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14 ACHARNIANS was performed at the Lenaia festival in Athens in 425 b.c. and took first place in the balloting that came at the end, defeating Kratinos’ Storm-tossed and Eupolis’ New Moons, neither of which has been preserved. There can be little doubt that the original audience consisted mostly of average democrats, to whom the play must have appealed in some important way, since a majority of their representatives voted to award it the prize. This may at first be surprising, for the opening scenes in Acharnians in particular present Athens’ government as controlled not by the people themselves (as state ideology would have had it) but by a group of corrupt insiders, whose malfeasance is made possible by the stupidity of the rest of the population . Rather than correct this situation, the poet’s hero gives up, severs himself from the state, and spends most of the play thumbing his nose at anyone who disagrees with his decision. On the face of it, therefore, Acharnians seems blatantly insulting to average democrats. It must nonetheless have pleased them, and the possibility that this is an accident is eliminated by the fact that one year laterKnights,inwhichthepeoplearerepresentedbyanimbecilicoldmanwhose affairs are run for him by his conniving slaves, took first place as well. Almost all of Aristophanes’ surviving comedies are, in a very basic sense, political, in that they are set in contemporary Athens and offer detailed criticisms of the state of public affairs there. The schemes the poet’s heroes devise to convert the city into a better place to live, however, are utterly impractical in real-world terms, so that it is impossible to understand the comedies as THE POLITICS OF COMEDY AND THE PROBLEM OF THE RECEPTION OF ARISTOPHANES’ ACHARNIANS 01A-T1535-P1 2/20/01 5:34 PM Page 14 straightforward proposals for political or social reform. In addition, although the historical Aristophanes must have had political convictions, and although the hero in Acharnians is clearly to be identified with the author in some important way (see below), the opinions expressed by the playwright’s characters cannot necessarily be identified with his own. Aristophanes almost certainly always had one eye set on winning the prize at the festival in which he was competing and therefore had little choice but to appeal to what he took to be popular tastes and prejudices, presumably repressing some of his own feelings in order to do so. The apparent inconsistency between the playwright’s portrayal of the Athenian people as idiots and his desire to be awarded first place by their representatives thus poses a fundamental question: how can Acharnians have been approved by an audience that would not, on the face of it, seem likely to have been sympathetic to many of its most basic assertions? The essay that follows is an attempt to answer that question. Dikaiopolis and Athens By 425 b.c., Athens and Sparta were the two leading Greek powers in the eastern Mediterranean world and had been locked for about six years in a nasty war of attrition, commonly referred to as the Peloponnesian War. The origins of this conflict are traced in detail by the contemporary historian Thucydides, who describes a number of incidental causes, including a trade embargo imposed by Athens on her pro-Spartan neighbor Megara, to which Aristophanes refers in Acharnians and again in Peace a few years later. Thucydides nonetheless insists that the “truest cause” of the hostilities—although the one least mentioned openly—was that the Spartans became afraid of the widespread commercial and military empire Athens had built up in the years following the Persian invasion of Greece in 480–479 b.c. and decided to put an end to it (Thuc. 1.23.6). Sparta in the late fifth century was a formidable military power, which preferred to support narrow, oligarchic governments in other cities and exercised a firm and often brutal control over many of its Peloponnesian neighbors. On land, the Peloponnesian forces were far superior to the Athenians and their allies, and when war broke out in 431 b.c. the Spartans adopted a strategy of invading the enemy’s countryside every summer, destroying farmsteads and crops, and then withdrawing again into their own territory. One of the first areas damaged in this way was the rural district of Acharnai (Thuc. 2.19.2), whose inhabitants make up the chorus of embittered old peasant-farmers in the Aristophanic comedy that bears their name...

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