#attic comedy

[starlightseraph]

i mostly post about silly gay brainrot on here, but in real life i tend to be a pseudo-intellectual tartt-dostoevsky nightmare girl who spends her time reading things that no one’s cared about for centuries.

anyways, may i present my favourite ancient greek comedy, Lysistrata, by Aristophanes, premiered in 411 BCE:

in this play, the women of athens and sparta (cities leading opposite sides of the peloponnesian war) band together and occupy the acropolis, taking possession of all the public money of athens and going on a sex strike until their husbands/lovers end the war. it’s hilarious, and if you read about the original performance (produced by aristophanes’ friend, callistratus) and costumes, it gets even more absurd. featuring: athena, the closest thing ancient greeks ever got to feminism, a character named σκοροδοπανδοκευτριαρτοπώλιδες, and sex jokes that would make a stripper blush.

below is a photo from a modern production, and trust me when i say that this is… not inaccurate to how it was originally performed over 2 thousand years ago. it’s not at all decent, so beware lol

they performed it like this in 411 BCE.

i’ve been thinking about lysistrata a lot recently because it was the topic of an episode from my all-time favourite podcast. the episode is a few months old by now, but i’ve had a summer, so i only just got around to it. linked here.

then, just after listening to the episode, i was in an absolutely magical used bookshop that was like an eclectic, authentically developed maze that went on forever in all directions. the kind you imagine being owned by a witch or mysterious old man. they also had 6 cats. anyways, i was playing with one of the cats, and lo and behold, my eye falls directly on a copy of lysistrata. i’ve read lysistrata multiple times, but i didn’t have my own copy, so i bought it. now, i was already in the ancient section of the shop, but what are the odds? i’m the most materially analytic person you’ve ever met, but sometimes i do feel the gods that i don’t believe in (it would be athena, in this case) smiling on me.

[aboutanancientenquiry]

A collective work by Histos on Attic comedy and ancient Greek historiography

Supplementary Volumes

____________________

Histos Supplement 6

Emily Baragwanath and Edith Foster, edd., Clio and Thalia. Attic Comedy and Historiography (2017)

Full text

Individual papers:

Ch. 1. Emily Baragwanath and Edith Foster, Introduction: Clio and Thalia, 1–30

Ch. 2. Donald Lateiner, Insults and Humiliations in Fifth-Century Historiography and Comedy, 31–66

Ch. 3. Mark C. Mash, Humour, Ethnography, and Embassy: Herodotus, Histories 3.17–25 and Aristophanes, Acharnians 61–133, 67–97

Ch. 4. Daniel P. Tompkins, The Death of Nicias: No Laughing Matter, 99–128

Ch. 5. Edith Foster, Aristophanes' Cleon and Post-Peloponnesian War Athenians: Denunciations in Thucydides, 129–52

Ch. 6. Rob Tordoff, Memory and the Rhetoric of Soteria in Aristophanes' Assembly Women, 153–210

Ch. 7. Christopher Baron, Comedy and History, Theory and Evidence in Duris of Samos, 211–39

The links above give on line access to the whole volume as pdf.