Humiliation? Voyeurism, Violence, and Humor in Old Comedy

Humiliation?
Voyeurism, Violence,
and Humor in Old Comedy*
IA N RU F F E L L
One of the principal attributes of Old Comedy, as much for modern critics as for
ancient, is its aggression. From attacks on individuals, particularly historical individuals, to the behavior of its protagonists while pursuing their crazy schemes, the
implications of such verbal and actual violence have proved in different ways problematic. The visual elements, in particular, have often proved troubling when set
against the big political issues and self-proclaimed ambitions of the plays. While
the resources of the comic stage have often been considered, the specific contribution of the spectacle of comic aggression has rarely been considered directly, even
compared to obscenity, which has been treated primarily from a linguistic viewpoint.1 For some critics, this comic aggression is all too easily dismissed as slapstick, childish jokes, a ritual hangover, or the integration of elements of popular
nonliterary comedyall far from any serious dimension.2 Some critics, conversely,
accept Aristophanic claims to be moving away from low comedy, despite patent
evidence to the contrary. Others use the very crudeness of such humor to tell a
simple story of power, in terms of genre-specific comic heroism or the straightforward expression of masculine power and male sexuality, common to other expressions of phallic aggression.3 It is certainly the case that the visual dimension of
comic aggression puts issues of masculinity and power center-stage and that the
visual dimension to aggressive humor offers a particularly immediate source of
ideological engagement for the spectators. I shall argue here, however, that the
spectacle of violence is an altogether more anxious one, and poses questions about
the exercise of power and nature of authority in fifth- and early fourth-century
BCE Athens.
This paper falls in two parts. In the first part, I consider the violence of Old
Comedy in relation to theories of humor that emphasize audience superiority,
group solidarity, and the humiliation and social marginalization of targets. I shall
argue that even in instances of comic violence and slapstick, a straightforward identification of victim with comic target is not always possible, that comic violence is
less about social stratification than about political rivalry, and that the targets of
violent humor betray as much political anxiety as they do triumphant heroism. In
the second part, I develop these anxieties over masculine power within Old Comedy by bringing into this account of violence the elements of sexual aggression and
H E LIO S , vol. 40 no. 12, 2013 Texas Tech University Press
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humiliation. I discuss the audiences visual experience and pleasure, and its implications, by engaging with positions within feminist film theory: on the one hand,
Laura Mulveys (1975) theory of the sadistic, dominant male gaze, and on the other,
Kaja Silvermans (1992) account of masculinity in crisis. Sexual aggression in plays
of the 420s and earlier 410s use, I argue, sexual dominance as part of a process of
remasculinization, an attempt to cover up and compensate for the anxieties over
masculine power.4 In the latter part of the fifth century and in the early fourth century, such remasculinization in any visual sense was considerably more questionable and the process of male humiliation gathered apace. The watching (for pleasure)
of male abjection, impotence, and lack occurred in the sexual sphere but has acute
implications for claims to power in other spheres, not least politics.
Political Violence and Comic Mastery

Physical violence and slapstick humor constitute the most direct expression of
power on the comic stage, and as such, readily offer the prospect of being analyzed
in terms of a superiority theory of humor. According to this theory, the audience
focalize through the speaker or actor and are laughing, usually with them, at the
target, butt, or victim. Such aggressive laughter certainly has a long history in
Greek culture, going back most obviously to the fate of Thersites in Iliad 2.26578
or the lesser Ajax in Iliad 23.77384. They also had a place in ancient theories of
comedy specifically, starting with the contemporary witness Ps.-Xenophon in his
Constitution of the Athenians 2.18, where it is argued that the dmos (the audience)
exerts through Old Comedy a form of political and social control. Aristotles comments on comic character are in part about audience superiority in relation to the
visual experience. In more modern times, a victim or superiority theory of humor
is particularly associated with Henri Bergson, for whom aggressive comedy is a
means of asserting social norms by attacking transgressors: Laughter is, above all,
a corrective. Being intended to humiliate, it must make a painful impression on the
person against whom it is directed (1956, 187).5 Such humiliation, I shall argue, is
certainly an important component of Old Comedy, but in its strongest, visual
form, it is strictly limited and targeted.
There are challenges to this emphasis on the theorization of comedy as attack,
as the formation of in-groups and out-groups and the reinforcement of norms.
Many linguistic, semiotic, and script-based models are centered instead on incongruity, and emphasize not only verbal, visual, and conceptual disjunctions, but also
(implicitly or explicitly) productive connections and congruities. Such models can
also, interestingly, be traced back to classical theory.6 In such models, the position
of the victim or butt has been contestedwhether or not, indeed, the victim is an
essential part of the comic transaction (speakeraddresseeaudiencebutt), or is an
RU F F E L LHumiliation? Voyeurism, Violence, and Humor in Old Comedy
249
aspect of the comic transaction with sociological implications. Nor indeed does an
audiences pleasure derive (only) from superiority, but from processing those conceptual juxtapositions, from transgression, recognition, or even empathy.7 Even
with the sort of visual humor in stage violence and sexual aggression, the butt is
not always straightforward or stable. Audiences may find (or have found) violence
funny, but that does not mean that the victim of the violence is necessarily the butt
(or the only butt) of the joke.
In terms of the original audience experience, it is also important to bear in
mind the very open way in which the audiences stance, expectations, and response
are shaped from within the fiction, not least in terms of visual humor. On the one
hand, a relatively stable collective identity and subject position is set up for the
audience (male citizen body with occasional expansion). On the other, mutual
watching is emphasized: fictional participants scrutinize their audience collectively
and also pick out (notional or actual) targets within the audience.8 Reproached at
times for gullibility and passivity (particularly in relation to other discourses), the
ancient spectators were frequently confronted with the expectation of a critical
interpretative stance, not least in relation to visual jokes.9 In Aristophanes, moreover, there is a particular deprecation of a kind of visual and violent humor (Vesp.
5861; Nub. 53744). These are mendacious claims, but as is well known, Aristophanes can engage in apparently just that behavior, including in the same play (not
least Clouds, as I shall discuss shortly). Whatever the truth value, such instances of
comic metatheatricality emphasize the active, critical, and interrogative stance of
the audience and of the comic gaze, rather than a passive and quiescent one.10 The
mendacity, however, is less in the question of whether comic violence exists or not,
than it is in the hard lines drawn between Aristophanes and his rivals (cf. the prologue of Frogs) and between violence and visual humor and conceptual humor.
Certainly, the much-maligned instances of Heraclean gluttony, when they appear,
are thoroughly implicated in the kinds of conceptual humor that Aristophanes
professes to prefer.11 The same can, I argue, be said of Aristophanic violence.
A good starting point is the ending of the revised Clouds, perhaps the most
startling display of comic violence and the humor of Schadenfreude. After Strepsiades attempt to use the techniques of Socrates workshop has spectacularly backfired, with his son turning into a father-beaterand some at least of the beating is
enacted (13215)Strepsiades is told by the Cloud Chorus that this was all a punishment. Strepsiades concedes that he was at fault, but decides to burn down the
thinking-shop (phrontistrion) anyway (145266). He calls for a ladder, an axe, and
a burning torch in order to bring down the roof on the students (148790). The
audience clearly witness Strepsiades and Xanthias setting about this on the skn
roof (even if not to the extent of literally setting the skn on fire), as students flee
the scene:
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Maqhthv~ AV
St.
kajgwv tin j aujtw`n thvmeron dou`nai divkhn

ejmoi; poihvsw, keij sfovdr j ei[s j ajlazovne~.
ijou; ijou
so;n e[rgon, w\ da`/~, iJevnai pollh;n flovga. (Nub. 14913)
Student :
Strepsiades:
I am going to exact some penalty from them today

even if they are really cunning devils.
Oh! Oh!
Its up to you, torch, to set a great fire.
Strepsiades is quite explicit here: he is going to burn the students to death. This is
both his desire and his expectation (1499500).12
What of the audience? In a recent discussion (2006), Martin Revermann has
argued that, uncomfortable as it is, such scenes of comic violence were intended for
and received as audience enjoyment and that, as a corollary, the comic protagonist
would not have been condemned for the use of violence in itself. I would not dissent from this, except to note that the questions of who is acting violently, and how,
are of critical importance: Pheidippides father-beating would have been perceived,
and was characterized, in strongly different terms from the assault on the thinkingshop. I would resist, however, Revermanns (2006, 235) suggestion that the generic
context renders the violence somehow safe and gives no meaningful direction to
the audience: The final violence has to be seen in its generic context as comic
violence. . . .
This formulation is problematic in a number of ways. In a play that articulates
its points through a series of extremely visual set-piecesfrom Socrates on his
dangling stool through the definition of the school and its students, the characterization of Socrates (blanket-stealing a specialty), and the two embodied logoi13to
deny similar meaningfulness to the final scene seems, to say the least, odd. Like
most scholars, Revermann is unwilling to accept Plato and pin the blame for
Socrates death on Aristophanes; the suggestion that Aristophanes was encouraging fire-raising and assault (to any degree) sits uneasily with such a position. Nonetheless, Plato clearly expects his readers to remember the physical details of
Socrates messing around in the air (perhaps Plato was wise to gloss over the
ending).
Certainly I do not want to suggest that the audience would have been likely to
walk out of the Theater of Dionysus and lay hands on the nearest passing Sophist,
but in both narrative and conceptual terms, the place of this spectacle is telling. It
is important to find a space between direct and immediate imitation by an audience on the one hand, and ideological, moral, or political significance on the other.
Here it is useful to consider, for a moment, modern debates over the effect of
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watching violence (and associated moral panics) which have been a feature of public discourse since the development of mass media (particularly television). In
these debates there has been considerable empirical study of the effect of watching
the fictional enactment of violence, but it is such as to warn us against imposing
simple models of audience engagement or effect. Commenting in the 1970s and
drawing on empirical audience research, Stuart Hall (1976, 2267) argued against
simple behaviorist models (which are still problematic today) and commented on
the effects of watching violence in Westerns:
Not only do children learn the conventions of the simple-structure Western,
like the rules of the game, but the very conventionalization of its elements serves
to background the actual violent content, displacing the focus of interest onto
other elements. . . . Westerns, indeed, have a strikingly clear, though often skeletal and over-simplified moral structurea moral economy to which they
strictly adhere. However strange it may seem, few violent actions are wholly
gratuitous, meaningless or unexplained: they are always motivated in some way
or another.
Violence, then, may be part of the repertoire of genres (old and new) and may
accordingly be learnt as part of the rules of the game, as it were; but it is plugged
into thematic, narrative, symbolic, and cognitive contexts, which may include
superiority relations in the pragmatics of humor.
Such contexts are critical in Clouds. First, in dramatic terms, the visual violence
is tightly woven into the articulation of comic victory. This is a common element
in the plays, looking beyond the end of the performance into the judging and
beyond (P. J. Wilson 2007), although it is rarely presented in such terms of pure
violence. Second, unlike comic violence without consequences, as in cartoons like
Tom and Jerry,14 this violence has real effects within dramatic time and implicitly
beyond. Unlike Tom, neither the students nor their masters will recover, or be seen
to recover, within the fictional world. Third, this concluding spectacle serves as the
punctuation mark for an unusually strong moral narrative in this play, which until
almost the very end of the play is a profoundly negative one. Unlike other plays by
Aristophanes, Clouds presents Strepsiades quest for personal salvation through the
evasion of the debts incurred by his son as an immoral act from the beginning. No
other characters query this intent, except for the hapless, hopeless, and compromised Stronger Argument, until the Clouds reveal that they do in fact stand for
traditional notions of dik and the traditional gods and that Strepsiades has been
punished for his wickedness (145461). There are, then, plenty of reasons to
see Strepsiades as far from an exemplary moral agent, and indeed as the butt of
the joke (as he has been of Pheidippides fists). Indeed, his burning down the
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thinking-shop may indeed be drawing further attention to Strepsiades idiotic

crudeness. The concluding violence, then, is multiply overcoded and motivated,
and may suggest multiple targets for the on-looking audience, not only the victims
of arson. The multiple comic motivations (and targets) are drawn from and reinforce the earlier explorations in this morality tale.
In no other extant play is the role of violence so marked as the culmination or
even the articulation of the action. Even in Clouds, though, the relationship
between the collective audience position and the perpetrators and victims of violence is somewhat complex. Similar ambivalence in relation to the comic hero is
seen regularly elsewhere with respect to violence. Although traditional models of
Old Comedy would have the audience focalize through the comic hero (where
identifiable) and see the dominant and expected plot-structure of the plays as one
charting the triumph of the comic hero, overcoming narrative and physical obstacles along the way, comic violence tells a rather different story with respect to both
character and action.15 Above all, despite the strongly agonistic nature of the genre,
the idea of physical mastery is relatively underdeveloped. The fantasies of empowerment and transformation set up in the plays, particularly in prologues, are rarely
achieved through physical prowess, and never individual prowess. Such violence as
there is in these terms is reactive and directed almost exclusively at (other, rival)
self-appointed political experts like sycophants and oracle-sellers.16 Indeed, the
most significant physical action in plot terms is the rescue of Peace in Peace
458519, which is very different in characterit is in fact not violent at all and is
an example of collective, rather than individual, action.
Just as, however, it is easy to overstate the extent to which the Old Comedy is
physically and visually violent, the complexity of comic violence can be understated, particularly in relation to the rhetoric of authority, for one consistent target
of comic violence are comic protagonists (or heroes) themselves. In however transitory a fashion, the central characters of Old Comedy are as much victims as purveyors of violence, often indeed in the same play. The Choruss assault on
Dicaeopolis in Acharnians or on Pisetaerus and Euelpides in Birds (35663,
38692), or Bdelycleons resorting to violence against his father Philocleon in
Wasps (4569) demonstrate less mastery than resistance and an attempt to be
heard.17 In Knights, the Sausage Sellers qualifications for dealing in verbal aggression, which is figured as physical violence (38790; cf. 2613, 4509), stems explicitly from his own experience of violence (1236, 1239, 1242). In this respect, he is
not so very different from other foci of comic plots.
Such a fluid relationship between violence and authority is evident in what is
the most extended display of comic violencethe torture scene in Frogs (60573),
which plays with both class and identity. Dionysus is wearing a blatantly implausible Heracles outfit for his trip to the Underworlda lionskin and club over his
253
saffron gown (krokton) and boots (kothornoi)but the disguise is regularly

taken seriously by the inhabitants of the Underworld, with dramatically good or
bad results, which in turn prompts a series of costume swaps with his slave,
Xanthias. As in other instances of incomplete disguise or transformation (discussed below), the butts are both the viewer and the viewed.18 The running joke
escalates into a routine where the doorkeeper of the Underworld (Aeacus) looks to
punish the person who killed his pet dog, Cerberus. Xanthias (as Heracles) cheekily offers his slave Dionysus for torture, whereupon Dionysus claims immortality
and suggests that Aeacus torture Xanthias (supposedly an immortal) who should
not be able to feel it either. Aeacus ends up beating up both to see who screams
first.
The routine relies upon the default assumption on the comic stage that slaves
deserve to be, are used to being, and can tolerate being beaten (cf. Clouds 5660),
even if that is not actually seen regularly elsewhere in the surviving plays.19 Dionysus, on the other hand, has a track record of suffering and being poorly tolerant of
physical discomfort, as in Eupoliss Taxiarkhoi (A. M. Wilson 1974; Storey 2003,
2537; Ruffell, 2011, 3056) and earlier in the rowing competition with the frogs.
The comedy is partly that of superiority and Schadenfreude, as both master and
servant are beaten and Aeacus is misled and confused, but also depends upon a
series of gags where Dionysus and Xanthias cover up their screams with increasingly creative but implausible explanations of why they have cried out (6505):
Ai.
Di.
Ai.
Ai.
mw`n wjdunhvqh~
Xa.
ouj ma; Di j ajll j ejfrovntisa
oJpovq j ravkleia tajn Diomeivoi~ givgnetai.
a[nqrwpo~ iJerov~. deu`ro pavlin badistevon.
ijou; ijouv.
Ai.
tiv ejstin
Di.
iJppeva~ oJrw`.
tiv dh`ta klavei~
Di.
krommuvwn ojsfraivnomai.
ejpei; protima`/~ g j oujdevn
Di.
oujdevn moi mevlei.
Xanthias:
Aeacus:
Dionysus:
Aeacus:
Dionysus:
Aeacus:
Dionysus:
Aeacus:
Dionysus:
Surely you didnt feel it?

No by Zeus: I just thought
of when the festival of Heracles is happening at Diomeia.
A holy man indeed. Right, time to go back over here again.
Ow! Ow!
Whats up?
I can see the Knights!
Why did you yell, then?
I can smell onions.
Then you didnt feel anything?
Im not bothered at all.
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In terms of the wider strategies of the play, the violent humor of this scene affords
a threefold problematization of authority in the figures of Aeacus, Xanthias (who
goes further than any other character in Old Comedy in subverting master/slave
relations20), and Dionysus. The abuse of Dionysus here comes on top of his manifest cowardice (271331) and might be thought to undermine his authority to pronounce on anything, whether technical matters or the associated political question
of how to save Athens. His creativity here, however, as in the competition with the
frogs, is as significant as his victimhood. Dionysus is consistently this combination
of patsy and wit, the embodiment of the comic,21 but that combination makes the
quite strident claims to authority after the parabasis difficult to take entirely
straightforwardly.
The exploitation of violence for humor in Aristophanes implies a variety of
relations between audience and fictional participants. The humor of Schadenfreude
plays a part, but one consistently implicated with the ideological and literary positioning of the plays. While any comic character has the potential for treatment as a
butt, there is a preference to select as victims rival participants in civic discourse,
which suggests the consolidation of generic authority. Such instances require sympathy between audience and a comic protagonist, but audiences are not consistently aligned with one aggressor against a set of butts throughout a play, nor does
comic victory require unequivocal comic domination. Indeed, the exploitation of
violence may question hierarchies and the use of power as much as it consolidates
them.
Voyeurism, Masculinity, and Power: From Ambivalence to Crisis

In this section, I explore further this ambivalence in comic violence by extending
the scope of visual humor from (non-sexual) physical assault to forms of sexual
dominance and humiliation. Enacted before the gaze of the ideologically (if not
actually) male audience, the exercise of sexual power encompasses both an active,
penetrating sexuality and an increasingly masochistic flavor, as citizen males are
humiliated by men and women of every status. I shall engage with feminist film
theory to argue that sexual power here stands as a proxy for political power. What
can be seen in the earlier plays of Aristophanes as a recuperation of ambivalence
and anxiety becomes increasingly symptomatic of a masculinity and political culture in crisis.
One element in the comic grotesque certainly looks like the celebration and
uncontrolled expression of aggressive male sexuality, displayed by and for men.
Indeed, one might easily come to the conclusion that Old Comedy, perhaps most
flagrantly and publicly of any ancient form, involves the fetishistic and controlling
male gaze. Such a notion descends from Laura Mulveys classic psychoanalytic
255
reading of Hollywood cinema, in which she contends that women in films are
either voyeuristically exploited as sexual objects or fetishized in terms of unattainable beauty, but not allowed their own identity as desiring subjects. Mulveys position has obvious attractions: it is easily assimilable to superiority theories of humor,
is consonant with approaches to ancient humor which emphasize the pornographic
aspects of ancient humor (both in terms of display and of sexual aggression and
threat), and fits neatly the actual or supposed composition of the ancient
audience.22
The character of Festivity (Theoria) is a good example of the way that such
objectification works in Old Comedy. Theoria is one of the female characters in
Old Comedy who act as markers of the attainment of a major characters goals. As
one of the handmaidens of the goddess Peace, who has been rescued and is herself
displayed to the audience as a large statue,23 she is handed over to the council as a
symbol of peace and male sexual desire, the two (as often in Old Comedy) being
strongly related. Attainment of peace will be enacted in and through the sexual
possession of Festivity (Pax 88790):
boulhv, prutavnei~, oJra`te th;n Qewrivan.
skevyasq j o{s j uJmi`n ajgaqa; paradwvsw fevrwn,
w{ste eujqevw~ a[ranta~ uJma`~ tw; skevlei
tauvth~ metewvrw ka`/t j ajgagei`n navrrusin.24
Council, executives, look at Festivity.
Look at all the good things Ive brought to give you,
so that you can immediately lift her legs
up high and then celebrate a Release.
It is further grist to this interpretative mill that Festivity actually refers specifically
to spectating, with obvious application to the immediate performance context. The
association of the audience gaze with active male sexuality is clearly very strong,
and the division of sexual spoilswith Theoria going to the audience and Opora
(Harvest Time) to Trygaeusonly serves to emphasize this association. Sexual
dominance and collective cohesion seem to go unerringly together, unifying audience pleasure with the triumph of the comic protagonist.
A series of such sexual trophies can be seen particularly in the earlier Aristophanic comedies. Women, girls, and boys are all lined up for sexual penetration
in Acharnians, Knights, and Wasps, together with the closely related personified
abstractions Opora and Theoria (Peace) and Basileia (Birds). Dicaeopoliss victory,
in particular, sees him exercising conspicuous sexual power over a number of
participants, only one set of whom are his female prizes, his so-called girlfriends
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(fivlai, 1217); these are preceded by arguably the most disturbing scene in Greek
comedy, when the Megarian traffics his daughters to him, badly disguised as piglets, the visual enactment of an obscene pun, and reinforced by a sequence of agricultural fellatio jokes. The implicit violence is particularly strong in Knights
(138495); we may contrast in Wasps the jokes that are as much at the expense of
Philocleons aging apparatus as at the flute girls he has kidnapped from the symposium (13424). Such figures are also drawn upon or developed in Lysistrata, Thesmophoriazusae, and Ecclesiazusae, but also in rather more complicated explorations
of sexual power, as I shall discuss below.
This aggressive desiring comic gaze is almost exclusively directed towards slaves
and foreigners, male or female, personifications, abstractions, or even deities.25 The
individuated Chorus of Eupoliss Poleis (Cities), who are said to be being eyed by
members of the audience, includes several of these categories.26 There is, however,
a marked reluctance to involve citizen wives in this way, which fits with other wellknown comic reticences relating to the representation and even naming of citizen
wives, at least before Lysistrata (Sommerstein 1980a, Henderson 1987), and which
will become, if anything, stronger in New Comedy. Other desires could certainly
be discussed (as in Clouds, by both Arguments) and our image of comic objects of
desire might perhaps change if we had more of Eupoliss Autolykos I and II, but
visual representation of male sexual desire remains largely consistent in Aristophanes. It is a picture in which humor reinforces social hierarchies and norms and
in which the audience, particularly if they focalize through the comic males, are
complicit.
This is, however, only a partial account of sexual dominance in Old Comedy, as
can be observed on both theoretical and practical grounds. In theoretical terms,
criticisms of Mulveys approach are well known. One criticism is over a lack of
actual audience researchalthough that is necessarily a flaw of classicists studies
as well. Two other objections are more fundamental. First, the options left for a
feminist cinema (or audience) are narrow. Mulvey champions disruptive strategies
long associated with the (male) avant-garde. This privileging of formalism over
realism has been criticized as both restrictive and stuck within patriarchal categories and practice.27 As far as Old Comedy is concerned, those avant-garde and
modernist strategies and audiences are precisely those with which Aristophanic
metatheatricality has been compared, including that of the active spectator, which
I discussed briefly in the first part of the essay. Second, Mulveys rigid construction
of the gaze leaves very little space for strategies of rereading, contestation, and
resistance. This, too, is problematic in relation to both the initial and subsequent
reception of Old Comedy, where the possibility of dissident reading or even the
attraction of new performances would be closed down. The continuing refactoring
of the regularly revived Lysistrata is only the most conspicuous example of a prob-
257
lem from this perspective. The sadistic and fetishizing viewer cannot be a complete
(or universal) explanation.
The nature of the comic grotesque also means that a straightforward translation
of Mulveys theory is not entirely feasible. If Mulveys main problem in narrative
cinema is that of beauty, and if the goal for feminist cinema is the destruction of
such beauty, in Old Comedy there is the reverse problem: everyone is ugly.28 This
has important implications for the way the audience experiences the world of Old
Comedy. While the grotesque comic bodies certainly do not obliterate difference,
sectional distinctions in terms of ugly versus not ugly (or realistic) only develop
over the course of the fourth century, largely at the expense of older men and slaves
(Webster and Green 1978, 456; Green 1994, 348; Green and Handley 1994, 50,
5861; Green 2002, 1045). The convention of ugliness also makes it difficult to see
the comic body in the first instance as an object of simple aggressive humor (to be
laughed at) or as re-inscribing social norms; it is certainly far from the idealized
and often highly class-based versions of the body found elsewhere in Athenian
representations.29 Its anti-idealizing and its emphasis on the material and the real
create a fictional environment that is both dislocated and firmly anchored.30 In that
sense, there is the possibility of both disruptive carnivalesque liberation rooted in
fundamental desires (and not only temporary license31) and (and for the same reason) the exaggeration of social norms, not least in the sexual realm.
Furthermore, although the evidence for the fifth century is limited, male characters are if anything more ugly and distorted than female characters. Certainly, the
phallus renders the male characters more obviously distorted, and that visual focus
draws particular attention towards exaggerated male sexuality. That tendency in
the comic body is reflected in the obsession of comic plots with male sexuality,
both aggressive and otherwise. This obsession leaves little room for genuine female
subjectivity, short of some determined reading against the grain. It does mean,
however, that a translation of Mulveys approach lacks explanatory value in addressing the full ramifications of this concern for male sexuality. On the one hand, there
is an excess of penetration in Old Comedy (or at least talking about, imagining, or
anticipating it), which is at odds with cultural norms to the extent that it has arguably warped modern accounts of ancient sexuality.32 On the other, a particular
problem with attributing to the audience of Old Comedy a sadistic male gaze is
that the most extended instances of sexual and gendered dominance in the genre
consist of violence directed at men.
Let me explore this further by drawing on feminist explorations of masculinity,
in particular Kaja Silvermans study of nonstandard or deviant masculinities. Like
Foucault, Silverman sees sexuality and the social order as implicated with one
another, but argues for a more complex relationship between them, through a process of ideological facilitation and fantasy that she calls the dominant fiction:
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Male and female constitute the dominant fictions most fundamental binary
opposition. Its many other ideological elements, such as signifiers like town
and nation, or the antithesis of power and the people, all exist in a metaphoric
relation to those terms. They derive their conceptual and affective value from
that relation. (1992, 345)
For Silverman, there is an excess of desire in even the most normative circumstances, but in non-normative contexts there is a much greater possibility of threatening or circumventing the social order. In the first instance, Silverman reads a
number of post-World War II films, including the at first sight highly normative Its
a Wonderful Life (1946), as explorations of male lack, masochism, and impotence
in the wake of the historical trauma of the war, with attempts in most cases to shore
up male sexuality and its association with social power.
If the dominant fictions most privileged term is the phallus (Silverman 1992,
2), the male symbolic order is particularly visible, and vulnerable, in Old Comedy.33 As an example, consider, again, Acharnians. Here, the dominant phallus (in
a social as well as a sexual sense) is only achieved by the atomization of the male
social and sexual order, and a masochistic exploration of both sexual and nonsexual violence. What looks like phallic affirmation actually leaves potentially troubling questions about masculinity and the relationship between the sexual and
political orders.
Symbolic phalluses abound in the play. Once Dicaeopolis has enacted a personal peace with the Spartans, his celebration of the Rural Dionysia involves both
a phallic procession, replete with normative gender roles, and a hymn to Phales,
which features a rape fantasy. Set against these representations of masculinity in
social and sexual spheres are the violent scenes that provide the frame, scenes in
which the father and his allies are objects of violence. Thus Amphitheus, the supposedly divine character who arranges peace for him, is apparently dragged out of
the assembly by the archers after spinning an extremely specious story of being a
god and then demanding journey pay from the Athenian assembly (4454). The
joke is partly on the audience: it turns out that he can do what he claims after all.
Dicaeopolis himself is at the mercy of the Chorus for most of the first half of the
play. He is stoned by them on their first entrance (2805); his subsequent recourse
to a butchers block is a conspicuous reminder of that threat. His threat to shaft
them with words (444) by means of the Telephus disguise certainly encourages the
audience to see the Chorus as the butt of the joke, but it also draws attention to
Dicaeopoliss impotence at this stage in the proceedings, as the threat of manual
violation turns out to be rather less effective than advertised.
The relationship between sexuality, violence, and the political order is strikingly
shown when Dicaeopolis strips Lamachus, the embodiment of the Big Man and
259
the personification of militarism,34 of his trappings of power: the shield (5813)

and helmet (5848). As Lamachus worries about what Dicaeopolis is doing with
his crests, Dicaeopoliss final visual insult is to suggest that Lamachus service him
sexually (58792):
La.
La.
ou|to~ tiv dravsei~ tw`/ ptivlw/ mevllei~ ejxemei`n

ptivlon ga;r e[stin
Di.
eijpev moi, tivno~ pote;
o[rniqov~ ejstin a\ra kompalakuvqou
oi[m j wJ~ teqnhvxei~.
Di.
mhdamw`~, w\ Lavmace,
ouj ga;r kat j ijscuvn ejstivn: eij d j ijscuro;~ ei\,
tiv m j oujk ajpeywvlhsa~ eu[oplo~ ga;r ei\.
Lamachus:
Hey, you, what are you going to do? Are you going to use that
feather to throw up?
The feathers
Dicaeopolis: Go on tell me, what on earth
birds is it? A boasters?
Lamachus:
You are so dead.
Dicaeopolis: No way, Lamachus,
youre not strong enough for that job; but if youre feeling forceful,
why dont you peel me back? Youre going well equipped.
The pun on Lamachuss equipment clearly references Lamachuss phallus, no doubt

revealed flamboyantly in this moment, and it seems to be an invitation to the general to display with it his prowess sexually on Dicaeopolis. The shocking suggestion
(for a citizen male), amplified by stage action, is thus the punch-line to the routine
that deconstructs a series of visual symbols of power. The precise action is less
clear. The verb, ajpoywlevw, is elsewhere used, as of the Odomanti (161), of retracting the foreskin, through erection or circumcision. The sword/phallus metaphor
plays on both sides, but the implication seems to be that Dicaeopolis is inviting
Lamachus to stimulate him through anal penetration with or without additional
masturbation.35 Either way, there is a progressive laying bare of Lamachuss political and military power in a series of visual symbols, until it reaches the symbolic
kernel, the phallus.
The lack of political power that Dicaeopolis experiences in the prologue, and
in which the audience is invited to share, is thus followed by a series of selfabnegations. In order to win his just outcome (on an optimistic reading of the
play), Dicaeopolis has to be physically abused, make himself sexually available to
the general, and adopt, however temporarily, a marginal socio-economic position.
Indeed, both by the beggar costume and by apparently offering to be penetrated,
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H E L IO S
Dicaeopolis is drawing attention to the powerlessness of the ordinary citizen male,

as if he were no citizen at all. Lamachus, indeed, is as shocked by the implied class
relationship as anything, as he repeatedly comments on Dicaeopoliss appearance
as a beggar and cues Dicaeopoliss rejoinder that he is in fact the honest citizen, not
the political hack (577a, 5937). The only power for the honest citizen, however,
has been the verbal and conceptual facility that has persuaded the Chorus through
arguments encapsulated in masquerade and shamelessness. Although there are a
number of strategies used to encourage the audience to focalize through Dicaeopolis, it is entirely possible to overstate their social solidarity in watching this masochistic display: he is at times the object of humor here, as well as the agent of it, at
the expense of the Chorus and Lamachus.
By his facility in winning over or removing his opponents, Dicaeopolis is able
to establish his new political, social, and mercantile order. In this new world order
there is a recuperation of Dicaeopolis within norms of masculinity, at least as far as
they concern him alone. Thus he now uses physical violence, against the regular
comic target of the sycophant. He acquires both the Megarians daughters and the
girlfriends with which he returns from the priests dinner, in a realization of the
hymn to Phales. As well, however, as having created the paradox of a polis of one
within the Athenian polis, so too he seems to have created one male sexual order
within another. After the parabasis, his is the only sexual power or pleasure to be
seen. Indeed, as well as denying peace (and sexuality) to the men of Athensthe
Chorus, Dercetes, and Lamachushe puts sexual power, embodied in the peace
ointment given to the bridesmaid, into the hands of the citizen wife (105966).
In that dispensing of sexual power, there is an explicit opposition of violence
and sexuality, a contrast between those responsible for war (other men) who are
denied control of their sexuality, and those not responsible (women). This opposition between sexuality, in the figure of the remasculinized Dicaeopolis who enjoys
peace, and collective violence, in the figure of Lamachus who has to go on campaign (1071141) and returns injured (117497), is presented clearly through verbal and visual parallels in the final scenes of the play (121421):
La.
Di.
La.
Di.
lavbesqev mou, lavbesqe tou` skevlou~: papai`

proslavbesq j, w\ fivloi.
ejmou` dev ge sfw; tou` pevou~ a[mfw mevsou
proslavbesq j, w\ fivlai.
eijliggiw` kavra livqw/ peplhgmevno~
kai; skotodiniw`.
kajgw; kaqeuvdein bouvlomai kai; stuvomai
kai; skotobiniw`.
261
Lamachus:
Hold me. Hold my leg; argh,

hold tight, boys.
Dicaeopolis: Take my cock, both of you, round the shaft:
hold tight, girls.
Lamachus:
Im dizzyI was hit on the head by a stone
and Im fainting in the dark.
Dicaeopolis: I too want to sleep and Ive got an erection
and I want to fuck in the dark.
The power relations between Dicaeopolis and Lamachus are clearly reversed. The
civic violence directed towards Dicaeopolis and other citizens has turned into violence inflicted on the politician. The paratragic threats of Lamachus have turned
into paratragic victimhood (Foley 1988, 416): unlike Dicaeopolis, he is unable to
step outside of his own tragic discourse.
The story of Dicaeopoliss little polis could be said, in certain terms, to be one
of justice. A contrast is drawn between the practice of Dicaeopoliss polis, which
removes civic nuisances, profits from civic enemies, and distributes peace to
deserving parties, and the extremism of those deploying violence to narrow political engagement, close down debate, and commit to war. The distinctions are presented through a series of stark visual oppositions: Dicaeopolis and the assembly,
Dicaeopolis and the butchers block, Dicaeopolis and Lamachus. The presentation
of violence would then emphasize two very different sets of political ideas about
the ends of power and to a large extent its means too.36 That would be a very cozy
and tidy account, but Acharnians is less comfortable and more open-ended than
that. Prospectively, within the fictional world, the political and sexual systems
show no sign of reunification. Using the fictional city of one as a model for the
actual city of many is, to say the least, problematic. Above all, if Acharnians is seen
as a diagnosis rather than a suggested cure, it is hard to see the personal triumph
of Dicaeopolis and his individual enjoyment of sexuality as entirely erasing the
anxieties that are evident in the presentation of the male citizen in the sexual and
political order of things.
A similar dialogue between personal victory and an earlier exercise in humiliation can be seen to occur in most of Aristophanes early plays: Knights, Clouds,
Wasps, and Birds (examples of which have been noted above). Political and social
disruption in these plays is refracted through a crisis in masculinity, which is then
shored up. Peace is the major exception in this as it is in other respects (Cassio
1985), such as the degree of coherence between major subject-positions: protagonist, chorus, and audience. Whether this challenge to masculine norms betrays a
particular anxiety of the 420sbecause of the developing nature of Athenian
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H E L IO S
democracy, or because of the historical situation in the Archidamian War or the

aftermath of the launching of the Sicilian expeditionis more unclear, given the
lack of extant earlier plays that can be studied in similar detail.
If Silverman is right to implicate the political and the sexual, then any significant designs on the dominant fiction are always liable to be expressed in terms of
masculinity, vulnerability, and lack, whatever the historical circumstances. In the
extant plays of Aristophanes from 411 to 390, however, there is a still more extreme
form of crisis, a more sustained masochistic witnessing of men being humiliated
onstage and far less shoring up of masculinity within the world of the play, and
certainly not in the visual sense that is witnessed in Acharnians, Knights, or Birds.
I have already discussed the extended flagellation in Frogs, in the context of scenes
of humiliation and role-reversal, at the hands of both male and female characters
(Aeacus, barmaids). Frogs can be seen as part of a pattern of material over these
decades. In Thesmophoriazusae, Lysistrata, and Ecclesiazusae the violence and
humiliation have a much more strongly sexual sense. They share with Frogs the
presentation of subverted power relations to the spectators without any effective
visual counter.
Thesmophoriazusae is unquestionably the most violent of all the extant plays,
but one where the connections between masculinity and power are put into stark
question, not least through their visual representation. Much has been written
about the cross-dressing in the comedy and the associated play with fictionality
through its parody of tragedy,37 but these are also implicated with violence and
humiliation, in which audience enjoyment is overwhelmingly and certainly visually aimed at the representation and victimization of what looks like male, penetrating sexuality.
The play begins with apparent assertion of such comic male sexuality, as Euripides and his male relative, who might have been identified as Mnesilochus,38 seek
Agathons assistance in infiltrating the womens assembly. The relative, as a coarser
foil to Euripides, has much in common with earlier comic protagonists such as
Dicaeopolis or Strepsiades. When Agathon emerges, Mnesilochuss initial response
has all the hallmarks of unrefined masculine aggression, as he is erotically stimulated by Agathons appearance and music. Already, though, the aggressive sexuality
is considerably mitigated: Mnesilochuss own desire is anally rather than phallicly
stimulated (1303), while his confusion as to Agathons gender-blurring strengthens the mixed messages.39 Such a response certainly reflects on Agathons (excessively seductive) music and sexual preferences, but also undermines considerably
the claims to phallic power made elsewhere in this scene (1578). That phallic
power is more explicitly undermined in what follows, as Mnesilochus is blackmailed into infiltrating the womens assembly himself and consents to being crossdressed himself.
263
From an audience perspective, the economy of pleasure in this sequence is

complex. The dressing scene is also an extended torture scene, as Mnesilochus is
forcibly singed and plucked, with particular attention paid to the genital area. Even
more than in Acharnians or Frogs, this relies on enjoyment of the abuse of the
comic male (2359):
Eu.
Eu.
Kh.
Eu.
oJra`/~ seautovn
Kh.
ouj ma; Div j, ajlla; Kleisqevnh.
ajnivstas j, i{n j ajfeuvsw se, kajkuvya~ e[ce.
oi[moi kakodaivmwn, delfavkion genhvsomai.
ejnegkavtw ti~ e[ndoqen da`/d j h] luvcnon.
ejpivkupte: th;n kevrkon fulavttou nun a[kran.
Euripides:
Mnesilochus:
Euripides:
Mnesilochus:
Euripides:
Do you see yourself?

No by Zeus: Kleisthenes.
Stand up so I can singe you. Bend over and hold still.
Oh what an unlucky bastard; Im going to be a suckling pig.
Someone bring out a torch or a lamp.
Bend overand watch out for the top of your dick.
The phallus in flight is as much the butt of the humor here as are the singed buttocks. There are, however, forms of enjoyment here other than Schadenfreude at the
expense of Mnesilochus.40 This scene fits into a long cross-cultural tradition of
forced cross-dressing narratives where force licences enjoyment on the part of the
cross-dressed subject (cf. Garber 1993, 70). By extension, this may add a further
vicarious connection between (male) audience and character.
Visually, Mnesilochus in a frock has continuities with other unconvincing costumes in Old Comedy such as those of birds and beggars. There is a basic incongruity within the fiction, central to much modern drag in performance (Newton
1979), even as Mnesilochus attempts to pass and, incredibly, does so. The incongruity of his outfit engineers a superiority of the actual audience over the internal
audience of the women at their assembly. There is also a male complicity between
audience and character, as the unconvincingly female Mnesilochus details to the
fictional women their faults. But it only stretches so far because the implausibility
of the disguise is always in danger of tipping over back onto Mnesilochus, while the
whole scene flirts with the possibility that he might be discovered.
So the travails of Mnesilochus do not end with a very rough depilation. After
jumping from the frying pan into the fire, his capture by the women entails further
discovery, exposure, and humiliation, before both the women and the external
audience. The search for Mnesilochuss phallus is an extended routine (6438) but
only part of a wider process of forcible disrobing, prodding, and removal of any
264
H E L IO S
element of his former passing. He is finally, after two abortive attempts at escape,
tied to a board for public (audience) display (92933):
PRUTANIS
o{d j e[sq j oJ panou`rgo~ o}n e[leg j hJmi`n Kleisqevnh~
ou|to~, tiv kuvptei~ dh`son aujto;n eijsavgwn,
w\ toxovt j, ejn th`/ sanivdi, ka[peit j ejnqadi;
sthvsa~ fuvlatte kai; prosievnai mhdevna
e[a pro;~ aujto;n, ajlla; th;n mavstig j e[cwn:
pai` j, h]n prosivh/ ti~.
Magistrate:
So this is the crook that Kleisthenes was telling us about?
You: why are you lurking there? Take him in and lash him,
archer, to the pillory, and then set him up here
watch him and allow no-one to approach
him, but use the whip
and, if anyone does approach, strike him.
The pornography of humiliation is nowhere else so blatant in Old Comedy. The

violence is male (Scythian) on male, but much force (and pleasure) for the audience derives from (fictional) women watching an exposed and constrained man. It
also derives from Mnesilochuss embarrassment at public exposure: nudity, he says,
would be better than being this source of mockeryan old man in a (by now thoroughly disheveled) frock and headband (93942). Imprisonment cues escape routines via the Andromeda and Palamedes, but the incongruous exposure and
imprisonment and consequently visual humor continues for almost three hundred
lines.
Mnesilochuss escapades thus provide frissons of excitement and pleasure, but
pleasure in aggressive male sexuality barely registers beyond the opening scene.
The handling of the archer, lured away from Mnesilochus by Euripides (again in
drag disguise, 11991201) and his dancing girl, Elaphion, exploits both a female
object of desire and the ridiculousness of male sexuality. That the Scythian stupidly
fucks away his prisoner (by fucking the slave girl Elaphion) is consistent with the
treatment of male sexuality in the play. The phallus is central to the humor, but
rather than signifying mastery, it signifies lack, weakness, submission, and subordinationin short, ridicule.
In Thesmophoriazusae this presentation of (the limits of) aggressive masculinity is bound up with issues of fictionality, particularly tragedy. In the other extant
plays of Aristophanes in which women are center-stage, similar visual pleasures of
265
humiliation are integrated into ideological concerns. In both Lysistrata and Ecclesiazusae the men are again targets of the aggressive gaze, not only from the women,
but also from male characters and the (largely) male audience. While comic stereotypes of women abound in both plays,41 men are most consistently the butts of
visual, aggressive humor.
In Ecclesiazusae, there is a stark difference between the womens cross-dressing
and that of Praxagoras husband Blepyrus. The emphasis of the womens infiltration
of the assembly is on passing. Paradoxically, even if they fail, they still pass as
men,42 a joke that hits more at comic politicians, their fictional audience, and
thence their actual analogues than at the fictional female activists. Blepyruss misadventures are of an entirely different order. His entry follows a hasty piece of sartorial improvisation, throwing on his wifes frock and footwear (3179) to go
outside and relieve himself (3206):
ajll j ejn kaqarw`/ pou` pou` ti~ a]n cevsa~ tuvcoi
h] pantacou` toi nuktov~ ejstin ejn kalw`/
ouj gavr me nu`n cevzontav g j oujdei;~ o[yetai.
oi[moi kakodaivmwn, o{ti gevrwn w]n hjgovmhn
gunai`c j: o{sa~ ei[m j a[xio~ plhga;~ labei`n.
ouj gavr poq j uJgie;~ oujde;n ejxelhvluqen
dravsous j. o{mw~ d j ou\n ejstin ajpopathtevon.
Where, where on earth can anyone take a crap in private?
Surely anywhere is fine at night?
No-one will see me shitting now.
Oh what an idiot I am, that as an old man I got
married. How many lashes I deserve.
Shes never gone out to do anything
healthy. Still, I need to take that dump.
This cross-dressing, like that of Thesmophoriazusae, is a compulsion-narrative. By

contrast with the womens, the incompleteness is greater and the threat of exposure
and attendant ridicule much stronger, and duly realized. In contrast to Mnesilochus, he does not seek to pass, and his anxieties lead straight to an extremely
aggressive scatological routine, where they are fully realized in the eyes of his
neighbor and a passerby, Chremes.
This exercise in sustained visual humiliation is not the gratuitous humor that
Aristophanes deprecates in Clouds. It is tightly wired into the thematic and argumentative structure of the play. Just as Praxagora is built up through internal explanations and intertextual echoes into a (for the time and the genre) plausible speaker
266
H E L IO S
(Ruffell 2006, 7882), so too her opposition is here substantially undermined.

More significantly, the scene explores visually the question of male competence, a
point of attack for Praxagora in her bid for power. Far from revealing its horrors,
the sustained humiliation of men by men feeds the comic argument for
gynaikokratia.
The same applies to the fate of the young lover, Epigenes, the object of serial
sexual assault by three old women as their plans come to fruition. Although the old
women are undoubtedly grotesque, they are also the dominant agents: the butt is
in large part the young man. The comic grotesque here certainly amplifies standard
comic representations of age and gender, but that in itself is far less surprising or
radical than the reversal in power relations (1093101):43
Ep.
Gr.g.
Ep.
oi[moi kakodaivmwn: ejggu;~ h[dh th`~ quvra~

ejlkovmenov~ eijm
j
Gr.g.
ajll j oujde;n e[stai soi plevon.
xunespesou`mai ga;r meta; sou`.
Ep.
mh; pro;~ qew`n:
eJni; ga;r xunevcesqai krei`tton h] duoi`n kakoi`n.
nh; th;n kavthn, ejavn te bouvlh/ g j h[n te mhv.
w\ triskakodaivmwn, eij gunai`ka dei` sapra;n
binei`n o{lhn th;n nuvkta kai; th;n hJmevran,
ka[peit j, ejpeida;n th`sd j ajpallagw`, pavlin
Fruvnhn e[cousin lhvkuqon pro;~ tai`~ gnavqoi~.
Epigenes:
Old Woman :
Epigenes:
Old Woman :
Epigenes:
Oh god Ive had it; Im already close to the door

dragged along.
Thats going to be no use for you.
Ill be coming with you.
No by the gods;
Its better to be afflicted by one than two evils.
Yes by Hekate, whether you want it or not.
Oh Im triply done for, if I have to fuck a sagging old woman
all night and all day,
and then, when Ive got free of her, to do
an old toad with a death-jar already at her jaws.
The sexuality of older women is of course one object of humor here (as often), but
laughter and the aggressive gaze are aimed equally, if not more so, at Epigenes, as
he is dragged off. This scene forms part of a running joke of sexual and scatological
humiliation that asserts and enacts female dominance and, conversely, male and
therefore civic inadequacy.44 The hapless Blepyrus presents one (older, more everyday) masculinity, Epigenes one of the haughtier sort (tw`n semnotevrwn, 632) dep-
267
recated in earlier discussion.45 The net result is a far more ambivalent and less
strictly ironic play than is sometimes supposed.
In Lysistrata the achievement of goals is far less rapid than in Ecclesiazusae. The
power struggle is mapped out by physical confrontations on stage, where successful aggression is directed exclusively at men by women. It is not that men do not
seek to be violent or to initiate violence. Both the male semi-chorus and the
proboulos make efforts to penetrate the gates and retake the Acropolis by force.
This aggression reflects the male aggression in war, but its failure also echoes the
sex strike in progress offstage.46 The mens assault on the Acropolis and the attempt
of the proboulos to control the unruly women meet with actual violence or sexual
humiliation in return. This visual assault on male power and authority is as central
to the plot as the economic and religious mastery attained in seizing the Acropolis
or the sexual mastery that is enacted as the play progresses.
The old men enter with a mixture of song and recitative that not only presents
them as implausibly aged Marathonomakhoi (285), that is, at least 100 years old,
but extends the joke further by pushing them back to the origins of the democracy
and the Spartan occupation of the Acropolis (27280).47 Their first encounter with
the far more sprightly semi-chorus of women proceeds with the men making a
series of threats of violence and the women countering (35680), all of which leads
to the punch-line of the old men finally making a move with their torches and
being soaked by the women for their trouble. The decrepitude and physical incapacity of the old men, already pointed up in their entry, is reinforced by suggestions of impotence and incontinence, as they complain to the proboulos
(399402):
tiv dh`t j a[n, eij puvqoio kai; th;n tw`nd j u{brin
ai} ta[lla q j uJbrivkasi kajk tw`n kalpivdwn
e[lousan hJma`~, w{ste qaijmativdia
seivein pavrestin w{sper ejneourhkovta~.
What then if you heard of their outrageous act?
Theyve assaulted us in every way and drenched
us from their water jars, and so we need to
shake our little cloaks as if we had pissed in them.
The entrance of the proboulos descends from the self-confident beginnings of

democracy, a central plank in democratic propaganda, to the most recent constitutional tinkering after the Sicilian catastrophe. The association is made clear in the
probouloss own comments on the iniquities of women (3902). His recourse to
violencein ordering his slaves to break down the doors with their crowbars
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H E L IO S
(4249) and, after Lysistrata has emerged to counter him, to attack the womens
leaderis again met with a forthright physical response from the reserve of market
traders and barmaids (45662). This brief but effective intervention plays, of
course, upon well-established stereotypes, but also emphasizes that Lysistratas
women are united not only internationally but also across age and class divides.48
The disempowerment of the probouloss slave bodyguard (with all its connotations) happens physically; that of the proboulos, verbally and symbolically. The
visual dimension punctuates the debate and directs audience response just as it
does later in Ecclesiazusae, although in Lysistrata the symbolism is a deliberate
intervention rather than a consequence of male incompetence. The proboulos is
fitted out (badly), first with the womens dress and equipment (veil and basket,
5318) and then with funeral attire (60210). This enacts visually the claims
(within the fictional world) of female power and the need for the proboulos first to
learn from womens experience and then to withdraw. It marks, too, the full
assumption by Lysistrata of public speech and action: the claim that war will be
womens business (Lys. 538; cf. 520 and Homer, Il. 6.492) gains a stark plausibility.
Despite the evidence that confronts them, and with ever-increasing implausibility, the old men of the Chorus continue to assert their claims to power through
their democratic, anti-tyrannical, anti-Persian, and anti-Spartan credentials.49 As
well as pushing their age back still further, the claims are wildly at odds with the
power dynamic enacted visually in the play. In this parabatic/agonistic confrontation with the womens semi-chorus, the sides strip for action, but it becomes clear
that the mens symbolic nakedness becomes a marker not of athletic vigor but of
naked impotence, as the women will later gently suggest (101821):
Co.ge
Co.gu
wJ~ ejgw; misw`n gunai`ka~ oujdevpote pauvsomai.

ajll j o{tan bouvlh/ suv. nu`n d j ou\n ou[ se periovyomai
gumno;n o[nq j ou{tw~. o{ra ga;r wJ~ katagevlasto~ ei\.
ajlla; th;n ejxwmivd j ejnduvsw se prosiou`s j ejgwv.
Old Men:
Yes: for I will never stop hating women.
Old Women: Well, take your own time. Anyway, I wont ignore
your exposure. See how ridiculous you are.
Im coming over and putting your cloak back on.
The reversal of gendered codes of nakedness (Sommerstein 2009, 23946), continues as the play reaches its climax in the second half of the play. The mens claims to
power echo even more hollowly as the womens sex strike takes effect.
The subsequent distribution of gazes reinforces the power dynamic that has
been established. Although Myrrhine and then, particularly, Diallage (Reconcilia-
269
tion) are objects of male desire within the play and the latter the symbol of prospective (re-)union, the major comic focus is on the phallus as the source of
vulnerability and weakness, as first Cinesias is teased and frustrated50 and then the
ambassadors are forced into agreeing to a peace treaty (10813):
kai; mh;n oJrw` kai; touvsde tou;~ aujtovcqona~
w{sper palaista;~ a[ndra~ ajpo; tw`n gastevrwn
qaijmavti j ajpostevllonta~:
I see our native sons over here looking
like wrestlers holding their cloaks
away from their stomachs;
The erect and uncontrolled phallus is a particular source of visual humor, only this
time it is not slaves or non-Greeks who are demonstrating their lack of self-control
but Athenian citizens (and citizens of other states, even the Spartans). As the focus
for the male gaze and the major source and object of humor in this part of the play,
the phallus not only is a marker of reversal but offers a commentary on the masculine exercise of power and thus is symbolically linked to the plays central project.51
Equally a symbol of sexual and political aggression and domination, it demonstrates by its lack of control the vulnerability, weakness, and need for correction
that the women are bringing. Both Myrrhines toying with Cinesias and Lysistratas
manipulation of the ambassadors show the limits of male power.
Throughout Lysistrata there is a disjunction between claims to (male) power,
authority, and legitimacy, through the male semi-chorus as custodians of the past,
through the proboulos as an incarnation of contemporary power, and through the
ambassadors as the instantiation of foreign policy, and the visual dismantling of
such claims through either direct violence or sexual humiliation. Even more than
in Ecclesiazusae, the visual dimension serves to support systematically the womens
intervention and to diagnose the nature of the masculine power. There is, to be
sure, a restoration of marital relations in Lysistrata, just as ultimately the new
regime in Ecclesiazusae is for the benefit of men and just as Mnesilochus and
Euripides survive in Thesmophoriazusae; but there is in none of these plays anything like the visual shoring up or reassertion of male sexuality and power as we
see in Acharnians.
As a play aimed primarily at an Athenian audience, the specifically Athenian
claims are the most targeted. As nowhere else in Aristophanes, Lysistrata explicitly
addresses the way that Athenian democracy constructed and memorialized its past
to validate its present. The male semi-chorus, in particular, provides a full tour of
foundation myths for the Athenian democracyfrom the period of the Peisistratids
270
H E L IO S
through Marathon and the Persian invasionmyths that were pervasive in visual
and verbal accounts of the Athenian democracy. The emptiness of these myths is
shown not through the implausible age of these ancient democrats in itself, but
through their startling lack of power. Even compared to the treatment of the fanatical Chorus of Wasps, the visual undermining of verbal claims is striking. If ideology is concerned to hide the workings of power, Lysistrata smashes apart verbal
claims and material reality, above all visually through the comic gaze.
Clearly, given the political context in 411 BCE, this is not a neutral act, but the
implications are not spelt out. With the parallel treatment of the proboulos and the
ambassadors, it is difficult to see in this ideological deconstruction any partisan
position in relation to the events later that year. Rather, the stage presents a crisis
in democracy, whose symptoms include both an increasingly toothless attachment
to the past at the expense of the present and a failure of both collective and individual leadership.
In all three plays, the pleasure of the audience is in the watching of citizen male
humiliation in violent and/or sexual terms. If the phallus is the distinguishing feature of Old Comedy, it is not, in these plays, in the spirit of aggressive male penetrative sexuality, but as a symbol of the complexities and vulnerabilities of both
sexuality and power. In Thesmophoriazusae, the deconstruction of penetrative
power is the corollary of the literary and metaliterary games that are pursued there;
in Lysistrata and Ecclesiazusae, not only does the male body (mal)function in
such a way as to undermine opponents of the protagonist, but male sexuality as an
allegory of male political power is tightly intertwined with the main conceptual
and political ideas of the play. The visual dimension provides one of the ways in
which the presentation of these ideas through otherwise marginal figures is consolidated. The resulting interplay is a prime engine of humor, incorporating and
transcending the simple pleasures of humiliation, domination, and audience
superiority.
Masculine and civic power, considered as and through the phallus, seems to
show in these plays a particular sense of crisis. Although an anxiety over power is
a primary feature of Old Comedy in general, the plays of the later Peloponnesian
War and the postwar period, including Frogs, all seem to present this anxiety visually at a much greater level, and that is regardless of the degree to which political
troubles are an explicit theme. It is tempting to associate this particular anxiety
over masculine power, embodied in the phallus, as a product of the historical
trauma of the years after the failure of the Sicilian expedition, with its substantial
casualties and the loss of Athenian military power, followed ultimately by the loss
of Athenian political and imperial power at the end of the Peloponnesian War. The
anxiety that has been evident but covered over and shored up (however inadequately) in the earlier plays of the Peloponnesian War is now given free rein and
271
emerges into a sense of palpable crisis. This was not to last. Only four (or five) years
later, Aristophanes Wealth will proceed to marry an apparently subversive political
scheme to a far more conventional and comforting display of masculine power and
of the sadistic gaze, as Chremylus or his proxy Carion humiliate or physically maltreat a series of characters, in particular Poverty, the sycophant (92945), and the
old woman (1196207). The times as well as the genre may be changing.
Conclusion
The role of aggressive visual humor in Aristophanes is far from straightforward,
indeed is far less straightforward than Aristophanes himself would have us believe.
While some of the aggressive humor is used to reflect or construct marginal or
transgressive groups or individuals (particularly slaves and foreigners), it does so
in ways that cannot be explained with reference to simple sociological or behaviorist models or to an abstracted carnivalesque. Rather, there is a constructive use of
both violence and its viewers, where the enjoyment of comic domination, overlaid
with other forms of humor, serves to enhance or reinforce the conceptual humor
of the plays, or even, as in the case of Lysistrata, serve as a central plank in the
conceptual scheme. The implication of the phallus with the social and political
order means that anxieties, tensions, or crises in the latter are presented manifestly
in the former. To gaze at the comic phallus is more often than not to encounter
comic inadequacy and a comic lack rather than comic mastery. The comic gaze in
Aristophanes certainly has a dimension of a controlling desire, but it is also ambivalent, interrogative, and frequently self-critical, less an expression of sadism than of
masochism. Taking comic pleasure in violence and humiliation is less an expression of individual or collective male mastery than the exposing and limiting of
excessive or problematic power.
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Notes
*Thanks to Douglas Cairns, Anton Powell, Nancy Rabinowitz, Catherine Steel, and the journals anonymous referee and editor for their comments on drafts of this paper, and to the panel at
the Celtic Classics Conference in Cork, 2008, for discussion.
1. Obscenity: Henderson 1991a and Robson 2006, 7094; cf. de Wit-Tak 1968.
2. For Aristophanes in the context of Greco-Roman popular comedy, see Murray 1972. He at
least sees in the better comedies (189) the use of these elements for illustration of themes and
vividness.
3. Comic heroism: Whitman 1964; see also Henderson 1993 and 1997. Sexuality and power:
see esp. Zweig 1992; for aggression and sexual domination in ancient humor, Richlin 1992.
275
4. For remasculinization see the discussions of post-Vietnam films by Jeffords 1989 and of New
Korean Cinema by Kim 2004.
5. For Aristotle, see esp. Poetics 1449a327 (comic characters worse than the norm); cf. Poetics
1448a118; Plato, Resp. 395E5396A6, 606C25 (behavior not to be imitated). For detailed treatment of laughter in Plato and Aristotle, see Halliwell 2008, 276302, 30731; in relation to the
visual dimension, Foley 2000, 30711; for Ps.-Xenophon and social control, Ruffell 2011, 101.
Eco (1987) sees the comic involving the implicit assumption of norms.
6. For a survey see Attardo 1994. For linguistic, semiotic, and script-based theories, see Raskin
1985, the first half of Freud 1991, and the semiotic and narratological formulation of Palmer 1987,
which includes analyses of purely visual gags in silent cinema. The productive aspect of jokes can
be traced back to Aristotle on witticisms (asteia, including puns: Rhet. 1412a9b3). For fuller
discussion, see Ruffell 2011, 823.
7. Note, e.g., Pirandellos (1974, 186) distinction between the humorous and the comic in terms
of whether or not the audience feels empathy for the victim.
8. E.g., the different trades at Pax 5439. On tragedy, see Rabinowitz, this volume. Contrast the
anonymity of the modern audience in the darkened cinema and (usually) theater.
9. Explored by Slater 1993 and 2002 in relation to Acharnians. In Peace, the expectation is that
the comic audience will speculate about the meaning of the (mostly visual) joke that is the dungbeetle (438); see also Slater 1999.
10. Traditional models of fictionality and dramatic illusion tend towards passive audiences; cf.
Ruffell 2008.
11. Heraclean gluttony is certainly relevant to the plot but also to broader comic points both in
Av. 157990 and in Frogs.
12. This particular conclusion to the play seems to be one of the clearly identifiable changes to
the original version; see Hypothesis VI in the edition of N. G. Wilson 2007.
13. This would be all the more so if they really were represented as fighting cocks, but even
anthropomorphized logoi are still making a strong visual statement.
14. For the fluidity of Tex Averys oeuvre in relation to violence and its consequences (amongst
other characteristics), see Wells 1998, 1467.
15. For the traditional formal model, see Pickard-Cambridge 1927 and, more recently, Gelzer
1976 and 1993. For the recasting of this model in Proppian terms, see Sifakis 1992.
16. Sycophants: Ach. 81833, 91058; Av. 141069; Plut. 850958; Eupolis, Demes, fr. 99.79
120. Oracle-sellers and seers: Pax 111521 (Hierocles), Av. 95991. The repertoire is extended in
Birds to a series of political polypragmones, where Pisetaerus hits out at an inspector, a decreeseller and a town-planner (Meton). For the first in the sequence, see Av. 990, with Dunbar 1995
ad loc. The violence against Socrates in Clouds and even the ejection of Poverty in Wealth at the
end of the agn, may fall into the same category of displacing rival self-appointed experts. See also
the Phrynis and Pyronides vase (Salerno Pc 1812), which suggests violence against a poet in
Demes.
17. Later in Wasps, Philocleon is violent offstage (138991, 14178), but the actual display of
violence is mutual, between father and son (13867, 14424), which reflects their lack of mastery.
The only agn to end in violence between characters is the unusual instance of Wealth, where an
ideological impasse has been reached (see Ruffell 2006, with bibliography).
18. So Dicaeopolis as Telephus in Ach. 480625 and Mnesilochus in Thesmophoriazusae (see
below). The joke is more at the expense of the viewed character in Birds: first Tereus (92107) and
then Pisetaerus and Euelpides (8018).
19. For threats against slaves, see Dover 1993, 434. In fact, the most blatant routine involving
276
H E L IO S
violence against a slave, in Peace (25562), involves not humans but an appropriately violent pair
of gods: Polemos (War) and Kudoimos (Mayhem).
20. For possible historical reasons, see Dover 1993, 4350 on Xanthias, esp. in relation to
Arginousai. For comic reticences in relation to slaves, see Vidal-Naquet 1986, with some comments in Ruffell 2000, 4912 and note 86.
21. It is difficult to see these early scenes as learning experiences, despite the arguments of, in
particular, Lada-Richards 1998, 69109. Dionysus is not the only god to be treated in such an
ambivalent fashion: see esp. Birds, where Heracles (and, in his own way, the Triballian) undermines Poseidon, while Prometheuss mission skulking under an umbrella is a significant visual
joke (1493512).
22. For perspectives on women in the audience, see Pickard-Cambridge 1988, 2645; Henderson 1991a; Goldhill 1994. Henderson is, I think, right to argue that the balance of evidence supports the presence of (some) women in the audience, but its collective identity is overwhelmingly
male, as Goldhill emphasizes. See also now Roselli 2011.
23. Pax 520; the statue is mocked by Eupolis, Autolykos, fr. 62 and Plato Comicus, Nikai, fr. 86.
24. The point of the play on ajnavrrusin is unclear; see Olson 1998 ad loc. The image of the
sacrificial victims head being pulled back suggests a number of sexual positions, not least from
behind.
25. Pisetaeruss threats towards Iris in Birds are followed by him shooing her off with some
exclamations that hint at physical encouragement: eujra;x patavx (1258). The latter word is suggestive of patavssw (I strike), but it may only be a further echo of Pisetaeruss sexual threats towards
Iris without any physical contact; see Dunbar 1995 ad loc.
26. Eupolis, Poleis, frr. 223, 2457; for discussion, see Rosen 1997 and Storey 2003, 21820.
27. See, e.g., de Lauretis 1984, 5869 and 2007, 2630. Mulvey responds to some criticisms of
her work in a later essay (1981). Rabinowitz (this volume) discusses the background to Mulveys
work and offers a critique in relation to Greek tragedy.
28. For raw material, see Trendall 1967, Webster and Green 1978, L. M. Stone 1984, PickardCambridge 1988.
29. Winkler 1990, which is the starting point for the detailed treatment in Foley 2000.
30. This position insists on both elements in Bakhtins grotesque realism. For the Bakhtinian
grotesque, see esp. Goldhill 1991, Edwards 1993 and 2002, von Mllendorff 1995, and for carnival
Carrire 1979. Pelling (2000, 1256) suggests that the major difference between carnival and Aristophanic Comedy is that the latter starts from reality; whatever the truth of this in plot terms, it is
false in visual terms.
31. Most recent scholars have preferred temporary license to the more optimistic formulations
of Bakhtin. Foley (2000) emphasizes the obviously costume nature of the comic body as an engine
for license; Revermann (2006, 14559) stresses humor and license. Halliwells (2008, 2623) institutional shamelessness, in which he emphasizes the phallus, apparently reduces to a form of temporary license.
32. Davidson (2001 and 2007) traces Foucaults model of ancient sexuality back to Dover 1978,
which was heavily influenced by comedy. Stehle (2002, 377 note 301) suggests comedy operates on
a Manichean hierarchy of penetration and, rather like Mulvey, attributes it to privileging
heterosexuality.
33. Given Silvermans Lacanian underpinnings, this would actually be a triple metaphor: theatrical/fictional phallus for the male penis for the Lacanian phallus as signifier of male power.
34. Whatever the reality of Lamachuss politics, his name contributes a useful pun.
35. Olson (2002 ad Ach. 5912) envisages purely anal stimulation, whereas Sommerstein
277
(1980b ad 592) envisages Lamachus masturbating Dicaeopolis while penetrating him. On the verb,
see also Henderson 1991b, 110.
36. It would be going, perhaps, too far to compare the distinction between repressive (civic)
violence and enabling power proposed by H. Arendt 1970, but there are two distinct modes here.
37. Intersecting as it does the overlapping but hardly isomorphic or homogeneous discourses
of feminism, queer theory, and transgender activism. See, e.g., the differing perspectives in Raymond 1980, Butler 1990, and S. Stone 1992. For treatments of gender in the play, see esp. Zeitlin
1981; Taaffe 1993, 74102; and Stehle 2002, all with further bibliography.
38. He is unnamed, but Mnesilochus has intertextual form as a comic character (Telecleides,
fr. 41).
39. Parsing effeminacy or cross-dressing as indicative of hypersexuality is common enough (cf.
Garber 1993, 3013, 30911); what is striking is Mnesilochuss own physical response.
40. In the discussion at Cork, the possibility of actual penetration or revelation of an actual
orifice was raised. Both are unlikely. The actors actual (as opposed to fictional) body is not explicitly indicated anywhere else in Greek comedy, while discomfiting an actor does nothing for comic
timing or performance quality. As Louise Welsh (2002, 152) puts it, Other possible side effects
include . . . piles, and a punch in the face for inflicting too much pain. In other dramatic traditions, graphic physical violence up to and including apparent anal penetration can be represented
without literally breaching the fictional or indeed actual body. Marlowes Edward II often features
enthusiastic renderings of death-by-poker, most famously in the 1990 Royal Shakespeare Company production at the Swan in Stratford, with Simon Russell Beale as Edward II; see Forker 1994,
1134 and, in relation to queer politics, Potter 2004, 2735, with further bibliography.
41. In particular, the sex and drink jokes of Lysistrata, esp. in the prologue and attempted
escape from the Acropolis, and the womens attempts at public speaking in Ecclesiazusae.
42. The comments on Praxagoras appearance at 4189 only serve to make her a more plausible
politician, given the setup at 1104.
43. Similar language is deployed of the old women as of old men like Philocleon (esp. saprov~:
Vesp. 1343, 1380 and Eccl. 884, 926, 1098), although that is not always reflected in critical vocabulary.
44. For older women in Old Comedy, see Henderson 1987; also Henderson 1991b, 99104.
45. There are signs that he is also the sort to have signet rings (tw`n sfragi`da~ ejcovntwn, 632).
The old womans criticism of him for not being democratic (9415) may simply be tactical, but
may also point to social status. Epigenes suggestion that he will have to pretend to be a merchant
(e[mporo~ ei\nai skhvyomai, 1027; that is, a metic) suggests that he is a citizen of wealthy
background.
46. For the sexual symbolism see Revermann 2006, 2504. The reciprocal analogy is one of the
ways in which the plays two plot strands (Vaio 1973) are intimately related. What is not represented analogically onstage is the possibility of marital rape, which is addressed frankly, if rather
breezily, in Lys. 1623.
47. So they are at least 120; later they become still older (61635, 66470).
48. Cf. the more explicitly sympathetic focalization through a market trader at 55964.
49. Leipsydrion: 66470; tyranny: 6169; tyrannicides: 6305; Sparta: 620, 628; Artemisia: 675;
Amazons: 6789. The Stoa Poikile is specifically referenced in 6789.
50. Cinesiass only exercise of power is to encourage (verbally but probably also physically) his
baby to cry and so elicit sympathy from Myrrhine (Lys. 8789).
51. It is surprising that Revermann (2006, 251) does not address this at all, but only the potential penetration.
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Humiliation?

Political Violence and Comic Mastery

RU F F E L LHumiliation? Voyeurism, Violence, and Humor in Old Comedy

kajgwv tin j aujtw`n thvmeron dou`nai divkhn

I am going to exact some penalty from them today

RU F F E L LHumiliation? Voyeurism, Violence, and Humor in Old Comedy

thinking-shop may indeed be drawing further attention to Strepsiades idiotic

RU F F E L LHumiliation? Voyeurism, Violence, and Humor in Old Comedy

saffron gown (krokton) and boots (kothornoi)but the disguise is regularly

Surely you didnt feel it?

Voyeurism, Masculinity, and Power: From Ambivalence to Crisis

RU F F E L LHumiliation? Voyeurism, Violence, and Humor in Old Comedy

RU F F E L LHumiliation? Voyeurism, Violence, and Humor in Old Comedy

RU F F E L LHumiliation? Voyeurism, Violence, and Humor in Old Comedy

the personification of militarism,34 of his trappings of power: the shield (5813)

ou|to~ tiv dravsei~ tw`/ ptivlw/ mevllei~ ejxemei`n

The pun on Lamachuss equipment clearly references Lamachuss phallus, no doubt

Dicaeopolis is drawing attention to the powerlessness of the ordinary citizen male,

lavbesqev mou, lavbesqe tou` skevlou~: papai`

RU F F E L LHumiliation? Voyeurism, Violence, and Humor in Old Comedy

Hold me. Hold my leg; argh,

democracy, or because of the historical situation in the Archidamian War or the

RU F F E L LHumiliation? Voyeurism, Violence, and Humor in Old Comedy

From an audience perspective, the economy of pleasure in this sequence is

Do you see yourself?

The pornography of humiliation is nowhere else so blatant in Old Comedy. The

RU F F E L LHumiliation? Voyeurism, Violence, and Humor in Old Comedy

This cross-dressing, like that of Thesmophoriazusae, is a compulsion-narrative. By

(Ruffell 2006, 7882), so too her opposition is here substantially undermined.

oi[moi kakodaivmwn: ejggu;~ h[dh th`~ quvra~

Oh god Ive had it; Im already close to the door

RU F F E L LHumiliation? Voyeurism, Violence, and Humor in Old Comedy

The entrance of the proboulos descends from the self-confident beginnings of

wJ~ ejgw; misw`n gunai`ka~ oujdevpote pauvsomai.

RU F F E L LHumiliation? Voyeurism, Violence, and Humor in Old Comedy

RU F F E L LHumiliation? Voyeurism, Violence, and Humor in Old Comedy

. 2007. Figures of Resistance: Essays in Feminist Theory. Champaign, IL.

RU F F E L LHumiliation? Voyeurism, Violence, and Humor in Old Comedy

Murray, C. T. 1972. Popular Comedy in Aristophanes. AJP 93: 16989.

RU F F E L LHumiliation? Voyeurism, Violence, and Humor in Old Comedy

RU F F E L LHumiliation? Voyeurism, Violence, and Humor in Old Comedy

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