of rhetoric. After an introductory warning that he will say “things disagreeable but just,” he mischievously adds: “Cleon will not accuse me again of offending the State in the presence of foreigners, for we are at the Lenaea, strictly among ourselves” (501-6). He then attacks the main theme of his discourse by identifying himself with his audience. “I hate the Lacedaemonians as much as you do, for they destroyed my vineyards too!” He proceeds with vehemence to further arguments, striving to prove that he—and, consequently, Aristophanes—is neither pro-Spartan nor a traitor. Having thus secured the attention and, to a certain extent, the trust of his listeners, he delivers his own version of the war-chronicle:

(Some) men of ours—I do not say the State;
remember this, I do not say the State—

(515-17)

He does not slander the State; there is no fear, therefore, of a new action of Cleon against him. So he continues:

… Some young tipsy cottabus-players, went
and stole from Megara-town the fair Simaetha.
Then the Megarians, garlicked with the smart,
Stole, in return, two of Aspasia's hussies.
From these three wantons, o'er the Hellenic race
burst forth the first beginnings of the War! …

(524-28)

The narrative is concluded in a more serious mood, by the repetition of the leitmotiv of the oration—the proclamation of the enemy's right:

… Had some Laconian, sailing out,
denounced and sold a small Seriphian dog,
would you have sat unmoved? Far, far from that!
Ye would have launched three hundred ships of war! …

(541-45)

Dicaeopolis' bravura speech has an immediate effect—or better say, half-effect—on the chorus: half of the Acharnians are convinced of the rightness of his cause, while the other half continue to react. Aristophanes thus presents a microscopic view of the customary political disputes, which separated most of the Greek cities into two enemy camps. He also provides a natural explanation for the traditional separation of the chorus into the so-called half-choruses, opposing each other.

A war dance between the two parties follows, in which we should imagine more action taking place than the text actually describes. The manuscripts that we possess are mostly the works of Christian copyists who had never set foot in a theatre; this accounts for the numberless omissions and misinterpretations suffered by Greek drama. Dancers “imitated through rhythm, the characters, sufferings and actions” of men, Aristotle will state half a century later (Poetics, I, 5). In the Aristophanic comedies, more specifically, we often perceive that the author demands that his chorus add movement between the lines to illustrate the events by mimicry. They ought to create that “elasticité joyeuse” that Jacques Copeau dreamed of for his own theatre.¹⁰

In the violent battle between the two Acharnian semi-choruses we have a ne plus ultra ironic outcome: the pacifists fight better than the bellicose and finally win! Thereupon, the vanquished ones call Lamachus, the Athenian general, to come to their rescue. Punctually, through the third door of the stage-building, the high-crested warrior emerges as terrifying as lightning and thunder (572).

This historical personage owes his immortality more to Aristophanes' caricature than to his portrayal by Thucydides. As a stage character, he descends directly from the vociferous Heracles of the Doric Drama, having also some contingency with the arrogant general of the famous Archilochian epigram. Through the Acharnians, he becomes the legitimate progenitor of all the braggart soldiers, who will storm the theatre in later ages—from the alazon and the episeistos of New Attic Comedy and the Roman miles gloriosus to the capitano and the scaramuccia of later European farces—whose living scion is, prosaically enough, the tough sergeant of modern films.¹¹

The peace-loving little man beholds the tempestuous general and whispers:

That's what I loathe: that's why I made my treaty—
when grayhaired veterans in the ranks I saw,
and boys like you, paltry, malingering boys,
off to some Thrace, their daily pay three drachmas! …

(599-602)

And, gradually, the old underdogs of the chorus, the poor Acharnian sans culottes, who not too long ago glowed with Marathonian ambitions, have to admit that Dicaeopolis is right in every word he said. The two so-far hostile semichoruses unite in one common ideal: Peace. Then, walking toward the spectators, they deliver the parabasis (526 f.).

“The man has the best of the wordy debate, and the hearts of the people he is winning to his plea for the truce,” they say. By “man” they are referring, of course, to Dicaeopolis, who has convinced them. But they are also referring to their playwright, who has convinced, or at least so he hopes, the crowd of the Dionysus Theatre. In the parabasis the chorus was by tradition the author's claque: enunciated his message and sang his own praises.

This most original and, one might say, irrational dramatic particle of Greek Comedy—the parabasis—had a triple character: it was a eulogy, a libel, and a sermon all in one. Scholars see in it seven parts:¹²

1. The kommation (a short introduction, appeal or invocation)

2. The parabasis proper or the anapaests (where the poet advises his fellow citizens, attacks his enemies, and exalts himself)

3. The pnigos or makron (a long epigrammatic sentence, which can be either a vow, an oath or a curse)

4. The ode or strophe (lyrical passage, usually nostalgic, sung by the semichorus)

5. The epirrhema (resolution or admonition, sometimes serious, sometimes sarcastic, spoken by one chorus leader)

6. The antode or antistrophe, and

7. The antepirrhema

In the convention of the parabasis, Schlegel saw¹³ “something incongruous with the essence of dramatic representation; for in the drama the poet should always be behind his dramatic personages, who again ought … to take no perceptible notice of the spectators.” Theatre-goers of the middle twentieth century are in a much better position to understand the parabasis than those of the last one. Our dramaturgy has rediscovered, either purposely or accidentally, much of the spirit of the Aristophanic address to the public and has produced numerous variations on it. We, today, acquainted with the expressionistic and epic drama, as well as with many individual experiments by nonrealistic playwrights, feel more akin to the Attic parabasis than to many a fashionable theatrical genre of the imitation-of-life repertory.

The ancient method of performing a parabasis is, of course, terra incognita for us. We can no more than guess which parts were delivered by the whole chorus and which by one or two leading soloists, where the flute was used and where it was not, where the chorus sang or chanted, danced or walked. The modern director, therefore, can give the parabasis any theatrical form he likes, provided that he formally suspend the dramatic action and that he let the company address the audience. The concentration of the Athenian spectator on this lecture (of one hundred or more lines) was doubtless guaranteed by a visual and auditory variety of impressions. That is the purpose of the metrical versatility and multiple form of expression characteristic of the parabasis.¹⁴ The Acharnians provides us with at least one argument that the anapaests were danced by the whole chorus. The leader orders the group to take off their outer garments and make their bodies more fit for dancing (627). The same order occurs in other Aristophanic plays. (Cf. Lysistrata, 662, 686.)

The present parabasis is also a fine example of Aristophanes' sense of balance between the sublime and the ridiculous. Serious arguments are succeeded by jocular ones in equal proportion. His aims are both objective (to propagandize for Peace) and subjective (to comment on his own career, as that of a comic poet worthy of his mission). Every time, however, that he reaches a climax of earnestness, he purposely brings on an anticlimax. For example, when he prophesizes that foreigners will be visiting Athens hereafter “only to meet the poet, who was courageous enough to tell the citizens what is right,” he adds the gasconade that the king of Persia is sure the Athenians will win the war, since they have Aristophanes as their adviser! (643-51)

The parabasis over, the chorus withdraws to let the play resume its action. There is no information as to where the dancers stood, or sat, during the episodes. As far as comedy is concerned, I am inclined to imagine that during their moments of inaction they arrayed themselves in a semicircular line, parallel to the circumference of the orchestra, thus becoming the innermost row of spectators. At least that is how they are placed in the Epidaurus productions, and the device seems quite satisfactory. For the audience, they are part of the show; for the actors, part of the audience.¹⁵

The two episodes that follow—the Megarian's and the Boeotian's—present two contrasting examples of the effects of the war on men, as symbolized by an impoverished Greek and an enriched one. The timid Megarian (729 f.) is so hungry that he is enticed to exchange his two daughters for some salt or garlic from Dicaeopolis' free market. Yet, who would ever buy two skinny girls, as those whom the poor man is dragging behind him? As he happens to come from the hometown of Dorian farce, a farcical trick—a “Megarian machination”—will help him out: he will sell his daughters as if they were pigs. He immediately disguises the girls in pig's attire and orders them to pronounce no other word but “koi koi”—thus creating the first item in Aristophanes' rich dictionary of animal sounds.¹⁶ It is also the first of many animal disguises that we shall meet in his comedies and which should be seen as survivals of the old komos tradition. Dicaeopolis agrees to buy the pig-girls and the Megarian goes away blissfully exclaiming: “I wish I could sell my mother and my wife too!”

The Boeotian, who comes next (860), is in every way the opposite of the previous visitor—fat, prosperous, ebulient, gay, and loaded with baskets of goods. He lacks, however, the other man's ingenuity, which, after all, was a direct symptom of his misery. The Boeotian does not come to buy; he has everything that a bon vivant can ask for. On the contrary, he comes to sell some of his products. As Dicaeopolis delights over a fat eel of Lake Copais—a symbol of terrestrial happiness—the Theban proposes to exchange it for something that his city lacks and which abounds in Cleon's Athens—an informer. Going from word to action, Dicaeopolis captures a notorious stool-pigeon, Nicarchus, wraps him in straw and gives him to the visitor in exchange for the eel.

In the meantime Lamachus, the lofty-crested general, who is also a hungry man, enviously eyes Dicaeopolis' market. He sends his aide to buy some food, but the Just Citizen will not sell a single thing to a warmonger. On the contrary, he is delighted to offer some peace-ointment to a newly-wed bride, who wishes to keep “the bridegroom's penis away from the battlefront.” He helps her, because she is a woman and, therefore, not responsible for the war. This passage gives us the first hint of Aristophanes' attitude toward women. On many occasions he will mock them, but he will never become their enemy. He laughs at them, but admires them too. As mothers or mistresses, they hate war and belong to his own camp. This bride is a sister of tomorrow's Lysistrata and, consequently, she deserves peace.

The Anthesteria (1000 f.) is the second Dionysiac festival reproduced in the Acharnians. As most of these traditional festivities must have been annulled during the war, Aristophanes makes a generous display of their charms. He intensifies his antiwar message with arguments of nostalgia. The play will close, as a matter of fact, with Dicaeopolis' victory in the drinking bout of the Anthesteria and his acclamation by the chorus.

Before we come to the comedy's conclusion, we ought to mention two important episodes in which the blessings of peace confront the misery of war. The pacific Dicaeopolis and the bellicose Lamachus are juxtaposed in a wildly vivid stichomythia:

L.
Boy, bring me out my soldier's knapsack here!
D.
Boy, bring me out my supper basket here! …
L.
Now bring me here my helmet's double plume!
D.
Now bring me here my thrushes and ring doves! …
L.
Man, don't keep jeering at my armor so!
D.
Man, don't keep peering at my thrushes so! …
L.
Surely the moths my crest have eaten up …
D.
Sure this hare soup I'll eat before I sup! …

(1097-1112 passim)

The second episode completes the first. Lamachus' aide enters out of breath and, in a parody of tragedy's indispensable messengers, announces that his master has been mortally wounded. “Jumping over a ditch, he broke his ankle on a stake and his skull on a stone! …” (1178-80). This so very Chaplinesque description was, unfortunately, a prophetic one. Eleven years after the production of the Acharnians, the real Lamachus was killed in the Sicilian expedition, while jumping, Thucydides tells us, over a ditch (VI, 101).

The moaning general is now brought into the orchestra on a stretcher, while Dicaeopolis enters dancing, in the company of two pretty girls. War and Peace have each rewarded their faithful accordingly. The reveling pacifist and the moribund warmonger are once more contrasted in an antiphony that reaches simultaneously the paroxysm of joy and the convulsion of physical pain!

L.
My brain is dizzy with the blow of hostile stone!

.....

D.
Mine's dizzy too: to bed I'll go, and not alone!

.....

(1218-21)

Between the two parallel scenes, an allegorical figure, bearing the name of Reconciliation, makes her appearance. The old men of the chorus, with tears of happiness in their eyes, honor her by singing an ode of Anacreontian flavor: “O dear Reconciliation, we had forgotten how beautiful you were! …” (990). Though the figure is mute, her presence is eloquent. Years later, in the Lysistrata, the same personification will appear before the spectators, but she will be something quite different: a cock-teasing little tart, whom the heroine will use as a decoy for the fighting males. The present Reconciliation has only spiritual charms; the poet is still young.

With the apotheosis of Reconciliation, the catastrophe of Lamachus and the joyful kordax of the inebriated Just Citizen, the play comes to its end. Private peace has triumphed and Dicaeopolis is lauded by the Acharnians. The pacific manifesto is over and Aristophanes hopes to win the approbation of all the Athenians—including, of course, the dramatic judges. The comic hero demands a prize for his drinking victory and the comic poet demands a crown of ivy for his dramatic victory. The chorus leaves the orchestra singing the Olympic Hymn of Archilochus (tenella kallinike!) as an ovation to both the play's hero and its poet, as if the two were—and they certainly were—one person.¹⁷

The plays of Cratinus and Eupolis, competing on that day, were defeated by the Acharnians—and that is practically all we know about them. By crowning Callistratus, alias Aristophanes, the Athenians showed that they deeply sympathized with his political tribulations and approved of his advocation for peace. After five years of war, most families were lamenting over their dead, heroic slogans had lost their meaning, and the very cause of the war had certainly disappeared in a cloud of uncertainty. After all, those “two whores of Aspasia's” might have been the real cause, as Aristophanes had flippantly suggested. Why not? Stupid causes make wars idiotic.¹⁸

The Athenians were certain, however, that the young playwright had told them “things disagreeable, but just” (501). And from then on they adopted him as their worthy spokesman. While the Assembly was still searching in the chaos for a leader, the theatre had already found one.

Notes

1. “In the presence of foreigners” (cf. Acharnians, 502; Life, etc.).

2. Acharnians, 377-82. All quotations of the Acharnians are from B. B. Rogers' translation.

3. Cf. Chapter I, note 22 in Solomos, Alexis. The Living Aristophanes. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1974.

4. The Acharnians, 1235 lines; the Knights, 1408; the Clouds, 1510. Among contemporary tragedies, the Sons of Heracles, 1050; the Hecuba, 1271; the Hippolytus, 1459; the Oedipus Tyrant, 1464.

5. We cannot be certain whether or not it was Cratinus who inaugurated the “autobiographical” type of comedy. At any rate, in his last play, the Wine Jug (423 b.c.), he made himself the comic hero.

6. Pollux, IV, 108-9 (cf. Pickard-Cambridge, Festivals, pp. 245-50).

7. The order of the leader for a circular dance is “Get into a circle!” (the Women at the Thesmophoria, 954, 968). About the flute-player, cf. Scholiast on Wasps, 582.

8. The proskenion (or stage-facade) in Aristophanes needs to have either three doors (or openings) in the Acharnians and the Assembly of Women, or two doors, as in the Clouds, or a single central one, as in the Knights, the Wasps, the Lysistrata.

9. Acharnians, 408-9. Since Aristophanes is parodying the device, it is beyond question that Euripides had already been using the ekkyclema in his tragedies before 425 b.c.

10. J. Copeau (Lectures, 1921).

11. For stock-types in Aristophanes and their traditions, see also F. M. Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy, passim.

12. F. M. Cornford, op. cit., passim; Pickard-Cambridge, Dithyramb, Tragedy, Comedy, pp. 213-29.

13. A. W. Schlegel, op. cit., Lecture XI, p. 151.

14. I cannot say that I share the opinion that in Attic Comedy's early years the parabasis had its place at the beginning of a play. Its message could hardly be delivered in the still unsettled atmosphere of the opening of a performance. Besides, the sermon should assault the public when the action was already ripe and the concentration absolute. (Perhaps, those who suggested the idea had never seen an Attic Comedy performed.)

15. Schiller saw the ancient tragic chorus as a living wall surrounding tragedy, in order to keep it untouched by reality and to protect its poetic liberty (Introduction to The Bride of Messina). Something analogous might be attributed to the comic chorus, as well. In the Epidaurus performances of the Greek National Theatre, we introduced the device of twenty-four wooden cubes aligned on the semicircumference of the orchestra, on the amphitheatre's side. There the chorus sat during its passive moments and watched the actors, reacted and commented on the happenings, like a genuine audience.

16. Acharnians, 780; Wasps, 903; Birds, 227 f.; Frogs, 209 f. Even in this respect, Cratinus had been a pioneer: in his Dionysalexandros (Fr. 43) there was a sheep's cry—bee bee (bn̄)—which subsequently became the cornerstone of a vast linguistic controversy over the ancient Greek pronunciation.

17. Archilochus' song of victory, on Heracles (cf. Pindar, Olympian Odes, IX; Birds, 1764).

18. Rabelais, Swift, Voltaire, Jarry, and many others have presented fantastic wars fought for idiotic reasons. The only difference between them and Aristophanes is that his war was real and burning with actuality.