Rude Talk in Athens Page 3

  Who judged the plays and how they judged them are a bit less clear. There were ten official judges, one from each of the original tribes of Athens, chosen by a complicated lottery system, and tampering with the process was punishable by death. But from here it gets murky. Apparently five judges decided the winner. Or, as the second-century CE satirist Lucian of Samosata wrote in his Harmonides:

  Public opinion must inevitably follow the opinion of the best judges. The public, after all, is mainly composed of untutored minds, that know not good from bad themselves; but when they hear a man praised by the great authorities, they take it for granted that he is not undeserving of praise, and praise him accordingly. It is the same at the games: most of the spectators know enough to clap or hiss, but the judging is done by some five or six persons.6

  The comedy performances were colorful, loud, and very rude. The spectators could eat, drink, and misbehave. Shouts from the audience could be directed at the actors or the chorus or other patrons in the audience. It was a party. The comic playwrights used this freewheeling atmosphere to their advantage, openly appealing to the audience and judges to award them the prize. There are several instances in Aristophanes’s plays where the chorus tries to rally the crowd to influence the judges. It is in these moments, with the crowd provoked, when the comic writers could weaponize their jokes and skewer some of the hypocrisy of the Athenian brand: the folly of sustained war, the disenfranchisement of women, the treatment of the enslaved, and the dangers of demagoguery.

  First-century CE writer and rhetorician Quintilian wrote, “Old Comedy is perhaps alone in preserving not only that pure grace of Attic language but also a very potent freedom, and if it is especially good in chasing down vice, it does have a very great deal of power, however, in other areas. For it is grand and elegant and charming … there are many authors but especially Aristophanes, Eupolis, and Cratinus.”7

  Aristophanes and his peers would speak out: mocking colleagues and competitors as venomously as they stung other prominent Athenians, deflating egos, bringing the hubristic down to earth, pointing out foibles and depravity, settling personal scores, and igniting new outrages. From the plays and fragments that survived, we know that it was bitingly funny, subversive, and, most of all, self-serving. And sometimes the jokes were just strange, especially in the case of Ariphrades, a man publicly vilified as a practitioner of cunnilingus.

  The Case against Ariphrades

  In classic Athenian comedies, the agon is the section of the play where a debate or argument happens—the characters take a stand, announce their plans, challenge each other, and variously bicker and quarrel. Aristophanes was brilliant at writing these debates, typically starting with his characters discussing something that seems quite reasonable and then slowly compounding it with more and more absurd accusations and demands until it becomes something else altogether. Which, now that I think of it, is a comedic technique that everyone from Molière to the Marx Brothers to Tina Fey have successfully employed.* Sometimes it’s simply the protagonist addressing the audience or chorus with something academics call an “epirrhematic agon,” because academics like to make things more complicated.

  Let’s give Aristophanes his epirrhematic moment. What did he say about Ariphrades?

  In his play Knights, first performed in 424 BCE—and here I’ll use Kenneth McLeish’s 1979 translation—the chorus of knights have a rolling conversation in the style of a Broadway musical, trading lines and singling out Ariphrades for abuse:

  KNIGHTS: Ariphrades! That swine!

  Who?

  Ariphrades.

  Never heard of him?

  Arignotos’ brother. Yes.

  Good old Arignotos. One of the best.

  So what’s wrong with his brother?

  You mean you haven’t heard? Some are born vile, some

  have vileness thrust upon them—but he invented vileness.

  Thrives on it.

  Just listen to him playing the flute, then think of the whores

  that mouth has blown,

  Just imagine that filthy, acrobatic tongue—

  And if that doesn’t turn your stomach,

  Don’t imagine you’ll ever get a drink from me.1

  In his translation of the same section of Knights, writer Paul Roche decides not to break it up and assigns the whole speech to the leader of the chorus:

  LEADER: There is nothing shameful in showing up the

  shameful.

  It’s a good foil for showing up the good,

  though I shouldn’t have to add

  a bad name to a man already bad

  or contrast him with a friend of mine who’s careful.

  And when it comes to music, I know the bad from good

  and can tell an Arignotus from his brother Ariphrades.

  They couldn’t be more different: Ariphrades is slimy;

  But he isn’t mere slimy, or I might have passed him by;

  He’s gone much further and given “slimy” quite a new

  dimension with shameful tricks like licking up the dew

  in brothels till he sullies

  his beard and upsets the hot-stuff ladies …

  like a horny Polymnestus or Oenichus his crony.*

  Anyone who doesn’t hate the guts of such a man

  shan’t ever share a cup with me again.2

  In other translations, Ariphrades is “licking the detestable dew in bawdyhouses besmirching his beard, disturbing the ladies’ hotpots”3 or he “pollutes his tongue with shameful pleasures, licking up in his orgies the abominable dew, fouling his beard and tormenting women’s privates.”4

  No matter which translation you use, I think we all know what Aristophanes is saying: Ariphrades is going down on flute girls. But proclaiming that it is stomach turning or you should hate the guts of someone who does that feels a bit extreme to my modern sensibility.

  In the notes to his 1889 translation of Knights, Benjamin Dann Walsh, a fellow of Trinity College of Cambridge University and future first official state entomologist of Illinois, takes Aristophanes at face value: “Although we cannot but esteem our author, for the feeling of disgust which he expresses, at the abominations of which this depraved fellow was guilty, yet it certainly were to be wished, that, while he condemned the offender, he had not spoken quite so plainly out as to the nature of the offence.”5

  I’ll try not to make fun of a nineteenth-century bug collector like Walsh; times were different back then and he was, after all, only wishing to save sensitive readers and scholars of the classics from having to imagine what someone might do with his tongue on a clitoris. But I’m personally offended by how judgmental he gets, later referring to Ariphrades as a “besotted debauchee.” As someone who has been called a besotted debauchee from time to time, I’m not surprised that a comic writer might have a relationship with alcohol and recreational depravity; there is a long history of writers who liked a drink.* But even modern scholars persist in slandering Ariphrades. For example Robert C. Bartlett, in the notes to his excellent new translations of Aristophanes, name-checks a few characters in the parabasis of Knights, writing, “This is followed by the mention of two fellows fully deserving of much censure (Ariphrades and Cleonymus), each licentious in his own way.”6 Really? In our modern epoch oral sex counts as licentiousness? I’m not even sure it qualifies as kinky.

  Two years later, Aristophanes went after Ariphrades again in Wasps. This time the chorus starts talking about Ariphrades’s father, Automenes:

  CHORUS: Happy Automenes, how we congratulate you! You’ve begotten sons of the highest artistic skill. First of all a very skilful man, dear to everyone, the supreme lyre-player, on whom delight attends; another, the actor, who’s terribly skilful; and then Ariphrades, a long way the most talented of all, who (so his father once swore) without learning it from anybody licked them up every time he went into a brothel.7

  In his translation, classicist and notorious wit Moses Hadas puts a slightly more poetic spin on the wo
rds: “Self-inspired he learned, the bawdyhouses among, / How most ingeniously to operate his tongue.”8 Which doesn’t give credit to the flute girls who might’ve given him some pointers while he had his face between their legs. It is interesting that Ariphrades is accused of—and credited with—“inventing vileness” that he did “without learning it from anybody.”

  Do we really think Ariphrades invented cunnilingus? It’s hard to say. No one is sure when the Kama Sutra, the ancient Hindu text on lovemaking, was written, but historians place it at around 400 BCE, which means it doesn’t predate Ariphrades. And although you’d think that six thousand years of Chinese civilization probably had some form of oral sex going on before the Greeks, Taoism—which advises performing cunnilingus as a way to preserve chi and enhance longevity—also only goes as far back as the fourth century BCE. That’s a century later than the Greeks. Which leaves Aristophanes’s accusations against Ariphrades as some of the earliest written evidence of the practice we have.

  I would love to invent something so important. I’m not talking about a position. There are all kinds of arrangements of limbs and genitals that have different names—doggy style, missionary, cowgirl, reverse cowgirl—but those are all variations on intercourse. Imagine if you patented a new sex act today. What would the licensing and franchise fees be like? Your bank account swelling exponentially as royalties poured in from hundreds of millions of people paying a small fee to perform the sex act you invented. You’d be immensely wealthy and quite possibly beloved, like the person who invented egg cartons. Of course you’d get pirated, there would be counterfeits for sale on the internet, knockoffs coming from China, and slight variations that claim to be original—enough to keep a team of lawyers working full time, enforcing your copyright. But as far as we know, Ariphrades made no claim on cunnilingus; if he did invent it, he put it up on Creative Commons as shareware.

  Did he, as Aristophanes claimed, acquire the skill on his own? I don’t know what the sex ed classes were like in the ancient gymnasiums, but there were certainly guides to sex: a woman named Philaenis of Samos is credited, and subsequently discredited by some scholars, with writing an early sex manual. But for Aristophanes to publicly acknowledge Ariphrades for his self-taught skills was not a compliment, it was a public pronouncement that the rival satirist was not up to the standards of Athenian manhood. Aristotle said, “The male is by nature superior and the female inferior … the one rules and the other is ruled.”9 To an upstanding Athenian male of the time, Ariphrades’s actions would have been problematic at the least.

  The third instance of Aristophanes talking smack about Ariphrades is really just a throwaway line in the play Peace from 421 BCE, as two characters discuss how to deliver a maiden to her betrothed.

  SERVANT: Who! Ariphrades: he wants her brought his way.

  TRYGAEUS: No: I can’t bear his dirty, sloppy way.10

  It’s a minor slap, more in line with what Chris Rock said about R. Kelly eating ass* than a major callout. You can detect a hint of exhaustion, as if Aristophanes didn’t really want to go there but couldn’t resist, like he was trying to get the last word in.

  Thirty years later in Assemblywomen—a raunchy comedy about a kind of collective society that enforces sexual equality for the old and unattractive—he again singles Ariphrades out, this time with a single line: “Stop gabbing, Ariphrades! Come, sit down”11 As if Ariphrades has arrived late, wiping excess secretions from his beard and causing a disturbance.

  And there’s another mention in an undated, untitled play where the line reads: “I’m afraid that Ariphrades will eat away our business for us!”12 I can only imagine that this is a conversation between two men opening a brothel. Mentioning this fragment in an article entitled “How to Avoid Being a Komodoumenos,” historian Alan H. Sommerstein writes, “The Aristophanic status of this fragment is somewhat uncertain, but there is no doubt that it is a fragment of Old Comedy, and its language clearly indicates that the Ariphrades mentioned in it is the alleged cunnilinctor of Knights, Wasps, and Peace.”13

  Put together, it’s a lot. Only eleven of Aristophanes’s forty plays have survived, so who knows how many times he hammered away at the same old joke about Ariphrades? Who does that? Imagine being on the receiving end of these tirades. And yet that was where a lot of the humor of Old Comedy came from. Public officials, prominent citizens, rival writers—all kinds of people were subjected to public humiliation on the Athenian stage. There’s even a word for it: komodoumenos, to be a target of public mockery. These generally had to be well-known individuals, otherwise the joke wouldn’t land. As Sommerstein writes, “To ask what sort of people became komodoumenoi may be something like asking what made a person well known in fifth-century Athens.”

  It would be fascinating to hear Ariphrades’s riposte. What would he say in his defense? And what jokes would he make about Aristophanes? But all we’re left with is a salacious rumor that has somehow persisted, like Catherine the Great fucking her horse.

  * A great example is Abbott and Costello’s “Susquehanna Hat Company” routine.

  * According to Roche: Polymnestus was a seventh-century BCE poet from Colophon. Oenichus was a musician. Which sounds like some of my friends.

  * From Cratinus to Tennessee Williams, Dorothy Parker to Jean Rhys, Patricia Highsmith to Marguerite Duras, Hunter Thompson to Jay McInerney, with tens of thousands of stops in between.

  * From Chris Rock’s 2004 standup special Never Scared: “At one point on the tape, R. Kelly’s eating this girl’s ass out like it’s Puppy Chow. He’s in her ass like he’s got diabetes and her ass got insulin in it.”

  The Defense of Ariphrades

  There is a little hole-in-the-wall place in Athens called Cinque Wine Bar. My wife and I found it by accident while roaming the hip and hustling Psiri neighborhood, a few blocks from Monastiraki Square, the heart of the tourist area near the Acropolis. We were looking for a quiet place to have a glass of wine, which can sometimes be more difficult than you’d think in an area obsessed with selling souvlaki to tourists.

  During the day Psiri is a mix of light industry and junk shops that remind me of Canal Street in New York City during the ’80s. Vendors stack dusty books, battered electrical parts, used hardware, clothing, tchotchkes, old cooking pots, power tools, burner phones—basically anything and everything you don’t really want or need—onto the sidewalk and spilling out into streets. It is difficult to navigate during the day and, unless you’re looking for a pair of Soviet-era jumper cables or an outdated math textbook in German, is an area I avoid. However, at night it transforms; the junk is cleared away, and hip restaurants and bars spring to life. It’s just as chaotic, but a completely different vibe.

  Cinque is tucked away from the main bustle on a little side street. It’s a quiet and friendly bar that serves only Greek wines by small vintners, plates of local cheese, and homemade chutneys. In other words, it is my kind of place. The owners, Grigoris and Evangelia, are fanatical about Greek wine and gave me a splash-by-splash tour of the oenological output of the entire country. Grigoris, or Greg, is an exuberant man who likes to tell stories. His English is limited—but much better than my nonexistent Greek—so that Evangelia was pulled into the conversation to act as his good-natured but slightly put-upon translator and the straight (wo)man to his jokes. They are excellent company and have a nose for delicious wines.

  Much like Alcibiades at the symposium, I got plastered.

  Wine has a way of forging friendships, and on subsequent visits, after a glass or two, I began telling them about my interest in Ariphrades. It turned out that Evangelia has a sister who studies ancient Greek. She called her sister and, after a few minutes, came back with a translation of the name.

  Ari = “crude” or “rude.”

  Phrades = “speaking.”

  According to Evangelia’s sister, the name signifies someone who is rude or, perhaps, someone who uses his tongue in a crude way. Did it mean he was salty? The Lenny Bruce of the A
gora? Or was it the other way he used his tongue? I wasn’t quite convinced. It seemed too on the nose, you know? Like his reputation was coloring how people translated his name. But besides that, what parents name their kid Crude Talker? It just didn’t seem like something Automenes would do. So I checked the Eulexis-web lemmatiser* for ancient Greek texts and ari turned up as a prefix, “an inseparable particle, marking an idea of strength, of superiority.” Google Translate turns Ariphrades into “Mars Phrases,” which sounds like a great name for a new age cat psychologist. I found the contradictions funny, and, like a lot of things about ancient Athens, the more you investigate, the less you know.

  I asked Mary Norris, author of the excellent travelogue/ language acquisition memoir Greek to Me1 if she had an idea what his name might mean. She told me that aristo means “best,” as in “aristocracy,” and hazarded a guess that “Aristophanes means something like ‘he appears the best.’” She added, “I am not sure if ari means ‘superior’ without the sto. Anyway, etymology of names is dangerous territory.” Personally, I like a frisson of danger when I’m trying to do research.

  If you’ve read her charming memoir of being a copy editor, Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen,2 you’ll know that she likes precision. She asked James Romm, the James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics at Bard College and author of several books on the ancient world, what he made of Ariphrades’s name.

  James replied immediately: “As to Ariphrades: the meaning is ‘very wise,’ to go by the lexicon. You’re right that ari- is connected to aristos but does not convey ‘best’ so much as ‘very.’ The adjective phradês simply means ‘wise.’”

  That seems more like it. Not to say that Ariphrades was very wise, but it feels like a name parents might give their child.