Identity and Ideology: The Farmer Chorus of Aristophanes’ Peace

Identity and Ideology: The Farmer Chorus of Aristophanes’ Peace James F. McGlew Iowa State University One of the features that makesPeace distinctive among Aristophanes’ surviving works is the remarkable instability of its chorus’ identity. Aristophanes encourages his audience to see Peace’s chorus at certain points of the play as an undifferentiated group of men from various Greek cities (cf. w\ Panevllhne": 302); at others, Aristophanes presents his chorus as a loose collection of various professions (“farmers and merchants and artisans”: 296) or of citizens from various Greek cities (Boeotians, Spartans, Argives, Megarians and Athenians: 466–503). At its most fragmented state, Peace’s chorus even contains a recognizable historical individual, the Athenian general Lamachus (473), whose appearance in Peace’s chorus entails a degree of individual characterization otherwise unknown in Aristophanes’ surviving comedies. The vacillation in the chorus’ identity and the variation in the degree of its cohesiveness correspond to its changing behavior: the chorus sometimes acts in a simple, coherent manner in pursuit of a single goal, while at other times its behavior seems utterly unharmonious and self-destructive. Stability seems hardly de rigueur for the personae of Aristophanes’ plays; the dramatic roles of his choruses, in particular, are really fixed MCGLEW: IDENTITY AND IDEOLOGY 75 only when their dramatic role is limited.1 Nevertheless the vacillations in identity of the chorus of Peace seem to disturb our understanding of the play itself, and, worse still, threaten to frustrate our attempts to reconstruct the Athenian audience’s sense of it. Or do we expect too much? G. M. Sifakis, in his influential treatment of this question, argues that in wanting to fix the chorus as a character, we are applying an idea of dramatic identity that is “not appropriate”2 —a notion surely unlike the expectations that an Athenian audience brought with them to the play. Sifakis is certainly right that modern critics should not impose their aesthetic expectations on Aristophanes’ audience of fifth-century Athenian citizens. Yet this does not explain the distinct conceptions of dramatic identity and illusion that distinguish Peace and Aristophanes’ other plays from modern theater. This paper argues that, in order to understand Peace’s sense of dramatic illusion and identity, scholars do not need to suppress all expectations that define a modern audience’s theatrical experience (not that such a suppression is possible). There is in fact real method in the madness that makes the distinctive role and identity of Peace’s chorus significant for Aristophanes’ audience and meaningful for its modern readers. I aim to show that Peace’s chorus, far from acting randomly, follows a trajectory of dramatic identity that is crucial for understanding the dramatic and ideological characteristics of this distinctive play. The identity of Peace’s chorus is most dramatically fragmented in the first half of the play, in that section between parodos and parabasis 1 Knights is a good early example. But even in Knights, where the chorus’ dramatic role is least complicated, it functions as much to bring the audience into the play as to represent a distinct dramatic identity. cf. Zimmermann 228. 2 Sifakis 29–32. Sifakis gives a substantial account of older bibliography. See also Dover 137–39. Among recent commentators Sommerstein (1985, xviii–xix) devotes most attention to the problem of the chorus. For him (xviii), the vacillating identity of the chorus is “at first sight puzzling,” and he suggests (xix) that the play for that reason placed special (if not altogether atypical) demands on the “audience’s imagination.” My point is that these demands themselves involve the audience in a reflection on the nature of political identity and peace. Olson says little about the question in his recent commentary, but he is certainly right that “the identity of Aristophanic choruses often fluctuates in the course of the play” (181 n.508). These fluctuations, I maintain, are in fact the key to understanding the play. 76 SYLLECTA CLASSICA 12 (2001) where we expect to find an agon. The absence of a full epirrhematic agon corresponds, as Gelzer has noted,3 to the absence of any substantive opposition to (or serious discussion of) Trygaeus’ plan of rescuing the goddess Peace from the deep grave...