Rude Talk in Athens Read online

  Let’s imagine our subject, Ariphrades, arriving for a symposium in the Plaka neighborhood of Athens, not far from the Acropolis and the Agora, the central marketplace, circa 420 BCE. Let’s say the symposium is hosted by a wealthy patron of the arts and, much like a literary salon in Paris or a coffee shop in Brooklyn, the room is filled with writers and their egos—with a few flute girls squeezed in for imaginary historical accuracy.

  Ariphrades stood outside the house and adjusted his chiton. He wasn’t cold, but in this well-to-do part of the Plaka he wanted to look sharp, so he threw part of the cloth over his shoulder, pulling it down and tucking it into a fold. He ran his fingers through his beard and smoothed his hair. He really should’ve cleaned up and changed into fresh clothes before coming to such an auspicious gathering, but he’d been preoccupied, working on a new play, before joining his brothers at the palaestra for some exercise. He sniffed his armpits. They smelled like fresh olive oil.

  An enslaved young man answered the door and Ariphrades couldn’t help but feel underdressed. Even the slave’s clothing was of finer quality than his. He wiped his bare feet and followed him through the house to where the symposium was under way.

  Oil lamps lit the crowded andron, and Ariphrades could see several famous writers reclining on the couches as the wine flowed.

  Let’s imagine that the host of this symposium loved the theater and bankrolled the productions at the festivals. Who else might have been in the room? Perhaps a young man named Eupolis, who had won first prize at the previous year’s City Dionysia with his comedy Toadies. Maybe Leucon, who came in third that year. Other comedy writers, like Pherecrates and Philonides, would probably be here. Agathon the poet. Perhaps the famous tragedians Sophocles and Euripides were lounging in a corner. Just because their plays are heavy doesn’t mean they don’t like to party.

  Unless you’re a classicist or a scholar of ancient Athenian comedy, these names probably don’t mean much to you. For most of them, today their work exists only in fragments or not at all. Which is not to say they weren’t as important or successful or brilliant as Aristophanes at the time; it’s just that for reasons we can speculate on later, history has been cruel.

  Eupolis’s Toadies, for example, sounds like something Phoebe Waller-Bridge or Molière might have written. A “toady” was a parasite, a moocher of the highest order. The play is about the wealthiest man in Athens inviting a bunch of intellectuals and their loser friends to his estate. High jinks, and the complete looting of his wealth, ensue. Here’s a fragment that survived:

  Now we’ll tell you about the toady’s life.

  Just listen how totally cool we really are:

  First of all, check out the servant we have with us;

  Usually it’s someone else’s boy, though I get my turn too.

  And I’ve got these two fancy coats, see

  I wear one of the other when I go to the marketplace.

  And when I see some sucker there,

  especially a rich one, I’m all over him!

  And if this rich bozo utters so much as a syllable, I applaud it,

  and pretend to be amazed at his every word.2

  I can’t imagine that every guest at this symposium was a writer. Hopefully our host would know better. An actor or musician or artist or philosopher might have been invited. Maybe a soldier or gentleman farmer. Definitely Aristophanes would be there, still smoldering with rage for coming in second to Eupolis at the last competition.

  To give you some perspective of how important theater and writers were to ancient Athenians, what level celebrities they were at the time, this would’ve been akin to going to a party with Beyoncé and Bono, Guillermo del Toro and Paolo Sorrentino, Léa Seydoux and Elisabeth Moss, Taylor Swift, Tom Hanks, and the guy who sang “Gangnam Style,” with maybe Padma Lakshmi, Damien Hirst, David Guetta, Formula One champion Lewis Hamilton, and the singer from Destroyer tossed into the mix for fun. In other words, they were the entertainment industry of their time, influential and important in the cultural and civic life of their community. Aside from sporting events and war, theater was what brought Athenians together, and comedy was the main outlet for unfiltered political speech that could reach a large audience. Have writers ever had it so good?

  Platonius, a literary critic who historians believe was writing in the ninth or tenth century, wrote an essay called “On the Distinctions among Comedies,” which described this particular era of Athenian comedy—so-called Old Comedy—as being uniquely rude: “And so, since free speech was available to all, writers of comedies had licence to mock generals and jurors who were making bad judgments and some of the citizens who were money-grubbers or lived licentiously.”3 Platonius re viewed the major works of the writers of this era and described Cratinus as particularly caustic, while Aristophanes softened his abuse with tongue-in-cheek humor. Eupolis, he says, was “as charming as he is sublime.”4

  Cratinus, widely known as a lover of wine with a taste for pretty boys, was older than both Eupolis and Aristophanes and had passed away by the time our imaginary symposium is happening. But if he had been alive, I’m confident he wouldn’t have missed an opportunity to drink.

  Like most artistic communities, I assume everyone knew everyone. Ariphrades would’ve smiled as he entered, and the other guests would’ve lifted their cups in greeting.

  Ariphrades was handed a cup of wine and took a sip. The wine was from Chios—expensive and mixed with fresh spring water; it went down easily. Perhaps that accounted for the state of drunkenness in the andron.

  Aristophanes was teetering in the center of the room, his beard soggy and stained from the grape, as an enslaved man refilled his cup. He began complaining about the size of tripods—the large trophies for theatrical competitions—being erected on the Street of Tripods. His last sponsor had declined to pay for one as large as Aristophanes felt he deserved. “Was that not the greatest comedy ever performed?” he asked the room.

  One of the other writers present, maybe Leucon, said, “But you didn’t win. So shut up.”

  Aristophanes ignored him and slurred, “Talent such as mine deserves the biggest tripod!”

  Ariphrades saw some smirks from the other men, and a few shook their heads in dismay at Aristophanes’s bragging. Most of them had heard it before; when Aristophanes was in his cups he could be a bit of a blowhard. But no one said anything, not even in jest, because Aristophanes was a cruel wit, the master of the sick burn, and no one wanted to be the target of one of his harangues.

  Earlier in the evening there might have been talk of poetry and art, or the latest gossip about certain philosophers speaking at the stoa, but now, as the wine worked its magic and the flute girls circulated, the symposium was turning ever so slightly Dionysian.

  Ariphrades watched the enslaved man scoop wine from the krater. And, as he waited for his cup to be refilled, he greeted the host and apologized for being late. The host patted the seat next to him, offering to share his couch. Ariphrades happily joined him, but as he sat he saw Aristophanes catch his eye across the room.

  Aristophanes looked at the host and warned, “You might share your couch, but do not share your wine cup.” Aristophanes laughed at his own comment, managing to spill some wine on his chiton in the process. He stepped into the center of the andron and raised his cup in a mocking toast. “Ariphrades the wicked. Greetings.”

  Ariphrades smiled and raised his cup to Aristophanes.

  Aristophanes acknowledged him with a nod and asked, “And why were you late Ariphrades? Did something come up?” Aristophanes made a crude grab at his crotch, miming an uncontrollable erection and evoking peals of laughter from the guests.

  Symposiuming (Wikimedia Commons).

  Obviously I have no way of knowing if Aristophanes made these jokes at a symposium, but it’s not much of a stretch because these are things Aristophanes said about Ariphrades in his plays; he was obsessed with Ariphrades, an exceptional personal and artistic vendetta that spanned more than th
irty years of creative output. But tonight, at the imaginary symposium, he was just warming up. Another voice would jump in. Perhaps someone would agree with Aristophanes or Ariphrades might defend himself. Voices would be raised. People would mock and laugh and take the piss. In other words, a serious slanging match would erupt. Because that’s what these guys did. Their plays were raunchy—explicitly sexual and scatological—and contained elements of what we call “battle rap”; it is easy to imagine insults, boasts, sexual innuendo, and imaginary scenarios involving your mother spilling from their mouths as the symposium got heated. That’s because the comic playwrights of ancient Athens did not have a fuck to give about who they offended. It was the age of rude talk.

  * The looted artifacts from this smash and grab were renamed the Elgin Marbles and are on display at the British Museum, as if they were property of the British, who should really give them back.

  * A wealthy and extremely good-looking Athenian born in 450 BCE, Alcibiades was kind of a rock star until he led an expedition to Sicily in 415 BCE, where the Greek army got its ass handed to it.

  Athens™®

  Classical Athens was built on the backs of slaves. The society was funded by conquest and constant war and ruled by a deeply entrenched patriarchy. It wasn’t all poets and philosophers in sandals thinking groovy thoughts while naked young men wrestled in the palaestrae. Although that was part of it too. But in reality, as classics professor Johanna Hanink writes in her book The Classical Debt, Athens was “a well-oiled imperial machine.”1

  I’m not going to be an apologist for a slave-based economy or quote some historians who claim Athenians treated their slaves better than other civilizations did theirs. They enslaved the people they conquered. Period. Their standard of living was based on owning other human beings who did much of the hard labor, domestic duties, and basically all the shit work that the citizens didn’t want to do. Almost every family had slaves, and some estimates put the ratio of slave to citizen at almost twenty to one. Those amazing buildings and monuments that tourists travel around the world to visit, the structures that we hold up as evidence of the superiority of Western civilization, much like the White House in Washington, D.C.—those were built by enslaved people. Which is not to diminish their grandeur or importance, but they were built to project the power of Athens to the ancient world. It worked at the time and continues to this day. Classical Athens is generally regarded as the birthplace of democracy, philosophy, theater, and the arts. Hanink continues in her book: “Athenians did not consciously ‘invent’ Western civilization, but they did consciously create an idealized vision of themselves and their city.” In other words, they created a brand.

  I wish I could buy into the myth of the utopian society where everyone wore organic linen and drank biodynamic wine while they discussed the life of the mind and read poetry, but fifth-century BCE Athens was complicated—sophisticated and beautiful and ugly and barbaric.

  With the enslaved population taking care of the day-to-day chores, the male citizens of Athens devoted their energies to philosophy, the arts, politics, and the pursuit of pleasure. One of the things they did, in addition to getting plastered at tavernas and symposiums, was to enjoy a robust sex life. To paraphrase Demosthenes, you could have sex with a courtesan for pleasure, your wife to create heirs, and slaves for your daily sexual needs.2

  Wives were for bearing offspring and managing the house, which gave them some agency—a distinctly different experience compared with the life of your average prostitute. We know that wives were protected and often confined to their homes so that the parentage of the offspring would not be questioned. Adultery was illegal, punishable by death. If you caught your wife having an affair, the Athenian courts allowed you to shove a radish up the offending man’s ass. I’m not talking about one of those little French Breakfast radishes either; think daikon.

  Prostitution was much like our modern customer rewards programs, with silver, gold, and platinum levels: a tiered system from expensive courtesans called “hetaerae,” to flute girls who would entertain at parties, to brothel prostitutes, to streetwalkers who worked in the alleys and open areas of the Kerameikos. Socrates is famously quoted as saying the abundance of prostitutes was convenient as a kind of safety valve for releasing the pressures of lust.3

  None of this was illegal or particularly frowned upon. Prices for various sex acts were set by the city government, which, naturally, was a group of men. And if that didn’t float your boat, there were boys available for courting. Or you could just rub one out in public, as Diogenes the Cynic often did. When his fellow Athenians complained about his public masturbation, he famously wished, “it were as easy to banish hunger by rubbing the belly.”4 In other words, for men, it was an all-day splooge-a-thon; for women, who had virtually no rights in Athenian society, well, they were simply fucked. It was patriarchy on steroids. And all this sex on the brain had an impact on the arts.

  Both of the major theater festivals, the Dionysia and the Lenaia, were centerpieces of a celebration of Dionysus, the god of wine and winemaking, fertility and epiphany, ecstasy and theater. And how better to start a celebration of this louche and irresistible god but with a phallus procession: a penis parade of drunk men carrying large cocks and shouting obscenities as they cavorted through town like some kind of raucous frat party or a convention of drunk regional marketing managers set loose in Vegas.

  Some historians, including Aristotle, suggested that comedy was born from these debauched happenings. Which makes sense. They’d already gone to the trouble of making gigantic phalli for the parades, so why not put them to use in a more structured way? And it’s the Dionysus festival. A party! After all, Dionysus was called “the god who comes.” Some historians attribute this to some sort of epiphanic quality he possessed, but who are they kidding? He may inspire an epiphany, but then he rolls over and goes to sleep.

  Still, the festivals were more than just drunken sausage parties; they were an opportunity for Athens to project its power and importance and show off its freewheeling culture to visitors from other parts of the world, especially ambassadors from conquered territories who were required to drop by and pay their annual taxes. Kind of like a Mob boss taking his tribute, then inviting you to stay for coffee and tiramisu.

  The biggest event in Athens was the Panathenaic festival, which was held in the summer and was all about Athena. There were a lot of sacrifices of animals, which sounds messy. And I imagine it was slightly more respectful and restrained than the Dionysian festivals. The main feature of the festival was the procession from the Dipylon gate at the edge of the city, along the Panathenaic Way, to the top of the Acropolis. This parade is depicted in the frieze on the inner chamber of the Parthenon, somewhat disappointingly bereft of giant phalli. But this was still ancient Athens and they loved games and competitions, so the Panathenaic featured lots of sporting events like wrestling and boxing and chariot races. There were singing contests and epic poetry recitations. It sounds kind of like a county fair to me: a parade, some livestock, and funnel cakes.

  But for theater-loving Athenians, the City Dionysia (held in the spring) and the Lenaia festival (sometime in mid-winter) were the highlights of the year. I should note that just like Broadway shows doing out-of-town tryouts, there was a festival held outside Athens sometime in December/January-ish, called the Rural Dionysia, where plays could be worked on far from the critical eye of sophisticated urbanites. The City Dionysia ran for five days with roughly three days for tragedies and two for comedy, while the Lenaia was a smaller festival that featured more comedies.

  Who went to these plays? Well, according to David Kawalko Roselli, author of the book Theater of the People: Spectators and Society in Ancient Athens, almost everyone. In his book, Roselli endeavors to understand the politics of ancient Athens by figuring out who was attending the plays and how the content of the plays might’ve affected the populace. He believes the audiences were more mixed and international than previous historians hav
e thought. “The diverse ethnic origins of the ‘theater workers’ (e.g., musicians), various financial sponsors, and trainers, as well as the participation of slaves, put a significant noncitizen presence right at the heart of theater production.”5

  If the population of Athens at the time was roughly three hundred thousand, and only thirty thousand were citizens, restricting the theatrical audience to male citizens doesn’t make box office sense. What self-respecting show business impresario wouldn’t sell seats to women and foreigners and freed slaves? A boffo box office, as Variety would say, has always been as important as any political or cultural impact a play might have.

  One way to get an understanding of how important these festivals were is to look at the money spent on mounting the plays. Demosthenes is said to have complained that the festivals were better financed than the military, and that was no small potatoes. Let’s just push pause here and think about that for a moment. Can you imagine living in a world where the military takes a back seat to the arts? What would it be like to live in a society where writers earned a decent living and independent bookstores were subsidized? What if working in the theater was considered heroic sacrifice for the benefit of your country, and musicians and dancers and people with paint splatter in their hair were given priority boarding on flights? Imagine a society where the air force, army, and navy would all compete for National Endowment for the Armed Forces grants. That new bomber? Sorry. Just didn’t generate sufficient enthusiasm with our panel. That submarine you requested? We’re looking for projects that benefit society. We encourage you to submit next year and suggest you try a seagoing vessel that floats on top of the water. Taxpayers want to see what they’re paying for.

  And it wasn’t just the money that energized the ancient theater world. There was serious prestige to be gained for the writers, actors, musicians, and choragus—essentially a wealthy individual who acted as the patron and producer/director of the chorus, who would bankroll the production and help wrangle the various performers and artisans—from winning the competition.