Venom in Verse

Venom in Verse

PRINCETON MODERN GREEK STUDIES This series is sponsored by the Princeton University Program in Hellenic Studies with the support of the Stanley J. Seeger Hellenic Fund. Firewalking and Religious Healing: The Anastenaria of Greece and the American Firewalking Movement by Loring M. Danforth Kazantzakis: Politics of the Spirit by Peter Bien Dance and the Body Politic in Northern Greece by Jane K. Cowan Yannis Ritsos: Repetitions, Testimonies, Parentheses edited and translated by Edmund Keeley Contested Identities: Gender and Kinship in Modern Greece edited by Peter Loizos and Evthymios Papataxiarchis A Place in History: Social and Monumental Time in a Cretan Town by Michael Herzfeld Demons and the Devil: Moral Imagination in Modern Greek Culture by Charles Stewart The Enlightenment as Social Criticism: Iosipos Moisiodax and Greek Culture in the Eighteenth Century by Paschalis M. Kitromilides C. P. Cavafy: Collected Poems translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard; edited by George Savidis The Fourth Dimension by Yannis Ritsos, Peter Green and Beverly Bardsley, translators George Seferis: Collected Poems, Revised Edition translated, edited, and introduced by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard In a Different Place: Pilgrimage, Gender, and Politics at a Greek Island Shrine by Jill Dubisch Cavafy’s Alexandria, Revised Edition by Edmund Keeley The Films of Theo Angelopoulos: A Cinema of Contemplation by Andrew Horton The Muslin Bonaparte: Diplomacy and Orientalism in Ali Pasha’s Greece by K. E. Fleming Venom in Verse: Aristophanes in Modern Greece by Gonda A. H. Van Steen

Venom in Verse ARISTOPHANES IN MODERN GR EECE

Gonda A. H. Van Steen

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

Copyright q 2000 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Van Steen, Gonda Aline Hector, 1964– Venom in verse: Aristophanes in modern Greece / Gonda A.H. Van Steen p. cm.—(Princeton modern Greek studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-691-00956-2 (alk. paper) 1. Aristophanes—Appreciation—Greece, Modern. 2. Aristophanes—Stage history—Greece, Modern. 3. Greek drama (Comedy)—Appreciation—Greece, Modern. 4. Greek drama (Comedy)—Presentation, Modern. 5. Theater—Greece, Modern—History. I. Title. II. Series. PA3879.V34 2000 8828.01—dc21

99-039767

Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Princeton University Program in Hellenic Studies with the support of the Stanley J. Seeger Hellenic Fund This book has been composed in Galliard The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper) http://pup.princeton.edu Printed in the United States of America 10

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To Greg Terzian and Dimitri Gondicas

Contents

List of Illustrations

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Preface

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Acknowledgments Prologue

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CHAPTER 1 Poisoned Gift from Antiquity: Aristophanes as Paravase of Koraes’ Nationalist Ideology

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CHAPTER 2 Aristophanes in Modern Greek: A Demotic, Satirical, and Theatrical Paravase

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CHAPTER 3 The Lysistrata Euphoria of 1900 to 1940: Sexual and Antifeminist Paravase

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CHAPTER 4 Koun’s Birds of 1959: Paravase of Right-Wing Politics

124

CHAPTER 5 Framing, Clowning, and Cloning Aristophanes

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Epilogue

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Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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Illustrations

FIGURES 1. Phasoules takes Aristophanes up into the clouds (Clouds)

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2. Cartoon of Tsatsos by Makres

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3. Cartoon of Tsatsos by Phokion Demetriades

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4. Caricature of Tsatsos by Geses

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5. Drawing by Elly Solomonide-Balanou of the 1997 memorial production of Koun’s Birds

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6. The Lysistrata of cartoonist Bost

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TABLES 1. Modern Greek Stage Productions of Aristophanes, 1951–74

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2. Modern Greek Stage Productions of Aristophanes, 1975–98

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Preface

People say that when the tyrant Dionysius wanted to familiarize himself with the political system of the Athenians, Plato sent him the work of the poet Aristophanes, ... advising him to study his plays to gain insight into the Athenian state. —Aristophanes, Vita 42–45 K-A

ARISTOPHANES is vitally important reading for students of modern as well as ancient Greek politics. The playwright matters, not only as the sole preserved source of Attic comedy but also because his work and the history of its reception help us understand Greece today. I have written this study with Plato’s legendary recommendation in mind: if he had been around, he would have promoted Aristophanes once again. But since he is not, this book must make the introduction. NOTHING

TO

DO

WITH

ARISTOPHANES?

Symptomatic misconceptions have spurred me to remedy scholarly disregard of Aristophanes’ reception in modern Greece. Many classicists seem to agree that Attic comedy never sustained a rich theatrical revival tradition in Europe. Misled by this Western-oriented consensus, they have also constructed the genre’s at best marginal existence in Greece. Gilbert Murray’s oft-quoted conclusion that “Aristophanes died intestate” is based solely on the experience and knowledge of translations, adaptations, and productions in mainstream English-speaking countries. The persistence of such inferences qua value judgments has inspired faulty or reductive statements even in recent works on ancient drama. Graham Ley, for instance, claimed in 1991: “With the exception of Lysistrata, and on occasions Frogs, and apart from regular productions by the Greek National Theatre, there have been relatively few performances of Aristophanes’ comedies, and few directly commissioned scripts.”1 Yet any investigation of the poet’s contemporary Greek tradition beyond the National Theater’s contradicts this assertion. Aristophanes is the country’s most popular and one of its most political playwrights, surpassing all other authors, ancient or modern, native or foreign. The large number of scripts directly commissioned from prominent Greek literati, eager to

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shine in a field as competitive as Attic comedy, is only a small indication of the poet’s enduring appeal. Perhaps more telling, recently as many as six to a dozen new comic revival productions (that is, excluding repeat performances) have been presented each year at the annual summer festivals of Athens and Epidaurus and in the provinces. These productions have covered Aristophanes’ entire corpus, and their styles, diversified by different personalities and drama schools, and even by singular performances, have ranged from philological and archaeological fidelity to extreme modernization. Niall Slater showed signs of the common misunderstanding of Aristophanes’ reception in modern Greece. He maintained in 1993: “Certainly the National Theatre of Greece has reclaimed its national heritage and has, for much of this century, been staging that heritage at Epidaurus and more recently in the Odeon of Herodes Atticus in Athens.” Ignoring the achievements of the modernist Karolos Koun in reviving ancient drama since the early 1930s, he continued: Yet even if there were not lingering questions about the influence of French staging and acting style on the history of the Greek National Theatre, we would still need to acknowledge that even in the days of easy air travel such performances are relatively inaccessible to us. When the Greek National Theatre tours, moreover, it is still a matter of putting square plays in round theatres, as Peter Brook has termed it. In other words, there has been no great, internally driven movement in the staging of classical drama as there has been for Shakespeare; such performances as we have seen are much more parasitic upon other developments in theatre.2

My analysis of the pioneering work of internationally renowned Greek stage producers, such as Koun, Alexes Solomos, and Spyros Euangelatos, refutes both this negativism and the unfair comparison with the Shakespearean tradition. To a varying extent, Aristophanic comedy has been the mainstay of these directors’ innovative work. Moreover, extraordinary productions, such as Koun’s Birds, have changed the course of Greek stage interpretation of contemporary and ancient drama, and even of revival theater abroad. In examining Attic comedy’s modern readings, this book taps unusually rich sources of Greek literary and theatrical culture and makes them accessible for the first time in English. My strategy has been to leave the ground open for new interpretations of the ancient and the contemporary Aristophanes alike, unburdened by the baggage of standard philological scholarship or by arguments about controversial side issues.3 Instead of referring to the past or to secondary literature to validate a particular reading, I analyze the consequences of conscious artistic and directorial decisions and the ways in which these have affected later interpretations.

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I have discussed textual and historical details only when a modern reading called for them. This deliberately unencumbered approach does justice to the lay or pragmatic mind-set that Greek artists and consumers have brought to the comic revival stage. It also helps to re-create (and rehabilitate) both the personal and the collective experience of performance in a new classical moment, as it were. This freedom will in turn enable the reader to observe the scene and to reassess the ancient text as both a play-act and an act of communication. OTHER PEOPLES’ ARISTOPHANES The following comparative outline, for which I am deeply indebted to J. M. Walton, shows that the earliest modern Greek stage tradition of Attic comedy differed, both in quantity and in quality, from its initial reception elsewhere in Europe and in the United States.4 In Greece, the leap from a text-based to a performance-oriented Nachleben of Aristophanes took place in 1868, when the first popular adaptation and production of the Plutus established a permanent taste for contemporized satire. Both the early date and the results of this shift are impressive when compared with the corresponding initial developments in Western Europe or North America. In Renaissance Italy, ancient Greek theater did not see a lasting stage revival of its own, but it inspired the conception of Italian opera. In seventeenth-century France, Greek tragedy was honored more than Greek comedy primarily for its influence on neoclassical drama—in particular on the plays of Racine, Corneille, and their followers. Heralding Weimar classicism, Goethe and Schiller brought ancient tragedy to the forefront of German theater. Apart from Goethe’s amateur production of Aristophanes’ Birds (1780), Attic comedy was overlooked in Germany until 1908, although more or less liberal translations were available. In 1908 the famous Austrian director Max Reinhardt put on the Lysistrata in Berlin. Despite its immense success, it was not followed by any other significant pre-1950s attempt to reinterpret the Aristophanic repertoire, let alone to establish a tradition of comic revivals. The classical drama festival regularly held (since 1921) at the ancient Greek theater of Syracuse in Sicily featured a 1927 production of the Clouds, but its next Aristophanic comedy, a modern version of the Frogs, was not performed until 1976. In Great Britain, an 1883 revival of the Birds at Cambridge claimed to be the first complete play production since Aristophanes’ death. This claim perhaps underestimated J. R. Planch´e’s free adaptation The Birds of Aristophanes, staged at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, in 1846. It certainly ignored two Athenian productions of 1868, the Plutus and the

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Clouds. The Cambridge Greek plays included other early revivals of Attic comedy as well, namely the Wasps (1897, 1909), and the Birds again (1903).5 Only since 1954 has King’s College, London, presented annual productions of ancient tragedy and occasionally comedy. Nearly all British revivals were conceived in academic circles, and they never attained the broader outreach characteristic of even the earliest modern Greek stage interpretations. For many years professional British theater dared to invest only in the Lysistrata and the Birds, regarded as Aristophanes’ most universally popular plays. Terence Gray, for instance, produced the Lysistrata in an interesting 1931 double bill with Sophocles’ Antigone. As director of the Cambridge Festival Theatre he also staged two versions of the Birds (1928, 1933). Norman Marshall’s Gate Theatre presented an unexpurgated Lysistrata in 1935. But it took a Greek producer, Minos Volanakes, to introduce the larger British public to Aristophanes. His 1957 Lysistrata at the Royal Court won great success and soon moved to London’s West End. The prevalence of Aristophanes’ most popular plays showed also in the North American stage reception, which also was driven by academia. The Greek Theater at the University of California, Berkeley, for instance, housed an early-twentieth-century revival of the Birds in the original language. The year 1930 saw the first American Lysistrata, a turning point in the United States’ popular acceptance of classical drama. The production of Norman Bel Geddes in Gilbert Seldes’s adaptation had been inspired by the touring 1923 Lysistrata of the Moscow Art Theater. Notwithstanding some negative reviews, the show ran for more than 250 performances. In the mid-1930s the Federal Theater Project, the artistic offspring of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA), sponsored the creation of an all-black Lysistrata adapted by Theodore Brown. But its premiere at the University of Washington in Seattle was closed by the WPA for being too risqu´e. The war years witnessed further attempts to revive the Lysistrata. Aristophanic comedies that are typically less popular with modern audiences than the Lysistrata and the Birds were first staged in the United States, as in most Western European countries, after 1950.6 R ESEARCH

AND

PROGRAM NOTES

Aristophanes’ revival history in modern Greece has received very little attention thus far in local and foreign scholarship.7 Anything other than the parastasiographia (the simple listing of productions) of his comedies has remained nearly unexplored.8 Hardly any theoretical writings have been published by directors, and the quality of the rare exceptions leaves much to be desired: they are closer to personal memoirs than to critical

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essays. The same holds true of the scarce source material in the form of rehearsal notes, promptbooks, a mise-en-sc`ene, or any other technical information about productions. Very few films, videos, and recordings are available (and those practically inaccessible) to re-create the original modern performances. The few historians attempting to broaden the monoculture of the local stage and its observers have published biased or incomplete accounts. For instance, the agenda of Giannes Sideres in The Ancient Theater on the Modern Greek Stage, 1817–1932 was to argue classical drama’s importance as the literary bedrock for much-needed Greek unity and continuity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This mental framework left little room for analyzing the Aristophanic productions of that time. Also contributing to the obvious lack of substantial regular sources is the common Greek preference for supposedly higher-quality theater bearing a foreign signature.9 Greek audiences themselves, considered more broadly, have left in writing very few personal impressions or critiques of actual stagings. Oral descriptions tend to vary greatly according to the speaker’s age, sex, education, and socioeconomic background. My own study therefore draws heavily on the more ephemeral materials to which contemporary Greece has inevitably restricted the student of revival and native drama: it relies not just on statistics and other historical documents but on newspaper articles, critiques, and playbills, as well as on interviews conducted with people active in theater, journalism, academia, and politics. To aid future scholarly analysis, I have inserted extensive translations of a few texts that are not readily available even in Greek.10 These will also allow the reader to follow my argument better and, perhaps, to experience some aspects of the playscripts as the original Greek audiences did. Researchers of modern Greek stage productions necessarily start from secondary and often very subjective judgments of the quality of these interpretations. Most nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Greek theater critics offered only rudimentary performance criticism of the Aristophanic revivals they claimed to evaluate. Even the established critics of the pre-1970s generation tended to be inarticulate and unsophisticated on this topic. Greek critics have often limited themselves to analyzing comic performances philologically, narrating the contents of the original plays instead of discussing productions from a theatrical viewpoint. They essentially commented on the text as the basis of a performance but neglected the issues and tensions raised by the performance itself. Also, most Greek critics past and present have not been free from a certain degree of positive or negative prejudice. They have let themselves be tricked into either praising or loathing a given production, thereby pronouncing the verdict on its commercial success or failure. I have not followed (or tried to establish) an aesthetic canon for deciding whether

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to include certain interpretations and their relevant sources as parts of this study. On the contrary, I have omitted nearly all aesthetic judgments and facile labels, especially from my discussion of recent translations and stage productions. The translations and performances discussed in chapters 2 and 3 are presented as historical events, but stagings of chapters 4 and 5 have been selected based on reception, a criterion I revisit in the epilogue. Most productions were launched via the official channels of the Athens and Epidaurus Festivals, and thus received enough public and critical attention to generate multiple—often discordant—opinions and reviews. Their exposure to much larger theatergoing audiences is particularly helpful for the researcher who aims to reconstruct the expectations raised by, and the responsibilities assigned to, Greek professionals staging Aristophanes today. In following these logistical criteria, which do not necessarily reflect the quality of performances, I do not intend to imply personal indifference to theatrical aesthetics or to the value of critical evaluation in the study of drama. My purpose has rather been to provide readers with the necessary data to help them form their own criteria by which to assess modern productions of both Aristophanes and classical tragedy staged in Greece or abroad. My aim is not to propose a readymade canon but to supply the background for the reader’s own informed judgments. Nor can this analysis substitute for reading the texts firsthand or seeing the plays in performance. In a broad survey such as this, it would be both redundant and impracticable to discuss in detail all Aristophanic performances presented at the dramatic festivals. Therefore, at the risk of oversimplifying, I have chosen to highlight those productions that best sum up dominant practices in any given era, even if they are not the most prestigious ones. For further data on the spread of Aristophanic stagings since 1951, please refer to the charts in the epilogue. I completed this book in 1999, which allowed for the scope of nearly fifty years of comic revivals, and of a quarter century of artistic freedom following the 1974 abolition of the Greek military dictatorship. For more detailed theater-historical information and for more extensive bibliographical and other references, the reader may consult my doctoral dissertation. No knowledge of either ancient or modern Greek is assumed in this book. All quotations from Greek sources have been translated. Most translations are my own; a few, as indicated, have been taken from the standard published translations. I have also translated or transliterated the original titles of modern Greek primary and secondary sources in order to facilitate a critical rereading of the given materials. On the vexed problem of transliterating from the Greek, I adhere to the main principles issued

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by the Library of Congress unless a Greek name has a well-established form of its own in English. For ancient Greek and Latin proper names, I adopt the conventional Latinized forms broadly used in the English language. Both systems work better together without diacritics in a book in which ancient and modern Greek names occur side by side.

Acknowledgments

The completion of this book provides a long-awaited opportunity to thank publicly the people on whose expertise, guidance, and support I have relied. I owe a tremendous debt to my long-term advisors, Dimitri Gondicas, Richard Martin, and Josiah Ober, who engaged this new material with great enthusiasm and interest. They have generously given of their time and energy to discuss practical and theoretical issues with me, and they have presented challenging fresh approaches to matters I had considered closed. I have learned much from them and count on their enduring friendship. For welcome criticism and vivid discussion, I am also grateful to the faculty of the Classics Department and the Program in Hellenic Studies at Princeton University, and of the Classics Department at Cornell University and at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Alexander Nehamas, David Ricks, Helen Kolias, Jeffrey Rusten, David Konstan, Frank Romer, and Christopher Trinacty have provided me with valuable feedback and thoughtful comments on early, often rough versions of the manuscript. Their expert help resulted in many useful changes and new insights, which have greatly improved the finished product. Edmund Keeley, Froma Zeitlin, and Michael Herzfeld shared their critical acumen with me and have always expanded my horizons. I express special gratitude to Oliver Taplin and Stratos Constantinidis, the readers for Princeton University Press, for their incisive and helpful assessments of my work. Stratos has shown a responsiveness to all aspects of my topic that is more than noteworthy. To all these scholars, and to many others whose contribution is less easy to isolate and identify, my profound thanks. I am, of course, solely responsible for whatever deficiencies remain despite their best efforts. I thank Elly Solomonide-Balanou for granting me permission to reprint her drawing of the 1997 memorial production of Koun’s Birds. I am also indebted to many Greek theater professionals for granting me interviews and access to new or obscure source materials. I owe a further note of gratitude to the librarians and staff members of numerous institutions, research libraries, and archives, for their prompt and unstinting assistance. Jochen Twele, Eleni Konstantaki, Ronnie Hanley, and Claire Myones were invaluable to me during my years at Princeton University. At various stages in its development, this book was advanced by generous grants, for which I thank the following foundations: the Alexander Papamarkou Fund, the Center of International Studies and the Council

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on Regional Studies at Princeton University, the Gennadeion and the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, the Dr. M. Aylwin Cotton Foundation, and the Provost’s Author Support Fund at the University of Arizona. I am indebted to the Modern Greek Studies Association and its committee of readers for the award of its inaugural Ph.D. Dissertation Prize, which I used to make the final revisions to this text. Here I single out, however, the Stanley J. Seeger Hellenic Fund and the Committee on Hellenic Studies at Princeton University, whose representatives work nothing short of magic. Mary Murrell and Molan Chun Goldstein, my editors at Princeton University Press, have embraced this project with great enthusiasm and professionalism. They and their support staff edited the manuscript with skill and sensitivity. I also gratefully acknowledge the help of my copyeditors, Madeleine Adams and Alice Falk, in eradicating mistakes and inelegancies from my English. A warm word of thanks goes to Richard Burgi, who first introduced me to modern Greek theater and who remains an unfailing source of information and kindness. Barry Goldfarb opened new windows in guiding me to graduate school in the United States. I mark my heartfelt appreciation also to Herman Van Looy and Ria Verstuyft in Belgium, where it all began. For the example of their treasured wisdom, their sound pedagogy, and their collegiality, I am very grateful. Particular thanks are due also to my cherished friends at the Athens Centre, Greece, for their affectionate and abundant hospitality over many years. Rosemary Donnelly, Griet Vankeerberghen, Kian Beyzavi, Shirley Stein, and Leigh Gibson deserve special thanks: their congeniality, good humor, and encouragement never fail to sustain me. My husband, Greg Terzian, has helped me draw the tables in the epilogue. Beyond practical support, however, he has given me his invaluable love, his constant thoughtfulness, and his willingness to listen, read, and respond, even when he was stationed in distant locations overseas. His own work and work ethic have always enlightened me. His and Dimitri Gondicas’ conviction that I could finish this book gave me the energy and the confidence to do just that. Their tactful patience and loyal trust are gifts they have freely given and continue to give me. My debt to both of them is immeasurable. Finally, a very special “dank u” to my sisters, Maria and Els, for what we shared at home and in college, and to my parents, for giving me all the opportunities they never had.

Venom in Verse

Prologue

WHEN

THE

LIGHTS DIM . . .

Aristophanes tumbles out of an ore cart and onto the stage. His white robe is dirty and disheveled. He is bald, really bald, the classicist in me notices before I even realize what is happening. And then Aristophanes starts venting: the workers drilling the new Athenian metro lines have hit his grave and disturbed his centuries-long rest. What do the Greeks want from him? What more can they take!? They’ve abused his plays so much and they continue to do so every summer, without ever paying him a single obol in copyright money. He’d be rich otherwise, as rich as some big shots out there. But now, no, now he is as broke and as disillusioned with Greek government as the average Giannes in the audience. June 1997: Greeks gathered in the Athenian Delphinario applaud the opening scene with their favorite, Thanases Vengos, as Aristophanes. Grouchy though the ancient poet may be at first, he is ready to take on the cause of the long-suffering fellow Athenian again, in this musical comedy called The Enfeebled Greek (Ho Hellen Exasthenes). The revue freely reuses themes from five of Aristophanes’ works to complain about the austerity measures of Konstantinos Semites’ socialist government. The Greek audience instantly plays along with the reincarnated, warmblooded Aristophanes of the producers’ lively imagination: the poet becomes the cumulative personality of his corpus, quite literally. While I am recalling other theatrical ways in which Aristophanes has been brought back from the dead, the Greeks go for the meat in the message. Leave it to a playwright who has been dead for more than two millennia to jolt Greece out of its political doldrums in the blink of a blackout. Koun’s 1959 Birds, which galvanized the local public and spawned years of controversy, and other revival productions tell the same unusual story of how intensely alive Aristophanes is in modern Greece. Old Comedy is no comedy of small talk; to the Greeks, it strikes home again and again with direct, unprocessed power. WHY ARISTOPHANES? Aristophanes provides a way to understand modern Greek society. Because his humor is so obviously vulgar and accessible, he brings ancient and contemporary Greece together instead of prying them apart: the “noble” but also “elitist” ancient civilization and the “popular” and down-

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Prologue

to-earth modern one. The plays of a long-dead comic poet with strong opinions about state and citizenship, about language and literature, about women, party politics, and modernization help illuminate Greek culture of the nineteenth and twentieth century. On his living, interactive stage, policies and personalities have been debated and derided in ways that would have been unthinkable in more conventional public settings. Aristophanes provided an alternative democratic forum in his own time, and again today’s Greek comedy reaches beyond both mainstream and marginal artistic forms, raising uncanny issues in its probing way. As much as it is a fantasizing and utopian genre, Attic comedy has also been exploratory and problematizing: it sets forth as many provocations as ingenious solutions. Aristophanes has been political in both text and modern Greek context: he is the remarkable index of the “political venture of comedy” because he blurs the boundaries between the fictional play, often made more satirical, and the country’s sociopolitical predicament.1 Compared to other nationalities, the Greeks have consistently received “their” classical poet with a stronger sense of direct relevance, with a much greater volume of translations, adaptations, and productions, and with more heated disputes about intent and interpretation. Aristophanes has been the Greek touchstone of political and linguistic progressiveness, of gender transformation and social change, and of a modernist openness to things new, whether innovative or “subversive.” His morality has been vilified, his language and humor bowdlerized. He has borne the brunt of early-twentieth-century Greek feminist attack and he has been almost silenced by censorship and right-wing political reprisal. Yet, since Aristophanes established built-in name recognition, he has suffered equally from overexploitation, institutionalization, and lack of purpose. The playwright’s texts have been invoked to support myriad causes and his name has been used and abused to sell a vast quantity of un-Aristophanic goods. But beyond the poet’s impressive record of hits, reprints, and ticket sales, he has been revived in the broadest sense. Every major interpretation of Aristophanes was an act of rewriting—rewrighting— and revision of the classical text in light of contemporary sociocultural anxieties. In the nineteenth century this anaviose (revival) was a slow but tenacious struggle that ran contrary to the desired “grand rebirth” of Hellenic nationhood, morality, and language. From 1900 on, however, Aristophanic performance, whether generated by linguistic infighting or—more surprisingly—by male transvestite pornography, persisted and became a fact of Greek life. Right-wing governments from the 1950s through the 1970s felt the modern Aristophanes’ presence with such discomfort that they banned his comedies.2 The recent global culture of new oral, aural, and visual media has again adopted the classical poet to great

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effect, to decry matters as diverse as current Balkan friction or the exhaustion of the domestic popular tradition. To argue that only in Greece did the regular reception history of a classic become, once again, a practice of engaged public performance, I have used sources and techniques that rarely figure in conventional treatments of Aristophanes, let alone in studies of Greek civilization and politics, whether ancient or contemporary. My conclusions cross boundaries between classical philology, actual performance, and critical theory, and they subvert a record of Attic comedy characterized by denial or distortion (see my preface). The claim that an ancient author provides insight into a modern society and vice versa might strike classicists and historians as bold, whereas Neohellenists might perceive the argument for Aristophanes’ broad presence in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Greece as exaggerated. Nonetheless, comic revivals in contemporary Greece have been as ubiquitous and politically motivated as were the original performances in antiquity. Aristophanes has proved an ideal mirror image of the official and unofficial discourses of his modern homeland, and he has opened the perfect site for cultural criticism across time and space. At once classical (because of the long philological tradition) and popular (because of his humor’s immediacy), the poet’s work has been a choice battleground in the interplay between old and new. Book after book has interpreted Attic comedy within its ancient context, but none has focused on the meanings shared between adaptations of Aristophanes and modern Greek civilization. Also, more than any other sector of theater or performance criticism, criticism of revival comedy has remained complacently unmethodological. Therefore this study tells not one but two stories of reception: it is an account of Attic comedy’s reinvention, of its time and place in modern Greece, but it also presents a theoretically informed analysis of the genre’s reflection of the contemporary Greek mentality. This book is the first to define the relationship between Aristophanes’ plays and the tactics and antics of the culture that spawned the comic revival tradition. ENTER

THE

AUDIENCE

This book tries to read not Aristophanes’ mind but the mentality of modern audiences, regardless of whether they were ever targeted by the playwright. The Greek civic mind-set that has responded to revival comedy of the past decades is far more important to me than the author’s historical intent. Directorial interference will also receive more attention in these pages than Aristophanes’ presumed literary and theatrical aims. In the modern Greek performance culture of Attic comedy, which often plays to the audience’s rule, viewers do not remain passive but become

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spect-actors. They act out the power of the public, in its double meaning of the large majority in society as in theater. Theirs is the mass rule of the “theater state” supported by the unruly, unpredictable Aristophanes. Nonetheless, this is a case of mostly constructive “theatrocracy” when measured against Plato’s definition (Laws 701a; cf. Republic 492b–c); the philosopher equated the rowdy stage public with the voting majority crowds of the open-air Athenian assembly, law courts, and army camps, which were never insulated from surrounding outdoor activity. Greek spect-actors form the critical civic gaze, an unstable given that extends beyond the one-way direction of viewers watching players. Comic performance and festival histrionics frequently move offstage. Critics, journalists, and politicians who are normally assigned seats in the audience— sometimes front-row display seats—often bring their own theatricality to the real-world spotlight. Both directions of the gaze are operative because revival comedy contains so many recognizable cultural ingredients and at the same time exposes the texture and dynamics of surrounding Greek life. “We’re not in any shape to be a harmonious thing, we’re just the audience,” a veteran theatergoer once told me, alerting me to the changing identities of Greeks as postmodern subjects. Aristophanes’ revival engages its far from homogeneous public in a diverse dialectical experience. His eager “attendants” become partners in his unruliness because Attic comedy invites more than the usual dose of reaction, criticism, or friction. While the modern Aristophanes freely mixes strands of past and present, exalted myth and harsh reality, antiheroic selfishness and democratic community, he asks individuals, groups, or classes to make choices and to declare preferences, even if he is only seeking the affirmation of consumers’ hard-to-fake laughter. As revival comedy moves about the fertile grounds of stage dialectics, role-playing and exchanging, and self-referentiality, it asserts that the plays are never predetermined or closed; instead, they constitute collaborative projects, not final products, of performers, public, and participatory environment. Aristophanes’ verbal, paraverbal, and visual language through time offers its many recipients perks of richness and open-endedness: it posits again and again the poet’s centrality to multiple circuits of meaning. The Greeks’ cultivation of different interpretations of Aristophanes challenges traditional modes of thinking about ancient text and performance. The classical plays, even individual scenes and lines, in modern Greek society have repeatedly acquired new meanings that were colored more often by the recipients’ cultural lenses than by the transmitted or received originals. This phenomenon helps dispel, from the very beginning, the notion that objective and timeless readings, independent of a wider context or receptive horizon, might be enshrined within the an-

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cient texts themselves. Once the search for such positivistic, single, or fixed meanings has been abandoned, classicists may discover new approaches to long-standing philological and archaeological problems in the study of Attic comedy. A theater practice as enduring as the modern Greek revival stage can help scholars formulate new answers and adjust prevailing attitudes and assumptions about language, verbal and visual art, and the act of performance itself. I have worked with the bare minimum of presumptions about the meaning of Aristophanes’ plays, and I have consciously distanced myself from hypotheses about (or criticisms of) the poet’s persona or his specific political intentions. The comic revival tradition is political only in the broad sense, in that it stages shifting ideological contrasts and contradictions.3 The meanings attributed by contemporaries are only tentatively objective, because they are the historicizing results or effects of modern conditions and preconditions, not products of the singular true reading of both the text and the narrow circumstantial context. In the ongoing process in which today’s recipients become part of tomorrow’s received, Aristophanes is not the unchanging carrier of either universal or uniquely Hellenic meaning, but he is a function, crucible, or expression of the mentality of Greek society in transformation. WATCHING COMEDY

AS

CULTURE

Why is it that Greek theater directors vie to reinterpret Attic comedy? What explains Aristophanes’ popularity across broad social levels of the Greek population, past and present? What was the prehistory of this breakthrough, so unusual for a corpus of eleven ancient texts? Why did Greek politicians of the 1950s through mid-1970s feel threatened by the voice of a playwright dead for more than two thousand years? Why is it that only Greek theaters can hope to meet the formidable financial problems of staging classical comedy regularly? The Greek reception of Aristophanes differs from revival traditions elsewhere in that it has always been predicated on creative forces rather than on imitation. Attic comedy made contemporary has gauged and transgressed conventional cultural norms and expectations. Although these violations have usually been only temporary, given the limits of the performance act and site, together they constitute Aristophanes’ function of revisionist “social drama” (to borrow an anthropological concept), of comedy’s experimental politics and alternative culture. Aristophanic performance has been a total cultural event, even in the exceptional case of players and viewers withdrawing into a retrogressive time capsule, as in the 1868 Clouds of director Rankaves (see chapter 2). It has been a privileged site where ideology happens, where boundaries

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between theatrical fiction and the real world vanish, where society presents and represents itself in a self-conscious, profoundly politicized practice. Sounding boards of cultural debate and negotiation, comic revivals have been primary signals of the high stakes of neglected unofficial traditions. Aristophanes has figured as a prominent exponent of noncanonical, popular representation amid the rivalries of various socioeconomic and intellectual classes, each of which has claimed the exclusive possession of his classical texts, his imaginative stagecraft, and the “proper” Attic language contrasting with the “improper” humor. The playwright’s uncanny ability to enshrine and to stage a nexus of modern sociopolitical and ideological constructs accounts for his lasting impact. Expressing and responding to each era’s complex needs, the poet belongs as much to the Greek present as to the Greek past. Through Aristophanes’ voice the Greeks rewrite the present in the context of the past. With the playwright’s help, they classicize and defuse current reality. Meanwhile, Aristophanes also invites interpreters to reinscribe antiquity in the present, via the eternal contemporaneity of his humor. Greek affinity with the past and its comic poet is a two-way street. WATCHING CULTURE

AS

COMEDY

Greek theater practitioners have devoted much effort to bringing Aristophanes home. They have drawn from native public spectacle while confronting, not copying, revivals of ancient tragedy. Producers, translators, actors, and artists have resorted to a gamut of formal and contextual techniques to make classical comedy work again: adding verbal and visual anachronisms; excising choral passages or setting them to popular music—often incongruous, to heighten comic effect; reusing universally successful recipes for humor, such as deliberate anomaly and the shock effect of aprosdoketon, or the outwitting of the audience’s shared expectations. Because revival comedy has always functioned as a testing ground and field of professional competition for local artistic and literary circles, its performance criticism allows us to gauge the cultural activity of given periods in Greek history. In fact, the names of Greeks committed to translating and interpreting Aristophanes, theatrically or otherwise, read like a who’s who of contemporary artistic, social, and political life. In addition to this insiders’ reception, the occasional grappling of xenoi (“foreigners” or “strangers,” in common parlance) with Aristophanes helps demarcate the re-created public space reserved for “our great comic poet,” with territorial claims of the type “the plays ‘R’ us.” Aristophanes has been invested with both implicit and explicit definitions of Greekness and the Greek sense of belonging. He has been recruited to endorse the “other-than-classical” heritage: distinctly homegrown, popular, and still male-oriented. I hardly need add that my own identity as a woman, as a

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foreigner and outsider, and as a Western European classicist has made my field research and writing all the more challenging. R ECEPTION

OF

COMEDY

AND

CULTURE

The isolation of different points of emergence does not conform to the successive configurations of an identical meaning; rather, they result from substitutions, displacements, disguised conquests, and systematic reversals. If interpretation were the slow exposure of the meaning hidden in an origin, then only metaphysics could interpret the development of humanity. But if interpretation is the violent or surreptitious appropriation of a system of rules, which in itself has no essential meaning, in order to impose a direction, to bend it to a new will, to force its participation in a different game, and to subject it to secondary rules, then the development of humanity is a series of interpretations. —Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” trans. Brouchard and Simon

Why Aristophanes or any of his plays became especially beloved, how that popularity evolved, and what factors conditioned this success are questions that may be clarified by the principles of “reception aesthetic,” commonly referred to as “reception theory.” My study is informed by this hermeneutic method promulgated by Hans Robert Jauss and the Konstanz School, which from the late 1960s on has offered an alternative approach to positivistic modes of mainly literary exegesis.4 Critical of the theory’s text-based framework, however, I pay due attention to new public interpretations of Aristophanes, repeat performances, audience interaction, and metatheatricality. With Foucault, I also study the dynamics of language and power play, as well as the use of canonization, whether of drama or of individuals in real life, to legitimate knowledge and to enforce an inherited status quo. Again, Neohellenists, historians, and classicists will meet here a broader discourse on the Greek reception of cultural phenomena beyond transmitted literature from the late eighteenth through the twentieth century. I have dispensed with a strictly linear chronological treatment of the various patterns in reading Aristophanes in favor of a more nuanced analysis of modern Greek cultural exchanges with key issues of (revived) Attic comedy, such as nationalism and revolutionary politics, language and satirical humor, sexuality and changing gender roles, moral and political censorship, stage competition, left- and right-wing polarization, (neo-)Hellenic authenticity, and literary and theatrical creativity.5 Each historical phase of Aristophanes’ Nachleben has not only regis-

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tered the imprint of ancient and modern alike but has also remained inseparable from earlier processes and from the author’s greater diachronic and synchronic reception. Every new production has engaged in a dialogue with the preceding plays of an ever-evolving Aristophanic tradition, whether by choice or by chance, and each in turn has affected subsequent productions. Thus, every stage revival has grown into an act of (re)writing and (re)vision of both the ancient text and the added weight of reception. Consequently, when the present-day maker or recipient of theater reinterprets the Greek classics by the light of personal taste, he or she often fails to realize that the classics themselves, in their previous incarnations, have contributed to the formation of that taste. These ongoing dialectics may tell as much about those who reacted to the ancient dramatists, about their cultural and social values, as about the poets themselves or the individual classical texts. Informed by reception theory, then, my study places most emphasis on the modern pole of the larger reciprocal relationship between past and present. My goal has been not to understand Aristophanes per se, but rather to apprehend the use of his comedies in modern Greek literature, theater, and society. Therefore the pristine, classical moment of the original performance, the ancient playwright-producer himself, and his own historical audience all need to be placed in a perspective illuminated by the later stagings, which have commonly been denounced for their (allegedly) impoverished readings of the old master. HELLENE

AND

ROMIOS

IN

DEBATE

A brief outline of relevant Greek historical issues may help to set the stage for an agon between two opposing representations of local culture. The Greek state of 1821 has frequently been proclaimed the successor to the Golden Age civilization of ancient Hellas. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western European intelligentsia and both foreign and native nationalists promulgated this official Enlightenment perspective so actively that Greece sank into an identity crisis. At the heart of the Western-Hellenic ideal of grand-scale cultural reception of the classical past lay the myth of Greek continuity and, by extension, of indigenous purity prior to and beyond corruption from the Orient—that is, prior to the Tourkokratia, or the four centuries of Ottoman rule before 1821. In the history of revival drama, ancient tragedy was tapped as the reservoir of uncontaminated cultural grandeur and ethnic heroism, concordant with the new state’s normative ideology. But because revival tragedy had to function as a moral support for the nation, it remained for many decades impermeable to experimentation with contemporary theatrical means and ideas. The “unsuitable” Aristophanes, by contrast, beloved by all but

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honored by few, was not assigned any duties in the state-building project; he was therefore much more accepting of dramatic innovations and new political and cultural encrustations. This compelling weight of recent history always readied the ancient playwright to step into the next mode of reception. Aristophanes’ comedies survived, not because they transmitted a historically accurate or morally uplifting content or sought-after linguistic forms, but because they expressed the (anti)values of each successive phase in the modern country’s cultural development. Traumatic episodes of Greek identity formation mobilized the pliable Aristophanes to endorse certain assumptions, and to combat others, about texts, plays, politics, ideology, and criticism. I do not pursue the contested claim for continuity between old and new—between classical and contemporary Greek comic traditions, theater practices, and civilizations in general. The bearing of Aristophanes on modern Greece situates itself on a comparative, cross-cultural level, and the reception of his oeuvre opens up a historical perspective exceptional in its duration and diversity. Many features of comedy discussed here are paralleled in the learned and vernacular, literary and theatrical traditions of other peoples. The argument of continuity is only relevant insofar as it promoted the conscious revival of classical dramaturgy, not its organic perpetuation or survival. Revivals of ancient tragedies (often in modern adaptations) first emerged in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century communities of the Greek diaspora, whose members, unlike the Greeks in Ottoman-occupied native lands, shared in Western European Enlightenment thinking. The impact of classicizing theater is attributable to contemporary European rather than to surviving ancient Greek influences.6 The notions of Europe, of foreign infiltration, and of cultural and racial mixing in general have remained problematic in the context of Neohellenic nationalism. The Greeks continue to use the term Europe both to include and to exclude themselves. Michael Herzfeld has defined this persistent ambiguity as “a linguistic and conceptual adaptation to the conflict between an imported ideology [N.B. the Western Hellenist ideology, which regards the Greeks as central to the European entity] and a nativist one [N.B. stressing the Romaic dimension of the Greek identity].”7 The Hellenic vision drew heavily from Renaissance humanism and the Enlightenment, and adopted (canonical) classical philology as its intellectual mainstay. By contrast, the Greekness of Romiosyne, of being romios, “Roman,” was rediscovered (and celebrated to the limited extent allowed) in the indigenous Byzantine and Oriental cultural strata as well as in Eastern Orthodoxy, realms that foregrounded differences from Western Europe.8 Western Enlightenment discourses on the individual, progress, freedom, and modernity pervaded Neohellenic arguments on

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state formation, language, canon, and morality. Aristophanes was seen standing in the way of it all. He was regarded as an obstacle to progress in the Hellenic definition, and he therefore became the catalyst of progress—and the very incarnation of progressiveness—in the Romaic conception. The Romaic reappropriation took decades to achieve legitimacy and self-confidence, however, while the privileged parties continued to make strategic political use of the language—quite literally—of progress “respectful” of the classical Greek legacy. Romiosyne was buttressed by the pioneering nationalist synthesis of Konstantinos Paparregopoulos, in a work titled History of the Hellenic Nation (1860–72).9 The Romaic vision aimed at the construction of a transhistorical, diachronic Hellenism of the people that would embrace the Demotic language and cultural philosophy along with neglected folk and religious traditions. For this purpose, it rehabilitated the OrthodoxByzantine continuum, which collapsed the separation between ancient pagan Hellenism and the modern secular nation-state. By the late nineteenth century the ideology of Romiosyne had integrated Demotic mass performance, provocative satirical humor, even the call to dislodge the establishment. The Romios Greek constructed official power as the privileged capacity of authoritarian hierarchies. As a victim of officialdom, he found his own power not in exercising individual rights for the collective good order but in the popularly revered qualities of cunning manipulation and subversion. This more intimate, counterofficial mode was predicated on the levelheaded Romaic resilience that had enabled the Greek people to survive four hundred years of Ottoman rule. But the problem of the Greeks’ cultural affiliation and historical selfrepresentation is more complex than the Janus-faced split between Hellene and Romios. My study of alternative, discordant segments of Greek identity-building, such as comic and satirical discourse, may open new horizons beyond the realms of nationalism or ethnic and cultural lineage. Additional notions and subcategories will help crack the codes of the multifaceted loyalties and value systems acted out in comic representation, which is notorious for its versatility. Examples are the polarities of East and West, mass and elite, illiterate and educated, male and female, public and private, urban and rural or regional. Yet these poles are at most organizing principles, because the totalizing cultural and political venture of comedy is richer than what can be pinned down on a binary, structuralist axis. INTERRUPTING SMOOTH PERFORMANCE? THE PARABASIS Aristophanes became the conduit of collective Romaic self-knowledge. He was the comic assertion of the Romaic principle of revisionism, which

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in times of strictly enforced law and order helped the pendulum of Greek society swing back to normalcy. He assumed the role and characteristics of the archetypal Romaic trickster, embodying the spirit of unsocialized mischief and anarchy. Over Karaghiozes, the antihero of Greek shadow theater, Aristophanes had the advantage of a longer historical perspective and of homegrown roots that were thought to reach back all the way to antiquity. The poet became the champion of repressed social groups: since the mid–nineteenth century he has been claimed by avowed Greek liberals and leftists fighting political and religious hierarchies, foreign occupation, surveillance, and exploitation. As the mouthpiece of contested cultural authenticity, as the more aggressive critical resource of a Greek counterculture, Aristophanes has been almost consistently dissident, which made him more interesting to watch, read, act, adapt, quote, and distort. Aristophanes brought the Bakhtinian egalitarian edge to modern Greek public performance because his stage humor and laughter punched through constructs of elitism and privileged power. The playwright’s twentieth-century transgression of sexual and body politics (see chapter 3) was crucial in deflating officialdom and its obfuscation. Comic performers literally stripped vestments and investments down to the bare skin. The poet inspired the naked revolutionary realism that debunked the Western-Hellenic moralizing aesthetic altogether. This book will read Aristophanes’ anarchic nonstatus and the semibohemian practice of his liberal interpreters. Extracting or collecting the venom from the verses is an interesting and exciting way to study how ideas of national identity and cultural authenticity were formed, assimilated, and rejected. Aristophanes has been known to cross the line in a comic act of rebalancing society’s power relations. Leave it to his modern Greek interpreters to cross Aristophanes’ lines, in every sense of the words. I have used the modern Greek term paravase to stress the current meanings of “transgression” and “infringement.” Yet in ancient Greek, parabasis (from parabaino) most literally denoted the act of “going aside” and “passing beside”: hence the classical meanings of “pass beyond,” “overstep,” and “transgress,” with the prefix para- governing the various nuances. In modern as in ancient Greek, the more technical term parabasis/paravase also applies to a formal structural part of the oldest comedies of the fifth century B.C.E., in which (the actors and) the chorus members took off their masks, “stepped forward,” and addressed the audience directly on behalf of (the persona of) the playwright. Under the civic gaze of the assembled Athenian citizenry, the parabasis articulated the poet’s presumed public message and thereby crossed or “went beyond” the literal lines.10 This convention of Old Comedy thus permitted the (enacted)

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subversion or “overstepping” of the dramatic illusion. That is, it created a new illusion that pretended to be different from the one sustained in the rest of the play. Because both the ancient and modern parabasis provides a long moment of transgressing physical space as well as the artificial boundaries of stage and real world, and because modern paravase highlights the idea of transgression, I have adopted this term as the unifying vantage point for discussing Aristophanes’ Romaic revisionism both within and beyond comedy. Even if the original parabasis was not always the site where the classical plays were modernized, it still guaranteed the modern revival performance a built-in act or mode of breaking the dramatic illusion and of commenting directly to the audience on issues of social or political criticism. Like the Old Comic parabasis, modern paravase became the revitalizing force of Aristophanes’ comeback because, without reservation, it could take any degree of desired distance from the past, from the present, from the text, from the performance itself, from authority, and even, if need be, from the constant obligation to offer humor. When I call Aristophanes a champion of Romaic paravase, I stress the latter’s discovery of the former. The poet was reinvented to trespass on the myths of Hellenic continuity and purity and of a cohesive national and cultural identity. Far from remaining an unfamiliar writer of remote antiquity, he opened one of the ways in which modern Greeks have understood their own history and political structure. Aristophanes may not be alive in the literal sense, but he is the country’s immortal comic genius. He is the unsettling pneuma personified, the “spirit” and “wit” (in the word’s double meaning) that has invited popular identification with self-attributed national characteristics. Aristophanes has considerable sway over the broad Greek public and over local theater professionals. The spirit of his destabilizing anti-authority has refused to accept either the makers of revival comedy or its consumers as mere pawns in the process of reception. Few Aristophanic stage producers have asked their actors to play the parts of the ancient performers in a strictly literal way. Instead, they have caused the past, which generated the comedy, to reflect creatively on the present, in which it is reenacted. The revivals’ unwritten script and critical enterprise could never have been fully realized if the contemporary spectators had not engaged in a special, unspoken contract or bond of complicity with “their” comic poet, whether they did so as active recipients, as extras or collective actors, or even—like their ancient counterparts—as critics and judges of poetics and politics alike. SNEAK PREVIEW My first chapter demonstrates how the intellectual and social elites of pre- and postrevolutionary Greece denied stage production to Aris-

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tophanes’ texts, although they encouraged (adaptations of) “uplifting” classical tragedy. Influenced by the morality and aesthetics of both humanism and the Enlightenment (especially Voltaire), these Neohellenic circles regarded “their comic poet” as an inherited model of pure Attic Greek, on the one hand, but also as a modern “native” embarrassment, on the other, because of his risqu´e humor and general lack of decorum. Guided by Adamantios Koraes, this intelligentsia invoked ethical, linguistic, didactic, and broader “patriotic” motivations to restrict the reception of “the poisoned gift from antiquity” to the private medium of the expurgated text-without-translation of the more “suitable” Plutus. But the classical scholars’ exclusivist appropriation of the comic plays as objects of academic study was not the trend of the Greek future: the negative reception began losing its hold from the mid–nineteenth century on, when Greek politics and culture gradually became less authoritarian, as chapter 2 shows. The conservative philological reception of Aristophanes was countered by the 1868 stage production of a vernacular, highly satirical Plutus (by Sophokles Karydes and Michael Chourmouzes) of socialist inclination. Along with the nationalist, linguistic, and theatrical paravase, the crossing of satirical and sexual lines went to extremes with an early-twentieth-century euphoria of semipornographic adaptations of Aristophanes’ women’s plays (chapter 3). Representative of a growing urban spectacle industry, Attic comedy then explored the limits of modern Greek masculine identity and security, amid changing social and gender roles, increasing linguistic freedom, and newly seized moral license. Such shows remained popular throughout the 1930s with male transvestite troupes and with male-only audiences of all social ranks. In 1959 the scandalous Birds premiere by the Art Theater of Karolos Koun crystallized the democratic and left-wing potential of the Aristophanes of the cold war era (chapter 4). The production was banned on several occasions before and under the military dictatorship of 1967 to 1974. Contemporary stage directors—such as Alexes Solomos and Spyros Euangelatos, featured in chapter 5—have brought not only the better-known comedies but also Aristophanes’ other plays to large Greek and foreign tourist audiences attending the Athens and Epidaurus summer festivals inaugurated in the mid-fifties. They have shifted the main emphasis of the Aristophanic tradition toward consistent modernization of text, imagery, and stage technique in order to focus a new refracting lens on the current sociopolitical predicament.

CHAPTER

1

Poisoned Gift from Antiquity: Aristophanes as Paravase of Koraes’ Nationalist Ideology

VOLTAIRE’S HOSTILITY

TO

ARISTOPHANES

[T]he death of Socrates is the most odious part of Greek history. Aristophanes (that man whom the commentators admire, because he was a Greek, forgetting that Socrates was also a Greek), Aristophanes was the first to accustom the Athenians to thinking of Socrates as an atheist. That comic poet, who is neither comic nor a poet, . . . appears to me to be much lower and more despicable than Plutarch depicts him. This is what the wise Plutarch says of that buffoon: “The language of Aristophanes bespeaks his miserable quackery; it is made up of the lowest and the most disgusting puns; he is not even pleasing to the people; and to men of judgment and honor he is insupportable; his arrogance is intolerable, and all good men detest his malignity.” . . . Such was the man who, from afar, prepared the poison, by which infamous judges put to death the most virtuous man in Greece. —Voltaire, “atheist, atheism,” in Dictionnaire philosophique

In his fiery attack Voltaire accused Aristophanes of complicity in the death of Socrates, the model of virtue and critical thinking for the “Age of Rationality.” The comic poet had derided Socrates as a greedy sophist, atheist, and petty thief in his Clouds, which earned only a third prize at the 423 B.C.E. festival of the Great Dionysia.1 Moreover, Athenian democratic authorities had wrongfully sanctioned this production. Not even Plutarch had been harsh enough in censuring Aristophanes, although his Summary of a Comparison between Aristophanes and Menander unambiguously favored Menander and New Comedy over Attic Old Comedy. Plutarch blamed Aristophanes not only for offending good taste but also for mixing styles inappropriately. In the famous Apology (19b–c), Socrates’ professed self-defense before the Athenian judges of 399 B.C.E., Plato had the philosopher himself point to Aristophanes’ ridicule as having inspired his accusers. The pas-

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sage suggests a causal connection between the Clouds and Socrates’ trial, condemnation, and death more than twenty years later. This relationship underlies Voltaire’s reference to “the man who, from afar, prepared the poison.” The Enlightenment thinker concluded that not merely the verdict against Socrates but also the comedy itself, its author, and the entire contemporary democracy were therefore morally corrupt and corrupting. The Clouds had posed a similar ethical problem to the twelfth-century Byzantine scholiast Ioannes Tzetzes, who interspersed his commentary on the play with expressions of anger and even of disgust at the ancient comic poet.2 Ever since the second century C.E., Socrates had been defended as “a kind of honorary Christian,” an image rooted in the patristic tradition.3 For the modernist Enlightenment, however, Socrates was less a secular saint and martyr avant la lettre than the bedrock of rationalism itself. Voltaire hoped to instruct with plays, and he engaged in classicizing playwriting and acting himself. He was not against comedy per se. In general, he campaigned to restore drama to the cultural prominence it had enjoyed in ancient times, and he fought the antitheatrical prejudice of Enlightenment detractors such as the vocal Rousseau. Rousseau’s Letter to d’Alembert (1758), in which he protested the proposal to build a theater in Geneva, was directed against Voltaire. He drew his arguments from book 10 of the Republic of Plato. While acknowledging drama’s power, he abjured drama as entertainment for its supposed hurtful effects on morality and for its general disservice to human civilization.4 In the eighteenth-century conception of theater, which combined political, ethical, and didactic emphases, Attic comedy ranked as the most ignoble genre, and Aristophanes as morally dangerous. Before Voltaire and Rousseau, seventeenth-century French dramatic theorists either had excluded Aristophanes from their purview or had regarded comedy as much less worthy of critical and scholarly attention than tragedy. In his Pratique du th´eatre ˆ (1657), for example, l’Abb´e d’Aubignac had focused on Attic comedy to make an overt and prolonged attack against the ancients, who had shamefully enjoyed Aristophanes’ “abuse” of Socrates. With his contemporaries, he shared a view of fifth-century B.C.E. comedy as a primitive genre anticipating the more sophisticated New Comedy of Menander and the Romans. The playwrights of the Pl´eiade had preferred to rewrite Terence and had refused to imitate Aristophanes’ work, which was left virtually untapped as a reserve of antique culture. Their classical modernist poetics prescribed plays that were highly conventional and domestic and gave a moralized representation of universal characters.

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KORAES’ BACKGROUND The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century execration of Attic comedy had seldom been stated so succinctly as in Voltaire’s attack. His strident statement gave rise to the modern Greek reception and rejection of Aristophanes in the work of the prolific Greek expatriate writer Adamantios Koraes (1748–1833), for whom Enlightenment philosophy set out a lifelong program of assimilation. Koraes’ complex personality and nationalist ideology were central to Aristophanes’ earliest modern Greek history. Born in Smyrna of a well-to-do merchant family, Koraes studied medicine at the University of Montpellier. Thereafter, working in Paris as an autodidact philologist, he pursued his keen interests in ancient Greek language, literature, history, and philosophy, as well as in other languages. He contributed annotated scholarly editions of classical texts to the Hellenic Library, his most ambitious national-educational project. Thus he helped erect an early secular infrastructure for the dominant cultural ideology, which inculcated in the Greek reading public an awareness of its most valued possessions, the ancient texts.5 Koraes wrote many essays as well, expressing his fascination with new European ideas and debates and particularly with the French Enlightenment and its result, the French Revolution. His vast correspondence with thinkers from all over the world, including the then–U.S. President Thomas Jefferson, kept him at the cutting edge of Western ideology. Koraes’ initial native audience was not mainland Greece but the Greek diaspora communities that were shaping an identity of the West, of the glorious past, and of the benefits both were thought to confer: Venice, Trieste, Leipzig, Vienna, the Ionian islands, Constantinople (especially the thriving Phanari district on the Golden Horn), Bucharest, Jassy (Iasi), and Odessa.6 Mainland Greece, unlike Italy, France, Britain, Germany, and the Netherlands, had remained isolated from the mainstream of Western ideas. The Ottoman hegemony, which lasted until 1830, had deprived the Greek intelligentsia of access to the manuscripts of ancient authors that Eastern scholars had carried off from the disintegrating Byzantine empire. Since the 1453 fall of Constantinople, the Tourkokratia had effectively insulated native Greek territory from Western European historical movements—most important, from the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Situated outside the Ottoman-ruled homeland, the flourishing Greek diaspora communities did preserve ancient learning. Whereas the enslaved indigenous Greek population remained largely illiterate, the expatriate intelligentsia was conversant with Western European literature and philosophical thought, including the particularly attractive ideals of nationalism and liberal democratic freedom. This Greek educated elite,

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supported by foreign Philhellenic admirers of the Golden Age, championed the creation of a modern Greek state after the Western, essentially neoclassical, model. By the time of the 1821 War of Independence, it had also invested the “newborn” nation with the urgent cultural mission of catching up with the contemporary West. Consequently, the earlynineteenth-century official and elitist ideology of derivative Greek Enlightenment saw in the imitation both of the ancient past and of modern European accomplishments a powerful catalyst for the cultural and political advancement of the young state of Hellas. The constant measuring of Neohellenic culture against the touchstone of both the West and the idolized classical civilization forced the modern Greeks to discredit their indigenous, Romaic traditions, anchored in Byzantine-Ottoman and Oriental legacies, and to become more “Hellenic” in a Western style. Select diaspora Greeks like Koraes, who shared in the rapid progress of Western classical philology, were the first to establish a Neohellenic philological tradition that only reluctantly incorporated Aristophanes’ work. After all, this modern Greek revival unhesitatingly borrowed the patterns of transmission through which Western European scholars disseminated knowledge and appreciation of classical literature and civilization in general. Also Koraes’ own philological concern with Aristophanes was modeled on the reception of Attic comedy in those Western countries to which the Renaissance had handed down the treasured texts of antiquity as early as the late fifteenth century. That their strictly philological appropriation of the playwright preceded any comic stage revivals is not surprising. Humanist scholars, the first of many generations of modern classicists devoted to the textual study of ancient literature, had raised philological questions and brought forth an Aristophanes-of-the-texts. In time, the small educated reading public of eighteenth- through earlynineteenth-century Greece received Attic comedy on the same philological terms that prevailed at universities and centers of learning throughout Enlightenment Europe.

KORAES’ IDEOLOGY: GATHERING BUILDING BLOCKS THE MODERN GREEK NATION

FOR

CONSTRUCTING

French Culture and Morality Koraes often elaborated on the nurturing cultural climate established by the French Enlightenment, which revolutionized a traditionally Christian morality and introduced Western European modernity (one nation, one state—and a secular state at that).7 In his view, the French Enlightenment had the most to impart to the Neohellenic quest for liberal nationhood and cultural self-realization, so he held up French literary, philo-

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sophical, scientific, and ethical accomplishments as models to admire and emulate. The French Enlightenment also laid bare the urgent need for Neohellenic intellectuals to define the proper relationship not only between the new nation and Western Europe, but also between the modern Greeks and their Western-invented ancient ancestors. The Enlightenment indirectly cultivated the insistence on the ethnic and cultural lineage of the Neohellenes from classical Greece. Koraes resolved the partial dilemma between modern French “scientific” thinking and the ancients’ ethical and intellectual authority by claiming that the French almost equaled the ancestral Athenians in wisdom and morality, once the Enlightenment had enriched their culture. By imitating the French, the modern Greeks would grow closer to their classical forebears. Like the ancient Athenians, the French even suffered the revealing censure of a local comic playwright: “The French then, wise, benign, benevolent, and amiable like the [ancient] Athenians, have been ridiculed for their weaknesses in a manner similar to the Athenians. They have also earned themselves the same amount of rebuke, as the comic poet Aristophanes wrote against the small shortcomings of his fellow citizens.” Seeking a French counterpart to Aristophanes, Koraes most likely thought of Moli`ere, whom he and native Greek literati and dramatists admired fervently.8 For Koraes, comedy was not typical of classical Greece alone, but reappeared to ridicule the shortcomings even of Enlightenment France. The Hellenic Language In his pursuit of the moral and intellectual progress of the contemporary Greeks via the medium of their Western-discovered classical heritage, Koraes saw a shortcut in the Hellenic language. Once modified by himself and others holding the same views, this language would express Enlightenment thought and knowledge and would make the cultural revival and civic emancipation of the enslaved Greeks possible. Displaying moral and political optimism, Koraes promulgated not only a resurrection of ancient Greek glory but also an exchange or metakenosis (literally, “the pouring from one vessel into another”) with the humanist achievements of the Enlightenment nations of free Europe. He felt personally responsible for codifying and establishing the single standardized Hellenic tongue, composed of the best of ancient and Demotic Greek and able to function as a unifying cultural and sociopolitical force. Koraes is best known for developing a program for a compromise language, a form of Greek that may be identified partly with the later Kathareuousa (literally, “[language] in the process of purification”).9 In his choice of a written language and basis of education, he claimed to be following a “middle road” between the extremes of reviving ancient

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Greek and of transcribing the spoken idiom. Koraes’ program offered the benefit of bringing at least a temporary linguistic solution to the contention over Greek language in the early nineteenth century. Greek thinkers of that time were deeply divided between the supporters of the currently spoken Demotic tongue and those promoting ancient Greek as the new standard language. To the extreme Atticists, Koraes proved that spoken modern Greek is a genuine descendant of ancient Greek, and that therefore Demotic must not be suppressed entirely. In Koraes’ view, the “evolutionary,” thorough “correction” of its vocabulary and syntax, consonant with its ancient Greek roots, would suffice to create the single unifying language that the country needed in order to become a truly modern, Enlightenment nation-state. This proposed elevation of the Greek vernacular, to be achieved by gradually reinfusing it with neologisms patterned on classical Greek, would transform its native speakers, the present-day Hellenes, into more virtuous, civilized, and liberty-minded human beings. Artemis Leontis has pointed out that historical identification with a continuous territory is a core doctrine of nationalist ideologies.10 Thus the continuity argument was rekindled by the controversy regarding the appropriate standardized tongue for modern Greeks. The language debate was only one symptom of the cultural crisis that resulted when the Neohellenic elite forced prevailing native traditions toward compliance with the politics and aesthetics of Western European civilization. The West was alien to the masses of indigenous Greeks, who had been sealed off from European cultural developments by four centuries of Ottoman rule. The establishment of a close bond and identification between Hellenic language and national character, in which Koraes was particularly instrumental, subsequently led to the enduring and dangerous assumption that any deviation from the more conservative linguistic norm amounted to a lack of patriotism and to a renunciation of Greek national identity. Members of the Neohellenic intellectual and sociopolitical elites promulgated ancient Greek or Kathareuousa (or both) as metaphors for the advancement of Greece, and consequently for the nationalism of their users. They considered “vulgar” Demotic a hindrance to progress and associated it explicitly with the nation’s cultural “delay” or “belatedness” and with its defenders’ unpatriotic interest in the “inglorious” recent Romaic history of defeat, serfdom, and ignominy. Their identification with bygone classical glory evidently served as an assurance of worth against the latest centuries of subjugation. Canon of Ancient Literature Koraes was convinced that Greece needed not only a language but an entire modern literature that would undergird the nationalist political en-

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terprise and therefore revive a canon of ancient authors. That he encouraged the study of classical Greek tragic texts may be taken for granted. Neither he himself nor any member of his circle would have questioned the instructive value of the diction and morality of the Athenian tragedies, forever at the core of the classical canon and universally admired in “civilized” Europe as well. Nor would the literary cognoscenti have contested the special significance of these ancient masterpieces as cornerstones in constructing an elevated modern Greek cultural identity and an official ideology of liberated nationhood. Greek tragedy was generally regarded as a pinnacle of the glorious classical past that the Neohellenic intelligentsia eagerly tried to recapture. But Attic comedy posed problems, first and foremost in Koraes’ own perception. Unlike the tragedians, Aristophanes did not readily conform to the narrowly classicizing Western-Hellenic model and offered little matter for demonstrating one’s affiliations with empowering humanist and Enlightenment learning or even with the valorized past. Unlike tragedy, comedy could not be construed as a privileged embodiment of ancient and Western values. The playwright’s morality was unacceptable to Koraes, while other potentially liberating aspects of his comic talent, such as his universal humor and imaginative stagecraft, did not hold the scholar’s attention. Yet Koraes’ obsession with the Hellenic language, the crucial meeting point of his philological and ideological concerns, naturally drove him toward rediscovering Aristophanic comedy, a vast gold mine of words and forms preserved from the heyday of classical Athens. The scholar’s linguistic interest in the Athenian playwright, based on his painstakingly close readings of the extant works and fragments, generated throughout his philological studies a great many detailed references to Aristophanic words and phrasings. Koraes’ usual practice was to register the poet’s usage of a word or expression next to several other alternative occurrences, all distilled from ancient Greek literature. He then derived his own models and paradigms of linguistic use from these entries, compiled in a manner reminiscent of the first- and second-century C.E. Atticistic lexicographers and their Byzantine successors. The undoubted wealth of Aristophanes’ Attic diction, however, should not be considered Koraes’ exclusive discovery. Ever since antiquity and especially since the Atticistic movement, the playwright had been known for his linguistically pure language of the classical period, as well as for the virtuosity of his personal, often colloquial expression.11 For Koraes, this philological preoccupation with Aristophanes’ idiom was not an escape into the idealized past: it was of a piece with his broader nationalist-ideological view of language and culture. Both were receptive processes grounded in his conviction that the revival of the clas-

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sical language had the unique potential to ennoble the people currently speaking a tongue derived from it. The linguistically pure and yet personal idiom of Aristophanes embodied for him the very subtlety of the Greek language. In the scholar’s view, however, the ideal could not be achieved without a sufficient level of education, whose medium was the agreed Hellenic canon as well as the standard written language that he envisioned as a temporary linguistic compromise. GRAVEDIGGER

OF

ANTIQUITY, EYESORE

OF

MODERNITY

Koraes still had to face the special ideological problems raised by Aristophanes. Voltaire had put his finger on this sore spot when he condemned ancient and modern Greeks alike for approving the Athenian comic poet: “The tanners, the cobblers, and the seamstresses of Athens applauded a farce in which Socrates was represented lifted in the air in a hamper, announcing that there was no God, and boasting of having stolen a cloak while he was teaching philosophy. A whole people, whose bad government sanctioned such infamous licenses, well deserved what has happened to it, to become the slave of the Romans, and to be today the slave of the Turks.”12 Voltaire’s curse must have been a slap in the face of contemporary and subsequent generations of educated Neohellenes familiar with his writings. Audaciously juxtaposing two realms as distant and yet as close as ancient and modern Greece, Voltaire blamed the ancients and moderns alike: the modern Hellenes deserved their current bondage to the Ottoman Turks for the murder of Socrates, the heinous crime against humanity and rationality, committed by none other than their ancient Greek predecessors in an age of “bad government” and too much democratic freedom. What justifications could Koraes, a Greek, resort to in order to make Aristophanes, his fellow Greek, more acceptable to the Enlightenment West as well as to his modern homeland, which he wished to resurrect from its ancient past? Koraes’ observations about Aristophanes are especially interesting because the comic poet challenged his otherwise optimistic perspective on Hellenic culture as a grand continuum. Beyond mediating French Enlightenment thought and general debate about morality, language, and literature, Koraes saw a new ideological role for himself in expunging the greatest blot from both the history pages and the conscience of the emerging modern Greek nation. Voltaire’s loathing of the gravedigger Aristophanes had struck an immediate, complex, and emotional chord: his blow had hit home. Koraes did not single out Aristophanes for any of his text editions or his Introductions to the Ancient Greek Authors.13 Instead, it seems to have taken time—and professional and psychological growth—for the scholar

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to distill a more or less coherent personal perception of “the Athenian comic playwright” (or “the great comic poet,” often capitalized, as he preferred to call him). This process of maturation translated into numerous short references to and asides about Aristophanes scattered throughout the Prolegomena, observations that are substantial enough to allow analysis.14 Failing the Norms of French Morality That Voltaire’s assault on Aristophanes had an impact on Koraes’ perception showed already in the first volume of the Prolegomena (255n.), which also condemned the classical playwright for being too harsh on Socrates (cf. 3:324–25). Koraes charged the poet with digging the philosopher’s grave by deriding him on the comic stage of democratic Athens: “Aristophanes made fun of Socrates on stage, twenty-three years prior to the conviction of the latter, who was then at an age that excludes even the very suspicion of him being a pederast. That play of the admired comic poet defiled his own reputation, without harming the dutiful respect that virtue-loving people pay to Socrates.” Judging the playwright by Voltaire’s French standards, Koraes made it clear that Aristophanes’ ethical flaw had irrevocably defiled his reputation. Less convincing is his moralizing argument that Socrates’ relatively young age at the time of the Clouds production would have precluded any leanings toward, and even the very suspicion of, pederasty. In Prolegomena 2:337, Koraes referred to Clouds 179, in which Aristophanes depicted Socrates as stealing a cloak from the palaestra (wrestling school). There, he declared that the poet had become “a foulmouthed sycophant instead of a comic playwright, since he accused even the philosophers of being thieves.” Like Voltaire, Koraes denied Aristophanes his title for accusing Socrates of stealing. To be morally worthy of being called a comic poet, Aristophanes should have been more discriminating in his attacks: “If he is a [true] comic playwright, then he must deride only what impedes the progress of his fellow citizens toward knowledge and virtue. He should refrain from turning comedy into an actual dagger emporium, and from giving out weapons of slaughter to injurers and injured alike, without discriminating whether a friend or a stranger will be hurt.” Otherwise, future critics such as Plutarch, Voltaire, and the Greek intellectuals of Koraes’ circle will find little in his work of moral or cultural value. This ideal of the ethical and intellectual advancement of one’s own people drew directly on the pervading vocabulary and imagery of Western and Neohellenic Enlightenment. Its underlying philosophy, however, never resolved the inherent tension between the search for idealized pure origins, on the one hand, and the biological metaphor

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of literary genres and other cultural phenomena “growing to maturity,” on the other. Koraes, and Voltaire before him, measured Aristophanes against norms established not by ancient Greek sources but by modern Western European ideology, and consequently found the Athenian playwright unsupportive of Enlightenment philosophy. This setup for disappointment is symptomatic of the (re-)creation of Aristophanes in a Western-Hellenic mold. Koraes continued: “Unfortunately, because the Athenian comic poet lacked that sense of discrimination, his comedies generated no other results than distress to the philosophers, and comfort to the charlatanpriests of Asclepius” (2:337). This is perhaps Koraes’ single most pessimistic evaluation of Aristophanes: the playwright irrevocably thwarted movements of progress and inflicted moral and intellectual damage on ancient Athenian society because he was unable to distinguish between the virtuous and enlightened “friend,” such as the philosopher Socrates, and the ignorant and wicked “stranger,” alien to enlightened thought. Here Koraes also mentioned the groups most affected by the poet’s abuse: the philosophers (and Socrates in particular), who were distressed, and the dishonest priests of Asclepius, the ancient Greek god of healing, who were comforted.15 Abusing Civic Freedom Koraes restated his reservations about the ethical practices of Attic comedy in a passage in which he likened classical theater to the Ecclesia (ancient Assembly), calling them both “learning schools for political conduct” (3:37). He continued: The [ancient] comic poets would have rectified both the morals and the civic life of their fatherland, if they had not replaced the necessary theatrical license with the absolute freedom to make vulgar and disparaging personal attacks against the [Athenian] citizens, rather than to deride individual weaknesses in general terms. And if their evil tongue had mocked evil citizens only, that would have been tolerable. In the latter case, perhaps the bad citizens, once abused on the comic stage, would have been inclined to feel redeeming embarrassment and remorse. But by making fun of the good citizens as well, the comic poets encouraged the evil ones to become even more insolent. Cleon [, for instance,] had good reason to feel more pride than shame, for he kept hearing his name mentioned on the same stage on which Socrates too, the great teacher of human philosophy, had been represented as a charlatan.

In Koraes’ view, Aristophanes missed every chance to rectify public morality. By failing to represent the punishment of vice and the reward of virtue, the playwright created a situation in which depraved Athenians

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enjoyed the greatest license: abusing the privileges of the democratic system, they could continue their wrongdoings at the expense of decent fellow citizens who were undeservedly victimized by the poet’s exploitation of civic and theatrical freedom. Aristophanes’ ridicule was inadequate to combat vice, for all the public attention paid to men like Cleon only encouraged them to perpetuate their corrupt practices. Koraes repudiated Attic comedy not only because it failed to teach virtue, but also because it showcased the very evils it was supposed to eradicate. For Koraes, Aristophanes’ comedy adulterated ancient society and concentrated the evils that had led to Athens’ downfall. Like any good (ex-)doctor, the scholar suggested a practical remedy: “[Comic] theater can only cure wrongdoings by fighting them without naming the wrongdoers. Indeed, only in this case will the theater encourage all people to suspect and question themselves: ‘Maybe it is me?’ On the other hand, when a particular person is singled out, all the others have good reason to comfort themselves, saying: ‘It is not me!’ ” (3:37–38).16 How can we be challenged to rectify our mistakes if we are certain that we are not among the named protagonists? According to Koraes, only when the spectators can recognize themselves in the stage characters are they in a position to correct the faults that expose them to public ridicule. Aristophanic comedy should have abandoned the notorious practice of onomasti komodein (lampooning specific individuals on stage).17 If he had scoffed at anonymous victims or at public weaknesses instead, Aristophanes would have much more effectively elevated the morals of his citizen audience. This ethical concern ought to have been the ultimate aim of the Athenian playwright. Koraes’ strictures on comedy reveal a dichotomizing didacticism—vice may be derided on stage, but not in personal terms. He accepted ridicule as an effective weapon of instruction against vice if wielded in the general domain, ignoring the possibility that the representation of virtue might as easily attract denigrating laughter as appreciation. Following classical and French literary critics, such as Aristotle and Boileau, Koraes maintained that the function of comic literature was both to please and to instruct, with the emphasis generally falling on instruction. Most late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Greek critical discussions of Aristophanes dealt extensively not only with the ideal of ethical benefit but also with the issues of decorum, purity of genre, and respect for the Greek “rules” central to Western neoclassical dramatic theory.18 But if comic theater presented a singular opportunity for moral elevation and if the ancient playwright had irrevocably wasted that opportunity, then Koraes and more elitist critics had to ensure that reading audiences did not learn the wrong lessons. Badly taught readers could upset the ethical, social, and political order, with consequences impossible to predict. Only by the first decades of the twentieth century did the

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ideal of instruction broaden from the purely moral realm to incorporate topics reflecting the taste of the large middle-class audiences for very liberal adaptations of Aristophanes.

Vaunting Vomolochia A Frenchman like Voltaire could easily condemn Aristophanes’ language and morality—not so a Greek thinker who aimed at recovering from the ancient past whatever might contribute to the spiritual advancement of his own people. Koraes’ remarks are pervaded by the need to defend the classical playwright against Voltaire’s rejection of his comedy as low-level (bas) farce. Prolegomena 2:158–61, for instance, comprises a nuanced discussion between Koraes and a friend from Chios concerning the place and function of drama within the context of education and philosophy. Koraes and his interlocutor established the distinction between the “good comedy” (kale komodia) and its opposite, the poor-quality comedy. Good comic theater is said to originate in the harmonious union of philosophy and philology, and to exert a civilizing influence on peoples capable of accommodating it. The ancient Athenians prove to be the prototype of such a people. Defining the opposite of “good comedy” in terms of vomolochia (scurrility) and phortike komodia (farce), Koraes added: Aristophanes (Wasps 66) gives this name [“farce”] to many comedies of his fellow playwrights, boasting that he was the first to cleanse drama from scurrilities. His boast is justified only if he means that he made a beginning of cleansing it. For he too blended a fair number of vulgarities into his own most elegant comedies, as the beginnings of all good things are inevitably bound to come about. Because to introduce these things to the peoples is a task that cannot be done overnight, nor by one person alone. Almost an entire century separated Aristophanes from Menander, the father of the slightly more upright comedy.

Koraes’ distinction between the “upright comedy” and its opposite, the crude “farce,” might go back as far as Aristotle. In his Nicomachean Ethics (1127b33–1128b3), Aristotle showed particular concern about the impropriety of humor attacking individuals (by name) so as to humiliate them (cf. Poetics 1451b14–16). He contrasted the tasteless, offensive abuse of the uneducated boor with the witty and tactful jokes of his educated counterpart, drawing a parallel antithesis between the obscenity (aischrologia) of Old Comedy and the innuendo (hyponoia) of New Comedy (1128a24). In a passage from the Poetics (1461b26–1462a4), however, in which he defended tragedy against apparently well-known

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criticisms made in favor of epic, tragedy was characterized as coarse and vulgar (phortike), as opposed to the more noble (beltion) epic. At first Koraes lent his approval to Aristophanes’ claim of having produced comedies superior to those written by his predecessors and contemporary rivals. He then quickly modified his opinion about this boast, stating that the Athenian playwright had only begun cleansing the comic art of all vulgarities. Not until the era of Menander, admired as “the father of the slightly more upright comedy,” was this literary and presumably ethical intention finally achieved. As an extenuating circumstance in Aristophanes’ case, however, Koraes noted that the fifth-century B.C.E. comic poet was a solitary pioneer in his art. But this very statement contradicts the scholar’s knowledge of the existence of “many comedies of fellow playwrights.” Assuming that Koraes knew of the preserved names, titles, and fragments of Old Comedy, we can conclude that he may have deliberately oversimplified the Athenian historical and literary context.19 Perhaps he ignored crucial data at the most convenient stage of his argument because he wished to shed a more favorable light on his comic poet. Koraes implicitly claims that Aristophanes was at least no worse a vomolochos (foul-mouth) than his competitors. The lack of a prior tradition of high-quality comic theater, free of vulgarities, might excuse both the playwright and his work. Koraes’ disparagement of Aristophanes as compared to Menander echoed previous and contemporary Western European assessments contrasting the key figures of Old and more “refined” New Comedy. In fact, Aristophanes’ reception had suffered from this antithesis since its early formulation by Plutarch, Voltaire’s informant.20 Menander’s huge influence on the Latin comic poets, especially on Terence, and the latter’s enduring popularity shaped medieval and later tastes in comic theater. Aristophanes was also conspicuously neglected by the Renaissance dramatists and translators into modern languages for reasons that included the loose, open-ended structure of his “primitive” form, the complexity of his language and his daring use of metaphor, the topicality and indecency of his humor, and even his plays’ total absence of romantic or domestic interest.21 Koraes and his Chiot correspondent had agreed that “true humor has no place except among free and enlightened people, equal before the law” (2:160), and thus the playwright’s “lack of art” resulted from the dearth of refinement characteristic of his era. Improving the comic theater of that early, unsophisticated period could not be done overnight; neither was it a task for one man. In the chronology sketched by Koraes, a stimulating, intellectual atmosphere fostering genuinely good humor did not prevail until shortly before the democratic age of Aristophanes. Menander was the first comic playwright to benefit from that new cultural climate. Yet Koraes’ apologetic statements also betray Hellenic na-

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tionalist pride and a sense of identification with Aristophanes, the classical writer of “most elegant comedies” in spite of their numerous vomolochies. In several passages of his Prolegomena Koraes made further efforts to account for the plentiful personal abuse and general lack of decorum that, in his eyes, hampered the full-scale reception of Attic comedy in scholarship and education. In a personal letter dated 3 March 1807, addressed to his friend Alexandros Vasileiou, Koraes recommended Aristophanes as a chariestatos vomolochos, a “most graceful, foulmouthed” poet, explaining: Do not let the apparent contradiction of these two epithets seem paradoxical to you. Aristophanes is indeed foulmouthed in many respects, but he has so many other charms, that devil, that he earned himself, from the mouth of the divine Plato, the following charming and mellifluous distich: The Graces were looking for an everlasting home; they found it in the soul of Aristophanes. Aristophanes is not difficult; the greatest difficulty he poses consists in the allusions he makes to circumstances of his own time. Many of these allusions have been explained by the scholiasts commenting on Aristophanes, who nevertheless also left a fair number of allusions unexplained. This misfortune, however, is common to all [ancient authors]. Apart from the Attic elegance of his mode of expression, apart from his very witty jokes and from the most stinging gibes against his corrupted fellow citizens, Aristophanes is the only poet through whom one gains a clear understanding of the contemporary situation in Athens, an understanding that proves to be very useful for the reading of Xenophon, Isocrates, and Demosthenes, and of all the authors who had something to say about the democracy of that era.22

Koraes praised the other side of Aristophanes’ “devilish” frankness: viewed from a positive angle, the comic straightforwardness that offended decorum enabled the modern reader to gain a deeper insight into the functioning of fifth- and early-fourth-century B.C.E. Athenian democracy. Tempering his own and French criticisms via judicious references to Aristophanes’ redeeming qualities, Koraes hoped to save him from total rejection or oblivion. He justified the private act of reading the poet’s plays by claiming that the overall charm of his comic art neutralized the vulgar jokes. Moreover, the playwright’s jeers were directed only against the “corrupted” among the Athenian citizenry. Here, Koraes overlooked for a moment Aristophanes’ contested role in “preparing the poison” for Socrates. Koraes even invoked the authority of the “divine” Plato by quoting his famous epitaph on Aristophanes. Although the epigram’s attribution to Plato is very doubtful, it served the scholar’s purpose of recommending Aristophanes’ texts to both the French and the modern Greek reading

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public. In addition, Koraes tackled the general complaint that Attic comedy makes for very difficult reading. He excused the playwright by pointing out that limited information about contemporary sociopolitical circumstances has survived. Plenty of data, however, might still be culled from the work of later generations of scholiasts, who left comprehensive annotations to the entire Aristophanic corpus. Also, the irrevocable loss of information on the poet’s cultural, historical, and political milieu should not reflect badly on Aristophanes, since he shares this unfortunate condition with most other ancient authors. Koraes further stressed the unique position that the playwright holds as an insightful eyewitness of contemporary Athenian democratic politics. A guided study of Aristophanes’ texts might therefore illuminate the reading of several other representatives of Greek democracy, such as Xenophon, Isocrates, and Demosthenes. Koraes not only defined the nature and function of comic theater but also helped construct the textual reception of a euphemized Aristophanes for his friend Vasileiou and for other students of ancient Greek civilization. Via personal addresses to the reading public he regarded as ideal for the comic plays, Koraes modeled the desired Neohellenic consumer response to Aristophanes. This reading audience typically was drawn from members of the early-nineteenth-century Greek social and intellectual elites, often adherents of Koraes’ own linguistic and ideological position. In sum, Koraes’ pronouncements are remarkable not only for their French-inspired rhetoric but for their apologetic undertone. The scholar’s excuses on behalf of Aristophanes, who deserved a historical apologia similar to Socrates’, initiated a new approach in the critical reception of his plays. Throughout most of the nineteenth century, the apologetic terminology of modern Greek critics, who were not necessarily followers of Koraes, served to recommend the mixed qualities of the Aristophanic corpus to both native and foreign intellectuals. The reception of the chariestatos vomolochos, the “most graceful foul-mouth,” and of Attic comedy as the poisoned gift from antiquity at once expressed and exacerbated the inferiority complex of Koraes and his contemporaries in their intellectual exchange with a “more advanced” Western Europe. In their eyes, if Greece wanted to be considered a fully cultured or even a politically mature nation, it needed all the polemics they could provide to accommodate an outcast genius of the magnitude of Aristophanes. Canonizing Aristophanes For Koraes, Aristophanes’ genius outweighed his offending language and unethical attitude, the prime objects of foreign censure. The playwright’s

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comedies, however, would have been beyond reproach if only he had made a concerted effort to refine his speech and improve his morals. Whereas the Enlightenment found the poet irreparably lacking on both counts and excluded nearly all of his comedies from the canon of ancient literature, Koraes set out to rescue as much of Aristophanes as possible for modern Greece, or at least for its educated intellectual reading audience. His aim was to save the poet’s name and reputation, and to integrate at least some plays of Attic comedy, ancient drama’s troublesome appendix, into the classicizing canon that would educate the growing reading public of the new nation. Koraes’ ideologically driven criticism generated a set of proposed reforms and restrictions of Aristophanes necessary for his admission to the native Hellenic canon. A first precept entailed that Attic comedy could only be accepted on strict philological grounds: Aristophanes was to be read, not performed. In terms reminiscent of Platonic and Enlightenment warnings against public performance, Koraes and his followers feared that the uneducated modern Greek public would become corrupted if exposed to Aristophanic comedy and to the unpredictable dynamics of live theater, itself far more influential than the printed word. Extrapolating from their radical view of the genre as adulterating ancient morals, personalities, and institutions, they anticipated similar effects in modern times as well. The general illiterate and semiliterate audience was thought to have a naive style of consumption, characterized by complete identification with the actions, language, and morals of the comic characters. These intellectuals assumed, somewhat incoherently, that the masses learn to imitate only evil and not good actions, which are easily discredited as false since the actors are merely pretending. Claiming immunity to the infection of Aristophanic immorality, Koraes confidently undertook the fashioning of the poet’s personality as much as his scripts for the reading canon. During the Middle Ages and Renaissance and throughout the “Age of Rationality,” Aristophanes’ plays had ceased to be plays and had turned into objects of philological study that could better stand the test of Christian and humanist ideological demands. This emphasis on the text rather than on performance was perpetuated by Koraes and by his circle of Neohellenic intellectuals, who continued to define the poet’s oeuvre in terms of its Attic language rather than its plot. Koraes’ learned apologia was intent on rehabilitating only Aristophanes’ texts. A staged comic revival might have subverted the playwright’s already questionable integrity, according to Koraes, who had been trying painstakingly to undo the effect of Voltaire’s notorious rejection. The refusal of stage representation of Aristophanic comedy is explained by the foreign and Neohellenic nationalist investment in a canon of an-

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cient Greek literature. This demanded that the classical past be idealized as well as appropriated. In the opinion of Koraes and of the contemporary intelligentsia, the eventual recovery of both the political autonomy and the national dignity of captive Greece hinged on the moral and intellectual education of the native Hellenes, which was itself contingent on the right ethical and cultural choices. Aristophanes’ scurrilities clashed far less with prevailing Christian values than with the nationalist dreams of this grand project of building modern Hellenism; stage productions would tarnish the ideal picture on which it rested. In Koraes’ most specific recommendation, refining Aristophanes’ impurities—his vomolochies or aischrologies—would render at least some of Attic comedy an acceptable part of the canon geared toward the ethical, cultural, and political greatness of the embryonic Greek state. Moral censorship was indeed at the heart of Koraes’ attempt to recover and yet to contain—to recover in order to contain—Aristophanes. He was willing to alter the ancient text to “improve” it, to play down its ignoble aspects and to emphasize its virtuous and didactic qualities. Following Koraes’ solution of expurgating the comedies, of removing or toning down all offending passages, other scholars could also contribute to make the playwright’s work live up to Hellas’ desired yet derivative morality and aesthetics. The scholarly and critical efforts of these Greeks stand as the earliest attempts to come to grips with the problem of rehabilitating Old Comedy. Only rarely did the early Neohellenic linguistic and philological approach to Aristophanes take up the possibility of comic performance. Koraes viewed it in the most cautious, conservative, even pessimistic terms, as in his Dialogue of Two Greeks Concerning the Greek Interests (1825), in which he elaborated on the nature, function, and potential benefit of various postrevolutionary forms of popular entertainment. He considered “whether theaters would be advantageous to Greece in its present situation,” given the very recent liberation of many of the long-enslaved Greek people. Koraes saw entertainment and instruction as functions intertwined with other, contemporary forums of public diversion, which he felt more deserving of promotion than performances of Aristophanic comedy. Because those other entertainments did not share ancient origins, they would not harm the all-too-fragile reconstruction and appropriation of the idealized classical Greek patrimony. By contrast, Aristophanes on the modern Greek stage had the potential to do more damage than good. Koraes’ general objections, applicable also to comic theater, were consonant with his nationalist ideals; they convey the high hopes he had invested in broader Greek aspirations for cultural and political elevation:

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Let us have theater, but we must be careful to gain from it only whatever good there is to be gained, and to avoid its many evils. Since the bonds of freedom do entail many hardships, time for recreation has rightly been set apart for the sufferers. Celebrations, feasts, and games provide for this diversion. Indeed, our games too must give us repose from, but not put an end to the hardships. . . . In my opinion, games should be such as to keep us keenly prepared for new and different hardships. [Examples of games] of this nature are . . . the games of the Lacedaemonians: capable of bestowing vigor and prudence upon the soul, which consequently would not bear to be enslaved to anyone but to the laws.23

Koraes’ allowance for spectacles and entertainments of an essentially patriotic nature echoes Rousseau’s concessions in his Letter to d’Alembert, which followed Plato’s denunciation of theater but nonetheless promoted civic festivals and republican fˆetes, athletic and gymnastic games, and naval tournaments.24 Both Rousseau and Koraes held up the civic contests of ancient Sparta as models of purity and patriotism for their encouragement of total public participation in communal causes. In light of the unsurpassed achievements of ancient theater, Koraes’ evaluation of contemporary Neohellenic drama was very pessimistic. Instead of offering a program for the reform of theater, he advocated its (temporary) suppression. He encouraged the new modern Greek society not to develop its own morality with respect to comedy and drama in general, but to adopt that of the French Enlightenment. When the Greek linguistic debate came to a head in the early decades of the nineteenth century, Koraes’ reaction brought together the two problems: “It is ridiculous to be polemical and dogmatic about something [i.e., the language issue] that is not going to be decided till the year 1950—the date at which, according to my reckoning, the first good (modern Greek) comedy or tragedy will be staged in a Greek theatre.”25 THE PLUTUS PREFERRED “Purified of all aischrologies” Aristophanes’ Plutus was the only comedy for which Koraes envisioned an active role in the Hellenic canon. Pursuing a philological conquest and scholarly control of comic language and morals, the straightlaced Koraes was troubled even by the few vulgarities in a play that had been regarded as the most inoffensive throughout medieval and Renaissance Europe as well as in the Byzantine tradition. The correct presentation of the Plutus, however, was for him a matter of national interest. Encouraging contemporary intellectuals to read but to cleanse the play reflected

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Koraes’ own ideological investment in this and other ancient texts: the carefully expurgated comedy was to serve moral, linguistic, and didactic purposes rather than broader literary and theatrical aims. The “shocking” vulgarities of the Plutus had to be neutralized via a high degree of circumspection in the private and exclusive acts of reading, studying, and teaching most, though not all, of its Attic lines. In Prolegomena 1:171, Koraes explicitly recommended that Greek schools teach a Plutus “purified of all aischrologies.” Just like the Greek language at large, which in the doctor-mentor’s grand scheme of nationbuilding required linguistic correction or “purification” (hence the later name Kathareuousa) of a piece with ethical cleansing, Aristophanes’ play was subjected to a medical cure of “purification” or “purging” from the disease of immorality.26 Koraes’ therapeutic advice influenced an important Greek encyclopedian, Vasileios P. Papa Euthymiou, who seriously considered expurgating the text of Aristophanes’ Plutus, as included in his four-volume Elements of the Greek Language (1812–13).27 In his preface, the scholar revealed that a friend had encouraged him to purify Aristophanes’ comedy but he did not dare to do so, for fear of destroying the unity of the original text and depriving the reader of some of the playwright’s best jokes. Thus, in his didactic treatment of the Plutus, Papa Euthymiou weighed ethical and aesthetic criteria, acknowledging Koraes’ recommendation though he rejected it. The Greek Encyclopedians and Educators for Language Aristophanes’ Plutus was popular among eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Greek educators and teachers such as Papa Euthymiou. Inspired by the example of the French Enlightenment encyclopedians, these first Neohellenic academics compiled the masterpieces of classical Greek literature, including the Plutus, for students learning “their” ancient Greek language and “native” cultural traditions. This propagation of linguistic and didactic standards was an integral part of the nationalist ideal of creating an ethnic Greek political space with a viable culture of continuity. The intellectual elite, typically expatriate, conceived of classical learning as a rich yet self-contained treasure-house inherited from the Golden Age via the West, to which their compilations supplied the key. With their encyclopedias in the original ancient Greek tongue, the younger generations studying at the high schools of the diaspora communities would be better equipped to overcome the negative effects of the detours and of the “retardation” of the intervening ages. Greek youth’s native language and thinking had to mimic defunct classical prototypes if the

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new nation wanted to emulate the ancient intellectual miracle—itself a construct of Western European Hellenism and Philhellenism. Both Ioannes Patousas and Stephanos Kommetas incorporated the ancient Greek text of Aristophanes’ Plutus into their encyclopedic works, along with a large number of classical tragedies. The Athenian Patousas taught in Venice, where he compiled his Philological Encyclopedia (1710) “for the use of the philologists and of those yearning to learn [philomathon] the [ancient] Greek language” (as the subtitle reads). About a century later, Kommetas published his Encyclopedia of Greek Studies in Vienna (1812–14). By printing an unexpurgated Plutus, both educators perpetuated a more positive reception inherited from medieval and Renaissance scholars. For them, the uncut text was a perfectly suitable tool for teaching competence in a particular form of Greek: namely, the Attic dialect of the classical period, the universally admired register of the ancient Greek language. Thus the encyclopedians’ early approval of the Plutus amounted to a canonization of Aristophanes’ Attic diction, not of the genre per se. Koraes’ advice to chasten or cleanse the Plutus confirmed yet restricted the play’s role to being a private, philological medium, never commended for public performance. In his opinion, the comedy’s ancient language could be studied and appreciated if only a few lines were eliminated from the preserved text. Koraes’ contemporaries, however, were less concerned with moral censorship than with the danger of destroying the original’s coherence. Despite polemics on either side, Koraes’ nationalist ideology was well served by the didactic compilation practice that hoped—by reading, teaching, and studying the ancient texts as blueprints—to restore classical Greek language, literature, and culture to reemerging Hellas. Both parties also agreed that Attic comedy should only be read. To the best of my knowledge, none of the early academics made any effort to revive Aristophanes for the contemporary reading public by translating, let alone staging, any of his plays. There was indeed little awareness and acceptance of modern Greek renditions, even for use as aids in the classroom. Such translations, if available, would have undermined the Greek teachers’ regressive linguistic principles, which were anchored in the recitation and memorization of the classical texts. In addition, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century students of ancient drama were strongly encouraged to regard Aristophanes as a “permanent contemporary” of all phases of Greek and Byzantine history, a claim in support of which the agelong popularity of the Plutus could easily be invoked. For the earliest Neohellenic philologists, disclosing the uninterrupted tradition and ancient, seamless past of Aristophanes’ work was far more important than making that work relevant to the present.

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From Postclassical Times to the Renaissance As I indicated earlier, the common scholarly predilection for Aristophanes’ Plutus was no accident. Despite the poet’s general lack of popularity since the postclassical era, the Plutus could claim a long history of being taught in the schools of medieval Europe, as it suited the Christian ethics and didactic intent of the educated classes. The play subsequently became the humanist favorite among Aristophanic comedies. The Plutus enjoyed great circulation also in the Byzantine tradition, which favored a triad that included the Clouds and Frogs as well. Of these three comedies selected for scholarly study and for formal school instruction, the Plutus was perceived to be freest of all the drawbacks hampering Aristophanes’ general reputation. “[T]o modern taste the least attractive and interesting” of Aristophanes’ plays, according to Kenneth Dover,28 the Plutus anticipated the goals of the Middle and New Comedy of Menander and of the Latin comedy of Plautus and Terence, which were particularly popular in medieval and Renaissance Europe. Terence also provided the most acceptable rhetorical and ethical model to the early humanist and neoclassical dramatic theorists, who staunchly defended the moral values of literary comedy and formulated standards emphasizing strict decorum in plot, diction, sentiment, and characterization. Like the works of New Comedy and of the Roman poets, the Plutus has a tightly knit plot instead of the loosely connected episodes characteristic of the early Aristophanes. It also offers less lyricism, less rustic or burlesque comedy, and no stinging satire of any kind. Compared to the fifth-century B.C.E. plays, with their impenetrable topical allusions and intractable Attic idioms, the Plutus is far less dependent on contextual reality and on personalized, often obscene gibes. Finally, the Plutus portrays the morally pleasing reward of virtue and punishment of vice by bringing on stage a motley parade of universally recognizable types similar to the characters of popular New Comedy, such as the servant Cario, prototype of the wily slave of Roman comic theater. In short, the play’s inoffensive entertainment and moralizing instruction suited postclassical through Enlightenment expectations about dramatic texts. And the Rest of Aristophanes? The Plutus was the one Aristophanic comedy that Koraes explicitly recommended for study and instruction, but only in its “purified” form. This process of “purification” involved tailoring the play to make it suit modern norms of morality and aesthetics, received secondhand from a

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“more civilized” Western Europe. The lack of decorum of all Aristophanic plays apart from the Plutus, however, continued to distress the conservative Greek logioi (learned elite). Given the necessary text-based discretion, a rare exception could at times be made for the Clouds. The rest of Attic comedy was thought unfit to function on the same didactic and ideological level as the texts of the classical tragedians and of other ancient authors setting moral and cultural examples for the Neohellenes. From the early eighteenth century through the postrevolutionary years, no other Aristophanic plays were added to the semi-official curriculum of high school instruction. The Plutus simply was the canon for ancient Greek comedy. As a result, the one play that fit the blueprint of the comic genre was dissociated from Aristophanes. The modernist moralization of the Plutus blocked an appreciation of the poet at large. It also created a bipolar antithesis with his “real” personality and with other plays’ comic characters so extreme as to be often incoherent. Yet Aristophanes’ supposed general laxity was perceived as a threat to prerevolutionary public, and deeply ethnocentric, morals: therefore it had to remain suppressed. Well after the era of Koraes, members of the postrevolutionary Greek intelligentsia developed at least a reluctant interest in Aristophanic comedies other than the Plutus, which had been part of their own formal school education. In 1845 the teacher and cleric Neophytos Doukas published the first complete annotated edition of Aristophanes’ oeuvre in modern Greece.29 A staunch opponent of Koraes’ position in the ongoing linguistic debate, Doukas advocated the use of ancient Greek and he himself edited many classical authors. Once again, a philological and academic stance toward Attic comedy converged with broader nationalistideological choices regarding the future of newborn Hellas.

COMIC POLEMICS ON THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND ON THE LANGUAGE QUESTION Recovering the “Lights”: Aristophanes’ Peace By the outbreak of the 1821 Revolution, Koraes had gathered a coterie of Greek friends and followers who endorsed his linguistic program for a Hellenic compromise language drawing from both ancient Greek and the vernacular. This Enlightenment intelligentsia contributed articles, often of a polemical nature, to the circle’s well-known periodical, Hermes Ho Logios (The Learned Hermes). In 1821 an anonymous supporter of Koraes published an incendiary piece titled “Where Do the Current Controversies of the Learned Come From? or, Against the Sycophancies of N.

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Doukas and S. Kommetas, Who Accused Koraes of Persecuting Greek Education and Language.” The author inserted long quotations from Koraes’ correspondence, including the passage translated below. Here, Koraes borrowed vivid vocabulary and full-blown imagery from Aristophanes’ Peace (514–17, 460) to illustrate the deep longing for a free and Enlightenment nation supposedly felt by all Greek people. In the ancient play, the Greek farmers, in a Panhellenic effort, try to pull the statue of the goddess Peace out from the dark cave in which Polemos, the war-god, has kept her imprisoned. The frustration of the Olympian gods with the eternally quarreling Greeks themselves constitutes a key motif of the classical original. Similarly, the suppressed modern Greeks aspire to liberate their country from oppressive gloom, for which they themselves bear at least some responsibility—if only because of their former apathy and lack of cooperation. Stark black-and-white images of darkness and light, propagandistic symbols of obscurantism and barbarity versus progress (however multifariously defined by the various ideological groups), further evoke Greece’s condition before and after the curing influence of revived classical antiquity, mediated through Western European Enlightenment: The new course, which we fortunately all follow nowadays, is very long, and we are but at the very beginning of the way. The lamp, that we all wish to relight in Greece, held in darkness, lies deep inside a well. We are but holding the very end of the rope with which we must haul it up. Therefore it is now or never that we must join forces with each other, if we want to prevent the lamp from slipping out of our hands. We must encourage one another with cries of hope mixed with fear: Don’t let go now, but pull with all your manly strength: there Peace comes at last! Come on now, pull all together, pull away! What shame, what disgrace can possibly equal the shame and the disgrace that will cover the faces of the Greeks, if we stand aloof at the very start of this course, if we allow the lamp, barely hauled up, to fall back again onto the bottom of the well?30 (italics mine)

Koraes grounded this exhortation of his readers to take up individual and collective responsibility for dragging their country out of darkness and decay in a relevant Aristophanic image. Undoubtedly the aim of this profoundly Greek rather than foreign context and diagnosis was to attain a greater impact upon his fellow countrymen, the divided modern Greeks. In Koraes’ wishful thinking, all Hellenes of the revolutionary

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years would at last make the required Panhellenic, well-coordinated effort to haul the lights of Greek civilization—that is, themselves—out of centuries of moral and cultural ignorance and political bondage. The lights of classical civilization and of Western Europe would be sufficient to revive Greece’s ancient splendor, and might even lighten the remaining burden of Ottoman tyranny. The real source of all tribulations, however, was not the yoke of captivity, which was usually blamed for the failings and inadequacies of the modern Greeks. The dead weight of Ottoman rule was only a far-reaching effect, not a cause, of the grim sociopolitical situation of contemporary Hellas. As in Aristophanes’ Peace, the real cause was the chronic lack of Panhellenic cooperation, a danger that continued to thwart moral, cultural, and political recovery. For Koraes the absentee patriot, the foremost patriotic obligation of the modern Greeks, if they wanted to prove true to their ancient predecessors, was to raise their country by spreading the light of knowledge of the ancestral patrimony. Korakistika and Babel-Talk Koraes may have been convincing to Philhellenes of the Western European Enlightenment, but he gained ill repute with modern Greeks of a different linguistic position and ideology. The scholar figured as the educated pedant, for instance, in the 1824 Dialogos of Dionysios Solomos, who advocated a literary/poetic language based directly on the vernacular.31 At times, the Demoticist opponents of Koraes resorted to their own Aristophanes to cleverly inflict their satirical wrath. Iakovakes Rizos Neroulos (1778–1849), for example, wrote a comic play called Korakistika, or Correction of the Romaic Tongue (1813), influenced by both Aristophanes and Moli`ere. As the title suggests, this early-nineteenthcentury prose comedy was a parody of Koraes’ linguistic theory and exaggerated practice. The old Soterios, a pseudo-erudite admirer of Koraes and the play’s protagonist, fervently promotes the incomprehensible “language of the crows,” or “abracadabra,” in Neroulos’ shrewd pun on Koraes’ name and the Greek word for “crow,” korax. Toward the comedy’s end, this character resorts to a hardly intelligible, multisyllable word to order a cabbage salad. What Soterios could simply have called a lachanosalata becomes the preposterous eladioxidioalatolachanokarykeuma. When he is about to choke on this word, Ioanniskos, his future son-inlaw and an opponent of Koraes, comes to his rescue by dissecting the verbal monstrosity. Apart from this conglomerate dish, reminiscent of the invitation to a multicourse dinner concluding Aristophanes’ Ecclesiazusae (1169–75), other components of Neroulos’ play also inspired by Attic comedy included the use of different dialectical idioms and regional ste-

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reotypes; obscene and scatological humor; rapid, lively conversations; and clear-cut comic circumstances, such as exaggerated generational conflict. Demetrios K. Vyzantios (1790–1853) wrote a second anti-Koraes play in Aristophanic spirit, akin to that of Neroulos. Vyzantios’ prose comedy, called Babel, or the Regional Corruption of the Greek Language (1836), also made use of dialects as well as repeated references to eating and defecating. Whereas the Korakistika remained a play for reading, Vyzantios’ Babel became an early landmark in the history of modern Greek theater. The simple plot of another comedy by Vyzantios, titled Gynaikokratia, or Women in Power (1841), was vaguely reminiscent of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata and Ecclesiazusae. Satirizing contemporary urban Greek morals, the author portrayed Athenian women who aspired to usurp political power and rebelled against their husbands and masters. As we have seen, Koraes forced his own version of Aristophanes into helping to construct a repressive but nonetheless desired Greek national and cultural unity, with its own liberated territories, autonomous institutions, and uniform Hellenic language and literature. This complex but fragile nationalist ideology, however, must be read dialectically in light of the centrifugal forces that it sought to contain, whether indigenous and Romaic folk dynamics or Western-Hellenic ambition and concomitant (self-)criticism. The reception of Aristophanes’ work was restricted not only to particular social and intellectual classes, but also to specific urban geographical contexts, in which better socioeconomic conditions prevailed than in the poor and largely illiterate rural areas. Inevitably, the poet’s initial educated reading public included students and scholars-teachers, members of the aristocracy and upper classes (including the merchant class), of the thriving Greek diaspora cities. These audiences set the terms of a high culture, foreign to the lower classes, at the yoke of which Aristophanes, the linguistically pure but “foulmouthed” playwright, was constantly straining. More than Koraes ever intended, his canon for a Hellenic language and literature consolidated elitist trends of the pre- and postrevolutionary revival of Aristophanes, characterized by the primacy of the printed text—the object of private philological study of the exalted Neohellenes. Stage adaptation of the embarrassing ancient playwright would have undermined the ideological function imposed upon him. Theater, a broadly social and political act by its very nature, could have stirred up uncontrollable collective emotions through powerful visual representations of ethical and cultural realities outside the officially sanctioned values. We might wonder if Koraes’ and other Greek intellectuals’ rejection of comic translation and performance was directly responsible for the lack of

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early Neohellenic renditions and productions of the classical playwright, but the terms of the question need to be refined: mechanistic cause-andeffect arguments have little relevance when larger receptive processes are at work. Rather than the absence of Aristophanic performance being the result of Koraes’ criticism, the two phenomena essentially shared a common set of literary, theatrical, and cultural foundations. With the same select group of modern Greek writers involved in scholarship as well as in most other intellectual pursuits, similar assumptions concerning the desired moral and aesthetic goals of drama, literature, and criticism became dominant in pre- and postindependence Hellas. The early modern Greek reception of Aristophanes incorporated sociopolitical preconditions and cultural realities that penetrated, and defined the nature of, specific treatments of comedy. It was therefore more than a matter of prudery or aesthetics that Aristophanes could not be translated into either a higher or a lower register of the modern Greek language, let alone be adapted for the emerging Neohellenic stage, until as late as the mid–nineteenth century. His comedies remained unreadable on many levels of literary purpose and theatrical event until social tone and tastes in humor changed. The ethical and aesthetic argument against adaptations of Aristophanes was often based on no more than the temporary myopia of the intellectual and political order. At the same time, morality and cultural aesthetics proved to be the most convenient covers underneath which to hide the truth about the far-reaching elitist ideological investment in the appropriate canon of ancient literature befitting the educated upper ranks of the new nation. In effect, foreign aesthetics served as a pretext for the Neohellenic elitist denial of the leveling forces of native Greek and other “inglorious” sociopolitical realities. The grafting of an imported aesthetic legacy onto the “authentic” Greek Aristophanes had severe literary and cultural repercussions, however. The reception of the Athenian playwright became framed by the larger question of the proper relationship of the modern Greeks to the three civilizations in whose midst they saw themselves: ancient Hellas, modern Europe, and the living popular tradition (which typically entered least into contemporary intellectual debates). But from the second half of the nineteenth century onward, the unacknowledged indigenous culture took its revenge on the oppressive official ideology of the upper classes through the channel of Aristophanic satire. By the 1860s, changing historical conditions had undermined the primacy of the ancient Greek texts and had created a more receptive climate both for adapting and for performing Attic comedy. The educated supporters of the indigenous Greek tradition began to invoke their fiction of Aristophanes for the staging of a Romaic paravase, or popular “transgression,” of the repressive elitist sociopolitical order. The new Greek hori-

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zon made room for a revival of several classical comedies via rudimentary stage productions, accessible for the first time to broader Greek audiences in translations and acting versions in the vernacular as well as in the learned Kathareuousa language. Once exposed to the performance dimension and satirical humor of an intelligible Aristophanes, the Greek reading and theatergoing public allowed no return to an exclusively philological and academic reception of comedy.

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Aristophanes in Modern Greek: A Demotic, Satirical, and Theatrical Paravase

DEMOTIC TRANSLATIONS “You’re reading a piece of Aristophanes, and don’t get anything out of it. You pore over the scholia, looking and learning, wracking your brain. [Finally,] after fifteen minutes, getting the sense of it, you burst out laughing, saying: ‘That was funny!’ ” Thus Ioannes Psychares in 1914 captured Greek expectations, anxieties, and surprises of the closing era of the narrowly philological reception of Aristophanes.1 Psychares was one of the leaders of the Demoticist movement of the 1880s, when the Greek language debate came to a head in a climate of literary and cultural renewal. Throughout the nineteenth century the linguistic controversy had continued to polarize Neohellenic thinkers, dividing them into supporters of ancient Greek, of the “purist” Kathareuousa (in various registers), and of the vernacular, Demotic or demotike. This last category was to shape Demoticism, a cultural movement headed by Psychares and Kostes Palamas, which pertained to language, education, literature, and history. The aim of the Demoticists was to standardize vernacular Greek dialects and to adopt these rather than Kathareuousa as the official language of all aspects of Neohellenic culture and society.2 The Demotic tongue established its own more accessible tradition in poetry, while ancient Greek and Kathareuousa served nationalist purposes of official Hellenism, endorsed by scholars and learned prose writers from the conservative upper classes. Modern Greek theater developed in the no-man’s-land between literature and society and, from the 1860s on, rooted itself most tenaciously in Athens, the historical location of ancient drama and the political capital of the new nation since 1834.3 By 1868 Aristophanes was sharing in the novel role of the Greek stage, which was now mediating between progressive and revisionist Demotic poetry, on the one hand, and academic and prose literature in ancient Greek or Kathareuousa, on the other. The new cultural horizon of the second half of the nineteenth century shook the conservative orientation toward language that had informed the earlier philological treatment of Aristophanes’ oeuvre: translators for the first time rendered some of his comedies into the Greek language as actually spoken. Apparently they also con-

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ceived of the possibility of producing their translations as acting versions. This chapter will show how new sociopolitical conditions profoundly changed Aristophanes’ philological reception as well as his didactic role. Revivals of tragedy and comedy, which philologists saw as proofs of continuity, in fact stood on opposite sides of the fault line between the Hellenic and the Romaic in a fragmented culture. Aristophanic translations in Kathareuousa continued to serve Greek moral, linguistic, and educational needs. If the study of classical comedy was allotted any time at all in the Neohellenic high school curriculum, the scholarly teaching of a corpus of Attic texts was still the primary didactic goal. Aristophanes was represented by the Plutus alone, for demands of ethical relevance required instruction in repetitive patterns of eternal virtues and vices. While the Plutus continued to be carefully read and taught, both vernacular translation and play production became feasible when a larger number of scholars and teachers agreed that translations naturally lent themselves to pedagogical use in those classrooms in which teaching fluency in ancient Greek was no longer a feasible objective. Translating Aristophanes had earlier been shunned because it undermined Neohellenic reactionary endeavors to revive the ancient Greek language or to rescue as much as possible from ancient Greek via Kathareuousa. But now Aristophanes’ works supported the political statement that Demoticist translators wanted to make. The appropriation of the Athenian comic poet via Demotic renditions—a form of exegesis in itself—helped the broader Greek public in changing urban areas grapple with earlier philological and elitist assessments. Contemporary renditions of Aristophanes’ comedies followed the general lines of the theoretical Language Question. The playwright was called on to support the linguistic arguments and pedagogical concerns of all participants, whether they advocated ancient Greek, Kathareuousa, or Demotic. The emerging practice of translating and subsequently staging Aristophanes constituted another modern investment in his work. As in previous phases of reception, the poet’s mid- and late-nineteenth-century image was shaped by acute historical and sociocultural needs. Contemporary ideological and social divisions reflected in the diverging uses of comedy and tragedy paralleled the linguistic controversy: the oppositions between the Greek educated elite and illiterate mass, between the learned, conservative, Western-Hellenic strands and the largely ignored popular, theatrical, and native Romaic culture. THE DEBUT

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GREEK R EVIVAL THEATER

Before exploring the 1860s practice of translating and producing Aristophanes, I owe the reader a brief and inevitably incomplete outline of late-eighteenth- through nineteenth-century Greek theatrical life.4 Al-

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though there was a brief tradition of rudimentary stage productions of classical tragedy in the prosperous Greek diaspora communities before the Revolution, they were often overshadowed by other theatrical events, such as performances of plays belonging to the French and Italian seventeenth- and eighteenth-century baroque and neoclassical repertoire. Foreign adaptations of ancient myths, staged either in their Western language or in one of the early modern Greek translations, were traditionally more popular than the original tragedies that had inspired them. Imbedded in neoclassical aesthetics were the moralizing messages of self-effacing heroism and unconditional love of both freedom and an idolized past. These messages fed directly into prerevolutionary Hellenic nationalist aspirations to restore ancestral glory and democratic independence, as well as the ancient Greek tongue. Furthermore, many Greeks firmly attached this patriotism, suggesting tyrannicide, personal sacrifice, and possible self-annihilation as conditions for a better collective future, to the “absolute truth” and strict morality upheld by the Eastern Orthodox Church. Thus productions of classical tragedy, either in foreign guise (making contemporary theater multilingual) or in the authentic ancient version, served to prepare the theatergoing audiences of expatriate Greeks for the 1821 War of Independence and its aftermath. The thriving cultural climate of the diaspora centers generated some classicizing modern Greek tragedies as well. We learn more about the early-nineteenth-century theatrical activity of Odessa, for example, from an anonymous member of Koraes’ milieu who contributed to the periodical Hermes Ho Logios an article titled “Diatribe of a Greek, Friend of His People, on the Situation of the Greeks Living in Odessa around the Year 1816.”5 This piece contains rare eyewitness information on dramaturgy in Odessa five years prior to the Revolution. The author, who gave himself the Enlightenment-inspired epithet philogenos (“patriotic” Greek, “friend of his people”), vented his dissatisfaction that only two plays were staged locally in 1816. Moreover, these plays, bearing the typical heroic and patriotic titles of The Souliots and Themistocles, had seen deplorably few performances.6 But the attitude of some Odessans gave the author his most important reason to complain: he chastised “conservatives” who opposed the theatrical initiative of the drama-loving younger generation. Insisting on a broader and better-organized repertoire, he demanded that audiences be offered a chance to see, “as if risen from death, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes,” and also to hear “our ancestral language.” The typical interests of the early nineteenth century, linking classical drama (including Aristophanes) and the ancient Greek language, stand out in this polemic supporting young theater-lovers of Odessa in their search for a Hellenic identity via their antique patrimony. In 1816 Odessa was not subject to Ottoman rule but was exposed to

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foreign influences, mainly Russian and Western European, in drama and other areas of culture. Nonetheless, the complaints of this anonymous “patriotic” writer appear to have had a great impact. Euripides’ Hecuba, Aeschylus’ Persians, and Sophocles’ Philoctetes were staged in Odessa one year after his exhortation. The lion’s share of the 1817 repertoire, however, was still taken up with foreign and ethnic neoclassical adaptations— the Themistocles of Pietro Metastasio, The Death of Demosthenes of Nikolaos Pikkolos, and a play about tyrannicide, the Harmodius and Aristogiton of Georgios Lassanes, among others.7 In order to awaken love of democratic freedom, the dramatic figures most often invoked were Themistocles, Pericles, the later orators, and the classical tragedians themselves. Aristophanic comedy, which compromised the Greeks’ identification with the “civilized” West, remained absent from this heroismdriven program of 1817. Tragic themes alone, even if heavily adapted, were considered timeless and universal. Only the moral exemplar of tragedy, heightened by classicism, would enable the Greeks to claim a place in Europe. The “Diatribe of a Greek” expressed concretely what an anonymous author in the Ionian Island Newspaper of 1817 phrased abstractly: The theater [that is, tragedy] has been the most powerful means not only of enlightening and refining the moral feelings of nations but of the amelioration of language. Especially among the Greeks, it is the fastest school where the crowds will be taught the language and will gradually develop it until it reaches a stage of daily progress towards a revival; and if, by good fortune, a new Aeschylus or Euripides is born among us . . . our language, which has up to now appeared somewhat rough, will assume a stable character and will emerge decorous and in a sincere, authentic form.8

The Philike Hetaireia (Society of Friends) based its revolutionary practice on similar ideals of resurrecting the ancient tragedians and rehabilitating Greek language, culture, and political autonomy. This secret organization, founded in Odessa in 1814, prepared the Greek revolt against the Ottoman Turks and voiced through theater its Enlightenment-inspired nationalist ambitions of liberty, equality, and self-determination. The society frequently staged the Greek neoclassical tragedy Achilles of Athanasios Christopoulos, for instance, a staple of both preand postindependence repertoires.9 The classicizing playwright Georgios Lassanes was an important member. More generally, the prerevolutionary intelligentsia realized the nationalist potential of instructing the populace in the values of heroism, cultural dignity, and political emancipation via the rudimentary stages of semiprofessional and amateur theaters, even of private homes. High school teachers in the Greek diaspora communities staged ancient tragedies with students, amateur actors, or both.

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Native modern Greek tragedy stressed patriotic and antityrannical messages as well, while modeling itself on imported compositions and themes (primarily Italian and French). These ethnic tragedies, however, resonated among the Neohellenic upper classes only while the nationalist independence struggle lasted. The intellectual and sociopolitical elites of the fledgling nation-state of 1821 regarded the same plays as unpatriotic and antinational because of their “primitiveness,” especially when compared with the scenic refinement, the broader repertoire, and the greater professionalism of Western European dramaturgy.10 This elite sometimes even censored or boycotted native historical-heroic plays, which the lower classes still liked and which, as the national struggle continued outside the new state’s borders, had not yet lost their usefulness. For example, the patriotic play Markos Botsares of Theodoros Alkaios was censored in 1843 and, around the same year, the nationalist-heroic Regas the Thessalian (or Regas Velestinles or Pheraios) of Ioannes Zampelios was repeatedly banned—both works named after champions of Greek independence and martyrs of the liberation struggle. The general populace, however, turned the focus of those plays, which ostensibly inspired hatred of Turkish tyranny, on a new, internal enemy: the Western European management of Greek cultural and political affairs. Popular entertainments dating from the time of the Tourkokratia further engaged the interest of the lower strata of society. Thus the theatergoing audience split, anticipating sociopolitical frictions that were to divide the Greek stage of the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The pre-independence nationalist theater had a long-lasting impact on postrevolutionary productions of original ancient tragedy, which the intelligentsia continued to promote as the cultural expression of Greek unity, high morality, and linguistic authenticity. The Athenian school performances in 1858 of Sophocles’ Antigone and Philoctetes may serve as examples of students and amateurs reviving classical tragedy. In Neohellenic intellectual life of the mid–nineteenth century, printed texts and translations of ancient and neoclassical drama remained the privileged possessions of the upper classes. But oral representation, an art form in which more people could share, thrived among the broader urban public; it gradually incorporated rudimentary theatrical productions of ancient drama. Whereas performances of classical tragedy readily served morally uplifting and nationalist purposes, Attic comedy did not, and therefore was not staged in Athens until the “Aristophanic moment” of 1868. The foreign comedies of Moli`ere and Goldoni had long enjoyed success among the modern Greeks, however, and were available in Greek translations and acting versions decades prior to the first renditions of Aristophanes. Dominating the postrevolutionary revivals of classical tragedy delivered

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either in ancient Greek or in Kathareuousa was the continuing tradition of staging Western European adaptations of the Greek classics, made popular by the urban upper classes in particular as part of their mimicry of Western manners. The elites of mid-nineteenth-century Greek society also encouraged performances of French and Italian operettas and melodramas, which were the first professional stagings in Greece; these productions were subsequently adopted by the commercial Athenian theaters. Otto, the first king of Greece (reigned 1833–62), and his Bavarian entourage were determined to model the cultural life of the new capital, including its theatrical activity, after mainstream European examples. For several years the Greek government under King Otto even subsidized Italian and French opera companies to ensure their frequent visits to the primitive playhouses of Athens. Those Westernized tastes, prevailing throughout the nineteenth century, established a fixed, elitist Athenian repertoire, typically consisting of performances of Italian and French classicizing tragedies, operas, operettas, and melodramas. The native stage was all but eclipsed by this imported theater, produced either by foreign companies traveling to Athens or by Greek commercial troupes (thiasoi) specializing in Western European imitations. For example, the four foreign adaptations of Medea, by the Frenchman Ernest Legouv´e and by the Italians Vittorio Alfieri, Caesar Della Valle (often staged in the modern Greek translation of Zampelios, Alfieri’s disciple), and Giovanni Battista Niccolini, were far more popular with Athenian troupes and elite audiences than was Euripides’ original. Europeanized neoclassical tastes were manifest also in critics’ laudatory descriptions of the grand manner in Western theater and in their frequent comparisons between foreign adaptations and native stagings of the classics. Some Greek productions of ancient drama were judged by the standards of the celebrated 1865 Athenian performances of Legouv´e’s Medea and of Racine’s Ph`edre, the title roles being played in both cases by the famous Italian actress Adelaide Ristori. Another overwhelming foreign success in Athens was the 1899 Parisian production of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex by the renowned Jean Mounet-Sully and the Com´edie Fran¸caise. From the mid-1860s on, both the lower and upper classes of Greek society began to attend local theater more regularly. Native drama in Athens was finally stabilized during the cultural renaissance of the 1880s, which generated, among other works, the neoclassical Kathareuousa tragedies of Demetrios Vernardakes, a moderate conservative in the language controversy. His 1893 patriotic tragedy Fausta, based on the history of Constantine the Great, appeared around the same time as the first Demotic novels and plays of the prolific Gregorios Xenopoulos (1867– 1951). The Municipal Theater (Demotikon Theatron) of Athens did not open until 1888, the year in which Psychares became the most visible

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proponent of Demoticism with his book My Journey, which attempted to lay out the scientific foundations of the vernacular.11 Outdoor summer theaters, which began in the late 1860s, engaged the masses’ interest with storytelling and other oral deliveries, mimes and pantomimes, variety shows of song and dance, imported circus-related spectacles, and the fare of itinerant entertainers, including shadow theater plays featuring Karaghiozes, the beloved trickster-hero of Anatolian descent. Foreign influences were visible also in other genres of popular performance, such as marketplace shows given by magicians, jongleurs, animal trainers, tightrope walkers, and other acrobats, as well as in the scores of French danseuses of questionable reputation. The high demand for these popular entertainments impeded both classical theater and native drama from making inroads with the broader public. Besides, stage acting signified something base, vulgar, or ludicrous to the indigenous populace. Nevertheless, it proved of great significance for the development of Greek theater, especially for revival and other comedy, that the thriving oral and folk spectacle culture had traditionally provided a forum for coded free speech during periods of occupation and repression, as during the Tourkokratia. The Greek provinces in particular fostered an oral legacy of religious rituals, laments, and tales that long resisted elite or official efforts to force them into the molds of the learned WesternHellenic culture. By the late nineteenth century the diversions of the common people also included the “dramatic idylls,” verse plays in the vernacular on contemporary heroic and Demotic characters, as well as Parisian-style boulevard, vaudeville, and revue shows, which were especially beloved by the newly emerging middle class. Aristophanes’ perceived accessibility supported this vision of the people’s communion through an organically unified, uninterrupted popular-literary expression covering oral tradition, Byzantine folk songs, Demotic poetry, and the performed speech of drama. Greek art forms that spoke to less elevated audiences and capitalized on public attitudes, however, have not yet received sufficient scholarly attention, and assiduous efforts are often required to collect the materials needed for such analysis. The more formal Athenian winter theater, with its neoclassical adaptations and occasional revivals of ancient tragedies, failed to excite nonacademic, general audiences but continued to attract the elite. During most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, productions of authentic classical tragedies were economically and logistically feasible only when undertaken by upper-class dilettanti. Producing original tragedy required a large number of chorus members and actors, who needed to be trained in the delivery of ancient Greek verse or Kathareuousa. These formal tragic performances, if staged without state subsidies, were hardly ever able to cover their production expenses with box office receipts.

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Recurring ideological and class conflicts in the Greek theater market also thwarted the broad development of revival drama, as did the absence of a professional cadre of stage managers and practitioners. Many basic conditions required for an improved modern Greek as well as revival theater, including formal instruction in dramaturgy, were lacking until shortly before the turn of the century. Consequently, commercial Greek companies avoided presenting original classical tragedy until that time. An exception was the 1896 production of Sophocles’ Ajax by Demetrios Kotopoules (father of the better-known actress Marika) and his thiasos Proodos or “Progress.” Because it was part of the festive celebration of the first modern Olympic Games, which attracted many Greek and foreign visitors to Athens, Kotopoules even managed to make a profit from Sophocles’ play, delivered partly in ancient Greek, partly in Kathareuousa. Sophocles, the most beloved tragedian of fifth-century B.C.E. Greece, was again called on as the most patriotic, “nationalminded” (ethnikos) dramatist. With the Persians, Aeschylus made his modern Athenian debut in 1889. Euripides was most popular because of the Western European adaptations of his Medea, offered by touring foreigners and by native commercial companies dependent on imported models. In general, however, amateur productions by Greek academics without stage training spurred the earliest theatrical revival of ancient tragedy and comedy. The Greek amateur troupes of the second half of the nineteenth through the early twentieth century helped bridge the gap between textual reception and the first phases of the Greek and international stage tradition of classical theater.

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Professional Producer Joins Demotic Translator The earliest Athenian stage adaptation of Aristophanes’ Plutus, in contrast with the dilettanti productions of ancient tragedy, originated in the cosmopolitan artistic circles of Athens and Constantinople. It was first presented at the Athens Theater on 21 January 1868 by Sophokles Karydes and his commercial thiasos “Sophokles,” in a pun on the names of the director and the classical tragedian.12 The progressive stage director, translator, satirical poet, and journalist used as acting version a Demotic prose adaptation of 1861 attributed to the Constantinopolitan Michael Chourmouzes (1801–82).13 Initially, four performances per week were scheduled. For this busy program, Karydes’ established native Greek theater company could count on the professional talents of the bettertrained actors and actresses of the time. Chourmouzes’ satirical inclination justifies his personal choice of Aris-

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tophanes as a model author, but it does not explain why he preferred the ancient text of the Plutus over any other play. I find no evidence that the semi-allegorical, less ad hominem work Plutus had yet been translated, let alone performed, in postindependence Greece, although it could boast the longest tradition of textual reception in Byzantine and modern Greek scholarship and education. On the threshold between Old Comedy and postclassical Middle and New Comedy, the Plutus on the one hand presented an interesting dramaturgical challenge to Athenian troupes facing obstacles to the progress of nineteenth-century Greek theater. On the other hand, more members of both the cast and the audience brought at least some prior reading knowledge of the Plutus with them to the contemporary stage. Also, the minimal role of the chorus in the Aristophanic original reduced the huge financial and logistical burden usually associated with producing Greek classics. Karydes’ production of the Plutus owed its success largely to Chourmouzes’ decision to politicize his rendition. The translator also brought an interesting historical and personal background to his work on Aristophanes. Constantinople, Chourmouzes’ birthplace, had enjoyed more international cultural exposure than Athens had, and its cosmopolitan merchant and middle class as well as its literati had embraced the Demotic idiom at a much earlier stage. Chourmouzes himself worked both in Constantinople and in pre- and postindependence Athens as a journalist and playwright of sociopolitical works and of popularly acclaimed comedies. Chief among his comedies of manners were Leprentes and Ho Tychodioktes (The Adventurer), both written in 1835, which satirically expressed the people’s resentment against the Bavarian-born King Otto and his German court, administrators, and technocrats. Chourmouzes had been an active participant in the Revolution and, along with Karydes, looked on the members of the palace elite as the latest foreign occupants of a newly enslaved Greece. In their eyes, those outsiders had no right to dictate the cultural and sociopolitical life of a people that shared few, if any, of the contemporary Western European notions of “propriety.” Together they voiced the political frustration of the lower and popular classes, which saw the foreign leaders again belittle folk culture and deny them the essence of their Romaic Greekness. Just as the elites execrated popular Romaic tastes, so the common ranks rejected many symbols of Western European civilization that overemphasized the classical dimension of Greek identity and credited the ancients with every achievement but Christianity. By the mid–nineteenth century, the terms Romios and Romiosyne had become familiar self-designations of ordinary Greeks referring to their recent struggle against Ottoman hegemony and stressing the native religious and cultural roots of Eastern Orthodoxy and of the Byzantine tradition. Both terms also captured the proverbial individualism of

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the Greek “spirit” or “character,” encompassing courage, resilience, and cunning (poneria). Satirical Journalism and Aristophanes The final years of Otto’s reign were marked by unrelenting attacks on and censorship of the press, which motivated political opponents like Chourmouzes to abandon Athens in order to avoid prosecution. In this oppressive climate he published his 1861 adaptation of Aristophanes’ Plutus anonymously.14 Also around 1860 the first Greek satirical newspapers appeared; they became widely popular in Athens, where they reflected public opinion on the vicissitudes of society and politics. Printed in the Demotic language, these papers reached a much broader reading public than did any other contemporary medium with literary pretensions. They further encouraged the ambitions of the rising urban working and middle classes for economic and political emancipation. The journalist-editors selected appropriate names to capture the self-assigned missions of their satirical papers. It is therefore significant that several nineteenth-century journals chose the name Aristophanes, spreading the poet’s reputation as caustic satirist among the Greek populace. Sophokles Karydes himself seems to have initiated this tradition: as early as 1858, he issued the first Athenian paper to lay claim to Aristophanes’ name, titled Aristophanes and the Magnetized (two years later, he founded another newspaper bearing the loaded name of Phos, or Light; 1860–77). In its prologue he introduced the theme of Aristophanes’ return to Athens from dark Hades to resume his comedy writing on current subjects. This theme and its execution, modeled on the Frogs, proved prophetic in light of the 1868 stage revivals of the Plutus. In the words of the revived Aristophanes, “I have come from Hades with full permission of Pluto and on request of the dead. I came to visit Athens and, upon my return here, to give to the Athenians some new comedies of mine, treating the present-day state of Greek affairs.” The underworld shades had begged Aristophanes to return to Athens and use his eternally relevant comic voice to raise a modern sociopolitical consciousness.15 Karydes identified with the ancient poet’s mid-nineteenthcentury vocation: continually hounded for attacking the Bavarians, he was living in the gloomy state of semipermanent breach of the law. In this interpretation, then, the dead roaming through Hades, urging the Aristophanic Karydes to defend the people’s interests, may be identified with other silenced Greeks. The blacklisted Chourmouzes was one of those denied full realization of their Aristophanic potential. In 1874 a second satirical newspaper named Aristophanes appeared in Athens under the directorship of P. P. Pegadiotes. The choice of title

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occasioned a tragicomic justification in the opening issue, reminiscent of Karydes’ earlier borrowing from the Frogs. Central again was the fantastic idea of a deceased playwright’s ascent from the underworld—but here summoned by the living to campaign for the well-being of a threatened and bereaved Greece: The heart-rending voice of the long-suffering Fatherland and her plaintive groans resounded so loudly that they reached even Hades, and awoke the great and glorious Aristophanes, asleep for 2,300 years now. To the desperate voice of his Fatherland, Aristophanes could not possibly be unresponsive. At the very moment when the weak voice of the living was unable to stop the frightful conflagration that, like an oncoming thunderbolt, threatened to reduce their land to ashes, Aristophanes simply had to rush to their rescue.16

Aristophanes’ double comic anabasis from Hades may also be interpreted as marking his rise to light from the darkness of logiotatismos (conservative linguistic and academic pedantry).17 The daylight of modern Greek actuality, itself shadowed by severe contemporary problems, demanded a reemergence of the brighter side of Aristophanes’ comic language and talent: his satirical humor, made accessible in vernacular journals, translations, and public performances, which had been deplorably neglected by elitist intellectuals of eighteenth- through mid-nineteenthcentury Hellas. Given how imagery of light and darkness had been (ab)used in the Neohellenic discourse on bringing Enlightenment to Greece-in-gloom, readers could have missed neither the symbolic value of both passages nor the subtle irony that Enlightenment was ultimately responsible for reducing Hellas to the obscurity of logiotatismos. In both programmatic statements, Aristophanes has been identified with one of his own dramatic characters; he has become a protagonist of one of his own plays. However, in a reversal of the Frogs, it was no ancient tragedian who needed to be retrieved from the dark underworld but the comic poet himself, whose unique position precluded competition. Greek newspapers named Aristophanes firmly established the pattern of writers seeking ancient models in order to find ideological affinity or even to affirm their satirical identity through comic imitation. The agents of this receptive process characteristically perceived the playwright, his oeuvre, and their own critical journalism as inseparable. This wholesale identification of the comic poet with his plays and, on a diachronic level, of the modern satirists with their classical archetype was fostered by the dearth of information about Aristophanes’ personality. Modern Greek fictions searched for biographical facts in the ancient comic corpus, which was regarded (and given too much weight) as the only tangible manifestation of the playwright. The historical equation between Aristophanes

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the satirist and his works continued to prevail in the nineteenth-century Greek satirical press, as well as in the marginal or paratheater of the first decades of the twentieth century.18 It constituted only part of the many ideological messages that contemporaries unhesitatingly deduced from the poet’s life and oeuvre. The practice of distilling the “real” historical and political Aristophanes from the comic (!) ideas and characters of his work has been one of the most enduring of modern Greek receptive dynamics. The Plutus Finally Performed In 1862 the Bavarian Otto was ousted and was succeeded the following year by the more liberal-minded Danish king, George I. Otto’s death in 1867 seemed to signal an opening toward greater liberty in cultural and political life. The relaxation of censorship foreshadowed a new freedom in which artists espousing a range of ideologies could address the daily concerns of the reading and theatergoing audiences. This moderately progressive climate made it less hazardous for Chourmouzes and Karydes to stage their antiroyal play in 1868. In 1867 the royal wedding of King George and the Russian princess Olga had occasioned the festive, semiprofessional premiere of Sophocles’ Antigone, performed by trained actors in cooperation with Athens University students.19 The play was staged at the Herodes Atticus Theater, which was newly excavated though not yet restored. The production used the Kathareuousa translation of Alexandros Rizos Rankaves and was directed by the archaeology professor Athanasios Rousopoulos. Though a new Greek version, it chose the musical score of Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy created for the 1841 German Antigone of Ludwig Tieck, which had become the main attraction in mid-nineteenth-century revivals of the tragedy.20 The 1868 repeat performance of the Athenian Antigone was followed by an amateur production of the Oedipus Rex of Sophocles, who was the all-time favorite of German romanticism and French neoclassicism alike (the latter with a predilection for the Oedipus plays).21 Sophokles Karydes and his professional company Sophokles posed a serious threat to the very name and conformist reputation of the patriotic fifth-century B.C.E. tragedian. Despite the recent political and artistic renewal, the Athenian authorities in 1867 rejected Karydes’ request that his thiasos be allowed to stage a play to welcome the royal newlyweds. In the issue of Phos of 17 November 1867, Karydes wrote: “we open the doors of the national [Greek] Theater, on the stage of which Sirens of corruption used to dance until recently. Once we hold this sacred precinct of the Muses in long-lasting possession and call to its altar select Greek actors, we will bring onto the stage the masterpieces of Hellenic, Ger-

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man, English, and Italian letters. At the same time, we expect to open a course of honor for young Greek poets respectful of ancient glory.”22 Karydes strengthened his argument by adopting the common Enlightenment idea that the Muses of literature had long since left Greece, their original homeland and unredeemed ancient topos.23 Yielding in her competition with the (female) stars of French and Italian light theater, operetta, and melodrama who, like sirens, kept the native people in their grip, the displaced Muse of dramatic poetry founded Western European theater of the neoclassical and romantic period. Once she returned to the worthier abode of mid-nineteenth-century Hellas, the Greeks would choose which masterpieces and performers of foreign literature would be allowed access to the Muses’ restored sacred precinct. At the same time, native actors, poets, and playwrights emulating ancient artistic achievements would finally also be able to shine in Greek interpretations of Western European high-quality drama. In January 1868, a few weeks after the publication of Karydes’ request and its refusal, the director of the Sophokles opened his production of Aristophanes’ Plutus at the Athens Theater (also called the Boukouras Theater, after its owner). This indoor playhouse, then the only one in the Greek capital, provided a less impressive but a more popular stage than the quasi-symbolic Herodes Atticus Theater.24 Despite its Roman date and unrestored condition, the latter was reserved for officially sanctioned productions of ancient tragedy commemorating the royal nuptials. Apart from the Antigone, this limited repertoire featured the 1868 stagings of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex as well as a formal student production of Aristophanes’ Clouds in Rankaves’ Kathareuousa translation. Obviously, Karydes presented the comedy Plutus in the Demotic and politicized rendition of Chourmouzes not as a complement of but rather as a critical, Romaic counterpart to the state-sponsored performances of classical tragedy. His production likewise stood in opposition to the conservative Hellenic Aristophanes of the official Kathareuousa translator Rankaves. Denied the artistic and political license to participate in the formal public celebrations, Karydes recruited the dead playwright as the main accomplice of his own theatrical coup. Both Aristophanes’ ancient name and the traditional choice of the Plutus might have given an initial appearance of compliance with the unspoken rules of the contemporary Greek establishment. But the poet did not play by any rules: his satirical potential and sociopolitical relevance proved uncontrollable. For the first time in the nineteenth-century reception of Aristophanes, a professional stage director called on the classical playwright to embody a political as well as artistic paravase. Karydes and Chourmouzes’ “transgression” not only functioned as an act of sociopolitical revisionism, but also exposed the prior literary and theatrical politics of neither translating nor performing

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Attic comedy. The freedom, candor, and openness commonly ascribed to the poet’s ancient democratic society were condensed and personified in the figure of Aristophanes himself during this first phase of his mid-nineteenth-century theatrical revival. Karydes’ production of the Plutus of Chourmouzes posed a threat to the state revival of the Greek classics, as can be deduced from the reaction of the university students who were rehearsing their own Clouds in Rankaves’ scholarly translation. Although the students had initially scheduled their academic performance for the same month as the Plutus (January 1868), they postponed it several times. The conservative Clouds, avoiding a public confrontation with the first popular Aristophanes production, finally opened at the Herodeion in May 1868. Even prior to the Plutus premiere, derogatory comments appeared in the newspaper Auge (Dawn) on 8 January 1868: Karydes was attacked for sabotaging, by means of a more accessible revival, the “noble” attempts of the amateurs and university students inspired by Rankaves. The conservative critic of the Auge touched on the most interesting issue of the Aristophanic moment of 1868: even those who had never seen the ancient playwright staged perceived the two productions as perfect artistic and ideological opposites, and therefore in open competition with each other. This enduring Greek receptive dynamic of dramatic competition or “stage dialectics,” present also in classical and postclassical theater, became most prominent during the second half of the twentieth century. The Unbearable Lightness of a Translation At the time when rewriting and even translating Aristophanes’ words was still taboo, Chourmouzes called his five-act adaptation of the Plutus a “free paraphrase.” In accordance with the theatrical conventions set by the first Western revivals of ancient tragedies, he placed little emphasis on preserving the episodic form of the original. Not only did his vernacular prose translation do justice to Aristophanes’ vivid language and satirical humor, it was also, for the first time, intelligible to the broader Demoticspeaking public, a rapt audience for the 1868 premiere and repeat performances. These were important linguistic and literary achievements in an epoch in which logiotatismos impeded the translation and stage adaptation of ancient drama in the native tongue. The accessibility of Chourmouzes’ genius proved itself again when the renowned modernist theater director Karolos Koun reused the 1861 paraphrase as the acting version for both his 1936 and 1957 innovative and successful productions of the Plutus. He thereby created public, scholarly, and theatrical interest in Chourmouzes’ rendition. Chourmouzes’ choice of Demotic was influenced by the traditionally

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stronger position of the spoken idiom in Constantinopolitan intellectualartistic as well as middle-class circles. It was also encouraged by the demands of developing ethnic Greek (particularly satirical) theater of the 1860s and by the practice of rendering French novels and Western European comic and melodramatic plays into Demotic. The imported literary and theatrical tradition and emerging authentic Greek drama, both popular genres geared toward broad public performance, were generally disinclined to adopt the learned Kathareuousa language. Thus contemporary developments of Greek theater helped promote the Demotic tongue for the earliest stage production of Aristophanes, while the mode of classicist archaizing continued to require an elevated, reconstructed idiom for revivals of ancient tragedy. In fact tragedy, signifier of a phantom past, remained under the tight control of the logioi, and hence missed nineteenth-century opportunities to be embraced by the larger urban audiences. A native Constantinopolitan Greek repertoire, counting Chourmouzes among its chief contributors, began to take shape around the year 1860.25 In 1861, for instance, Alexandros Zoeros published one of the first local neoclassical dramas, titled The Descendant of Timoleon. Twelve years later, Spyridon Vasileiades brought out his Galateia (1873), a representative Greek romantic play based on the ancient myth of the sculptor Pygmalion and the maiden Galatea. Both works saw immediate and repeated performances. Meanwhile, the number of translations of French and Italian novels, comedies, and melodramas published and performed in Constantinople rose from the late eighteenth century through the 1890s.26 Examples included renditions of popular Western romancers (Marmontel, Gessner, Mme de Sta¨el), modern Greek stage adaptations of the comedies of Moli`ere and Goldoni, and several acting versions of the French romanticist dramas of Victor Hugo and of Alexandre Dumas, as well as dozens of Greek translations of the works of lesser-known but very prolific nineteenth-century French playwrights (e.g., Adolphe Dennery and Auguste Anicet-Bourgeois). The contemporary Constantinopolitan press, however, severely criticized the improvised nature of many of these widely disseminated Greek translations and stage adaptations of French and Italian originals. Even worse, according to these journalists, the local reading public was addicted to this poor-quality literature and drama, which thus harmed indigenous morality. In the preface to his Plutus “paraphrase,” Chourmouzes chastised the younger generations for reading translated romantza (foreign novels) more avidly than the Greek classics. These redigested cultural imports left the local reading and theatergoing audiences unprepared for native literature and drama, including Chourmouzes’ other comedies with their biting sociopolitical censure. The author’s bitter rebuke of the uncritical

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contemporary public not only revealed envy of the great success of writers and translators of foreign trivia, it also expressed general concern about destructive Greek xenomania, which, in Chourmouzes’ view, caused various artistic problems, among them lack of creative productivity and of open-mindedness. Translators often selected minor works of the foreign light repertoire, while theater directors made their renditions easily accessible.27 Chourmouzes ironically asserted that if he only knew French, he too would be translating lightweight French novels en vogue. Recalling some (fictitious) examples of silly romances, he justified his own choice to paraphrase Aristophanes’ Plutus: The triumph of those translators of romantic novels prevents me from sleeping! My personal sense of honor (philotimon) truly feels very tempted when I see laurel wreaths crowning their heads, and I grow jealous with envy of the fortune of these “benefactors” of the Greek youth!28 But unfortunately, I myself do not know French. Otherwise, I too could be translating The Queen’s Decrepit Old Shoe, just as others have rendered The Queen’s Necklace. Therefore, I made a paraphrase of the Plutus of Aristophanes. I adapted part of the play, of course not for the sake of our romantic youth, since “many were the volumes of novels they saw and whose meaning they learned.” No, I adapted the Plutus for the benefit of readers like me, whose uncultivated sense of beauty prevents them from grasping the invaluable moral “wealth” of those novels, subjects of past, present, and future translations.29

Most likely, Chourmouzes invented the titles of the Greek translations ridiculed in the passage above.30 But the double mention of accessories belonging to the queen expressed his disgust with insipid Bavarian court etiquette and with Western European niceties of manners in general. In Chourmouzes’ biased observation, fellow translators dealing with those superficial tastes and trinkets in derivative literature were nevertheless honored with laurel crowns reminiscent of those given the ancient Olympic victors. Despite his deft allusion to Homer, Chourmouzes did not choose to translate ancient epic or tragedy but rather the Plutus, whose contemporary relevance he further underlined in his preface. Dedicating his literary talent to the vomolochos Aristophanes, his best bet to counter the dreaded rage for foreign novels, Chourmouzes subverted the earlier conservative practice of denying the playwright translation in either Demotic or Kathareuousa. For the Constantinopolitan artistic and political rebel, the Attic satirist, more than Homer or the tragedians, provided a mirror to current Greek realities and offered a polemical, revisionist model for representing the conflict-ridden years of King Otto’s decline in power. In a witty inversion of a famous opening line from Homer’s Odyssey (1.3: “many were the cities of men which he [Odysseus] saw and whose mind he learned”), Chourmouzes presented himself as a modern

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Ulysses, traveling throughout the Greek world on a personal odyssey. He gained inside knowledge of the astea or “cities” of Homer, but the youngsters of his time have only read “volumes” of imported novels, teuchea, from which they distill an essentially foreign, artificial, and corrupting perspective on their own narrow lives. Experience obtained from volumes of romantic novels cannot compare with real-life exposure to peoples and places. The passage concludes with Chourmouzes’ obvious pun on Aristophanes’ Ploutos, part of the “rich” ancient Greek tradition, as opposed to the questionable ploutos of depraved foreign novels, which is hard for people as “blunt” as he claims to be to detect. Chourmouzes believed the rules of upper-class social behavior to be Western European, and he read them as a culturally suspect threat to indigenous Greek purity and innocence. By denigrating social and literary codes of foreign making, he bolstered his personal opinion that ancient Greek civilization would ultimately triumph over French and other imported cultural products. Most likely, he deliberately belittled those products’ quality, along with the level of discrimination of his fellow translators, in order to proclaim Aristophanes an apt symbol of indigenous literary and cultural values. In his nationalist fervor, Chourmouzes not only decried conformism with foreign standards but also rejected the knowledge of Western European civilization at large, priding himself on not knowing the French language. The author’s ironic portrayal of both himself and Aristophanes as unlearned in, and uncomfortable with, Western ends and means further defined the qualities of an increasingly conscious national culture of the Greek people: it helped establish the values of Romaic ideology. Aristophanes’ Plutus figured not only as an ancient classic but also, in Chourmouzes’ vernacular adaptation, as a classic of modern Greek literature. As the ancient comic text and its subsequent performance came to represent artistic expressions of popular Greek nationalism, Aristophanes attained the prominence of a native patriotic hero and indigenous Romaic genius. Praised as an artist concerned with the simple people, the Athenian comic poet of modern and ancient times would continue to outshine the insipid French as well as their Greek agents-translators. With their unregulated satirical vigor, the classical playwright, Chourmouzes, and Karydes embodied the superiority of Romaic wit over foreign depravity and artificiality. This loaded perception fed directly into current Greek populist discourse, which was easily appropriated for the patriotic cause of the lower and middle classes. In the hands of the Constantinopolitan translator and of the stage director Karydes, Aristophanes became a powerful tool and focal point of the Romaic nationalist sentiment of generations of Greek people. Earlier and ongoing philological discussions used the poet’s work to validate a variety of ideological positions of

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the Western-Hellenic type, but Chourmouzes and Karydes were the first to create an engaged literary character, a native popular emblem of Demotic-style heroism and subversive political alignment. Chourmouzes not only restructured the form and language of the Plutus but also redirected Aristophanes’ morality and political ideology. Appropriating the play’s classical authority, he mediated those innovative ideas of Western politics and society that he himself fervently advocated (despite his rejection of other European trends and goods), such as the socialist ideology that he pioneered in Greece.31 In his prologue the translator introduced key concepts of his socialist interpretation of the Plutus, which prefigured even by title Marx’s Das Kapital (1867).32 Justifying his choice of the Plutus for translation, Chourmouzes defended the universal relevance and his sociopolitical reorientation of Aristophanes’ fourth-century B.C.E. play: “Wealth (ploutos) is the Mammon of the hierarchy of priests . . . , it is the strength of kings, and the backbone of power. Wealth is what ministers care about, . . . and what civil servants are devoted to. . . . Wealth is the wisdom of fools, and the myopia of the wise. Wealth is the goodwill of lawyers, and the panacea of doctors. . . . It is food for the hungry and appetite for the satiated. As for myself, ploutos means relief!” (8–9). Chourmouzes gave a new political interpretation to Aristophanes’ Plutus not simply by how he framed the original text (e.g., with his preface), but even by altering the play itself. For instance, he depicted his comic characters discussing social and economic equality among people, a bold ideal raised by the mid-nineteenth-century Western European working-class movement and by contemporary intellectuals. In the lengthy exchange between Chremylus and Penia, or Poverty (Plutus 415–609), for example, Chourmouzes introduced the concept of koinoktemosyne (communal ownership of goods), which is absent from the ancient text—though in his Ecclesiazusae Aristophanes did satirize related ideas, perhaps developed at the time by the philosopher Plato.33 Chourmouzes transformed part of the original exchange between the two characters: Therefore things should happen as I say: the honest and the just must all share Wealth on equal terms, without anyone of them having anything more than anybody else: all equal. POVERTY Are you too then asking to install the common ownership of goods? CHREMYLUS Of course I am. Since all of those whom I mentioned are honest and just, all of them must also be equally rich. (50; italics mine) CHREMYLUS

Chourmouzes replaced the sycophant of the original Plutus with a figure named Pseudaphosiomenos, or “Pseudo-devotee,” a nineteenth-century epithet that ridiculed those loyal to the monarchy of King Otto.34 Using such caustic satirical anachronisms, he blamed the members of

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native and foreign elites for the unjust political and economic conditions of the contemporary Greek society. Earlier in the paraphrase (20–21), Chourmouzes criticized also the much-resented old politics of money and power, mediated via patronage, rouspheti (the illegal dispensation of favors), and the right mesa, or influential contacts. He was especially harsh toward those defenders of King Otto who had helped him stay in power even after the 1843 military coup. This putsch, which had widespread popular support, forced Otto to ratify the long-denied constitution that nominally transformed the kingdom of Greece into a parliamentary democracy. However, Prime Minister Ioannes Kolettes allowed the king to establish what was in effect a parliamentary dictatorship.35 A prominent aide to Otto, Kolettes also ruthlessly practiced rouspheti, brigandage, and electoral manipulation. Chourmouzes’ assault, voiced by Chremylus and by his talkative slave Cario, was unbridled: One boasts about being well-connected with all the great people. In order to strip the small and simple folk. . . . [H]e who snubs the others, does he not do that because he has money? CHREMYLUS And those perhaps who interfere with the common people’s affairs, do they not act like that for your sake[, Ploutos]? CARIO Yes, and add on those whose patriotism is for sale. CHREMYLUS And even at a very high price, my poor chap. CARIO And he, boss, who runs around night and day, like a madman, to reinstall his master on the throne, is he not motivated by Wealth? CHREMYLUS Of course, just like his friend, that old fox, who is now playing the patriot, does he not boast about the wealth that he acquired by collecting the land levy [of one-tenth] from one, and by imposing taxes on another? And now he brings charges of embezzlement against those same people whom he has stripped himself? CARIO Dear fellow, who are you talking about? You don’t mean to say him who extracted promissory notes from the poor and from the orphans at the rate of five hundred thousand, and who is now gaining interest on that money? CHREMYLUS Yes! Just like that other person, who kept saying that he would serve justice, and that he would give his own opinion to the best of his conscience, did he not say that in order to extort money? CARIO And those, boss, who cannot bring themselves to say “No.” CHREMYLUS Yes, those too, just like those others who say “Yes” all the time: they do that to enrich themselves. (20–21) CHREMYLUS CARIO

For Chourmouzes, historical change validated present departures from a model of the past. Yet his political references and deliberate anomalies brought home to the Greek public Aristophanes’ contemporaneity. The novel practice of inserting anachronisms in ancient texts was highly effective: even a few alterations sufficed to make the entire classical original reflect on modern sociopolitical circumstances. Chourmouzes’ anachro-

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nisms and incongruities worked beyond the level of verbal shifts and changes, contributing heavily to his intended dramatic reinterpretation of the Plutus. They simplified not only Attic diction, imagery, and phraseology but also the fourth-century B.C.E. characters and their messages, stressing their current relevance. As he had done with the Pseudo-devotee, Chourmouzes resolved more complex Aristophanic figures into easily comprehensible types. The play that had introduced the distinct character-types of Middle and New Comedy readily lent itself to this modern reshaping. In simplifying and politicizing Aristophanes, the translator had to address debated philological questions of motivation, such as those concerning the comic role of Penia and the utopian dimension of the Plutus. Chourmouzes provided a modern, socialist-inspired rationale for his characters’ behavior by doing more than rewrite entire scenes and transform existing comic figures; he also mapped out explicitly the new ideological meaning of both given and added passages. Thus he attached a concretely sociopolitical finale of his own making to his Plutus paraphrase. This ending, distantly reminiscent of the finale of the Acharnians, took the form of a dialogue sung by the chorus of farmers engaged in noisy ideological dispute. Here Chourmouzes once again stressed the violent discrepancies between the life, and particularly between the eating habits, of the wealthy and the poor: while the rich drink champagne and consume fancy fruits, seafood, and caviar, the poor have only some stale bread and smelly sardines to eat; they season onions with vinegar, make two bites out of one, and try to sleep whenever struck with hunger. Chourmouzes organized this concrete imagery in a series of one-line oppositions presented in a rapidly paced stichomythic dialogue. His sketch of poverty versus affluence reflected also the antithesis between good and evil. Linking moral ideals to other kinds of popular emotion became a salient part of the pro-Romaic narrative of Aristophanes. His comedy presented itself as a voice of the people, publicly speaking for them as a collective yet also providing them with a medium through which they might express themselves more independently. Chourmouzes took great freedom in recasting classical comedy at a time when the original texts of ancient tragedy were still viewed as sacrosanct. Applying modern socialist thought to the historical Plutus, he realigned Aristophanes ideologically to defy philological and linguistic conservatism. His vernacular adaptation stood as a landmark of total transgression, or paravase, of the text-based, academic tradition of the Plutus. Undoubtedly Chourmouzes chose the most established Aristophanic play—the centerpiece of the conventional canon of Attic comedy—as the stock onto which to graft his socialist ideology in order to achieve greater (shock) effect. In their scheme of linguistic, theatrical, and ideological paravase,

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Chourmouzes and Karydes recovered the politicized satirical humor of Aristophanes and drew it into modern Greek Demotic literature and popular drama. Thus the comic poet came to be known not only as the satirist par excellence but also, by extension, as a progressive force committed to social criticism and political reform. The playwright’s new image as a genius of sociopolitical satire, sharp-edged yet ancient and therefore more easily accepted, determined for decades how Greeks defined Aristophanic humor. The Demotic and politico-satirical movement that rediscovered Attic comedy in the 1860s gained momentum throughout the last third of the nineteenth century, with the support of the Greek popular press. Aristophanic satire was embraced by the Athenian light theater of the first four decades of the twentieth century, and its popular presentation reached a wider range of urban social strata than any academic or official interpretation did. As Aristophanes came to embody the intimately linked Demotic and satirical forces of the 1860s, some lingering conservative perceptions of his language and humor faded. For the broader Greek public the irresistible synthesis of vernacular language and satire overrode the linguistic concerns, moral preoccupations, and Hellenic-nationalist impositions of the pre- and postrevolutionary years. The ancient comic poet became an icon of liberty, that defining value of native Romaic identity since the Ottoman occupation of the ethnic Greek lands. Connecting the historical struggle for political and personal freedom with “inherited” poetic genius and stinging wit, common Greeks defined themselves and Aristophanes in opposition to all things foreign, whether Turkish or Bavarian. As Chourmouzes’ pronouncements indicated, the understanding of Romaic character as embodied by the playwright was grounded in a satirical, Demotic idiom that condemned the influence of foreign language, morality, and culture (particularly French). Chourmouzes and Karydes promoted Aristophanes as the literary and theatrical standard-bearer distinguishing the Greeks from their external as well as internal enemies and competitors. The poet’s symbolic role in the struggle for liberty made it necessary for the translator and stage producer to reconcile their comic pursuits with the increasingly potent myth of Aristophanes as a Romaic national hero, vanquishing the French in a war of wit and leading his own people to Demotic literary and cultural victory.

HEADSTRONG ACHARNIANS (1856)

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Ioannes Raptarches Fighting the Flood of French Novels In 1856 the Constantinopolitan scholar and poet Ioannes Raptarches (1812–78) published his annotated prose rendition of Aristophanes’ Acharnians in a mild and very direct Kathareuousa idiom. Raptarches

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might have influenced Chourmouzes, for both pioneer comic translators identified with Aristophanes’ virtues as a national Greek poet, superior to any figure of contemporary French literature and theatrical life. Indeed, in his prologue, Raptarches sounded a programmatic note similar to Chourmouzes’. He attacked the younger Greek generations for their blatant indifference to classical texts—particularly galling in light of their great enthusiasm for translated foreign novels, which he called xenika athyrmata, or “foreign playthings.” Chourmouzes and Raptarches shared the cosmopolitan environment of mid-nineteenth-century Constantinople, where French and Italian romances, operettas, and melodramas all but eclipsed native cultural activity. After complaining about Greek scholars’ unwillingness to make even the best of classical literature more widely accessible via translations, Raptarches invoked the “authoritative” voice of Aristophanes himself to rebuke contemporary youth: All these remarks pertain to some of our narrow-minded youths, with only a smattering of knowledge, fervent followers and supporters of the foreign element. They criticize the ancient poems severely and treat them with disdain. They are also madly engaged in reading and translating accursed [i.e., foreign, mostly French] novels, which do not generate any other result than to corrupt pure morals and to poison the innocent soul. Those I dare to call, in the words of the Comic Playwright: “Worthless youngsters of a bad stamp, obscure and bizarre fellows, who have no patriotic feelings at all.”36

The Aristophanic quotation is Acharnians 517–18, part of Dicaeopolis’ speech in self-defense before the chorus. Raptarches’ alteration of the second line (the original reads “worthless, ill-coined, and bizarre”), adding the loaded notion of lack of ethnismos, or “patriotism” perhaps, transforms the quotation into an acutely modern charge. He thereby defended his own work, appreciative of the ancient Greek heritage and therefore “patriotic,” against those convinced that he would have better spent his time translating classical tragedy instead of comedy. Raptarches went on to excuse Aristophanes’ vulgarities as inherent in the natural origins and characteristics of Old Comedy. He accentuated the audacity of his own translating enterprise in a time when only tragic plays were being canonized as printed texts, foreign adaptations, and local Kathareuousa versions. Concluding on a note of false modesty, he requested his readers’ goodwill. After this polemical prologue there followed a long philological introduction to Aristophanes’ life and work, to ancient Greek theater, and to the Acharnians. Here, Raptarches made a concerted effort to clear the poet of the common accusations, which he enumerated. Not surprisingly, much of this 1856 list included criticisms persisting from the era of Koraes; but most were based on moral rather than on literary and artistic

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criteria, amounting to a condemnation of the playwright’s lack of decorum. One of Raptarches’ tactics was to explain the existing vomolochies by pointing to ancient comedy’s ritual roots, which allowed for apotropaic crudity. In fact, his refutation prefigured a common late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century academic view on the origins of classical comedy, which continue to be a matter of dispute. Raptarches’ statements anticipated by a generation some of the arguments made by the Cambridge School of anthropologists and classicists that Old Comedy was derived from phallic rites.37 Raptarches did not provide sources for his claim; instead, he seems to have composed a rare synthesis of the current state of Aristophanic reception, drawing from scholarly and semischolarly debates conducted among Greeks and foreigners in the mid–nineteenth century. Unfortunately for the student of Neohellenic literature and drama, serious literary criticism and commentary were infrequent and occasional at the time of Raptarches and Chourmouzes. One often finds instead polemical or quasi-apologetic prefaces and short dedicatory essays. But these biased prologues, dedications, and introductions to Attic comedy in general functioned as modern analogues to Aristophanes’ parabaseis and, as such, marked their own “transgression” both of current conventions and of the original text. The Acharnians: An Anachronism? Raptarches preferred Aristophanes’ oldest preserved and less decorous play, the Acharnians, to the well-established Plutus, yet did not state his reasons. But the teacher-translator’s overly modest dedication to his students at the Greek Commercial School (Helleno-Emporike Schole) at Chalke, near Constantinople, gives some hints: “To the young people, eager to learn (philomathei), who study at the Greek Commercial School at Chalke. To You, youth, lover of the arts (philomousos), this small and most imperfect [translating] effort is dedicated. The one who lovingly worked (philoponesas) on it regards only your vote of approval as the sweetest pleasure and reward for his efforts” (dedication; italics mine). The compound adjectives with philo- express Raptarches’ wish to see his translating work serve current educational purposes. This concern for the younger generation’s “yearning for knowledge” of Greek antiquity was a recurrent theme in the prefaces of the earliest Neohellenic encyclopedias and philological studies as well as of translations, highlighting the deliberate creation of new cultural and social beings who would cultivate “the love for inquiry, learning, and investigation.”38 Raptarches borrowed imagery from both ancient Greek law courts and dramaturgy in referring to the verdict that his students and broader audience would pronounce on this first printed translation of an Aristophanic

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play with a reputation far more ambivalent than that of the Plutus. His pioneering act of making the less commendable Acharnians accessible to young Constantinopolitans “yearning to learn” might be voted on, as it were, by jurors gathered in court, or by the judges and public at classical drama competitions. Repeating the word psephos (vote) throughout his preface, Raptarches further bolstered his identification with Aristophanes in situations of poetic and political evaluation. The ancient playwright addressed his theater audience and jury members in the parabaseis of most of his comedies, openly urging them, though always in a comic vein, to cast a vote favorable to his own dramatic work and to the public policies it advocated. As he sought recognition for this first printed translation of the rarely selected Acharnians, Raptarches’ own assimilation of, and creative deviation from, the kernel of the traditional comic parabasis brought him closer to the hero Dicaeopolis as well. This protagonist of the Acharnians, with whom Aristophanes himself presumably identified, is comically subjected to an elaborate trial weighing the audacity of his political views and of his “pacifist” initiative in establishing an individual peace treaty with the Spartan enemy. Aristophanes’ Acharnians, featuring a sequence of trade negotiations (with the Megarian and the Boeotian, for instance) in a climate of economic hardship and foreign embargo, had special appeal for both teachers and students at a school designed to impart commercial skills. Moreover, in the spring of 1856 the Greek Commercial School at Chalke had staged a student production of the Hecuba, Euripides’ powerful antiwar play.39 This Hecuba performance and the very readable translation (and possible staging, though it is unattested) of the Acharnians might have constituted a larger, pacifist reading curriculum and theater study program. Raptarches and other advocates of this project had good reasons to resort to classical drama, and to the Acharnians in particular, for assailing the hostile suspension of trade relations and the destructive repercussions of extended periods of war. From May 1854 until February 1857 they saw British and French troops occupy Piraeus to enforce Greek neutrality during the Crimean War between Russia and the Ottoman Empire.40 Although Raptarches refrained from inserting obvious anachronisms in his work, his choice of the Acharnians was itself extremely pointed. His translation provided an ancient commentary on contemporary reality, as well as a public expression of Greek indignation at foreign intervention. In Chourmouzes’ Plutus, attacks on the elites supportive of King Otto stood out conspicuously. Raptarches preferred not to add elements alien to the original text of the Acharnians. Instead, he presented the entire unaltered comedy, with its notoriously topical humor, as currently relevant despite its fifth-century B.C.E. origins. Thus, the play itself functioned as an anachronism mirroring the dire political, military, and espe-

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cially economic conditions of the final months of the foreign occupation of Piraeus. It became an established practice in the modern Greek reception of Aristophanes to use one of his comedies unchanged as a running commentary from the past to reflect on the present. In 1856 the translator and his students could watch the results of the paralyzing blockade from distant Constantinople, looking at the distress of Piraeus and Athens through the comic prism of Aristophanes’ Acharnians. As an audience, they resembled the Athenian public of the original production of 425 B.C.E., when the Acharnians transformed the war-related hardships inflicted on neighboring city-states (particularly Megara) as well as on Athens into comedy. In his 1856 prologue, Raptarches scorned the arrogance of Western Europeans who were laying claim to the classical Greek literary legacy, as if the modern Greeks were unfit custodians. The West owed its recent escape from ignorance and barbarism to ancient Greek culture, which, in his opinion, was not a global patrimony but the inalienable property of modern Hellas alone. In fact, the world had gained at local expense: the fabled ancestral heritage left little glory for the Greeks themselves. Raptarches used Enlightenment imagery to stress not the reawakening of bereft Greece under Western influence, but the civilizing of the European nations by the Greek heritage: “It has been incontrovertibly recognized that, in general, the writings of our glorious ancestors not only bestowed brightness onto the world of old, but they also did not cease to enlighten and transform the nations of today. The diffusion of these writings obviously brought about the magical dispersal of light from one pole to the other, the moral transformation of peoples wandering in the dark, and the rebirth of nations rolling about in the gloom of ignorance and barbarism” (5, italics mine; see also 7–11). Raptarches accused the Western Europeans, “envious because they themselves have no comparable patrimony,” of ingratitude and disrespect toward Greece and its inherited classical culture. While singling out the British and the French, the representatives of traditional Enlightenment, for his most violent rebuke, he did not explicitly refer to their ongoing occupation of Piraeus. For Raptarches and his Greek contemporaries, however, the connections between the British and French annexation of the literary and cultural legacy of Hellas and their simultaneous blockade of Piraeus and threat to Athens, the very heart of Hellenism, must have been obvious. Just as the British and the French kept the Greek capital under long-term siege, so did they besiege the ancient literary heritage. Thus Raptarches’ animosity against Western European cultural paradigms was linked to his condemnation of political, military, and economic foreign intervention. The need for Romaic-style resistance and for patriotic acts subverting non-Greek policies was most acute around the mid-

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1850s. Translating the ancient Acharnians to counter the cultural invaders’ flood of novels was as much an act of transgressive resistance, or paravase, as was the popular sabotage of military and economic sanctions imposed by the foreign occupying forces. The literary and artistic creativity demonstrated by both Raptarches’ Acharnians and the 1868 Plutus of Chourmouzes and Karydes characterized the mid-nineteenth-century reception history of Aristophanes. Neither Constantinopolitan translator took an exclusively academic or text-based interest in the Athenian playwright. They were not concerned with reconstructing the ancient form, content, and background of Aristophanes’ work, or with deducing conservative moral, didactic, and historical conclusions from his corpus. Forsaking the time-hallowed philological tradition, they instead exploited the poet’s dramatic oeuvre as a living literary and theatrical experience serving common sociopolitical purposes and associated the playwright with the defining traits of the Romaic Greek national character. Yearning for freedom from foreign powers and from economic hardships, Raptarches, Chourmouzes, and Karydes chose to deploy not ancient tragedy or Homer but classical comedy, which was ripe for a new ideological appropriation because of its relevance to the 1850s and 1860s. Most subsequent modern Greek translators and producers of Attic comedy insisted that their adaptations be interpreted politically as well. Rewriting the Athenian playwright became a dominant practice at the height of twentieth-century ideological strife, and proved necessary for performing older adaptations with a recognized public argument and commitment. Aristophanes voiced not only a literary but also a broader sociopolitical protest framed by popular nationalism of the transgressive, Romaic kind, demanding freedom from both imported cultural norms and foreign intervention. Reviving Aristophanes’ works became an act of Romaic patriotism as opposed to the Hellenic-style nationalism of the conformist productions of ancient tragedy.

THE 1868 CLOUDS: POPULAR AND CONSERVATIVE STAGE EXPECTATIONS CLASH “Guarding the Nation”: Keeping the Comic Audience under Control Following the stage premiere of Aristophanes’ Clouds at the Herodes Atticus Theater on 12 May 1868, the Athenian newspaper Ethnophylax repeatedly thanked the local police for actively contributing to the rebirth of ancient drama in its historical land of origin!41 Ethnophylax, or Guard of the Nation, was the well-chosen name of this semiofficial organ that promoted conservative revivals of the Greek classics. Here it was praising

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the Athenian police forces for intervening to control the rowdy crowds of nonelite Athenians who, bored with this and previous stagings by students and amateurs in the formal, incomprehensible Kathareuousa of Rankaves, disturbed the performance and harassed the inexperienced actors for parroting their lines. On this and other occasions, a police presence was needed to ensure that a minority of interested spectators could watch the learned performances to the end.42 This small group typically consisted of civil servants pressured by the administration to attend and of students and scholars who followed the Kathareuousa or ancient Greek lines in the textbooks they brought along to the theater. Another article in the Ethnophylax of 23 May 1868 further complained that the broad urban public gave preference to the “dregs” of Western European markets—the acrobats from Italy and the French grisettes, popular actresses of questionable talent and reputation. Fortunately, the journalist continued, not everyone shares this enthusiasm for poor-quality spectacles; there are still many Athenians who love productions of their “national stage” and who actively support “patriotic theater.”43 The student premiere of Aristophanes’ Clouds in the strict Kathareuousa rendition of Alexandros Rizos Rankaves (1809–92) aligned itself with the “patriotic” revivals of ancient tragedy celebrating the 1867 royal wedding. The contemporary Athenian public, however, had already experienced the Demotic Plutus production of Karydes in January 1868, countering the ongoing program of official, state-approved performances of the Greek classics. By May, when the conservative staging of Rankaves’ Clouds finally took place after many postponements, these audiences realized that Aristophanes did not have to speak Kathareuousa or ancient Greek. Instead, the poet’s work could readily be enjoyed in a more natural register of the Greek language that allowed for humorous anachronisms and even for biting political satire. Therefore the broader public had no scruples about preferring imported spectacles to the boring Clouds of Rankaves. The scheduled repeat performances of this student and amateur production were apparently canceled, suggesting that the premiere was perceived as a failure.44 The hostility of the general Athenian audiences, which in the space of a few months had gained vivid awareness of antithetical, competitive approaches to Aristophanic staging, was directed not so much against the attempts to revive ancient drama as against the conservative language choices of academics-turned-producers. Rankaves and Reactionary Translation Politics Rankaves had published his Kathareuousa translations of Aristophanes’ Clouds, Peace, and Birds in the same volume with Sophocles’ Antigone in 1860. The scholar-philologist and prominent exponent of the conserva-

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tive language ideology was also a prolific translator from Italian and German and one of the most important writers of poetry and fiction of his time. When his Kathareuousa rendering of the Antigone was repeatedly selected as the acting version, Rankaves quickly established a reputation as official translator and academic resource for Hellenic-style revival productions of ancient tragedy. These performances in Kathareuousa continued to be presented as illustrious and inspiring selections from the nation’s literary and theatrical patrimony. Not surprisingly, even the 1868 comic revival of the Clouds reflected the conservative linguistic and ideological background of Rankaves’ formal translations in the archaizing language. In the long prologue to his “faithful” philological translations of 1860, which were free of anachronisms and vulgarities, Rankaves defended the continuity of ancient Greek metrics and prosody. He translated the three comedies into strictly metered verses in the learned tongue and justified the chosen metrical patterns with prosodic annotations and careful references to the originals. Even his preference for the Clouds, Peace, and Birds may have been inspired by his academic interest in the study of the most complex Aristophanic meters. Footnotes explaining metrics abound as well in Rankaves’ own comedy Koutroules’ Wedding (Tou Koutroule ho gamos), published in 1845. Despite the play’s fair success with the contemporary Greek reading public, its overly strict prosodic form kept it from being staged in Athens until twenty-five years later. The work reflected the author’s concerted effort to revive the metrical patterns and traditional structure of Old Comedy.45 In his scholarly introduction, Rankaves stated that he intended his contemporary Aristophanic play to prove the continuity between classical and modern Greek meters.46 He also imposed the fifth-century B.C.E. comic structure of epeisodia onto Koutroules’ Wedding rather than dividing his work into acts and scenes as prescribed by the aesthetic conventions of European neoclassical and romantic dramaturgy. Rankaves inserted parabaseis and even introduced a chorus, though it remained disconnected from the comic action. The scholar’s cultivation of Aristophanic forms was deployed in the endless, untranslatable words that he coined (e.g., in Ecclesiazusae 1169–75). Rankaves’ formal mimicry of Aristophanes might have been technically perfect, but it left the overall impression of humorless sterility and it lacked any theatricality. Perhaps most damningly, the translator failed to realize that the stilted Kathareuousa language was by its very nature incompatible with the ancient Greek metrics and prosody that he strained to revive in his own comedy as well as in his Aristophanic renditions. The impulse for Rankaves’ translations of Aristophanes came from erudite scholarship, and he perpetuated linguistic and philological practices typical of the late eighteenth through the first half of the nineteenth

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century. The students and amateurs who staged his Kathareuousa version of the Clouds wished to contribute to the patriotic and state-sponsored celebratory events of 1867–68. Neither his translation nor production originated in professional Greek theater activity, as did the January 1868 semicommercial Plutus staging of Karydes and Chourmouzes. In contrast to the popular Plutus, the amateur premiere of the Clouds proved a didactic academic exercise that resuscitated, in all its minute detail, the form but not the humor of Aristophanic comedy. For its nonprofessional players, the Clouds functioned largely as an explication de texte, instructional not only for philologists and students of Attic comedy but also for broader civic audiences—or so the elitists believed. As in the city’s Golden Age, the general Athenian populace gathered at the foot of the Acropolis (albeit in small numbers and at the Herodeion) to attend a premiere of Aristophanes, only to find that he now spoke stifling Kathareuousa, as unintelligible to them as the original ancient Greek. Topoi of Hellenism The organizers of the 1867–68 official program of conservative tragic productions selected the second-century C.E. Herodes Atticus Theater for their stagings. Its interior newly excavated between 1857 and 1858, the Herodeion did not undergo full restoration in marble until a century later (1950–61), when the effects of its ancient destruction by fire were finally remedied. In the formalist mind-set of the time, however, it was the postclassical performance space nearest to the Theater of Dionysus, in which the tragedians of the Periclean Age had first presented their works. The insistence on spatial continuity, however strained in its application to the Roman Herodeion, expresses the desperate need to make ancient remnants fulfill current expectations, to authenticate physically the narrative of patriotism. The symbolically more powerful Dionysus Theater could not be used because of the objections raised internationally by archaeologists, who feared that elaborate scene building and the repeated influx of visitors would further damage the precariously preserved remains. Staged at the Herodeion following several productions of Sophoclean tragedy, the 1868 Clouds was approached not as a modern theatrical presentation of an actual play but as an authentic ancient text and literary monument to be reconstructed in a visible, archaeologically correct manner. In their naive, literal-minded idealism, Rankaves and his amateur actors saw it as their scholarly duty to restore the entire structure of the fifth-century B.C.E. Clouds, including its metrical patterns. Yet the performance could never be authentic, since both the physical stage, set apart as a recently excavated site, and the audience consciously visiting the “original setting” would always be inauthentic. To continue my meta-

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phor of revivals fashioned on architectural principles, the ancient text was rebuilt carefully according to Western European classicizing perceptions of how to retrieve and preserve tangible relics from the Greek past. Just as Western neoclassical art and architecture flourished in Athens in the 1860s, replacing traditional urban building forms with imported (German) ones, so did Rankaves’ Clouds represent European rationalism imposed as the only proper way to resurrect an ancient comedy. Not surprisingly, Rankaves’ sincere but amateurish attempt to restore classical plays as seen by the ancients themselves did not captivate the broader theatergoing audiences of Athens. The public regarded the student production of the Clouds as merely an extension of the 1867–68 conservative stage revivals of Sophocles and of their Hellenic-nationalist agenda. In many respects this first purely academic performance of a conformist Aristophanes reinforced the text-bound approach to Attic comedy. Via his translations in strict Kathareuousa and in classicizing meters, Rankaves endorsed the Enlightenment model of rigid philological learning and preservation of a seamless past. Presenting little real acting, the Clouds premiere in static lines merely illustrated his scholarly rendition. In fact, Rankaves treated the play’s dramaturgical dimension in a historicizing manner reminiscent of the learned philologists’ attempts to restore as many authentic readings of the ancient text as possible. He staged comedy as a reactionary cultural statement by preserving, to the best of his knowledge, the historical and archaeological conditions of Aristophanic theater. This dependence of performance on prior philological study and translation was reversed at the beginning of the twentieth century, when such imitative practice became unacceptable for Attic comedy. In the 1868 competition of the first two Aristophanic revivals, the prize of popular and commercial success went to the production that responded best to the growing demands for a Greek theater and culture with broader socioeconomic foundations. Rankaves’ rigidly academic approach doomed his Clouds. The general audiences of mid-nineteenthcentury Greece were indifferent if not openly hostile toward conservative stage revivals of Sophoclean tragedy; an Aristophanes imitating the conventional modes of tragic interpretation was even less appealing. A few months earlier they had warmly welcomed the 1868 Plutus, which served, for the first time, popular performative rather than reactionary scholarly purposes and which confidently displayed politicized humor behind its ancient plot and comic characters. Chourmouzes and Karydes problematized the Athenian playwright as imprisoned by the clich´es of solely academic reception. Their collaborative creation of a live performance for a contemporary audience unshackled Attic comedy from Neohellenic as well as classical precedents, fashioning a bold Aristophanes of

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attack and riposte who, in his own right, undermined the dominance of Western European thought in Greece. Whereas formalistic imitation and repetition were thought to instill respect for the ancients, creative stage interpretation of a subject like Aristophanes readily led to questioning the weighty authority of the past. The Aristophanic debut of Karydes and Chourmouzes marked a turning point in the history of the poet’s modern Greek reception for two reasons. First, their Plutus was produced with the conscious intent to entertain a larger urban audience of lower- and middle-class theatergoers. Second, since both Chourmouzes and Karydes wrote original Demotic plays themselves, their ancient “colleague” and “soul mate” benefited directly from the new associations with professional and commercial Greek comic theater that they drew on. Given the didactic and moralizing mind-set of contemporary academics approaching Attic comedy, Aristophanes, the outcast-genius, could not have gained much from his dubious compatibility with other Greek classics. Both the translator and producer, steeped in the native dramatic and satirical tradition of social criticism, were ideally qualified to cause a first breach in the forced alliance between a humorless Aristophanes and other “patriotic” revivals of ancient theater. Whereas Rankaves’ playwright remained alien to transgressive satire, Karydes launched the poet into a movement intended to reach new audiences and to enhance the native popular stage. Rankaves’ learned interpretation ran contrary to the kind of spectacle entertainment that the larger public expected in the 1860s. Consequently, the less-educated social strata did not hesitate to write off his Aristophanes as another intellectualist product of the foreign and native logioi. The failure of the 1868 Clouds further proved that the poet’s stage popularity depended less on the comedy selected than on the language of the acting version and on the broader vision of the players and producers. The same comedy was an overwhelming success in 1900 in the Demotic-satirical translation of Georgios Soures (see chapter 3). Applying Chourmouzes’ satirical stance to Rankaves’ choice of play, Soures once again enlisted Aristophanes in the battle of the forces competing for Greek national identity. But what the Aristophanes of 1900 came back for, and what he came back as, had already been determined by the cultural impact of the first stage revivals of 1868. The legacy of those productions was two opposed readings or faces of Aristophanes: the Romaic incarnation of transgression, frankness, and wit versus the academic and elite model of propriety and of moral and intellectual superiority. The former vision of an intelligible, amusing, and genial Aristophanes braced the masses’ insistence on their recent Ottoman as well as ancient past. When the Hellenic-style revival of Rankaves’ students lost out in popularity to the Romaic Plutus, Aristophanes was

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drawn irrevocably into the Greeks’ struggle to come to grips with the different strands of their history. The main sociopolitical dichotomy underlying the 1868 (re)constructions of the classical poet centered, once again, around the contest between the Western-Hellenic and the indigenous Romaic perception of Greek national identity. Both the official and popular readings were prompted by a desire to conserve the ethnic culture, defined in diametrically opposed ways: the Clouds promoted Hellenic, philological, didactic, and conformist patriotic interests, supported by Kathareuousa, whereas the Plutus held up Romaic mass spectacle, Demotic-satirical speech, and populist-transgressive nationalism. Although Raptarches, Chourmouzes, Karydes, and Rankaves probably all agreed that Aristophanic comedy as well as ancient tragedy could illustrate the nation’s national and cultural heritage, they disagreed on how this heritage should be diffused and how widely it represented the multilayered Greek tradition. The core question was whether Aristophanes’ stage reception should encompass the popular language and folk values of the Byzantine and Ottoman periods, values hitherto overlaid by the much-resented Western prototypes of the powerful Hellenic ideology. Fixating on a utopian classical past, Western Hellenism ignored or rejected recent popular traditions that differed significantly from those prevailing in industrialized European societies. Benedict Anderson has argued in Imagined Communities that the nation is conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. But in the second half of the nineteenth century, modern Greek theater, culture, and society at large did not reflect this “horizontal comradeship.” The divergent translation and stage practices of Rankaves and his students, on the one hand, and of Chourmouzes and Karydes, on the other, underscore how different the nationalist aesthetics and politics of various Greek social classes were. The semiperformative representation of the learned Kathareuousa Clouds was highbrow, directed at a narrow segment of society. This elite, however, set official culture and actively propagated its own tastes and standards. By contrast, the witty and politico-satirical Plutus of Chourmouzes and Karydes was middlebrow and addressed a broad-based audience of speakers of the vernacular. Here “broad-based” can be construed as covering the lower through working middle classes, attracted also by the production’s socialist message. For the rising ranks of Greek peasants and laborers, a social class caught between a rapidly emerging urban proletariat and the privileged and propertied upper strata, this socialist Aristophanes served as an ideological crutch: it offered them the basic myth of paravase and of popular solidarity in this paravase. Thus the antagonistic readings of the 1860s effectively constructed different constituencies and different nations for plays by the same author. As a symbol of artistic liberty and ideological paravase, the RomaicDemotic Plutus of 1868 exposed the failure of an independent Greece to

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consolidate in national unity. The two approaches to adopting Aristophanic language and stage potential demonstrated a clear break not only between genres but also between the ideologies underlying the different production styles and modes of transmission. In reception both at the time and subsequently, the playwright came out of this cultural and social strife on the side of the Romaic, vernacular, and performative tradition. Chourmouzes and Karydes presented the poet as a figure of intense, identifiably personal experience, and they opened up comic revival theater for frank and fearless satirical depictions of that experience. Their discovery of the Romaic Aristophanes, however, was followed by a silence imposed by the elitist classicism and philological decorum of the Kathareuousa logioi, who effectively discouraged grand-scale comic stage adaptation for more than three decades. The Athenian dramatic career of the Plutus was suspended until 1904, when Thomas Oikonomou finally staged the play anew with the Royal Theater, marking an ironic course from antimonarchism to royal patronage.47 But by the turn of the century, Aristophanes brought with him not only the baggage of his own ancient past but also the entire ambivalent weight of nineteenth-century Greek cultural oppositions. After 1868 Aristophanes functioned simultaneously as a link to the archaizing strands of previous decades and as a powerful ideological weapon for the future. Perceived as the Romaic antithesis to stifling logiotatismos, which had been exacerbated by the language struggle of the 1880s, Aristophanes became the most productive and adaptable personality of the classical and recent Greek heritage. The comic stage premieres of 1868 proved that the same ancient author could be recruited by diametrically opposed sociocultural interests. Similarly, the same play, the Plutus, served multiple purposes from the eighteenth through the mid–nineteenth century: it helped spread conservative registers of the Greek tongue, it was traditionally incorporated in Neohellenic encyclopedias among the great works of ancient drama, it was subjected to careful revisions of its language and morals, and finally it led the multifaceted paravase of all of these. As this one comedy was continuously reappropriated by changing ideologies, it acquired a modern history, first via encyclopedic and philological studies, and subsequently via Demotic translation and popular stage production. The response of the Greek public to this widening Plutus similarly changed from receiving a mere literary text to accepting a daring theatrical performance. The Aristophanic original, never fixed, was enriched by the diverse readings of the public as well as practitioners. Meanwhile, the aesthetic norms governing audience involvement in text and production shifted accordingly. The coexistence of varying aesthetics in literary and theatrical reception was as commonplace as the cohabitation of competing ideologies within Greek cultural and national territory.

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The Lysistrata Euphoria of 1900 to 1940: Sexual and Antifeminist Paravase [T]he Greeks dislike the pornographic drama. . . . There is no capital where vice is so little conspicuous as at Athens. . . . As a distinguished Greek novelist once said to me: “We are not yet sufficiently civilised to be immoral.” —William Miller, Greek Life in Town and Country

THE DAMP BASEMENT of the Athens Theater Museum holds four curious albums of photographs, theater programs, press clippings, fragments of scripts, and heterogeneous personal memorabilia ranging from congratulatory notes and business cards to pieces of silk and even snips of wigs. Two of these albums belonged to Marios Rotza¨ıron and the other two carry the name of Georgios Christodoulou. This unassuming collection of unpublished source materials and theatrical paraphernalia provides a unique key to the most peculiar phase in the history of Aristophanes’ reception in Greece. Central to the stage careers of both Rotza¨ıron and Christodoulou were bawdy Lysistrata adaptations, of whose scripts the albums preserve only excerpts. Other sources document that Rotza¨ıron and Christodoulou often employed the published and widely available Lysistrata and Ecclesiazusae (1904–1905) of the Demotic translator Polyvios Demetrakopoulos. Lacunas nevertheless face the modern scholar examining the semipublic, pornographic performances of Aristophanes’ women’s plays, their audience reception, and their sociological meaning as a stage phenomenon of the first forty years of the twentieth century. What characterized those bold Lysistrata adaptations, and why were they written? Why was the comic exchange limited to all-male casts and audiences, and how did this condition the shows’ functions? What new conception of Aristophanes encouraged such radical revision and fullscale rewriting of the women’s plays? And did the historically defined matrix of the original comedies intersect with modern gender politics and social struggle? The phenomenon of early-twentieth-century Greek stage practitioners rewriting Aristophanes radically and successfully demonstrates clearly that the mode of adaptation itself had become widely accepted. From 1868 on, when the Plutus in Demotic performance had fueled a paravase of the established moral and sociopolitical order, tam-

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pering with the work of the ancient comic genius was no longer taboo. Both the text’s philological sanctity and the requirement that a translation be exact or literal had been eroded. Throughout Aristophanes’ nineteenth-century history, Greek logioi had consistently reduced the Lysistrata to the most marginal textual position. In his encyclopedic work Grammatika, Konstantinos Oikonomos, a devotee of Koraes and a cleric-teacher at the Smyrna Gymnasium, left us a telling example of moral condemnation of the play: “The indecency of this work causes innocence to blush, and opens the mouth of the enemies of the Muse of drama to blaspheme theatrical performances with more impudence.”1 Oikonomos was not the only critic who regarded the Lysistrata as the one Aristophanic comedy that ought never to be revived. The Cretan scholar Markos Mousouros, compiler of the first printed edition of the Aristophanic corpus for the Venetian publisher Aldus Manutius (1498), had excluded both the Lysistrata and the Thesmophoriazusae. His influential edition had remained the standard text for nearly three centuries. Nor had any of Aristophanes’ women’s plays been part of the Byzantine triad. The Lysistrata made a comeback in the 1900s, however. A play without an early modern Greek past, it gained the most impressive future, which the present era continues to enrich. The early-twentieth-century boom in “disreputable” productions of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, as the play emerged from centuries of oblivion, received deplorably little critical attention in the contemporary press. Subsequent stage professionals and critics, though aware of this semipornographic tradition, rarely gave it serious consideration. Giannes Sideres (1898–1975), who collected and studied many of the materials currently held at the Athens Theater Museum, referred to this “embarrassing” stage practice only in brief, derogatory terms.2 His dismissive attitude, which I hope to overturn, influenced the negative judgments of the occasional later scholar and journalist (e.g., Nikos Anastasopoulos), who inevitably condemned this “stain” on the Greek revival of Aristophanes and of ancient drama at large. Critics vilified the “third sex” for going public with the most intimate acts. They chided in particular the dearth of imagination of the risqu´e Lysistrata productions, which for them typified the lack of originality of the Greek cabaret-style repertoire prior to the Second World War. Fearing that a brutalization in taste would ruin audiences for any intelligent fare, they blamed Aristophanes for appealing to the “lowest instincts.” But the following analysis of this peculiar episode in the poet’s reception reveals complex sociocultural dynamics, which shed a more positive light on the hedonist cabaret-Lysistrata of 1900 to 1940. Classical scholars generally maintain that the Lysistrata of 411 B.C.E. is one of Aristophanes’ least politicized works because it contains fewer topical gibes and more sexual humor than his others.3 The poet com-

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posed the play without the traditional Old Comic parabasis. Since its background of the Peloponnesian War can easily be transposed to any war in Greek or Western European memory, the Lysistrata has offered its producers attractive options under different historical circumstances.4 Aristophanes’ other women’s plays, the Ecclesiazusae and the Thesmophoriazusae, also hinge on sexual language and action. As early-twentiethcentury interpreters further reduced these plays’ literary, political, and historical dimensions, they freed up more room for obscenity, which they attached to the original female protagonists (Lysistrata and Praxagora in particular), prime agents of sexuality. THE LYSISTRATA

OF THE

“HEDONIST THEATER”

Shortly after 1900 the Lysistrata started to enjoy massive popularity with the all-male patrons of the commercial Greek theatro tes hedones (theater of [sensual] pleasure). Through the 1930s the small, often itinerant, and male-only bouloukia (unruly troupes) of this demimonde presented Demotic adaptations of the play in ektaktes parastaseis (special productions). In the better-organized Athenian equivalent of the French-imported soir´ee noire theater, famous male transvestites functioned both as stage producers and as leading female actors of their own “special troupes,” which also toured provincial capitals and Greek communities abroad. Typically referred to as imitateurs or metamorphotes (transformers), these self-made managers and protagonists of the Greek paratheater included Marios Rotza¨ıron, Georgios Christodoulou, Kyros Kyros, Marios Demopoulos, and the Manos Brothers (Manos and Stilpon).5 Although some metamorphotes also parodied famous actresses such as Marika Kotopoule and Kyvele (Adrianou), most specialized in playing the title role of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata for all-male audiences. Rotza¨ıron (pseudonym for Giannoules, 1890–1941) was active on the Greek stage beginning in 1915, both as Lysistrata and as Praxagora. A poorly preserved advertisement poster, for instance, proudly announces a typical 1923 soir´ee noire performance in four acts with Rotza¨ıron as Lysistrata. Female theatergoers are “austerely” forbidden to attend this show, with its “classical music” and “ancient dances” by Billy Barkoulliero (otherwise unknown). The poster carries drawings of naked women and of a satyrlike creature in various suggestive dance poses. Even though the central picture obviously portrays a naked woman, the performance was by a Greek male transvestite with a Westernizing artist’s name. Only in the late 1920s did Rotza¨ıron admit actresses to his Thiasos Aristophaneion, though he himself continued to play the leading roles. Featuring daring improvisation, his versions were also renowned for their opulent sets and costumes. Rotza¨ıron’s disciple Christodoulou

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staged similar Lysistrata adaptations but specialized in skits from popular epitheoreseis, or the Athenian revues, which I will revisit later. Pictures from the time show him as Aristophanes’ heroine and as a modern femme fatale wearing beautiful silk dresses, complete with fancy headgear and conspicuous jewelry. Most metamorphotes apparently also used sexual props and accessories. This eye for detail shown by men dressing up in women’s attire suggests that they were fantasizing female identity as well as body parts. For more than thirty years the Manos Brothers enjoyed great popularity in the Greek provinces performing the Lysistrata in their own idiom of Smyrna. Their Eastern tongue added a new dimension to the modern sexual language and politics governing the classical play: as often in antiquity, the prosperous coast of Asia Minor stood for the luxurious, delicate Orient, which generated effeminate males. Therefore, the spectacle of men playing eroticized women, who spoke the current Smyrnean tongue, must have confirmed early-twentieth-century Greek popular prejudices that feminized incoming male Anatolian refugees, along with their rebetic music. These biases were probably even stronger in the conservative provincial regions, where the Manos Brothers achieved their biggest successes, than in the urban and less isolated areas of Greece. It remains little known whether the 1922 Smyrna Disaster affected the productions of the Manos duo.6 Contemporary and later spectacles, particularly those of the marginalized Athenian underworld, generally maintained connections with the circles and the music of the rempetes, the stranded Asia Minor immigrants who established a subculture of drugs, music, and nostalgia. Rotza¨ıron, Christodoulou, and the Manos Brothers dressed—and undressed—across time and across gender and genre. Before the audience’s male gaze they embraced an irreverent world of Aristophanic humor, fantasy, and improvisation. In keeping with the Demotic acting versions and the lavish sets, their carefully chosen idiom of costuming was contemporary as well, with occasional archaizing touches. Their adapted Lysistrata was vaguely located in, but not fixed to, the classical period. The play was constantly altered and updated—pirated, as it were—though the new improvisations were rarely recorded. Many shows did not adhere either to a fixed scenario or to a consistent production style. Among the methods of theatrical and metatheatrical manipulation of the Aristophanic raw material were travesty, parody and caricature (of renowned actresses), deception and unmasking, and plays on images, on props, and on words. The Lysistrata stage offered a program of diverse entertainment that included witty monologues, suggestive pantomimes, music, song, and dance, in an exotic assortment of art forms and genres, complete with fanciful decor and choreography. Directors apparently reduced

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the women’s plays in length, making them more concentrated and direct, provocative and whimsical. Relying on rapid and varied pacing, this practice countered the brief attention span of viewers who lacked much prior experience as theatergoers. Customers seeking novelty for their money were treated to ever-new sensations and to the latest scenic and other technical innovations. At the urban soir´ee noire playhouses, much money and energy were invested in maintaining the shows’ glamorous drag and fa¸cade. One may surmise that the plots of some Lysistrata productions were entirely anachronistic, deliberately confusing dates, places, events, and characters. That assessment might be an overstatement, however, missing the point because of one’s preconceptions: contemporary and later critics expected that comic revivals should generally attempt to re-create Aristophanic dialogue and stagecraft accurately. But here, historical authenticity was not a priority; the women’s plays were instead made subservient to modern popular psychology and humor in every sense of the word. More than any philological or dramatic principles, actors’ and audiences’ willingness to accept new windows of time, space, and character development invested the show with meaning, real and authentic in its own right. The objective of the semipornographic productions was neither to convey historical knowledge nor to enact stage practices of the past, but to express the psychological preoccupations of contemporary men. The Lysistrata tradition set its own measures of time, space, and credibility, which conformed to the politics of gender and cultural relations from 1900 on. They reflected male-female antagonism, feminism and the antifeminist backlash, broader class struggle, the gendered text of nationalism, and—most intricately—the projection of effeminacy onto the “other” (whether fellow Greek, Eastern immigrant Greek, or Westerner) as onto the more fluid or imported art forms.7 WOMEN’S PLAYS, MEN’S PLAYGROUND Informed by feminist theory, my reading of these Lysistratas posits gender play as perhaps the most important factor in the exchange of meanings between male performers and male spectators. A useful category of analysis is that of the “male gaze,” not only as a masculine construct but also as the literal look of a male-only clientele directed by verbal and visual cues.8 I realize, however, that any theory of women and modern comic theater is in danger of falling into the same hypotheses and problems exhibited by analyses of Aristophanes’ own plays, which cannot be so simply labeled as feminist or antifeminist, misogynist or not. In proposing the modern Greek Aristophanes turned antifeminist, I do not rule out different interpretations of the Lysistrata adaptations of 1900 to

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1940. Comedies that roused men to sexual and cultural battle by making a spectacle of virility, femininity, and transgressions of both resist a simple analysis. I will integrate additional readings and the evidence supporting them toward the end of this chapter. All-male Greek theater companies of the 1900s transformed the women’s plays into plays of men speaking about (absent) women. They infused their stage acts with strands of gender antagonism and antifeminism that have been traditionally ignored. Together with their conservative male patrons, they reevaluated rapidly changing relations between men and women and within society more generally. Their modern Lysistrata did not call for women’s liberation but questioned gender and class identities. Aristophanes helped not to break away from but to renegotiate patriarchal structures on both levels. In these productions, his comedy did not remain primarily satirical but was modified by drag and other forms of visual and contextual communication, often imported from Western Europe. Men from all social classes were in varying degrees implicated in, or at least well served by, the new hedonist and antifeminist Aristophanes—hence the general lack of official protest over the morality and aesthetics of these shows. Greek men excluded Greek women from participating in their transvestite theatrical world. As I demonstrate in the next section, this prohibition hardened traditional male-female divisions; it also functioned to protect popular comedy that criticized and ridiculed perceived threats. I am less interested in value judgments of the Greek transvestite stage. Far more important, the public approval that this theater enjoyed seems to undercut a presumed antithesis between high social status and high culture, on the one hand, and low rank and popular culture, on the other. Also, I am aware that as much as the shows’ portrayals of women’s behavior are filtered through a masculine viewpoint, so I too must have filtered these men’s projections, including the statements of male critics. I open my argument for the existence of regressive gender polarity and antifeminism with the analysis of an elaborate Lysistrata scene. Then I will turn to neglected signs of shifts in relations between the sexes reflected in the early-twentieth-century reception of Aristophanes’ plays and themes. “I am Lysistrata, the androgynous one, with a collar a` la Byron” In 1933 the public of the Perroquet Theater saw a Lysistrata adaptation in a hedonist version that combined elements from the epitheorese and the soir´ee noire tradition. The Perroquet (after the French word for “parrot”) was an Athenian summer theater with a thiasos of its own.9 The name might even have punned on the mimicry, or “parroting,” of older and

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contemporary French cabaret that was a common practice and secure source of income for Greek commercial troupes. The 1933 Lysistrata was one of the skits of the successful revue Paparouna staged by Paul Nord (French pseudonym for Nikos Nikola¨ıdes), a Greek American poet, journalist, and playwright who was a master of sociopolitical satire.10 The popular epitheorese-actor and transvestite Kyriakos Maureas played the title role.11 This information on the production is drawn from a laudatory article by “D. G.” that appeared in the newspaper Hellenike on 15 June 1933, and from an anonymous article in Nord’s satirical journal Paparouna on 24 June 1933.12 The latter article cites what is probably the entire Lysistrata scene, and this rare excerpt is worth quoting in full: LYSISTRATA FROM THE R EVUE PAPAROUNA BY PAUL NORD (A moonlit night at the Monument of Philopappos. A couple passes across the stage, embracing and whispering words of love. All of a sudden, the ghost of Philopappos appears from the monument’s door. The couple leaves in a panic.) Characters Philopappos: G. Dianellos Othello: I. Stylianopoulos Lysistrata: K. Maureas Lampito: Kaite Arsene Comp`ere, Comm`ere: The Sylvas Couple PHILOP. (alone) To tread upon this most sacred hill the ancients loosened their sandals. [But] their descendants, who should stand free of blame, have polluted that very same hill. My quiet and beautiful monument has turned into a meeting place for lovers, for wonders and signs. And oh the irony, a boundless room for family. Here lovers press their lips against each other, and carve their names in the monument’s marble. But I will clear that situation, and confine the evil as much as possible. Nobody will set foot here anymore. I am the sole master and so is Sikelianos. But I see something: a shadow down there coming forward. That must be some shameless woman, some brazen creature. It looks like a woman full of beauty and coquetry. Who are you, you shameless one? LYSISTRATA (Maureas) I am Lysistrata, the androgynous one, with a collar a ` la Byron. PHILOP. The old Lysistrata of Aristophanes?

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No, the new one of Rotza¨ıron. And what are you looking for up here, all by yourself, at this time [of night]? LYSISTR. I came to hold a meeting of the women. PHILOP. Like the ones you held in the old days, when you had left your men all alone? When you had locked yourselves in the temples of the Acropolis, where later Mimekos and Mary were killed? LYSISTR. Something like that, though not quite the same. The same wonder never happens twice. Now the opposite occurred. The men got tired of our many follies, and they were the ones who left us. Because the females took on high airs, and they no longer stayed home quietly. On their own initiative, they raised the banner, and so, the devil took away their men. PHILOP. And then what happened? LYSISTR. The men became angry and alas, they all told us in no unclear terms: “Make up your minds! Either you stay home, or you won’t taste the fruit of knowledge. Either you’ll be wives and mothers of your children, or you won’t be eating bananas any more, or any other nice fruit. We will abandon you, we won’t set foot in the house any more. Come on then, make your choice: it’s either this or that.” PHILOP. That’s a serious matter. You poor thing, I feel sorry for you. But you look tired. Shall we go inside the monument? LYSISTR. No way! I am here for big affairs. But I’m starting to get impatient. What happened to the other women? LAMPITO (Ms. Arsene) (Enters Lampito with her son and with three other women.) Excuse us for being late, dear Lysistrata, but, you know, I live far away in Pankrati, and all the trams were full, as usual. LYSISTR. I imagine there must have been a real flirt at work.13 But why did you want to bring your child along, for it to see our wretchedness? LAMPITO How could I leave it at home all by itself, the poor kid, when its father is absent? LYSISTR. Oh the madman! But let it be. Now all of this will end forever, and either they’ll all regret what they’ve done, or injustice will find them, and Greece will become the boundless land of . . . cuckoldry! LAMPITO I think somebody is coming, impetuous like a bull, and black as pitch. PHILOP.

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LYSISTR.

Who is it then? Is it perhaps Eleutherios Venizelos, son of the Crow? OTHELLO (Stylianopoulos) No, I am Othello. I am the black general from Venice. First I was very white, like a dove, but I suffered a calamity, and turned all black within a span of four years. And what more is left for me in the winter of life? My existence depended on Desdemona, but stupid me, I strangled her with my own hands, and now I am looking to find a new mate. LYSISTR. Here’s your opportunity, now that our men are on strike, and cast us aside, like the lame Georgia. Come here, Othello. Even though you are all black, I still want you. Because our men’s strike made me desperately like black,14 (aside) and my humble bed will be promoted to a general. OTHELLO Oh what has come over me, miserable me. Iago mocked me, that wicked villain. But you are better-looking than the Venetian [Desdemona]. O what a cute little body, and those dreamy eyes. So where can we give each other erotic kisses? LYSISTR. There is some cave here. You’ve heard, of course, of the wise Socrates? OTHELLO And how far is it from here? LYSISTR. A little more than two fingers . . . LAMPITO And is Socrates there now? Has anybody seen him? LYSISTR. He went to a performance of the Children’s Theater. OTHELLO Never mind, my love, come, let me kiss you, and give me your handkerchief so that I can strangle you . . . LYSISTR. Keep talking to me, general, your words make me feel faint. And they hurt me more than your sword. O, tell me more, and let us two sweetly bring our lips together. LAMPITO (pulling Lysistrata back) Ai, what has come over you, woman? Let go of those cravings. No rush for you two to start kissing! There are more women here who have been keeping a sexual fast. LYSISTR. My dear, we were just joking about exchanging a kiss. PHILOP. Aren’t you ashamed, you Othello? You are betraying the struggle. OTHELLO But what then am I supposed to do, now that I’m left without Desdemona? PHILOP. Do what all the other men do who have left them, those chatterboxes. OTHELLO Yes, you’re right, old man. Therefore, let every man know that I’ll never become a strikebreaker. Don’t come close to me. A truncated serpent will eat you!

Lysistrata Euphoria, 1900 to 1940 LYSISTR.

Isn’t it a pity that the grass will remain untrodden? Let go, and see to what can happen, how we can make peace with our husbands. LYSISTR. Are you in a position then to advise me? I sent people down to negotiate. There they are, those poor people, who now come running up And I hope they come loaded with good news. (Comp`ere and Comm`ere arrive panting—the others surround them.) LYSISTR. What news did you bring us from Athens? COMPERE That even without you the men are doing just fine. LYSISTR. How come they’re doing so well without their dearest spouses? COMPERE It seems that Socrates has opened their eyes. They say that he has taught them curious lessons. LYSISTR. O the wicked old philosopher. I’ll make him pay for this! OTHELLO How are you doing, Philopappos, up here on Philopappos Hill? PHILOP. Let me tell you, I pick up little bits from time to time, while the capital sleeps and is at rest. OTHELLO Then this mountain here starts to breathe heavily. LYSISTR. Look at him, how handsome he is. Othello, my Othello, I’ve gone mad, I want you. COMPERE Well then, I will give you some good advice, and thus, I think, I’ll save the situation. OTHELLO Let us hear, yes let us hear what you think, tell us. LYSISTR. Perhaps our many misfortunes will come to an end. COMPERE I have a plan you will like. LYSISTR. And every man will immediately fall to our feet. COMPERE What does the government do with every railway strike? It immediately launches into action shifts of men taken from the army and the navy. LYSISTR. O, what a joy. I understand. If our men don’t comply, we can substitute whatever we want for them, and cute sailors and soldiers can take their place. Long live the government! And long live Tsaldares! COMPERE That’s the plan. When the men heard that, they showered curses over me, and they all set out to come up here. LYSISTR. When I think of what will happen, I lose my mind. (Noise. The men arrive. They embrace each other and kiss.) Othello, Othello, I want my Othello. (They kiss.) PHILOP. (aside) If I had known that this hill would gain that reputation, instead of a monument, I would have put a light high up here [to tease secret lovers].15 (Popular distichs of the time follow.)16 LAMPITO

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This fragment lends itself to the exploration of the complex dimensions of the Aristophanic stage of the interwar era: the male public’s fascination with its own ambiguous image, the reinforcing of common prejudices and preoccupations, the self-confidence gained from a theatrical display of masculinity and mock-masculinity, the male discourse of bluff and prescription, the breakdown of visual and sexual taboos and of biases against effeminacy, the voyeuristic pleasure the audience derived from watching men in drag playing women. Allowing different “looks” on gender and on wearing gender, hedonist comedy constructed sexual fantasies primarily through costume, location, and language. Language was the main key to manipulate the gender-coded performance apparatus, with more acts being implied than were actually shown on stage. Transvestite play therefore marked the eradication of certainties, the transgression of boundaries between male and female, the confusion of sexual attraction, and the blurring of class and racial demarcations (with Othello’s presence eliciting comments on color and ethnicity). Uncertainty will return at the end of this discussion, and questions will remain. Did conservative “real men” readily accept performances by men in women’s drag? Did they see that effeminacy, which conventionally signaled homosexuality, as coming from the West or from the East, since it could not possibly be indigenous? Did the appearance of men decked out as women not ironically undercut their antiwomen stance? Or could “deviant,” masculinized females, as the early feminists were regarded, best be caricatured by “deviant,” feminized males? Had fixed labels of sexual identity and orientation slipped so far as to make the “androgynous” the most widely applicable category? Could men who impersonated the sex they misunderstood or feared be gaining increased awareness and not lose any of their virility? The Lysistrata of this peculiar 1933 conflation captures various levels of undecidability for both cast and audience when she repeats the bottom line of the men’s ultimatum: “Make your choice: it’s either this or that.” Significantly, difficulty in making decisions and emotional lability are presented as cognate emblems of the feminine: Lysistrata wavers not only between a male and a female nature but also between heterosexual and homosexual attraction. Her declaration reflects on women becoming men and vice versa and on the conflict between new ambition and conventional domesticity. Yet it also throws into question the traditional notions of empowerment and loss of power associated with the respective transformations. The verbal and visual language here suggests the paradoxical figure of the man-turned-androgyne as a new power-wielding protagonist, able to read and manipulate female as well as male psychology, master of modern changes as well as ancient “stability.” It employs Aristophanic fantasies and reversals to expose selfinflicted constraints of traditionally constructed gender polarities.

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Nord merged Aristophanes’ Lysistrata with themes and characters from the Othello of Shakespeare, who had long been popular in Greece. After initial complaints by the ghost inhabiting the Roman funeral monument of Philopappos, he enters into conversation with the feminine-looking Maureas. This scene stresses Lysistrata’s novel character and motivation: it reverses the traditional authorship of the “old” Aristophanes and of the competing “new” Rotza¨ıron, who continued to perform as the “androgynous” Lysistrata-dame of Athenian interwar theater. The allusion to the heroine’s classy costume, after the fashion of Lord Byron, suits the atmosphere of scenic opulence for which Rotza¨ıron’s stage was known. The concern with garb and naming highlights the artifice and (meta) theatricality inherent in a male actor’s impersonation of a woman dressing like a Western man. To some extent, Lysistrata’s stage power is based on what remains of her masculine appearance, which is both real (because she is played by a male actor) and accentuated by her Byron collar—though the collar is ambiguously effeminate. This androgynous look again deceives when Maureas engages in female role-play that, via verbal and physical insinuation, soon fills the scene with the body politics of aroused and deflected desire. The trappings of costume, comic style, and gender patterning, however, set the stage for homosexual as well as heterosexual desire. Lysistrata is most often being watched by a male gaze, as when her good looks earn the attention of Philopappos and Othello, both eager enough to abandon solidarity for an affair on the sly. The “real” men look at Lysistrata, a false woman, in the way male spectators might, and they single out details of her appearance that are, on the transvestite stage, by definition contrived. The truth is that this scene does not permit the real-life she to exist. The new Lysistrata, like the “new woman,” is made—and refracted—in the male image, which parallels female subjugation in the outside world: she is an artificial creation of name giving, of costume and makeup, and of men’s fantasizing gaze. The female personality separate from suffocating male-imposed attire is absent; she plays no role in any gaze, expression, or negotiation. Maureas’ pose does not try to conceal this masquerade or the “vested” interests men have in women’s repression. Early on, the audience learns that the actor has adopted most exterior signs of Lysistrata, topped off with some Byronic features, but not the heroine’s consistent identity. Men’s eyes may pierce through all layers of the transvestite’s costuming, and distinguish at least three different voices in his remarks: that of the actor as well as the distorted voices of both the ancient and the modern Lysistrata. Because of the illusion of gender disguise, male spectators hear the predominantly masculine language of Maureas himself, of his not-so-convincing female impersonations, of producer Nord, and finally of Aristophanes turned fellow modern Greek.

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In another twist on the ancient comic plot, Lysistrata conspires against a marital strike undertaken by the Greek men. She has called for a women’s meeting to be held on Philopappos Hill (Hill of the Muses) opposite the Acropolis, the central site of Aristophanes’ original of “the old days.” In Lysistrata’s account of what caused the Greek men to engage in a sex strike, the classical background of the Peloponnesian War is conveniently absent. In fact, the only war on the horizon appears to be the war between the sexes. Modern men have been antagonized by their wives’ hopes for liberation and by their “misdirected ambitions” outside of the patriarchal home. The “new” Lysistrata has summoned her women to a different Athenian location under different historical circumstances. The reversals of time, place, and authorial attribution reflect more drastic alterations of the gender patterns and antagonistic male-female relations that constituted the ancient plot. Amid the changes, some elements from the fifthcentury B.C.E. context remain, albeit as anachronisms that humorously challenge the modern situation and themes rather than vice versa. The persistent reference to Aristophanic times, places, and characters as “old” (pal(a)ios) instead of “ancient” (archaios) indicates a deliberate lack of historical perspective. In Philopappos’ speech, the classical context blurs with the recent popular memory of Mimekos and Mary, two young Athenian lovers of different social rank who committed suicide by hurling themselves from the Acropolis. Lampito’s modern counterpart does not live in distant Sparta but in “faraway” Pankrati, today near downtown Athens. Arriving late in spite of the short distance, Lampito blames the Athenian public transportation system, which leaves much to be desired even when its workers are not on strike and need not be replaced by the military. Although Socrates is not part of the original comedy and remains offstage in the modern adaptation, he figures as both an ancient and a contemporary personality. He is still the sophos (pejoratively, the paliophilosophos) who spends time in a nearby cave, but now he has gone to attend a performance at the Children’s Theater. As a metadramatic comment, this may imply that compared to the adult-male-only transvestite stage, any other theater must be children’s play. Then the Comp`ere reports that it was Socrates who opened men’s eyes and who taught them the “curious lessons” of male emotional, domestic, and sexual self-sufficiency. The men appear to be doing “just fine” without their spouses, and they may even leave the desperate Lysistrata, Lampito, and other women in the cold for much longer. Nonetheless, the men still care enough about their wives’ sexual purity to rush off to the Philopappos Hill in order to head off the women’s emergency strategy. But the finale’s stage directions and minimal dialogue carry homosexual overtones sug-

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gesting that males can do without females. The subtext of this closing image is that men are better than women, that the male impersonator beats out the real she in both actual and performed sexual dynamics. Also, from the antifeminist perspective, how can there be true female liberation if women, wily though weak, prove willing at any time to sacrifice their goals to the instinctive craving for male attention? Examples of modern topical gibes and personal attacks are plentiful. The Comp`ere, the typical narrator-commentator of the epitheorese genre, has been given a female partner with the ambivalent French name of Comm`ere, which also means “gossipy woman.” Philopappos makes a comical allusion to the poet and playwright Angelos Sikelianos. Lysistrata mocks the well-known Cretan politician Eleutherios Venizelos (1864– 1936) in the racist context of the black Othello’s arrival. Venizelos’ government had fallen from power earlier in 1933, when his centrist Liberal Party had lost the elections to Panages Tsaldares and his right-wing People’s Party, hailed by Lysistrata toward the end of the scene. An abortive pro-Venizelos coup occurred in March 1933, followed by an attempt on the statesman’s life in June, at which time the Paparouna was presumably the hit of Athens. The economic problems that had knocked Venizelos’ government off course, and that were figured as public transportation strikes in this epitheorese, had been caused indirectly by the worldwide crisis triggered by the 1929 stock market crash. As a rationale for the male marital strike, Lysistrata relates men’s reactions to progressive female behavior. Her colorful account draws from the masculine as well as from the feminine perspective. She casts men’s angry reaction as “typically male” prejudices and anxieties about females. Meanwhile she reinforces these biases, because she is, after all, a man (Maureas) explaining that the “follies” and “high airs” of the rebellious, possessed women, who “raised the banner,” have driven the aggravated men to abandon their families. Women are to blame for dissolving domestic and social order and for inviting anomaly and chaos. Again adopting stereotypically male speech, outlook, and argumentation, Lysistrata reports that conservative men presented their spouses with two mutually exclusive options: either women could stay home as dutiful wives and mothers declining emancipation, or they would be denied a marital sex life. To win the sexual prize, to taste the “fruit of knowledge” and avoid being deprived of “bananas,” women had to fulfill men’s nonnegotiable conditions requiring that they resume their traditional household roles at the expense of their own ambition. Of course, the sexual reward the husbands proffered in exchange for their wives’ capitulation would trick women into accepting their terms, by which men had everything to gain and women everything to lose. The skewed male definition of what “tasting the fruit of knowledge” or “eating bananas” means for their sexual

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partners is thoroughly self-serving. Hiding behind a false dilemma, the men were cunning enough not to allow their own desire for sexual satisfaction to add to the women’s limited bargaining power. The logical choice for progressive women would have been between either subjugation at home or the more attractive alternative of acquiring knowledge (not exclusively sexual) and sociopolitical awareness outside of the patriarchal house, on the public scene of rapidly changing interwar Athens. This true choice does not contain the threat of men withholding sexual favors. Yet the aprosdoketon of virile Greek males refusing marital sex to their partners fits into the grid of reversals and subversions that carries the transvestite play: Aristophanes’ peace-loving women succeeded in their sex strike by denying men penetration, which led Nord’s modern males to believe—mistakenly—that they could effectively threaten women with refusing them the penis for oral sex. But the punishments are far from equivalent, and the latter would have worked only if the male assumption that their wives were very eager to perform oral sex proved right. Lysistrata and Lampito are—incongruously but comically—so depicted, quite unlike their fifth-century B.C.E. counterparts (exceptions to Aristophanes’ frequent portrayal of women as craving sex). Yet Nord’s men did abandon their spouses and children prior to this scene, which suggests that the majority of liberated wives could no longer be bribed or seduced into carrying out their sexual and other marital duties at the expense of their public aspirations. The 1933 Lysistrata comically exaggerates the antifeminist measures that Greek men envisioned undertaking to secure traditional gender patterns. Links between this play on gender, the broader feminist debate, and the ensuing antifeminist backlash are not too far-fetched in light of the Greek cultural commotion of the first decades of the twentieth century, which I will examine in more detail later. Against the period’s troubled historical background, the women’s movement and its contestation by men were forces guiding Aristophanic discourse on stage and in the satirical press (see below). Antifeminism was given voice and image by transvestite performers who explored sexuality beyond a strictly dichotomized view of gender. Hedonist play allowed men to appropriate women for porno fantasies and for other male-inflicted roles that ultimately reinforced sexual stereotypes. Nord’s extraordinary Lysistrata interpretation did not stand alone but was close to the end point of a forty-year-long comic tradition that questioned gender and social transformation. Women were explicitly prohibited not only from performing but even from attending the most critical plays of this extended Aristophanic practice. The characteristic exclusion of women from comedy (though not from ancient tragedy) was an important pillar of a male-dominated theater that perceived female threats to established mores and to the author-

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ity of Greek men, including that of the ancients. If women were to attend, they might discover Aristophanes’ transgressive language, humor, and body politics. The poet’s comic fictions might even encourage them individually or collectively to assume a stance of audacity, immorality, and disobedience to men, which would imperil male advantage in marital and social life. Therefore, Aristophanes and his fellow men had everything at stake in preventing women from interpreting the plays.

ARISTOPHANES-ANTIFEMINIST UNMASKED Soures’ Emancipation and Clouds The year 1901 saw the premiere of the comedy The Emancipation by Georgios Soures (1853–1919), the accomplished satirical journalist and translator. Soures drew heavily on the Lysistrata and Ecclesiazusae to ridicule the nascent social freedom among Athenian women. He depicted the Greek feminist movement as bound to collapse because it lacked a genuine ideology of emancipation and internal solidarity. The play’s finale reinstates the male establishment with full consent of the repentant female “rebels.”17 Soures’ own thiasos performed the comedy at the Municipal Theaters of Athens and Piraeus, but the production rivaled neither the boldness nor the success of the author’s 1900 adaptation of Aristophanes’ Clouds. In the 1909–10 season The Emancipation finally made a successful comeback with the famous actress and stage director Kyvele.18 Giannes Sideres ascribes Soures’ initial lack of success to the fact that women’s emancipation was not among the kyria (chief [concerns]) of turn-of-the-century Greek society. “But,” the theater historian continues, “Soures had before him a ‘reality’ better than the living: the Lysistrata and the Ecclesiazusae.”19 Sideres sees not only The Emancipation but also other Aristophanic plays as having little sociological importance. In light of contemporary and later evidence, however (see below), his observation that turn-of-the-century revival comedy did not express people’s public and private concerns appears unjustified. The critic of the Panathenaia of 31 October 1901 attested that Soures’ travesty of feminism in contemporized Aristophanic guise did strike home. By 1900 the concept of to gynaikeion (zetema), “the women’s issue,” was commonplace, and it figured prominently in many literary and theatrical works.20 The greatest impulse to draw on the forbidden Aristophanes, with his thoughts on women’s emancipation, came from Soures’ tremendously popular production of the Clouds in 1900. Social dynamics onstage and offstage attest to the growing gender polarization that both carried the Clouds performances and also conditioned the wave of hedonist Lysistrata shows through the 1930s. For four decades Aristophanic comedy sus-

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tained an atmosphere of male intimacy and solidarity across social ranks, which was communicated verbally and visually by sex-related satire. In a rare fusion of popular and scholarly excitement about a translation, Soures’ Clouds marked the turning point from philological reception to the new century’s string of mass comic productions and repeat performances. As the ancient text lost its supremacy, different and constantly changing styles and methods of theatrical interpretation ensued. Recognized in its own time as a watershed production, the 1900 Clouds inspired the ribald comic adaptations of Polyvios Demetrakopoulos and the transvestite Lysistrata shows. Of all revival stagings, it was the most instrumental in clearing away long-accumulated layers of textual, historical, and archaeological interpretation and in grounding popular-satirical Aristophanic performance on a solid basis. Once Soures, Demetrakopoulos, and the metamorphotes had deconstructed the poet’s nineteenth-century image, other Greek directors, translators, actors, and artists—especially from the 1930s on—could more easily engage him in new literary, theatrical, and sociopolitical movements. When Soures first presented his Clouds, his reputation as the satirist of Greece had already been established by the Romeos (1883–1918), his aptly named poetic-satirical weekly newspaper, the longest-surviving and most popular of its time.21 Inevitably, the comic vein of Soures’ adaptation was akin to the direct style of the Romeos, characterized by a lively vernacular idiom with wordplay, double entendre, and parodic rhetorical excess filled with foreign words and mock-Kathareuousa. The vomolochies of the Clouds were left in place or exaggerated. Soures added many anachronisms, which, since the 1868 politicized Plutus (of Karydes and Chourmouzes), were known to excite the general public looking for relevance in the classics. The use of rhyming and stressed fifteen-syllable verse, which the Demoticists adopted from modern Greek folk songs, further aligned his translation with the contemporary vernacular reappropriation of ancient authors.22 With his Romeos, Soures had long embraced the spoken language as the tongue most appropriate for satire, for modern Greek comic theater, and thus for the 1900 Clouds as well. The popular-poetic and satirical works of Soures and, soon after, of Demetrakopoulos transformed Aristophanes from an ancient Greek on paper into a Romaic cultural folk hero of the stage. Most of his comedies were translated for immediate performance into Demotic without passing through the intermediary stage of Kathareuousa, as typically occurred in the reception of classical tragedy and of other ancient literary genres. Even at the turn of the century, Soures’ self-assigned task of rendering Aristophanes was as treacherous as it had been for Raptarches and Chourmouzes. Soures’ humorous allusions to his controversial choice reveal that he realized his risk of alienating substantial parts of the relatively

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small Athenian reading and theatergoing public. In Ho Romeos he wittily acknowledges traditional moral reservations still going strong at the dawn of the twentieth century: Aristophanes’ notoriety might “contaminate” the modern translator. Phasoules and Perikletos, the rudimentary wood puppets of folk tradition turned quasi-literary protagonists of Soures’ satirical press, interact on a self-referential level, with Perikletos chastising the antihero: Now tell me, damn Phasoules, how the hell did it enter your mind to go and get involved with Aristophanes, and to become an immoral chap and foul-mouth of the first order? How come you made contemporary morality cover its face, and why did you inflict mortal wounds on the ethical standards of our days? Why were you the only one laughing impudently, like a villain? Bah! Get lost, you shameless rascal, you who has a family after all, who has a wife and children, and who preaches decorum.23

For more than thirty years, similar dialogues between Phasoules and his alter ego Perikletos expressed average Athenian views and mirrored social life. They colored Soures’ definition of Aristophanes’ popular-political sympathies and of his Romaic wit, which he saw as biting and sarcastic but seldom personally injurious. Romaic humor established the character of Soures’ mock-journalism as conveying resistance with a sociopolitical edge and, by extension, defined the character of the classical poet as well. Well before adapting the Clouds and attacking women’s emancipation, Soures had combined Demotic satire with an interest in the language, humor, and stagecraft of the playwright he considered his ancient counterpart. As early as 1876 he cooperated with P. P. Pegadiotes on the satirical newspaper Aristophanes. The following year he assumed co-directorship of the Phos of Sophokles Karydes, director of the 1868 Plutus.24 Soures inherited not only Karydes’ biting satirical judgment of politics and society but also his commitment to staging Aristophanes. The middle and lower ranks of Athenian society greeted Soures’ Demotic rendition and production of the Clouds with enthusiasm. This excitement generated colorful expressions of a strong sense of Romaic-style affinity, kinship, or syngeneia between the ancient and the modern satirist and between their respective audiences. Popular newspapers compared Soures to Aristophanes and the former’s literary subjects to the latter’s characters.25 For our purposes here, the comedy Panathenaia (1903) of Andreas Nikolaras provides the most telling example of the fascination with the old and the new Aristophanes: the ancient poet must fear the assaults of modern Athenian feminists who have been provoked by the incorrigible satirist and misogynist Soures.26 Certain of popular but not of academic approval, Soures gave a semi-

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private reading at the Athens Musical Society before taking his Clouds into production.27 He diplomatically set the stage for his novel adaptation to be welcomed as a remarkable achievement in spite of its bawdry. His act of “framing” worked, in that To Asty followed up on the event with a survey conducted among prominent scholars and literati, who were asked to evaluate Soures’ rendition; it was published in the issues from 9 to 13 October 1900 under the title “The Clouds of Aristophanes and the Translation by Soures: What Do the Literati Say?” This survey captures a privileged early moment of synchronic reception in which key players of turn-of-the-century Greek society participated. Most intellectuals praised the translation but some voiced interesting reservations. Kostes Palamas questioned whether Soures had been able to preserve the rich lyricism of Aristophanes’ original. “I am afraid,” he admitted, “lest Soures present the Clouds as a special issue of his Romeos, as an amplified dialogue between Phasoules and Perikletos.” In other words, Aristophanes was now talking in the no-frills Romaic voice of the satirical journalist. Classics professor Georgios Mistriotes, who had since 1895 assumed the “moral duty” of staging classical tragedy in ancient Greek, urged Soures to tone down the comic playwright’s “uncouth” language. The poet Georgios Strateges retorted that “eliminating the dirty phrases from Aristophanes’ text would compare to castrating the Hermes of Praxiteles for allegedly offending public morality.”28 To prune the classical comedies was to emasculate them, to cut away their “manly” qualities of sexual language and humor, which had found their equivalents in the uninhibited Romaic spirit. Strateges restated the Greek national ideal of popular identity as characteristically male and reaffirmed this ideal in his own construction of intellectual and public authority. Principles of philological and archaeological reconstruction and preservation had forced greater conservatism on the 1868 Clouds, which Rankaves saw as a textual artifact. In contrast, Strateges’ argument from literary archaeology urged a more progressive approach. The academic Paulos Nirvanas worried about the Clouds’ imminent stage premiere. He believed that only well-educated theatergoers could watch a risqu´e production without being infected by its immorality. In his opinion, the various Greek classes consumed ancient comedy differently, according to a rigid matrix of cultural capital and social hierarchy. Of course, Nirvanas’ warning that the “unprepared,” “unsuitable,” and therefore unpredictable public should not be exposed to performances of the Clouds was a fallacious pretext for censorship as well as a self-fulfilling prophecy: if contemporary audiences were to remain deprived of comic revival productions, they would never be able to reach the “appropriate disposition” required for immunity to theatrical immorality. Although the education minister, Spyridon Staes, promised Soures a grant to trans-

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late more comedies, he too opposed the stage representation of the supposed abuse of Socrates. Performances of the Clouds for the masses would deprive the philosopher of the respect the modern Greeks owed him—if only by dissipating their lingering sense of guilt about having executed the early precursor of Christian ethics and Enlightenment rationality. This lapse into old moral reservation and rhetoric, intended to reduce the perceived causality between the original Clouds and Socrates’ death, was the inevitable consequence of modern insistence on continuity between ancient and contemporary culture. Women Not Allowed Female theatergoers (N.B. kyriai) were not welcome at any performances of the Clouds, which Soures and professional actors premiered on 25 October 1900.29 Critics recommended that women’s moral and aesthetic sensibilities not be exposed to racy Aristophanic spectacle. No actresses were allowed to play in the Clouds, either. At the time it was believed that the actress led a life of immorality and really meant the acts and emotions she portrayed. Her impersonation of a corrupt character would corrupt her accordingly. Yet at the Clouds’ opening night, the interdiction against “ladies” and female performers did not apply to Mrs. Soures. The Akropolis of 27 October reported that she watched from behind the stage.30 The same article related the story of one brave lady who tried to gain access but was removed by the police. Local police were charged with maintaining public order, and that included enforcing the double standard.31 Moral censorship, when applied consistently, affected the composition of the audience more than it affected the language and content of Soures’ Clouds. According to To Asty (24 January 1901), the Ministry of the Interior issued a decree permitting women to attend some bowdlerized performances of the production. On the exceptional occasion of a 1901 carnival night, for instance, ladies—but only in masks—were allowed access to the gallery and highest boxes of the Athens Municipal Theater. Their male companions were officially urged to wear masks as well. Reportedly, no more than fifteen women showed up.32 The carnival masks clearly functioned as the proverbial fig leaf for both the male authorities and the (obligatory) male chaperones, rather than for the women spectators.33 Also, the austere spatial separation of the female audience compelled physical divisions along social and hierarchical lines. The striking reversal of masked women viewers, hidden from view in the theater’s least desirable areas, set opposite nonmasked men performers returning the gaze onstage, captured the underlying friction between male and female, public and private spheres. The facial covering here functioned as

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the key prop of spectators, not of players: it both marked and masked women’s ultimate exclusion from Aristophanic theater. With a few exceptions, through the 1930s women were not allowed to watch or perform the “corrupting” shows based on the adaptations of Soures and Demetrakopoulos. This common prohibition found a precedent in the informal exclusion of women from nineteenth-century obscene shadow theater performances featuring Karaghiozes, the masculineRomaic antihero; the beloved genre must have leveled some ground for the ribaldry of the male-only Aristophanic spectacles. Because of highbrow criticism and competition from novel, more “sophisticated” genres, Karaghiozes gradually lost his libertine character even though—or precisely because—his obscenity was regarded as a constitutive part of his Romaic personality. By the early twentieth century, elitist disapproval had effectively ushered the naughty figure out of sight, leaving behind an emasculated shadow of Karaghiozes’ former self, as well as the legacy of a more narrowly type-based repertoire.34 This loss coincided, however, with the rise of off-color productions of Aristophanes’ women’s plays, which attracted large audiences by presenting the forbidden fruit of obscenity under the cover of classical comedy.35 We should note that actresses played the female roles in the 1868 Plutus and that women had free access to its performances. Of course, the part of the allegorical figure Poverty (Penia) is free of vulgarities, which made this an attractive role to assign to an actress.36 The Plutus of Thomas Oikonomou also was open to women viewers and players after Themistokles Solomos, its Demotic translator, had toned down or expunged all scurrilities.37 Oikonomou directed the Royal Theater (1901– 1908), which had its impressive playhouse on Agiou Konstantinou Street (where it reopened as the National Theater of Greece in 1932). But in 1904 this “clean” production flopped. Anastasios Aperges, who had played Strepsiades in several of Soures’ performances, regularly staged Soures’ version with his all-male commercial Thiasos of the Clouds or Greek Theater Company Aristophanes.38 Because of the tours he organized, expatriates in Romania, Odessa, Constantinople, Trebizond, Smyrna, Cyprus, and Egypt could see what was perhaps the most well-traveled Greek production of its time.39 For about ten years, Aperges’ professional company was a tremendous success, cashing in not on the popularity or audacity of the ancient Clouds but on the reputation of the “foul-mouth” (athyrostomos) Soures. It was the most important among the epigonoi troupes, which lived off the new sensation surrounding Aristophanes and frequently copied others’ hits. Epigonoi directors often hired players from the original premiere (protoi didaxantes) in order to sell their own show. The advertised prohibition of women was probably also largely a promotion gimmick appealing to male curiosity—

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like the sexual content promised by the shows. When Aperges’ thiasos needed a boost of Aristophanic energy, he added the zestful male-only Lysistrata of Demetrakopoulos to the hackneyed repertoire of the 1910s. Although lacking in originality, Aperges’ work marked the earliest grandscale commercialization of Soures’ Clouds and other successful comedies. Through the 1920s and 1930s, professional Greek theater companies, quick to discover and exploit the financial attractions of the scandal-prone Aristophanes famous for his sexual trespassing, monopolized the production of the women’s plays. The obscenities that had caused nineteenthcentury directors to ignore Attic comedy suddenly made the plays look exciting on the twentieth-century stage. Among all-male audiences of the Greek communities of Cairo and Alexandria, Soures gained the title of “true national poet.” A laudatory review in the Alexandrian Tachydromos on 26 March 1901 hailed Soures as “the sole representative of the Greek spirit, the true national poet, who lamented all the misfortunes of his fatherland, and who lashed out at the political corruption with his marvelous iambic verses.” To sing the modern satirist’s praises, the critic resorted to terms previously reserved for revived classical tragedy. This conscious shift of epithets from ancient tragedy to comedy reveals what “patriotic poetry” had come to mean in a climate of deflated ideologies and military and sociopolitical setbacks. The emphasis was no longer on celebrating the grand ethos of antiquity, as authentic revivals of classical tragedy continued to do (albeit with little success). Instead, the critic defined “national poetry” as the satirical-Demotic expression of the resilient indigenous pneuma (“spirit” and “wit”), which confronted present problems and critically exposed the political corruption of the time. Soures Mocking the Feminist Look and Outlook Soures’ satirical journalism opened a dialogue between Athenian creators and consumers of the new turn-of-the-century male-female dynamics. His attacks on contemporary feminists anticipated and sharpened the Greek transformers’ regressive caricature of women’s ambition and femininity. Many Aristophanes-inspired pieces in the Romeos, Soures’ semiliterary one-man show, emphasize women’s novel, Western look, which was thought to betray their progressive public and private (even sexual) positions. Significantly, Soures’ satires, which female activists called misogynist and antifeminist (as discussed below), also formed a self-perpetuating commentary-cum-illustration on his production of Aristophanes’ Clouds. In the Romeos of 25 November 1900, a humorous sketch shows the wood puppet Phasoules carrying off the bald Aristophanes in the clouds (Clouds), while controlling him with the powerful weapon of his pen (see figure 1).

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1. Phasoules takes Aristophanes up into the clouds (Clouds). From Soures, Ho Romeos, 435 (originally published 25 November 1900).

Phasoules answers Perikletos, who is calling them back: I see the blue horizon of renowned Athens, . . . Strepsiades, Pheidippides, and hair-splitting sophists, Amynias and Pasias-types, interest-sucking creditors, I see also plenty of Coesyras, wrapped in shaggy cloaks, behaving a` la fran¸caise or English-style, and graciously wiggling their behinds as they walk. I see Hyperboli, Cleonymi, and the faces of other shady characters, who do not wear the ancient chlamys but Western garb.40

The more frivolous appearance and worsening morality of the supercilious Coesyra characters allegedly result from corrupting Western fashions and niceties of manners, typically French, which tempt Greek women to discard their submissive behavior along with their conservative local Oriental dress. Opposed to the plain native matron in traditional costume stands the sophisticated but immodest Western lady, the French

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coquette, flirtatious and licentious with men. The passage touts Aristophanes’ eternal contemporaneity, which invites popular identification between ancient comic figures and modern Athenians, despite their different outfits and exterior manners. This Romaic affinity applies not only to broad sociopolitical problems but also to small human shortcomings. Instead of drawing on the very best of classical and contemporary Greece to endorse Hellenic continuity, the iconoclast Soures inverts the terms and stresses perennial faults and weaknesses. He even makes Aristophanes support this comical argumentation. Together both satirists laughed at women’s new look and outlook. When female writers and publishers of the educated urban upper class and bourgeoisie embraced the cause of women’s rights, they probably never expected to be arguing about Aristophanes as well as about emancipation. Inspired by the international dialogue on feminist issues, late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Greek women’s organizations propagated gender equality as the hallmark of progress and modernity, and fought for the nationwide abolition of constricted female roles. In diverse forums—publications, open meetings, lectures, and even exhibitions of women’s handiwork—they focused on the goals of full citizenship, professional participation, and moral legitimacy, issues that they regarded as more urgent than achieving the right to vote. Since its 1872 foundation, the Union for Women’s Education was dedicated to the cause of female emancipation through better schooling. Immediate demands covered girls’ elementary through higher education as well as adequate legislation, such as laws warranting equal pay for equal work for the married and single women who were joining the paid workforce in increasing numbers. Higher rates of literacy fueled the feminist struggle against church, family, and community expectations dictating that women be only dutiful daughters, wives, and mothers.42 A number of emancipated Greek women had received their education abroad, often in France. They were the first to enter the better-paid professions as well as the male-dominated realms of literature and the arts. Some activist initiatives of these newly self-aware and more advantageously placed women mirrored those of feminist organizations in latenineteenth-century Western Europe.43 This explains why conservative male critics found it easy to dismiss the Greek movement as a morally corrupting phenomenon—Western, leftist-communist, or both—undeniably the product of a foreign “conspiracy” against quintessentially Greek, healthy Romaic masculinity. Connections between Greek socialism, Marxism, and communism, on the one hand, and feminism, on the other, became obvious in the interwar period. Pamphlets issued by the Socialist Organization of Women (officially recognized in 1926) urged (prospective) members to become “conscious feminists through social-

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ism,” because “socialism alone leads to female emancipation.”44 In the 1920s the communists participated actively in the Association of Greek Women for Women’s Rights.45 Suffrage, which Greek feminist journals and periodicals had started to demand before the rise of Leninist ideology in their country, was finally gained in 1952.46 The Newspaper for Ladies (Ephemeris ton Kyri´on, 1887–1917), published by the energetic Kallirroe Siganou-Parren, was most instrumental in promoting the Greek women’s agenda and, via its wide network of correspondents, in building female solidarity throughout Greece and the diaspora communities. In 1896 Parren founded the Great Association of Greek Women. She was also an activist novelist and playwright; her fouract drama The New Woman, with Marika Kotopoule in the female lead, was fairly successful.47 Parren’s three novels (The Emancipated Woman, The Witch, and The New Contract), on which the 1907 play was based, were serialized in her Newspaper between 1899 and 1903. Their publication coincided with the heyday of Soures’ Aristophanic success. Soures ridiculed Parren’s viewpoints and writings in his 1901 comedy Emancipation, which, as I noted before, drew heavily on the Lysistrata and Ecclesiazusae. It was filled with pastiche of her vocabulary, imagery, and argumentation.48 In his Romeos, Soures published shorter but more frequent parodies of the Newspaper for Ladies. Significantly, the Ephemeris posed fierce competition to the Romeos, and their years of publication largely overlapped. Circulation figures are hard to come by, but in 1892 the Ephemeris and the Romeos were ranked second and first among weekly journals (5,000 and 6,000 copies, respectively).49 In other words, the stable readership of the leading feminist paper rivaled Soures’ cohesive male audience. William Miller, a social historian of turn-of-the-century Greece, claimed that men met in the evening to read the latest issue of the Romeos together and to expound its humorous allusions.50 His testimony supports my view of Soures’ paper as the centerpiece of a male Romaic culture of semiliterary, often Aristophanic, satire. As feminist literature and journalism rose, it met with a tide of oppositional satire and comedy, spearheaded by Soures with Aristophanes as his Romeos-ally. For the same effect of comic relief, Demetrakopoulos and writers of popular revues, who followed Soures closely in time and spirit, continued to air male open animosity against women’s liberation. Soures’ raillery against educated or erudite women was particularly harsh. In The Mundane Athenian Women and The Emancipated Women he showed himself (always comically) hostile to the new educational and professional opportunities for daughters of the urban merchant and middle class. Written in Demotic blended with mock-Kathareuousa expressions and ironic French buzzwords, both satires ridiculed women’s dreams of language acquisition and all-around edification, as did his ban-

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ter with the feminists participating in the 1904 Conference on Education.51 In his Romeos, Soures’ indignation often focused on women primary and high school teachers. He targeted this social category because these foreign- or locally trained instructors had reached beyond domestic tutelage to fulfill themselves personally, intellectually, and financially.52 Parren too had begun her career as a teacher, which did not go unnoticed by the antifeminists. Soures’ satire depicted teachers and women activists as neurotic, half-insane creatures of anomalous speech and dubious learning. Soures and his followers, or at least their humorist personae, refused to accept professional womanhood and revisionist feminist discourse. For the sake of satire and sensation, they simplified visible and comic reality alike. At the start of a new era—both chronologically and socially—they turned satire and Aristophanic comedy into fields of gender confrontation. Soures set himself up as the first male popular voice of antifeminism. His borrowings from Aristophanes bestowed additional glee and glamour (that is, Romaic-style authority) on his position, because they presented his stance as inherited from the classical precursor.53 Soures used the women’s plays and the Clouds to prove that antifeminism went back in the native tradition as far as antiquity. Accordingly, Greek women activists counterattacked not only against Soures but also against Aristophanes, precisely because they saw the men as comic allies. Parren replied to Soures’ 1901 Emancipation with two long articles in which she called misogynist satire a historically typical side effect of the battle of the sexes.54 She denounced the modern satirist for co-opting the vulgar and immoral Aristophanes, classical prototype of misogynism. Soures should have taken inspiration from writers with a woman-friendly stance and not from the dated ancient satirist. To be sure, she and other Greek feminists overreached in rejecting Aristophanes for fostering personal and public hostility against women: reading his comic characters for the truth behind the poet is treacherous, and the scanty “biographical” allusions cannot, and should not, support deductions about his own attitudes. Nonetheless, Aristophanes’ alleged ancient status as a misogynist mocking women struck a chord in both camps. Parren’s condemnation of that stance did not have the desired effect, however. It not only acknowledged Aristophanes’ presence in the feminist controversy but also provoked the battling Romaic men to deploy him more vigorously. Displaying the dramatic interrelation between genre and gender, Parren’s counterattack is a final demonstration of contemporary women’s lack of a public voice as powerful as Aristophanes’. While the Newspaper for Ladies helped initiate female gender bonds, Soures transformed Aristophanes into the ideal locus for male solidarity. By reinterpreting the comic heritage, he gained a privileged and legiti-

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mate, even authoritative, domain. Soures’ vigorous comic attacks on feminism were part of a new and broader theatrical appropriation of Aristophanes, which, along with reinvigorated native satirical drama, presented itself as superior all-male comedy capable of assimilating, or of competing with, imported Western European forms and influences. Polyvios Demetrakopoulos: Adapting, Staging, and Marketing Soures directly influenced the comic renditions and revue-writing of Polyvios Demetrakopoulos (1864–1922; pseudonym, Pol Arcas). Significantly, his first translations were of the Ecclesiazusae (1904) and Lysistrata (1905).55 Konstantinos Chrestomanos (1867–1911) had commissioned Demetrakopoulos’ four-act verse translation of the Ecclesiazusae for a 1904 all-male premiere at the Homonoia Theater. The prose author and playwright, aesthete and romantic Chrestomanos had spent many years in the service of Empress Elizabeth (Sissy) of Austria.56 On his return to Athens, he founded the short-lived Nea Skene, or New Stage Company (1901–1906), which began its career in ancient drama with a promising production of Euripides’ Alcestis, followed by Sophocles’ Antigone. Like its rival, the more conservative Royal Theater, the New Stage Company helped make early-twentieth-century Greek drama more professional, though both houses have been criticized for occasionally courting the popular spectacle culture. With his mystes (“initiates,” as he referred to his trainees), Chrestomanos aspired to reviving classical theater in modern creative style and in the Demotic language. He promulgated those ideals during the troubled years when the classicist Georgios Mistriotes of Athens University and his Society for Staging Ancient Greek Drama insisted that their annual student productions of tragedy be in ancient Greek only. The iconoclast Chrestomanos declared in a manifesto that he read aloud to intellectuals invited to the Dionysus Theater: “I am not talking about retracing our steps backwards in the centuries, and I am not asking you to build Parthenons because we are Greek. The Greek poet does not need to shape words or ideas in the rhythms of Pindar or Sappho, rhythms gone with the waves. . . . The Parthenon is the crowned peak of the creative Greek intellect . . . and every crowned peak of the intellect is a Parthenon.”57 This manifesto undercut the Parthenon’s symbolic value as the single site or topos of Greek culture through the ages. Its impact was repeated in Chrestomanos’ choice of decor for the 1904 Ecclesiazusae: his sets showed the Acropolis—not the reconstructed sacred rock and Golden Age monuments of the Western-classicizing vision, but ruins in their current state of disrepair, surrounded by the humble, indigenous houses (anaphiotika) of recent times. The Parthenon, vene-

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rated symbol of national rebirth, now served as a painful reminder of destruction by foreign occupants. The decor even elicited a cynical remark from the critic of Hestia, who wondered whether perhaps Aristophanes lived after Morosini.58 Along the same revisionist lines, the comedy’s musical score, written by the popular composer Theophrastos Sakellarides, contained controversial Anatolian motifs and songs, including an amanes (love song) of the young man to his beloved. Blepyrus and his slave even danced an oriental ze¨ımpekikos instead of the ancient kordax. According to the Kairoi, the broader Athenian public, unlike the elites, much appreciated the anachronistic rebetic music, song, and dance. Even when they were hostile, reviewers acknowledged the premiere’s contemporaneity and its great social relevance for early-twentieth-century Greece. The critic in Hestia concluded: “We are truly the most genuine descendants of the ancient Greeks, both in our social and in our political morals.”59 The Ecclesiazusae adaptation commissioned from Demetrakopoulos was a deliberate part of Chrestomanos’ deconstruction of classical icons, which should have reminded his public and commentators of the relative value of all monuments of ancient Greek culture, including dramatic texts. Instead, critics and scholars have diverged widely in evaluating this revisionism. Was the production a daring but cheap comic revival cashing in on popular tastes for hedonist and Aristophanic sensation that had been whetted by Soures’ Clouds?60 Or did the idealist Chrestomanos try to express his avant-gardist aims, and particularly his fascination with foreign naturalist drama, via a classical play that had no modern Greek reception history?61 The latter appears more likely: Chrestomanos applied elements borrowed from a thriving Western naturalism to a “native” Aristophanic comedy with recognizable social relevance for troubled turn-ofthe-century Athens.62 But the novelty of his enterprise, as well as his decision to reduce the play’s poetry while retaining its uninhibited sexual and excremental humor, may explain why a majority of elitist critics misunderstood and vilified the premiere. Detractors strongly discouraged women from going to Ecclesiazusae performances. Chrestomanos’ playbill anticipated and partly provoked the scandal by stating, “Ladies and Misses are requested not to attend.” A few weeks after the premiere, however, an expurgated version opened for the female public. In Praxagora’s role it cast the actress Euangelia Paraskeuopoulou, who had established a great reputation for playing leads in ancient tragedies. Whether or not Chrestomanos produced the Ecclesiazusae as a last-ditch effort to reconcile the demands of art, fashionable tastes, and his creditors, his endeavors could not prevent the company from disbanding one year later. In 1905 the Athens Municipal Theater housed the modern Greek

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Lysistrata premiere, produced by a thiasos that had formed to present Demetrakopoulos’ new adaptation, a three-act Demotic version in rhyming fifteen-syllable lines.63 Again, women were barred from the opening and almost all of the numerous repeat performances. At the same playhouse in 1911, Demetrakopoulos and the League of Greek Actors restaged the 1904 Ecclesiazusae in a double bill with two scenes adapted from the Birds. In a bit of self-promotion, Demetrakopoulos promised that these Ecclesiazusae, in a reflection of current realities, would portray “women who dissolve the rule of men and usurp power, like ancient suffragettes.”64 From 1904 on, the publishing house of M. I. Saliveros had profited greatly from the popular demand for Demetrakopoulos’ Demotic adaptations of Aristophanes, particularly his women’s plays. About five years later the more prestigious Phexes Library of Ancient Greek Authors, a scholarly imprint of the Phexes publishing house (begun in 1907), joined in enriching this print culture of comedy: it reedited verse translations of Demetrakopoulos, again including his Ecclesiazusae and Lysistrata, for a broad reading public that apparently craved the words of its “national” poet. These first formal editions of Demotic versions of Aristophanes generally anticipated comparable renditions of other ancient authors, for which the vernacular was often rejected as inappropriate. Assisted by more or less established scholars and translators, the Phexes press made classical drama more accessible, especially for a broad middle-class reading public with growing literary and theatrical interests as well as greater disposable income. As a result, authors became less dependent financially on elite patrons (such as Koraes’ sponsors), as they were supported instead by booksellers and libraries. Increased urbanization and improved levels of literacy also encouraged the publication of works by Aristophanes. It is worth noting that Georgios Phexes accepted Demetrakopoulos’ racy verse adaptations before publishing the more literal, philologically “faithful” renderings by Markos Augeres (1884–1973; pseudonym for Georgios Papadopoulos). Augeres translated (or Phexes commissioned him to translate) precisely those comedies to which Demetrakopoulos had not yet laid claim.65 By 1912, when the entire Aristophanic corpus had been rendered into Demotic, the public taste for the poet was seemingly insatiable, a tribute both to the durability and to the novel sexual-satirical popularization of his oeuvre. Once knowledge of Demetrakopoulos’ women’s plays had spread via both the 1904–1905 productions and the rising popular print culture, the transformers adopted his translations and combined them with new, often Western-imported materials and technical advances. In the hedonist-transvestite phase of the Lysistrata tradition, it became increasingly unclear where Aristophanes left off and where the adaptation began. By

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augmenting the poet’s controversial obscenities, Demetrakopoulos and the transformers caused what was undoubtedly the most radical breach with nineteenth-century aesthetics. For the translator, Aristophanes’ bawdiness was an inextricable part of his verbal and nonverbal brilliance. Pruning the texts meant losing the poet’s wit and theatrical genius. However, Demetrakopoulos made the politics of the comedies more current and the scope more intimate by reorganizing and simplifying passages and by dividing the plays into acts. While keeping the original characters and plot, he altered the diction of many lines. In the introduction to his Thesmophoriazusae, Demetrakopoulos announced that he had not translated what he thought the modern public would find “hard to understand,” a practice he justified by his intention of creating a viable stage version. In his 1904 Ecclesiazusae he instituted another unusual technique, meant to solve the problem of Aristophanes’ topical jokes: he versified explanations from the ancient scholia and directly inserted these poetic lines of his own making into the modern Greek text. Anachronistic gibes colored Demetrakopoulos’ adaptations and rhyming prefaces, which he composed for some plays in the tone and style of the revue’s comic prologue. Like the popular revues, his pieces were bold, witty entertainments and satirical vignettes of urban Athenian life, filled with songs and rapidly paced skits. The Attic comedy Demetrakopoulos handed to the transformers was diverting and easy to assimilate, and it held the promise of financial success. In Demetrakopoulos, Aristophanes, the epitheorese, and the transvestite spectacle finally coincided. Theatrically, Demetrakopoulos’ stage versions stood out as being not simply smooth and sexual but also satirical and Romaic. Following in Soures’ footsteps, Demetrakopoulos held up a caricaturist, refracting mirror to the shifting mores of early-twentieth-century Greek society. For example, his 1911 Birds premiere was inspired by an outburst of national, cultural, and even linguistic pride.66 To the revue writer and translator, Aristophanes meant bantering modern commentary as well as readymade comic spectacle. Far from re-creating the fifth-century B.C.E. historical context, Demetrakopoulos brought the original play into conformity with current sociopolitical and linguistic conditions. Instead of likening his stage victims, the twentieth-century Malliaroi, to ancient comic characters, he insisted on a reverse comparison. His technique of fast-forwarding the past to fit modern Greek actuality transformed Aristophanes into a playwright as up-to-date as any epitheorese writer of the time. The approach implied that Demetrakopoulos and the classical poet met on equal terms. With a 1911 male-only premiere of the Frogs, Demetrakopoulos and transformer-producer Kyros Kyros shifted their focus back to gender demarcation. This trend continued in Kyros’ 1914 performances of the

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Thesmophoriazusae, again adapted by Demetrakopoulos. In the provincial region of Volos around 1920, Kyros’ troupe staged a free version of the Ecclesiazusae, significantly titled The Suffragettes and Common Marriage. A 1927 production of the Thesmophoriazusae was also called The Suffragettes. These unambiguous double titles underline Demetrakopoulos’ reuse of Aristophanes’ comedies to express, and to neutralize through ridicule, the threats perceived in gender and social transformation. After Soures, the prolific Demetrakopoulos contributed most to the transvestite exploration of sexuality and role-playing in the broadest sense, as well as to women’s characteristic exclusion from this negotiated process. Demetrakopoulos’ sequence of stage adaptations established a more permanent male-only cultural space, beyond ephemeral performances and particular audiences, for the enactment of uninhibited yet exclusivist experiences of shifting body politics, of male-female verbal and paraverbal exchange, and of a transgressive Aristophanic spectacle culture. Transformers such as Kyros and Rotza¨ıron, who often departed from Demetrakopoulos, reduced both his translations and Aristophanes’ original themes to raw material for their own semipornographic productions, which also appealed to different strands of male awareness. In their constant process of adapting the adapted, they felt no legal obligation or ethical compulsion to leave Demetrakopoulos’ scripts unaltered. No translator enjoyed an inviolable copyright, and this lack was symptomatic of the early-twentieth-century erosion of the sanctity of Aristophanes’ text itself: if the ancient playwright had no rights, how could Demetrakopoulos claim any? In the transvestites’ hands, the new violability also marked the undermining of both classical-canonical and traditional male supremacy, and at the same time put an end to women’s physical and psychological privacy. The public domain, where one pays no royalties, where no rights are acknowledged, now extended not only to comic translation and ancient literature but even to the male and female body and mind. Epitheorese and Attic Comedy Demetrakopoulos held Attic comedy to the theatrical norms of the rising Athenian epitheorese. Contributing to both fields, he pursued grand-scale and long-term stage entertainment for the broad urban public, the majority of whom, like the average practitioner of light drama, lacked traditional text-based knowledge of the ancient playwright—or of any playwright, for that matter. Aristophanes’ enduring theatrical viability took priority over philological and academic conventions. Demetrakopoulos made this evolution happen by connecting Attic comedy and epitheorese, and by rooting the French revue firmly in Athenian soil in the first place.

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The epitheorese, a form that had its heyday between 1907 and 1921, translated the term revue and thus was kin to the fin de si`ecle Parisian entertainment culture of the cabaret, boulevard, vari´et´e, and vaudeville, which contained transvestite specialty acts as well.67 Without underestimating its function as a timely response to the Greek urban predicament, the epitheorese may be called the Athenian equivalent of the cabaret-style light theaters that sprouted up in turn-of-the-century European cities.68 The prototype and trendsetter was the renowned Chat Noir in Paris, active from 1881 through 1896. Originally, the Chat Noir provided an informal grouping of artists with the experimental stage that they needed and thereby gave the impetus to the French avant-garde of the first decades of the twentieth century. It was gradually invested with the mystique of the vibrant soir´ee noire nightlife of the ann´ees folles. Whereas the Parisian spectacle culture mocked the settled urban bourgeois class, the Athenian epitheorese did less so—it was too dependent on its bourgeois patrons for financial survival. These Greeks, eager to Europeanize and move up the social ladder, sponsored the French-imported entertainment business despite some resistance from the educated elites against proliferating foreign influences. Hastening to satisfy the bourgeoisie’s hunger for Western cultural models, the Athenian epitheorese provided increasingly lavish spectacles with sumptuous costumes and set designs, but not necessarily a higher degree of professionalism in acting and directing. The quality of the revues varied enormously depending on the priorities of players and managers. Productions of Aristophanes’ women’s plays, ever popular in Demetrakopoulos’ adaptations, grew side by side with the epitheorese spectacle industry. Both newly introduced stylistic forms expressed turn-of-thecentury individualist sensibilities and gratified the artistic, psychological, and sensual needs of a nervous and unsettled urban audience. This public, tired of the deterministic spirit of realist and naturalist theater, embraced the novel genres because they offered various fanciful entertainments: dramatic sketches, comic gags and monologues, satire, parody, mime and pantomime, music, song, and costumed dance. Their cosmopolitan artists kept up with the latest forms of escapist, ever more sophisticated divertissements. This culture of evasion essentially responded to the socioeconomic fancies of the insecure, nonelite classes by supplying tableaux from the elusive dreamworld of the affluent Western city. For the revue and the comic repertoire of tempting and teasing to be grasped by the common ranks, productions had to be varied, condensed, and genuinely humorous, at the constant risk of copying foreign gimmicks and stereotyping themselves. Nonetheless, both the more improvisational Aristophanic stage and epitheorese theater functioned as a testing ground for innovative acts of caricature, travesty, cross-dressing, and other spe-

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cialty forms lacking any outlet in official and academic drama. With every version of the malleable scenario, Aristophanes and the revue show set out anew to deride outmoded sociopolitical hierarchies and institutions along with lingering taboos against verbal and visual crudity. Covered by the mantle of classical respectability, Attic comedy could even take a more critical approach toward current Greek foibles, including trespassing across gender boundaries. The revues, in contrast, occasionally were restricted by official censorship and began to concentrate more heavily on the domestic themes of love and adultery. But all of the characteristics shared by the turn-of-the-century Aristophanes and the epitheorese were crystallized in the work of Demetrakopoulos. Like Soures’ satire, both the epitheorese and Attic comedy of the 1900s censured the thought and conduct of liberal-minded women. The 1898 version of the tremendously popular annual revue A Bit of Everything (Ligo ap’ hola) illustrates the sexist and antifeminist (comic) assertions of an early exemplar of the genre that provided a blueprint for its successors. Mikios Lampros’ 1894 original, which later scholars have claimed to be the first Athenian epitheorese, had been expanded by a scene that ridiculed the newly self-aware woman and semi-erudite teacher—referring to a feminist congress in Agrinio (probably in 1896).69 Responding to Soures’ misogynist thrust, early-twentieth-century revue skits also projected the liberated Hellenis (-ida) as a favorite object of derision.70 The revue International Panathenaia of 1915 was a later reflection on women and on the women’s plays. Staged at the Kotopoule Theater, this epitheorese was written by Demetrakopoulos in cooperation with Bampes Anninos and Georgios Tsokopoulos, the well-known duo of scenario writers of the popular annual revue Panathenaia (1907–23), which set the tone of Greek theatrical and musical life for more than fifteen years. By 1915 Demetrakopoulos’ Lysistrata and epitheorese practice had long been influencing one another, and consequently the versatile female characters of the International Panathenaia resembled Aristophanes’ leading ladies. The modern women who called for worldwide peace employed Lysistrata’s old weapon of a sex strike. Yet they ignored the First World War’s real drama and abused the war motif as yet another pretext for teasing and taunting their men. This un-masquerade toys with the duplicity of blighting morality and prescribing female un-dress. But men are again in control of the gaze because, even when absent at war, they hold up the mirror for their partners. The following bouncy song, performed by women, clearly appears to be a belittling self-caricature: Run to Ypres, to Flanders, to Arras, to the Dardanelles. Tempt your lost men with laughter, wit, and coquetry.

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Cast an erotic glance at them, so that love’s flame may scorch and devour them. REFRAIN You accepted all of that? ALL Yes, very true! Swear the oath: “As long as the trouble of war will last, all men, white, black, yellow, and swarthy, will get fried, and they’ll go . . . hm, hm, hm. But we will say . . . shh, shh, shh.” Bare your neck, and your arms, white and soft. And when the men come near you, snuggle like a cat. Give each idiot two kisses too, and then leave them in the pit, barking like dogs. A transparent little dress each one of you must wear. And cast languishing glances, and wiggle your hips too. Keep your shapely body stretched out like this. And let a hellish fever fry them. If you see that that doesn’t work, and that you’re wasting effort, then start to pull up your skirt in the right way: for when a woman reveals her fleshy legs, anguish will seize them, and they’ll lose their mind.71

Demetrakopoulos postulated further affinity between ancient comedy and modern epitheorese by defining Aristophanes’ Birds as a quintessential revue: the classical play featured most of the stock-in-trade epitheorese characters, including the buffoon protagonist (Peisetaerus), the pretty woman (Iris), and the glutton (Heracles). To be sure, the high-quality lyrics of the Birds did not fit Demetrakopoulos’ reductive framework.72 Yet he forced Attic comedy—and its attractive female figures—to leap across centuries and societies to enhance the modern male-oriented entertainment industry. In 1908 Demetrakopoulos launched his own yearly revue, The Cinema, in which two Chinese heroes criticized Greek public affairs, including women’s liberties, after the example of Aristophanes’ Peisetaerus and Euelpides and of Soures’ Phasoules and Perikletos. His 1921 epitheorese, called by the French name Madame Marie, contained the song “The Magpies” (He [sic] Karakaxes, a label also used to denounce female chatterboxes), in which two laughable characters again commented to the spectators.73 Thus Demetrakopoulos applied new forms of Aristophanic reception as well as comic biases to the “kindred” forum of the Athenian revue, contributing in the process to its quick rise. The largely coinciding upsurge of both epitheorese and Attic comedy helped secure the interest of the lower- and middle-class audiences in

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urban Greek theater. The Demotic language, the teasing Romaic-satirical vein, the uninhibited acceptance of “facts of life,” and the promise of a male introspective and fantasy world all added to Aristophanes’ appeal. The Greek masses, who had long enjoyed varied open-air performances and participatory amusements, became patrons of the new comic spectacle culture, which readied them for future native drama on the regular stage. Members of these social strata embraced Aristophanic plays as paradoxically familiar entertainment, not distant from popular skits, satires, parodies, caricatures, or the more lavish diversions and attractions that characteristically were relevant to the present and involved the audience. Because of their prior exposure to, and interaction with, those heterogeneous types of free performance, the general populace expected frank dialogue and representation from Aristophanes as well. Thus, not just the personal initiative of translators and producers but contemporary audience demand as well steered the reception of the classical poet in new directions. Attic comedy as truly public performance was the only ancient genre able to capitalize on popular tastes of the turn of the century. Lysistrata a` la fran¸caise In 1910 Marika Kotopoule (1887–1954), the renowned actress from Chrestomanos’ school and an entrepreneurial stage manager, played Lysistrata in a belle e´ poque production she opened at the Homonoia Theater.74 Her Lysistrata, however, was not a feminist’s retort but a carbon copy (in modern Greek translation) of a well-known boulevard show imported directly from Paris: the Lysistrata of Maurice Donnay, a poet, playwright, and cofounder of the Chat Noir cabaret. Since its 1892 premiere at the Grand-Th´eaˆ tre, Donnay’s comedy had seen substantial reworking, repetition, and imitation in Paris and elsewhere in Europe.75 Thus, at the height of the Europeanizing of the entertainment business in Athens, the French origin and international approval of this (nontransvestite) Lysistrata enticed Kotopoule to undertake the play herself. Donnay omitted long portions and radically altered plot, structure, and themes of Aristophanes’ original—casting ancient courtesans (hetairai) as the odalisques of an Oriental harem, for instance. Conceding to the boulevard’s fascination with extramarital love, he gave Lysistrata a lover as well as a husband. After a long and contrived rejection scene, she yields to her lover’s advances, breaking her oath of sexual abstinence—itself an aphrodisiac meant to arouse the male—in the Temple of Artemis! Demetrakopoulos, competing translator and promoter of the all-male Athenian Aristophanes, observed (in a review under the name of his wife, Eirene P. Demetrakopoulou, in Skrip, 16 September 1910) that Ko-

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topoule had spared no expense to present this foreign Lysistrata with all possible luxury and elegance. But, he continued, the play had become French through and through and was no longer Aristophanes’. Kotopoule’s Lysistrata performance, exceptional at the time for the absence of cross-dressing, and Demetrakopoulos’ alarm at both the French and the female intrusion on Aristophanes’ male national character raise further questions about the influence of Parisian comic productions in Greece. Lysistrata’s theme had been popularized widely by Donnay and other practitioners of Western light theater since the late nineteenth century. But rather than following an autonomous Aristophanic tradition, the French Lysistrata figure was cast as the comic equivalent of ancient mythical females who had become the stage focus of (adulterous) sensuality, parody of the classics, and ahistorical escapism. The 1864 operetta La Belle H´el`ene with music by Jacques Offenbach had done the most to further this treatment of classical women: the production had caused an international Offenbachiade, which had inspired Donnay’s choice of a hedonist Aristophanes.76 True to the “Offenbacchanal” spirit, Donnay’s interests were not confined to the libertine Lysistrata. Among the shadow plays he composed for the Chat Noir was a typical 1891 show titled Phryn´e: Sc`enes grecques, which again presented tableaux of the titillating manners of ancient courtesans. Popular Parisian hedonist entertainment objectified mythical or legendary women (Helen of Troy, Aphrodite, Eurydice, Galatea, Phryne and other Greek hetairai, maenads or bacchae, among others) for the sake of male voyeurist pleasure; and Donnay’s Lysistrata, rivaling with the courtesan Salabaccho for the favors of a common lover, became one of them. Athenian popular theater brought the large number of female stock characters of Parisian spectacle a` la grecque down to a few Aristophanic women. At the same time, the poet’s comeback was broadened by the inclusion of the influential 1900 Clouds of Soures. Through that play, at the formative beginnings of the Athenian hedonist Aristophanes, Soures reinfused Attic comedy with current sociopolitical satire, antifeminist polemics, and (all-encompassing) Romaic Greekness. Both Soures’ and Demetrakopoulos’ insistence on these popular components marked the main distinction between the Athenian and the French Aristophanic shows. Kotopoule’s unusual venture—transplanting a Parisian Lysistrata directly to Athens, without passing it through the filters of transvestism and exaggerated Western effeminacy—could not but insult the proud Romaic-masculinist Aristophanes of Soures and Demetrakopoulos.77 An affirmation of the poet’s Romaic Greekness was clearly needed after French critics of Donnay in 1909 had lauded his revised Lysistrata as the perfect specimen of “Parisian Atticism,” with an emphasis on moderation and delicacy tempering the original’s excessive crudity.78 Donnay himself

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was exalted as Aristophanes’ ideal modern interpreter—an encroachment on Soures’ title. To neutralize the prototype of the Parisian hedonist Lysistrata, Soures transformed his Clouds into a satirical-Romaic, antifeminist caricature. His new orientation dictated new staging choices, one of which seems to have been the insistence on male-only casts and audiences. The Greek transformer’s feminized or effeminate body then became the ideal locus in which issues of sexual, cultural, and national superiority could be addressed. Athenian transvestite comedy suffocated this pretend, surrogate she under glitzy European costume and attire, which symbolized some of the constrictive trappings and stereotypes in which Greek men dressed women and Westerners alike. Cross-dressing in roles of the “weaker sex” reaffirmed not only male dominance over women but also virile Greek supremacy over alleged Western effeminacy. THE LANGUAGE QUESTION

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CONTEMPORARY THEATER

Both the Athenian epitheorese, which emerged in 1894, and Soures’ Clouds represented strands of Greek theatrical tradition with origins in the 1880s Demoticist movement.79 They did not find blatant misogyny there, however; the movement’s leaders, Ioannes Psychares and Kostes Palamas, were sympathetic to the feminist cause, because they realized women’s crucial role in transmitting the native tongue and indigenous Greek values.80 The 1888 publication of Psychares’ book My Journey had rekindled the Language Question, which resulted in a diglossia, or split, between “purists” (the Kathareuousianoi) and advocates of the Demotic folk idiom and oral culture.81 Although the number of radical followers of Psychares’ linguistic, folkloric, and social ideology (denounced as Psycharismos or malliarismos, “hairism”) remained relatively small, it came to include innovative twentieth-century translators of Aristophanes, such as the Marxist poet Kostas Varnales, to whom I will return in chapter 4. The year 1888 also gave the start to a Greek literary, dramatic, and broader cultural revival. In 1888 the Athens Municipal Theater opened its doors on Syngrou Avenue, and remained active until 1936.82 This playhouse saw several Demotic premieres and repeat performances of Aristophanes’ works, including Demetrakopoulos’ 1905 Lysistrata. By promoting vernacular drama, the Demoticists of 1888 expected to establish their linguistic theory and practice no less on stage than in lyric poetry and prose fiction, realms in which the popular tongue had long since gained considerable freedom and legitimacy.83 They welcomed the komeidyllio (comic idyll), a native prose comedy of daily life that incorporated song and dance.84 This genre, which shared elements of realism, naturalism, and melodrama with contemporary prose literature, enjoyed short-lived popu-

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larity among the Athenian middle classes from the late 1880s until 1896, when it gave way to the epitheorese.85 The Demoticists translated many classical authors in their endeavors to reappropriate Greek antiquity for the vernacular tradition, which they claimed was continuous through the Byzantine and post-Byzantine eras.86 Whereas the spoken idiom suited adaptations of Aristophanes, its use in renditions of the classical tragedians produced a genuine shock. Because Attic comedy was perceived as a prime object not of Western-Hellenic but of popular-Romaic national pride, its allegiance to the Demoticist cause was stable and, after the success of Soures’ vernacular Clouds, rarely contested. Aristophanes thus avoided the heaviest blows of the language battle that swept through Greece in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In contrast, tragedy’s reception became deeply entangled in the linguistic struggle over the ancient authors, which came to a head in 1903 in the bloody riots of the Oresteiaka (which themselves followed the violent Euangelika protest against Alexandros Palles’ Demotic translation of the Gospels). In 1903 Thomas Oikonomou of the Royal Theater produced Aeschylus’ Oresteia in Soteriades’ controversial adaptation in (a higher register of) the vernacular.87 This progressive choice enraged Athens University students, who clashed with local police when they took to the streets to defend the reactionary linguistic views of leading classics professor Georgios Mistriotes. The scuffle attested both to the high passions provoked by the linguistic debate and to the continued preference of the larger audience for revivals of classical drama in a more accessible language. The huge public attention devoted to this Oresteia prior to its opening foreshadowed its success with the common people of Athens: they crowded the theater for ten consecutive nights. Admittedly, the drama offstage may well have attracted even more viewers. A brief sketch of other developments in modern and revived ancient Greek drama will help put into perspective the flexibility and modernity of Aristophanes. The comic poet was allied with progressive and destabilizing forces forbidden to the tragedians: Demotic language and folklore; politico-satirical journalism; Romaic identity, masculinity, and paravase; public performance for the unschooled and unpredictable masses; emerging leftist ideologies and social critiques; and loosening religious, moral, and sexual codes. Athens, the capital city since 1834, did not acquire an indigenous theatrical repertoire until the end of the nineteenth century, mainly because native drama was overwhelmed by competition from Western European troupes active in Greek territories. These well-organized and bettertrained companies, with their refined style and viable commercial program, particularly impressed the nineteenth-century court and urban

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elites. French and Italian operettas and romantic melodramas, which dominated the Athenian stages from about 1840 on, were joined by imports from Parisian cabaret culture toward the century’s close. More sophisticated European operas and neoclassical tragedies, whether in the original languages or in Greek translations, also engaged the upper ranks of society. Other factors contributed to delaying indigenous drama for decades: the scarcity of professional directors, actors, and artists; the absence of a large and well-educated audience with prior theater experience; the financial insecurity of the relatively small Greek troupes; and the regulations by the state that censored drama on ethical and political grounds. Finally, the official pressure for formalistic revivals of ancient tragedy to support the young country’s cultural legitimacy and nationalist unification drained creative resources that could otherwise have been spent on establishing an attractive, substantial body of original Greek drama. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth century, revivals of classical tragedy in versions other than the favored Western European neoclassical adaptations generally drew on academic and student idealism, knowledge, and even economic backing. The 1868 Clouds of Rankaves’ students was the only comedy in this amateur tradition, but it too heeded the principles laid down for reviving tragedy and was staged in the symbolic Herodes Atticus Theater. The main problem facing the academic and volunteer movement, however, was its failure to excite popular and middle-class Athenian audiences. The broad public did not oppose the idea of tragic revivals, but reacted with hostility or apathy toward the language chosen to stage them: either authentic ancient Greek or conservative translations in Kathareuousa, equally incomprehensible registers for the unschooled masses.89 The public had no scruples about disrupting uncommunicative revival performances (even when the police were supervising), heckling the insecure amateur players, or abandoning the stilted Greek classics altogether. As a result, nearly all commercial theater companies chose not to produce original tragedy until well into the twentieth century, when Demotic was better accepted and translations became available that enabled them to circumvent the linguistic dilemma at the heart of the problem.90 Yet these Demotic acting versions could provoke considerable conservative protest, as the notorious Oresteiaka demonstrated. The professionals may have avoided the original tragedians for other reasons as well. First, the huge financial burden imposed by the obligatory choruses of classical drama discouraged them. Maintaining a large number of costumed chorus members drastically increased production and travel expenses for commercial troupes, who typically performed in Athens in the summer and toured the Greek communities abroad during the winter season. Second, professional companies and their audiences generally had little inter-

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est in the content and form of ancient tragedy, which they perceived as a genre paralyzed by its choruses, monologues, and messenger narratives.91 The production policies of Marika Kotopoule and Kyvele (Adrianou), the two leading and competing actresses and stage managers of the first half of the twentieth century, reflected this enduring indifference toward the classical tragedians.92 Until state-subsidized and more or less permanent professional theater companies emerged in the 1930s, tragic revivals were kept alive only by academic student troupes and societies of dilettanti, whose lack of concern with profit enabled them to try out what the commercial stage was unwilling to risk. The two more progressive turn-ofthe-century professional companies that experimented with ancient tragedy in Demotic did not last a single decade. These were Chrestomanos’ New Stage Company and the Royal Theater under Thomas Oikonomou, who put on the ill-fated 1903 Oresteia.93 Nonetheless, Chrestomanos and Oikonomou succeeded in elevating the concept and function of the professional theater producer, whose status tended to be quite low during those years when translators such as Soures and Demetrakopoulos directed many performances themselves. Unshaken by their lack of audience, members of Mistriotes’ Society for Staging Ancient Greek Drama presented annual, state-subsidized productions of tragedy in ancient Greek from 1896 until 1906. Mistriotes himself believed that—unlike Aristophanes—Aeschylus, Euripides, and particularly Sophocles offered infallible behavioral models for contemporary Greeks to imitate. He did not convince the Athenian public, however, which remained conspicuously absent whenever his students and amateurs performed.94 Seeking a modern Greek rebirth of the tragedians’ timeless ethos and language, Mistriotes still treated classical drama more as the bearer of Hellenic ideology than as a theatrical event; he followed an interpretive path leading back to the past, along a course mapped by academic formalism and nostalgic grandeur. At the height of Demoticist renewal, Mistriotes’ idealism spoke only to a small elite of Greek intellectuals, such as the university student who proclaimed in 1890: “The ancient Greek drama is the high teacher of national beauty, the infallible prophet of internal happiness.”95 Mistriotes failed because he perpetuated the Hellenic philological, “patriotic” treatment of classical tragedy when changing times called for new approaches. The self-styled director sacrificed performance to the delivery of “correct” prosodic ancient Greek. Lacking complete knowledge of authentic staging conditions, his student-amateurs re-created the conventional, historically, and archaeologically “accurate” style that had prevailed in earlier tragic revivals such as Rankaves’ Clouds. Along with minimal action and movement, it prominently featured monotonous, overly solemn, and hypertragic speech. Hardly any Athenians went to Mistriotes’ 1901 production of Sopho-

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cles’ Oedipus Rex. The university students and colleagues who did attend followed the ancient Greek lines in the textbooks they had brought along.96 But that same year, the urban populace crowded the playhouses in which Soures’ Clouds saw repeat performances. Although in the society’s founding documents Mistriotes had promised to stage Attic comedy as well, the mass-supported competition of Soures and Demetrakopoulos intimidated him, and he never made the attempt. Also, the “vulgar” Aristophanes in his Demotic, popular-Romaic, and even semipornographic guise conflicted on every count with Mistriotes’ conservative nationalist, linguistic, and moral standards. The classics professor and his dilettanti failed to appreciate the genius of Aristophanes, whom they saw as far beneath the tragedians. Thus, while the general audience demanded lighter genres and engaging performance styles, Mistriotes insisted on nonadapted tragedy stiffly delivered in ancient Greek. The society’s reactionary stagings met with acts of sabotage. On the opening day of the 1904 Ajax of Sophocles, for instance, the periodical Noumas printed the play’s complete Demotic translation by Zesimos Sideres.97 This feat resulted in nothing less than a Demoticist takeover of the premiere: much to Mistriotes’ aggravation, the original ancient Greek was “wasted” on the spectators present, who followed the vernacular rendition.98 Criticizing the society’s 1905 Antigone, Gregorios Xenopoulos, prolific Demotic novelist and author of social dramas, unmasked the Hellenic-nationalist language ideology: We think that if it were discovered that we do not comprehend our ancestors’ tongue, they [Western European visitors] will tell us that we do not descend from Pericles, and that the Parthenon is not our inheritance.99 And this fear causes us to claim, and even to believe it ourselves, that we do understand and have a feel for the Antigone in the original language. . . . [W]e thought we would amaze our foreign guests and take them in by demonstrating that we presumably are in a position to follow the Antigone as a drama and not as a pantomime [i.e., without comprehending the verbal language], as is the harsh and bitter truth.100

Mistriotes had long proclaimed cultural continuity and Neohellenic descent from the ancients, as in his congratulatory words to the studentperformers of his 1899 Electra of Sophocles: “Your enthusiasm for the immortal plays of our ancestors attests to the authenticity of our lineage and to our noble intention to improve national theater and thereby national life.” Note his frustration with those Western intellectuals whose quest for the classical past made them depreciate the modern Greeks: “[L]et us show to the foreigners that in our fatherland, there are not only ruins and not only owls, but also Greek men and women who can be inspired by the great and shining ideals of their ancestors.”101 The show-

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casing of the “immortal plays” reflected Mistriotes’ vision of ancient tragedy as an idealized moment of national Hellenic legitimation. It transformed his revivals into public displays of social and cultural superiority. Tragedy as the medium of choice made the native intellectual elite superior to the less-educated masses, and the modern Greeks superior to the Westerners with their borrowed, non-ancestral Hellenism. Mistriotes and his academic entourage placed the national patrimony in the service of existing class divisions and intellectual hierarchies. In this perspective, critical attacks and acts of sabotage were not only directed against the society’s stagings but implied a rejection of elite theater audiences as well. It was not surprising, then, that Mistriotes’ precarious constructs occasionally collided with opposing views, as in the street riots over the Oresteiaka. We can understand how the purportedly theoretical linguistic dispute could assume such violent sides if we remember the inextricable links that early Neohellenists, such as Koraes, forged between language and official nation-building.102 Mistriotes was a typical representative of academe, which promoted ancient Greek to assert the Western-Hellenic cultural and “patriotic” identity of the modern “descendants.” His circle refused to acknowledge that the lay populace had its own, less publicized concepts and ideals of a Romaic-style rekindling of Greek culture, based on the Demotic language and interest in folklore. Nor was Mistriotes’ brand of patriotism professed by all intellectuals, as Demoticist critics refused to exalt the linguistic propriety and rigid orthodoxy of ancient Greek or Kathareuousa over the creative irregularity of native vernacular drama and, by extension, of the popular Aristophanes. In the early 1890s Xenopoulos had turned from using Kathareuousa to advocating the Demotic tongue and had committed himself to the cause of authentic modern Greek theater. Meanwhile, exciting new Western dramatic imports successfully competed for a share of the attention and financial backing of the growing educated middle- and upper-class strata. The elitist Hellenic patriotism that Mistriotes’ state-subsidized productions were to serve was being undermined from within: an increasing portion of the traditional establishment denounced the extremely conservative tragic revivals and preferred to seek out and enjoy accessible and innovative theatrical genres. These more attractive forms included the ever-popular neoclassical adaptations of ancient drama, the komeidyllio, the epitheorese and related Parisian cabaret spectacle, and Aristophanic comedy, which was currently deliberating men’s shared antifeminist concerns in an engaging satirical language. In 1894 Xenopoulos poignantly lamented the French artistic fashions that affected Greek drama and audience taste: “From the perspective of theatrical life, we are a French cultural province.”103 This characterization of Greece as a disputed colony of Western cultural imperialism figured in

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Xenopoulos’ opening speech at the Athenian stage premiere of Ibsen’s Ghosts: it was mainly because Paris had discovered the naturalist Norwegian playwright that he first appeared in Greece.104 Seventeen months later, Mistriotes inaugurated a decade of protectionist tragedy in the name of inherited Hellenic civilization. Though their reactions were opposite, both Xenopoulos and Mistriotes resented how French prototypes and even enthusiasms for foreign works shaped turn-of-the-century Greek theater. The decade in which Mistriotes’ society existed experienced not only the Western annexation of native drama but also humiliating socioeconomic, political, and military setbacks at the hands of foreign forces, which fragmented traditional nineteenth-century Greek societal structures. In 1893 the country had been compelled to declare bankruptcy, and the effects of economic decline remained palpable. Massive emigration and epidemics drained human resources. The Greek army was defeated by the Turks in 1897 after the catastrophic Thirty Day War, while nationalist friction with Bulgaria over Macedonia intensified. The widespread devastation drove some intellectuals to increased radicalism; it encouraged others to accept Mistriotes’ conservative proffer of original tragedy as a welcome boost of the Hellenic-nationalist ideology. They believed that cultural traditionalism with a flavor of chauvinism would dispel “blameworthy” modern Greek insecurity and confirm the nation’s refueled irredentist ambition: its “Great Idea” to expand frontiers and to include the “unredeemed” (formerly Byzantine) territories where large ethnic Greek populations still lived under Ottoman rule.105 Nationalist irredentism operated on a metaphorical level in Mistriotes’ dramatic theory and practice. His conservative productions wrenched from Western control the classical playwrights, his “unredeemed compatriots” enmeshed in foreign adaptations, as well as the ethnic ancient Greek language—to be delivered not with the Erasmian but with the modern Greek pronunciation. Mistriotes “rescued” the tragedians for their native country. If it had been possible, he would have brought them home to the Dionysus Theater, or at least to the Herodeion. His “patriotic” archaiomania also dictated that the annual stagings be scheduled for March or April, coinciding with the season in which the Great Dionysia of the Golden Age were celebrated. Mistriotes had to settle, however, for the enclosed Municipal Theater and for the imperfect sphendone of the outdoor Panathenaic Stadium.106 Finally, Mistriotes’ retirement from Athens University in 1908 closed the era of the expansionist Great Idea politics of Greek drama, which for decades had hampered or left unexploited indigenous and more productive resources. Twentieth-century intellectuals and theater professionals abandoned protectionist cultural am-

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bitions that had striven to recapture not only the language of classical drama but, as in Rankaves’ Clouds, even its prosody and formal structure. Aristophanic comedy was regarded—and enjoyed—as incompatible with Hellenic academic aesthetics, with high-cultural and political irredentist aspirations. The poet was not asked, or even trusted, to speak with the authoritative or patriotic voice of the ancient past. Instead, he had to prove his lasting relevance to the changing world of the lowerand middle-class male public, which, in the 1900s, made up its mind as to how it liked its Aristophanes. These Greek men, with progressive ideas about class though not gender emancipation, accepted Attic comedy only on their own terms: as a Demotic epitheorese-style spectacle with a fair but flexible dose of transgressive obscenity, satirical humor, and sociopolitical commentary. Added was all the spice of the imported and transformed revue: bold songs and dances, extravagant sets and costumes, and forbidden (homo)erotic and pornographic themes. Off-color Lysistratas steered Aristophanes’ reception through the interwar period, continuing to influence stagings after transvestite interpretation had grown stale. But along with the acted female body, these shows commonly bared layers of male antifeminist satire, of sexual caricature as well as of deliberation on gender and genre. In the 1940s and 1950s, pornographic recasting of Aristophanes became an almost dead form. Declining antifeminist militancy may have been one of the reasons for the transformers’ and the public’s loss of interest in the women’s plays. The Lysistrata of the second half of the twentieth century was more often than not a feministprogressive voice (see chapter 5), and straight, nontransvestite productions of the play have outnumbered those featuring men impersonating women. SOCIAL

AND

GENDER STRUGGLE

In the general turn-of-the-century malaise, Mistriotes’ revivals of ancient tragedy marked off an elite social group and celebrated its “patriotism,” but they failed to build solidarity among classes and between the sexes. Upward movements of the Greek “middle classes” (mesaia stromata) paralleled occasional economic upsurges, but the fruits of modernization were distributed far from evenly.107 Under leftist ideological influence, the more liberal period following the 1909 Bourgeois Revolt of Goudi (which brought Venizelos to power) saw the first concerted programs and campaigns to increase public and individual rights. The new liberalism also allowed inquiry into feminist and gender issues, although another conservative backlash always threatened. In 1917 the Bolshevik Revolution held out a model for long-overdue socioeconomic reform;

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inevitably, Marxism and communism appealed to the Greek lower and middle classes, and to students and younger members of the growing intelligentsia. Via the liberating effect of his Demotic and satiricalRomaic public performance, Aristophanes, then, became a populist champion of the underprivileged ranks fighting inherited wealth, power, and prestige. His mid-nineteenth-century socialism, his subsequent Marxism, and his soon-to-be-discovered communism were markers of the poet’s “naturally” leftist alignment. Against the harangues of highbrow theater critics, many members of the contemporary Greek establishment publicly approved and occasionally even sponsored bawdy Aristophanic productions. The moral censors’ criticism may have been directed less against the quality of than against the broad support for the Lysistrata adaptations. Failing to recognize light comedy as a necessary expression of the unofficial Greek culture, the detractors relegated Aristophanes to low-status entertainment. Their rejection is significant because they spoke not only for the past and for tragic revivals but also for a small circle out of touch with the other social strata, which enjoyed the Aristophanic euphoria for more than three decades. Even as social upheaval cast doubts on the adequacy of the patriotic high art upheld by the critics, comedy was welcomed as a mode of escapism that counseled optimism and relief through laughter and nudity. Theater culture, though sometimes mediocre, had to represent the bulk of the populace, and this demand inspired middlebrow cries of protest against “pedantic” revivals of tragedy. Therefore, to be popularnational a modern Greek Aristophanes could not afford to be elitist and divisive, or disengaged from societal conflict. The tradition of Romaic spectacle on which the poet relied had long firmly upheld the ideal of male bonding. This bedrock now shook under the challenge of including “other” men and confronting freer women, but it settled back whenever men could share the satirical ammunition against feminism provided by Soures and Demetrakopoulos. Comedy’s projection of links between sociopolitical demise and loss of male-defined individual and national prestige sharpened its antifeminist focus as soon as vocal Greek women, like Parren, accused the poet of fueling historical and contemporary gender conflict. Thus, the Aristophanic stage signaled the endeavors of players and public alike to come to grips with the novel fabric of ethically and culturally ambiguous urban life of the first decades of the twentieth century.108 Around 1900 the Greek reception of Aristophanes modernized rapidly, taking its cues from the connected realms of Demoticist reform, satirical journalism, and popular native theater. The poet shook off the ties that constricted other classics’ language, translation, and stage interpretation

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by tapping into the Romaic wellsprings discovered by the satirist Soures. Soures drew the dichotomous constituents of Greek identity, the Romaic and the Hellenic, into the arena of ancient drama. His 1900 antifeminist Clouds forged the first link between the isolated comic revivals of the past and the future of popular (and potentially explosive) performances. After him, Demetrakopoulos and the transformers exploited the oeuvre of a uniquely “kindred” Aristophanes to create a flourishing and diversified spectacle industry. Aristophanes mirrored the new sensibilities of an upwardly mobile but often disillusioned urban audience. In an era rife with social and artistic tensions, revived ancient comedy was the perfect breeding ground and classical cover for the ultimate transgression of sexist caricature and sexual play—both being the communal property of men. The transvestites’ macho and misogynist language, again launched by the trend-setting Soures, was as much a defensive screen (to counter lingering biases against effeminacy) as a side effect of the new exhilarating male-only stage exploration of obscenity, gender transformation, and sexual identity and attraction. The comic euphoria helped redefine masculinity and femininity and helped manipulate the female image. Generally not an end itself, Aristophanes’ antifeminism contrasted “flawed” early-twentiethcentury reality with an ironic, conservative norm of the past to great humorous effect both in the satirical press and in the popular playhouses. In the language and action of all-male protest and bonding, liberal-minded women were derided as promiscuous, unreliable partners; hysterical suffragettes; half-witted pedants; or any combination of the above. Decked out in the universally attractive garb of humor and stagecraft, Aristophanes became the poet of all times: he embodied the weight of (the odd-one-out among) the classics and the clever resilience of the semi-anarchic Romaic underdog. His rebel spirit (in both respects, but with emphasis on the longevity of Romiosyne), his strangely familiar paravase appealed—and continues to appeal—most directly to the larger Greek public. Stimulated further by the optimism of imported light theater, Aristophanes grew into a quintessential symbol of survival, a phoenix (or his own bird-character Peisetaerus) rising from the ashes of national and personal demise. This sociologically inspired image is one answer to the commentators’ long-standing bias against the new comic plays: they were deeply imbedded in Greek civic critique and therefore should not be condemned as decadent and irrelevant French mimicry for male domestic mass-consumption. An interdependent framework of gender inquiry, feminist theory, and political and social discussion has opened useful categories of analysis of Aristophanes’ main traits/treats between 1900 and 1940. The playwright’s work was constantly reinvented as a forum to negotiate changing (not vanishing) morality—including the

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modern war of the sexes and threat of power differentials among men— along the (body)line of his malleable Lysistrata. Aristophanes emerged as an icon of social, verbal, and sexual liberation from an intricate transformation process that was relegated to “transformers” and predicated on women’s absence. By its very nature and intention, the pornographic comedy of males impersonating females promised only ambiguity—probing both the feminine and the act of representation—but no real control or certainty. The transvestite Aristophanic stage therefore became the choice medium to pose complex questions of genre, gender, and social mobility; to uproot dangerous, interlocked determinacies of the past, the canon, and patriarchy; and ultimately to expand awareness and knowledge of the self and the world. The popular demand for a liberated and libertine Aristophanes was not divorced from interpretive questions posed in preceding phases. Ideological, aesthetic, and ethical criteria had governed Attic comedy throughout the nineteenth century, but their elitist advocates had not been able to extricate the undesirable vomolochies from the ancient texts—not even via direct moral censorship of the earliest editions, translations, and stage adaptations. The haunting Aristophanes-vomolochos came back with a vengeance in the transvestite shows. In the popular mind and male fantasy, effectively fused into one entity, the ancient playwright who never wrote pornography was rapidly transformed into the modern Greek foulmouth (foul-thinker and -doer) par excellence. The mantle of classical art added to the attraction of the previously forbidden fruit: even pornography had an ancient pedigree. Thus, the early-twentieth-century image of a naughty Aristophanes was conditioned by older characterizations that it sought (if not always consciously) to modify. Because the removal of philological and historical layers of exegesis was bound to affect any new treatment, the original classical texts themselves ultimately played a less decisive role in creating a different approach than did the academic, “positivist,” and puritanical legacy of the preceding epoch. The Aristophanic stage presented a necessary corrective to the mode of sublimating the ethos and language of the classical dramatists and of ancient Greek civilization. While Mistriotes tightened the grip on tragic revivals, comic theater partook in a critical rethinking of the classics’ reception thus far. Left free to deride the imperiled values and crumbling monuments of late-nineteenth-century society, Aristophanes pushed forward a popular-based cultural process of demythologizing both the revered past and a supposedly cohesive Greek people: it fostered Romaic disdain for the high art of the conservative elite of old, which was irrelevant to the rising masses and bourgeoisie. Vocal and spirited antitraditionalism rejected inherited norms and reached seemingly irrational levels early in the new century. Demythologizing the Hellenic high culture also

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provoked the revolution in taste that set the stage for innovative Greek art and literature of the 1930s. By that time, Attic comedy’s future was secured not only by its deep roots in indigenous soil but also by its alertness to shifting popular appetites and foreign influences. The comic credibility of his subject matter supplied a fail-proof recipe for success, and Aristophanes became the living fellow native, in stark contrast with the classical tragedians who were and remained dead ancient Hellenes.

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Koun’s Birds of 1959: Paravase of Right-Wing Politics The Greek people have been deprived many times of their social freedom, even of their own voice. In Aristophanes they find themselves, . . . the voice of the people is his voice. —Perseus Athenaios, Hemeresia, 30 August 1989

THE TERROR

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OPTIMISM

The Incident On the evening of 29 August 1959 more than three thousand theatergoers gathered at the Odeion of Herodes Atticus to attend an opening production of Aristophanes’ Birds. Karolos Koun (1908–87), director of the Theatro Technes, or Art Theater, presented this bird utopia of 414 B.C.E. as part of the official and state-sponsored Athens Festival. Reportedly, from the very beginning of the play many spectators took offense at the liberties that the translator, Vasiles Rotas, had taken with the text. Rotas’ acting version employed bold anachronisms denouncing U.S. missiles, hand grenades, and military bases and airports, as well as icons of American culture from cowboys to Einstein.1 At the same time, the production’s music, by Manos Chatzidakis, failed to engage the audience. As in his score for Koun’s 1957 Plutus, Chatzidakis had preferred modern Greek folk tunes and Anatolian dances to ancient choral music and comic dance, artificially reconstructed on the basis of very scant evidence. The balletic choreography executed by the Helleniko Chorodrama of Rallou Manou did not please the public, either, largely because the score and dancers’ movements were not coordinated and the actors’ parts were often obscured by an overload of music, song, and dance. Moreover, the audience disliked the stage and costume designs of artist Giannes Tsarouches. His earthen-colored bird costumes looked poor and hastily fabricated, and his plain sets flouted convention (which demanded a solidly constructed backdrop with three entrances opening onto a raised stage platform). The overall impression was of an improvised, unfinished, and disorganized production—a miserable attempt to make the ancient original contemporary.

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Matters came to a head near the middle of the two-hour performance. In one scene, the protagonist, Peisetaerus (played by Demetres Chatzemarkos), called on a priest to sacrifice a goat to the gods. This priest, dressed in the robe of a modern clergyman, began chanting in the familiar notes of Byzantine ecclesiastical music, but without altering the content of Aristophanes’ original mock prayer to the Olympian gods of Nephelococcygia.2 Koun’s parody-of-the-parody shocked some spectators, who showed their disapproval of this “sacrilege” with cries of “Disgraceful,” “Shame,” “Enough!”3 It is unclear how many viewers reacted thus, since estimates vary according to the ideology of the source.4 Most of the audience, however, applauded enthusiastically. Chatzemarkos saved the scene by breaking off the mock prayer, but the atmosphere in the Herodeion remained tense during the rest of the performance. Official Action and Reaction The following day Konstantinos Tsatsos, a prominent intellectual and leading politician in the right-wing government of Prime Minister Karamanles, banned the three remaining scheduled performances of the Birds, declaring: “The play performed yesterday, insufficiently rehearsed, constituted a distortion of the spirit of the classical text, while some of its scenes were presented in such a way as to offend the religious sensibilities of the people.”5 Tsatsos had been among the spectators in the Herodeion, and he had taken offense at the production’s implicit criticisms of the Greek Orthodox Church and its alliance with the conservative, proAmerican Konstantinos Karamanles. Even though the latter’s rule of the mid-1950s through early 1960s was notorious for its authoritarianism, this formal act of censorship, inconsistent with democratic principles, baffled most Greeks. Popular reaction to the Art Theater’s exclusion from the Athens Festival was immediate. For about two weeks, the Greek press and radio covered daily developments of this public issue. The newspaper coverage also reflected the resulting political split. Some conservative papers, such as To Vema and He Kathemerine, attacked Rotas’ daring translation. Guided by an implicit bias against gay artists and Jewish liberals, they placed the blame on the director, Koun, who in addition to falling into both of the above categories was also a foreigner. Thus the establishment defended Tsatsos’ decision. But less conservative papers and journals, such as He Auge, Eleutheria, and Ta Nea, blamed the festival authorities, the conservative critics, Tsatsos, and even Karamanles himself. They claimed that the members of the festival’s organizing committee were at fault for not having canceled Koun’s premiere earlier, since they knew his usual mode of interpreting Aristophanes and had also been able to attend the play’s dress rehearsals.

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Tsatsos was charged with imposing state censorship and thereby infringing on the civic right of freedom of speech, even though blasphemy against sacred symbols was an offense in the Greek penal code. The editorial committee of the literary periodical Epitheorese Technes (1954–67), known for its liberal political stance, defended Koun and attacked Tsatsos and other detractors in an article titled “The ‘Stymphalian Birds’ of Mr. Tsatsos and the Ostriches among Our Theater Critics.” In the editors’ opinion, reviewers ignored the crucial issue of the government’s arbitrary and antidemocratic interference, exaggerated the weaknesses of Koun’s production, and thus justified the formal ban on trumped-up grounds. Tsatsos had no right, they continued, to make his personal taste into an official Panhellenic aesthetic. The scandal surrounding the Birds was slated to be discussed in the 10 September meeting of the Greek parliament, but some members refused to address the matter.6 He Auge of 1 September 1959 called the minister’s decision hypocritical and “an official acknowledgment of the bankruptcy of the Athens Festival.” On the front page of the same issue, the paper printed the observation by Athanasios Tsouparopoulos: “What Cleon could not do to Aristophanes [i.e., prevent him from speaking out publicly], Konstantinos Tsatsos managed to do, all under the cover of democracy!”7 The journalist claimed that the politician saw in Aristophanes’ satire and in his presumed revolutionary ideas a powerful threat to the establishment.8 Therefore, Tsouparopoulos continued, the 1959 production was banned not because the people disliked the opening performance but because the government disliked it. By punishing Koun, the minister wanted to set a precedent, to make everyone understand that interpretation of Aristophanes had to follow certain rules. For the incensed journalist, however, this act of censorship would stand as a monument to the climate of obscurantism fostered by the Karamanles administration. In a highly ironic passage, Tsouparopoulos wrote: Aristophanes “has been threatening the established order” for the past two or three years, with his comedies, with his crude language, and with his revolutionary ideas. He managed to sneak inside the “precinct of Helleno-Christian civilization,” but all he does is speak sarcastically about the sacred and the holy. First of all, he glorifies peace, which makes him intolerable. He calls on us Greeks, “liberated from civil fighting and from wars to bring peace into our midst!” And when did he do that? On the very same day when the cannons of Lycabettus shook the Acropolis inviting the people to celebrate the “joy” of the Civil War! Ah, that is too much, Mr. Aristophanes! Add those theories about wealth and poverty, about cruel injustice, and about social changes that must take place. . . . And finally, . . . there is his ridicule of the Olympian gods, along with his allegations at the very opening of the Birds: “We took the dark

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road back to a place without petty politicians and law courts, without sycophants, critics, or police forces . . .”! [ellipsis his] What is that all about?! How can a regime that is based on sycophancies, police forces, and petty politicians . . . tolerate all of that? So, get out of here, Mr. Aristophanes! We ain’t dumb birds!

Several newspapers gave Koun the opportunity to defend himself against Tsatsos’ intervention, publishing interviews in which the director expressed his surprise at the severe official reaction. Koun claimed that he had been interpreting Aristophanes in similar artistic terms for many years, since the time of his student productions at Athens College. At this American-sponsored boys’ high school, where Koun taught English prior to the Second World War, he had successfully directed a group of creative pupils performing the Birds (1932, 1939), the Frogs (1933), and the Plutus (1936). The Anexartetos Typos of 2 September 1959 printed a protest by Koun, in which he threatened to sue for financial compensation for the losses incurred by the forced cancellations. The same day, the paper began to publish the acting version of the Birds “without abridgments” as a sensational daily serial. The front page also printed Rotas’ justification of his free rendition. THE BIRDS CAUGHT

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COLD WAR POLITICS

More than any aesthetic and religious concerns, contemporary sociopolitical tension provoked the official ban against Koun’s Birds of 1959. Key to the entire scandal was the boldly antigovernment and anti-American rendition of the poet, playwright, and journalist Vasiles Rotas (1889– 1977). His name and reputation alone must have alarmed the conservatives even before the production opened, for Rotas had been a leading communist member of the leftist EAM, or the National Liberation Front (Ethnikon Apeleutherotikon Metopon), the largest Greek Resistance movement against the Nazi and Fascist-Italian Occupation (1940–44). In 1944, following the disbanding of his Athenian drama school, Rotas had organized one of the small mobile troupes of the Theater of the Mountains, consisting of both guerrilla soldiers and recruits from the sympathetic local population. Like other partisan itinerant thiasoi, he staged interactive agit(ation)-prop(aganda) plays mostly for rural and provincial audiences, presenting a “peasant revolutionary art with national character” in an era when existing city playhouses, such as the National Theater (founded in 1932, with Photos Polites as director), were forced to close down or were restricted by rigid German censorship.9 By the time of the 1959 Birds production, however, the reactionary, anticommunist administration of Karamanles had long since declared war

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against the remnants of the leftist Resistance, for reasons that were deeply grounded in the fratricidal civil strife of the late forties. In Rotas’ version, Aristophanes became enmeshed in Greek and international cold war politics. About a decade prior to Koun’s controversial premiere, the traumatic Civil War (1946–49) over the social and political hegemony of liberated Greece had undermined widespread popular admiration and practical support for the active Resistance fighters of EAM and other leftist organizations, including youth movements. The internecine strife between embattled Greek nationalists and communists had turned the tide against the latter, who, after several defeats in the north, proclaimed a “temporary cessation” of hostilities in 1949. In the aftermath of the Civil War, the Western-assisted, right-wing national governments that ruled without interruption from 1952 until 1963 aimed primarily at containing its communist enemies, who had been demobilized and demoralized by state and parastate repression. Those conservative administrations consistently associated former participation in EAM with communist conspiracy against national security. Rotas was only one of many who fell victim to this assumption. The Right received military and economic relief aid under the anticommunist Truman Doctrine of 1947, and it was supported by Britain, by a reinvigorated Greek monarchy, and by the powerful Orthodox Church.10 The Communist Party of Greece (KKE), since its foundation in 1918 the political front for leftists seeking large-scale political and societal reform, had been driven into exile and was officially outlawed from 1947 until 1974. The Greek Rally of Marshal Alexandros Papagos, commander in chief during the final stages of the civil strife, came first among the right-wing national governments endeavoring to keep communism in check. From 1955 on, Konstantinos Karamanles, at the head of his rightist National Radical Union (ERE), continued to maintain a close watch on those suspected of communist actions and sympathies while relentlessly enforcing many measures of the repressive legislation dating from the Civil War period. Only one year before the Birds scandal erupted, the prime minister’s party had won the elections by a large majority at the expense of the Liberal Party (center) and of the United Democratic Left (founded 1951), which, with nearly a quarter of the vote, had become the official opposition party. Within Karamanles’ administration, Konstantinos Tsatsos held the formal position of minister of the presidency of the government, and accordingly had oversight of interior cultural affairs. A former professor in the philosophy of law at Athens University, Tsatsos was a critic, friend, and brother-in-law of the poet George Seferis, with whom he had engaged in a modernist-aesthetic dialogue on poetry and on the nature of Hellenicity (hellenikoteta) in 1938 to 1939.11

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Under a second and more liberal post-junta administration of Karamanles (1974–81), Tsatsos became president of the Hellenic Republic. During Karamanles’ first premiership from 1955 until 1963, progress was made toward substantial, albeit uneven, economic reconstruction of a war-torn, exhausted Greece. The prime minister pursued foreign alliances to resurrect his country’s civic and military strength. He often came under attack from the opposition for allegedly betraying the cause of Hellenism to the United States and to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO, which Greece entered in 1952). In 1961 he succeeded in negotiating an association agreement with the European Community, and Greece became a full member exactly twenty years later. Karamanles’ domestic policies, however, failed to cope with the Left’s bitter frustration and with social divisions that, although embedded in the fratricidal struggle of the forties, perpetuated a long prewar legacy of clashes between progressives and conservatives. The government’s Western cultural orientation also fueled popular resentment. The thrust of Karamanles’ administration, captured by his later motto “Greece belongs to the West,” did not sufficiently appreciate the indigenous civilization, including native theater and folk music, or the enduring search for popular and Romaic national character, which had widely promoted the values of Romiosyne from the 1920s on. Greece’s experience of the cold war entailed unprecedented cruelty, perseverance, and controversy, with discordant accounts arousing huge public interest and emotional reaction even today. The ideological rift between Left and Right provides the historical framework of my discussion both of the 1959 Birds premiere and of Aristophanes’ broader reception in recent decades. Not coincidentally, the fiercest political opposition to Aristophanes arose in periods during which the communists threatened to slip from the government’s uncertain control. As the polarization between Left and Right heightened, several of Koun’s artistic collaborators, such as the translators Rotas and Kostas Varnales as well as the renowned composer Mikes Theodorakes, proclaimed their left-wing sympathies. Consequently, after the October 1961 elections, which led to Karamanles’ reappointment as prime minister, all of Theodorakes’ music and songs—closely identified with the struggle of suppressed Marxists and communists—were banned from Greek national radio. Many forward-looking artists and intellectuals, including Koun, belonged to neither the hard-line leftist or rightist camp, yet during an international communist scare and the internal exigencies that brooked no negotiation they were readily suspected of subversion. In a 1984 interview with Vana Charalampidou, Koun testified that in the climate of 1959 the establishment was quick to stigmatize any critical activity as communist-inspired. He stressed that he himself believed in “political” theater in the broad

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sense of the word, which included ancient drama, though not in theater dictated by party politics.12 It did not come as a surprise, then, that the right-wing authorities perceived the 1959 premiere and possible repeat performances of the Birds as dissident acts aimed against them. That the Art Theater had opened the production in the spotlight of the official, state-sponsored Athens Festival, geared also toward foreign visitors, exacerbated the incident’s public impact.13 Koun had commissioned the acting version of the Birds from Rotas, whose politics of translation were more outspoken than his own. In the 1960 first edition of his translation, Rotas upheld Aristophanes’ reception as a “measure of civilization” with comic revivals testing the limits of any society’s democratic freedom.14 He also added a caustic prologue and epilogue that, he imagined, Aristophanes’ ghost could have delivered before and after the ill-fated opening night. Kostas Nitsos, who has published numerous articles on modern Greek theater and who attended the Birds premiere, still considers the 1960 printed version of Rotas’ rendition less biting than the original acting version.15 From the statements of Nitsos and Tsouparopoulos (“the very same day when the cannons . . . invit[ed] the people to celebrate the ‘joy’ of the Civil War”), I deduce that Rotas had perhaps sharpened his acting version for the Birds of 29 August 1959 for historical reasons: on the night of 29–30 August 1949, Zachariades, leader of the left-wing Democratic Army, had been compelled to withdraw his troops into Albania, after a final standoff against the national forces on the Grammos and Vitsi mountains had failed.16 Rotas appears to have acted in defiance of the Left’s defeat exactly ten years earlier. He knew the power—and perils— of resistance drama all too well; as already noted, he himself had managed one of the 1940s’ partisan theater troupes. The premiere’s interdiction was thus another act of rightist suppression of left-wingers who had publicly shown that leftist militancy and sympathies were still alive. Rotas took revenge on the authoritarian administration in 1964, again by way of Aristophanic comedy. The year before, Karamanles had resigned over disagreements with King Paul, and he had left for exile in France after losing the elections to Georgios Papandreou and his centrist Center Union Party. Rotas then aired even louder left-wing, anticapitalist, and anti-American criticisms through the medium of the classical playwright. He inserted the same type of ideologically charged anachronisms that had drawn fire in the Birds in his translation of Aristophanes’ Peace, staged in the crisis years of 1964 and 1965 by director Pelos Katseles. He attacked “astronauts,” “bombs,” “hand grenades,” and “nuclear missiles,” and he decried continuing foreign intervention in Greece and abroad, with references to the United States, London, and Peking— he even included a “Heil Hitler.” In addition, Rotas’ Peace drew a bold

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political analogy between the demagogue Cleon, who had died prior to the ancient performance (421 B.C.E.), and Karamanles, who had withdrawn into self-imposed exile a few months before the 1964 production. With every mention of the absent Cleon, the Greek audience was encouraged to think of the absent Karamanles. Although the latter’s name was never explicitly mentioned, it was strongly suggested by the initial letter kappa of Kleon. The same verbal joke worked with the modern Greek word kopanos for “pestle,” or metaphorically “blockhead,” political puns that the audience applauded enthusiastically.17 The performance ended with the gripping image of children singing the only songs they ever learned in school: war songs. The real reasons for banning the Art Theater’s 1959 production were political, and the climate of anticommunist fear and suspicion affected not only Rotas, Koun, the actors, and other artistic contributors, but even Aristophanes. In an article titled “The Battle of the Birds,” Voula Damianakou, journalist and wife of Rotas, saw antileftist distrust and obscurantism envelop the ancient playwright himself. Defending her husband’s translation, she composed the following cynical parody of the language and argumentation of contemporary anticommunist paranoia: Aristophanes kept his unholy and unpatriotic objectives hidden. . . . Well-informed circles state that via a close collaborator of Aristophanes, serious evidence has emerged attesting to the antinational activity of the latter from the very moment he left his mother’s womb: he was delivered with his left ear first, with tightened fists, and with a bright-red color. His fate destined him for the art of the people, for the folk spirit, for the popular language, and for plenty of [other] unpatriotic qualities, amounting to the criminal act of high treason in the opinion of those who obtained certificates of “national-mindedness” from the Occupation authorities. Once it had been discovered that Aristophanes was a member, or rather a leading figure, of Koa, the satanic communist plot was brought out in the open. Even his name provided a clear-cut indication: Aristero-phanes, “the one who reveals himself as leftist.” Therefore Aristophanes deserves exile or even better: death!18

This caustic parody of the right-wing rhetoric of the cold war era unmasked Aristophanes as the born communist avant la lettre, “unpatriotic” or “antinational” (antethnikos) in his objectives, activities, and qualifications. “Well-informed circles” found what they presumed to be solid incriminating evidence in the leftist sympathies of Rotas, the playwright’s modern translator and hence “close collaborator,” which exposed Aristophanes as a leading co-conspirator. Ironically, Greeks who themselves received “certificates of ‘national-mindedness’ (ethnikophrosyne)” from the Occupation authorities because of their (likely) collaboration with

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the German Nazi and Italian Fascist enemy charged the ancient poet with high treason. Aristophanes is to suffer exile or death for his lifelong communist tendencies and for his leftist associations with the common Greek people and with their language and culture. Even his name reveals his sympathies: Aristero-phanes, taken here as a propagandistic title similar to the noms de guerre of many of his fellow partisans of the 1940s. Damianakou even introduces an imaginary underground communist party, to which the classical dramatist is supposed to belong. To the best of my knowledge, no postwar Greek communist organization by the name of Koa ever existed. The meaning of Koa is clear nonetheless, because in the acronyms of real action groups, the letter kappa (or kappa followed by omikron) typically stood for communist, and alpha referred to Aristera, or the Left. Damianakou alludes to Aristophanes’ allegiance to the people’s language as sufficient ground for the charges against him and his translator. The association of the written use of the Demotic tongue with the political Left and with communism had been deeply ingrained in the minds of the Greek public since the first decades of the twentieth century. In the opinion of the progressive camp, the pursuit of Demoticism was part of a broader program for the social and intellectual liberation of the illiterate bulk of the populace, currently debarred from an educational system stressing religion, classical studies, and the use of Kathareuousa. Whereas contemporary authors often intended their writings in the popular language to signal their left-wing, democratic sympathies, adherence to the archaizing tongue maintained its older connotations of political conservatism. From 1911 on, when the Kathareuousa of Greece’s new constitution was decreed the official language, this classicizing idiom had increasingly been equated with the Right and its Western-Hellenic nationalism, as well as with the preservation of the elitist status quo.19 In the very long run, Koraes had proved successful in implanting language-based ideological codes of “proper” morality and of Hellenic-style patriotism, setting the terms by which subsequent sociolinguistic issues would be argued and political affiliations would regularly be judged. Within the twentiethcentury Left-Right polarity, the official language policy of 1911 fueled the conservatives’ rejection of Demoticism as a tool of Marxism and communism, as well as their promotion of Kathareuousa as proof of “national-mindedness.” This self-styled ethnikophrosyne was thus proclaimed by Greek rightist defenders of the old social, political, and linguistic order, who joined in the ethnike parataxis, or “national camp.”20 The Right further de-Hellenized the likes of Rotas and Aristophanes and branded them as “unpatriotic” and “anti-Greek,” equating the writers, their language, and the entirety of their writings. According to Benedict Ander-

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son, language has been the most prominent element around which Europeans have constructed their concepts of the nation-state. In Greece, however, popular-Romaic nationalism of the Demotic tongue of the late 1950s clashed with Western-Hellenic patriotism imbued with Kathareuousa: the different languages represented diametrically opposed perceptions of nationalism within the same state. The treatment of the 1959 Birds revealed how easily representatives of the dominant right-wing administration took offense, and how little sense of humor they often displayed. It indicated no less how political the fare of the Art Theater really was, even though the Aristophanes of Koun and Rotas showed no apparent desire to overthrow the government or to substitute anarchy for law and order. The playwright’s comic license was abruptly curtailed. The producer and translator had not been granted dramatic liberty, but both had assumed it, aware of the risk, when there had seemed to be a political opening for an unfettered revival stage. To be sure, theatrical restrictions on free speech were part of state censorship and the suppression of freedom in contemporary civic life. Yet the direct ban on Aristophanes’ comedy corroborated leftists’ belief in the playwright’s mission: his ability to take on the artistic and public functions that in a free Greece would have been performed by a variety of genres and civic organs. During the cold war, Attic comedy—irreverent toward the Orthodox Church, local authority, and foreign allegiance—reemerged as an art form more committed to overlooked traditions than to canonical histories, and ultimately capable of reasserting Greek popular self-esteem. Through the 1959 incident, Aristophanes himself became a powerful, stirring symbol of the resilient vitality and stubborn struggle for freedom of the suppressed Left. In the interstices of the public imagination of the late fifties through mid-seventies, he represented the dissident Greek character, combining the qualities both of a modern Romaic standardbearer and of a classical genius of universal “wit” (pneuma). Not only did the shared Romaic “spirit” thrive on liberty, but the very thought of restraint, whether in the theater or in the realm of government, was antithetical to its nature and therefore had to be resisted. Aristophanes’ pneuma also mobilized the Greek people with its call for a proud national culture and politics that refused subservience. Committed to a larger social mandate, Romaic nationalism, the Left, and Aristophanes joined to broach such progressive topics as broad Demotic and artistic outreach, the improvement of intellectual and wider civic life, and even minority (re)empowerment. Against this ideological backdrop, the official silencing of the liberals Koun and Rotas was equated with an attack on the enduring underground support for the Left, which resorted to the comic

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2. Cartoon of Konstantinos Tsatsos being told by Aristophanes: “Get up!” By Makres; from Anexartetos Typos, 2 September 1959 (front page).

revival stage as one of the few remaining public outlets for discontent. Aristophanes, who was not likely to contradict popular opinion, provided a flexible site of paravase against any encroachment on Romaic values and traditions. Even though it was a one-time-only show in the 1959 season, the Birds thus managed to provoke intense debates and conflicts that touched on fundamental questions of Greek identity and destiny.

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ULTIMATE R EVIVAL COMEDY

The 1959 production of the Birds, the first big scandal of the official Athens Festival, not only shook the foundations of the Karamanles government but had a long-term impact on politics and theater as well. Its dissident contents and the unforeseen protests it spurred became critical public stakes in stage politics from the late fifties through the mid-seventies. Leftist newspapers continued to attack and ridicule Tsatsos, who was nicknamed “the Chicken” (he Kota), for many years after his infamous ban. Makres drew one of the first cartoons of the short Tsatsos quaking before the giant Aristophanes, who challenges him to “Get up!” (see figure 2). Phokion Demetriades became the most renowned cartoonist to keep the scandal alive with newspaper cartoons and caricatures. To accompany a 1986 interview with Koun, Peggy Kounenake reprinted a cartoon in which Tsatsos’ chicken asks Koun for two tickets to see Aristophanes’ Birds at the Art Theater (see figure 3). In the same year, an article by Giolanta Petsiou contained a reprinted caricature of Tsatsos, signed by Geses, with a large head and chicken body (see figure 4). Thus, even though the wings of the 1959 Birds had been clipped, Aristophanes’ comic and political influence extended far beyond the physical boundaries of the theater to the public forum of the Greek press and to popular representation. A Quick Flight Up The condemned Birds proved to be Koun’s largest failure and his greatest triumph. Against all initial expectations and despite a consistent lack of state support, the controversial production became the most important comic revival of the Art Theater, and perhaps the biggest landmark in the modern Greek reception history of Aristophanes. From 1960 on, with popular curiosity sharpened by the earlier ban, the modified, improved version earned broad public approval and eventually achieved unsurpassed success. But the new, freed Birds, with its heightened political and symbolic meaning, was performed in less prestigious playhouses; it appeared at neither the Athens nor the Epidaurus Festivals, which were forbidden territory for Koun’s play until 1975. The production’s new artistic features not only attracted large local and international audiences, but also shaped its fresh, positive reception by Greek critics. One of the main changes was the replacement in 1962 of the balletic choreography of Rallou Manou, criticized by most newspaper reviewers, with new choreography by Zouzou Nikoloude that featured popular dance motifs befitting the production’s folk atmosphere. Assisted by

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3. Cartoon of Tsatsos asking for tickets for Aristophanes’ Birds. By Phokion Demetriades; reprinted in P. Kounenake, “8 Questions to Karolos Koun” (in Greek), Tachydromos, 26 June 1986.

Nikoloude, Koun found a convincing solution to the dramaturgical problems posed by the complex ancient choruses: he made his bird-actors semiprotagonists and thus transformed their ensemble into perhaps the most dynamic element of the entire play, oscillating between lyricism and animal revelry. Moreover, he constantly altered yet carefully controlled the musical style and spectacle of rhythms, colors, and movements. Creating the classical chorus anew, Koun endowed this formerly troublesome component of revival theater with verbal, visual, and musical luster. Previous generations of journalists and drama reviewers had been preoccupied with the authenticity of the music, song, and dance of modern revivals, yet contemporary critics helped inspire the radical change in cho-

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4. A caricature of Tsatsos. By Geses; reprinted in G. Petsiou, “The ERE, Tsatsos, and the Chicken . . .” (in Greek), Prote, 30 July 1986.

reography in 1962: as performances were adjusted in response to reviews of the play, the critics contributed to the process of rewriting Koun’s original 1959 version. In the circular, dialectic movement between theater practice and critical reception, the older, negative perceptions of the Birds were gradually subsumed and contained by the open approval from reviewers and journalists, who both represented and shaped the broader Greek consumption of Aristophanes. As most of the 1959 detractors, who had written in the heat of the moment, changed their minds, they helped transform the premiere from a “disgraceful act of vandalism” into a source of national pride. With Aristophanes’ Birds, the Art Theater rapidly moved from the wings of Greek dramaturgy to center stage and began an impressive international run. Invited to Paris in 1962, Koun won the Th´eaˆ tre des Nations first prize for the best foreign production—an award he had to share with the National Theater, since both represented Greece. Later, as part of the World Theatre Season, the same comic revival was performed at the Ald-

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wych Theatre in London; there, as in other European capitals, it achieved overwhelming success—even though the move indoors affected, for instance, the way in which the choruses were executed. From 1965 on, the Birds often appeared on a double bill with a new production of Aeschylus’ Persians, the tragedy with which Koun was first permitted to participate again in the official Athens Festival after his six-year exclusion. Together the comic and tragic revivals constituted the balanced Greek contribution of the Art Theater to the more visible, international reception history of ancient drama. Both plays also represented what Philhellene Western European theatergoers have wanted to import from contemporary Hellas: live productions of the classics rather than of native Greek works. Since the mid-1950s, ancient drama has been the artistic commodity of the annual summer festivals of Athens and Epidaurus, at which impressive open-air performances have proved their commercial potential, largely through their appeal to international tourists. Consequently, classical drama was generally expected to be the contribution of present-day Greece to theatrical and cultural events organized by other Western countries. Koun was the first to take the modern Greek Aristophanes abroad on multiple occasions not just to expatriate communities, as small troupes had done since the 1900 Clouds of Soures, but to competitions and playhouses of worldwide repute. The foreign laurels gained by Koun in turn helped back home, drawing large numbers of Greeks and tourists to the ancient theaters for later, post-junta repetitions of the Birds. The Junta’s Chase Following the 1967 military coup of a clique of colonels, self-proclaimed as the “Revolution of 21 April” and enjoying the tacit backing of the United States, the Art Theater continued to suffer the repercussions of its earlier clash with the political establishment. Shortly after the putsch, representatives of the newly installed junta demanded that the company return home from a tour to London and cancel a scheduled performance of the Birds at the Lycabettus Theater. Meanwhile, the official Epidaurus Festival of Ancient Drama remained forbidden to this and other productions by Koun. At that time, the festival was better known as an international showcase for established directors, who were called on to help maintain a veneer of free artistic initiative and political liberalism, than as an experimental stage for marginalized, independent troupes such as Koun’s. Until the end of the colonels’ regime, only the governmentsubsidized National Theater of Greece (Ethniko Theatro Hellados) was allowed to stage the classics in the most prestigious historical setting, Epidaurus. After 1974, both summer festivals gradually opened more

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widely to the Art Theater and to other professional companies, such as the State Theater of Northern Greece and the Amphi-Theater of Spyros Euangelatos (founded in 1961 and 1975, respectively). Under the dictatorship, Koun declined state subsidies, notwithstanding his persistent financial difficulties. In 1968, however, he did accept an American grant from the Ford Foundation, an act that provoked the charge of collaboration with the U.S.-supported regime. In a 1973 interview, the director declared: “Perhaps I, too, belong to the establishment, but I believe that I am basically working against it.”21 Throughout his career Koun insisted that for him and for his drama school, the Art Theater was a unique artistic vocation, a task of and medium created by the intellect, not influenced by one-sided party politics. Historical circumstances, however, compelled his Aristophanic stage to become profoundly sociopolitical and to ask and answer disturbing questions about modern Greek culture and ideology. Identifying with the ancient playwright, Koun assumed a more committed, topical-political, or even skeptical stance, often confronting the taboos and prejudices of the time. The Art Theater soon fell victim to the colonels’ strict state control over art and literature. Most established writers decided not to publish in Greece at all during the first two and a half years of direct, prepublication censorship (via licensing procedures).22 In the fall of 1969 a new press law made editors, publishers, and authors legally responsible for censoring their own work in accordance with the “Revolution of 21 April.”23 During those seven years of direct and indirect control, wielded on both moral and political grounds, all stage companies, including the closely watched Art Theater, had to submit their scheduled plays—classical or modern, Greek or foreign—to the special censorship committees installed by the colonels. Works offensive to the regime, traditional morality, or religion could not be presented. Even after being initially approved, plays could still be closed at any time. Thus the junta censors rejected about half of the works of the Greek and international repertoire proposed by Koun, who later claimed that he felt constantly chased by the authorities.24 During that dark period of the dictatorship, the Art Theater staged only one new production of Aristophanes, the Lysistrata, which opened in London in 1969. Koun added a tragicomic and politically symbolic dimension to this revival that contrasted sharply with the happy, innocent mode of the 1957 Lysistrata of the National Theater, which was performed nearly every summer during the junta’s rule. Among Koun’s most daring innovations was the play’s unconventional finale, as well as the choice of the Demoticist and Marxist Kostas Varnales (1884–1974) as translator. As the spotlights gradually dimmed, the sound of a siren unexpectedly interrupted the festivities of reconciled Spartans and Athenians,

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making the ancient partygoers disperse to find shelter. With this closing image, the director evoked the fragile character of peace and joy under the terror of the current regime, perceived as a new force occupying Greece with repressive measures akin to those of the Nazis, including the installation of martial law. Koun, who had commissioned the acting version of the 1959 Birds from the communist Rotas, again engaged a declared leftist while the country was under an ultra-right-wing order notorious for its brutal hostility toward the political Left. Varnales was a Marxist poet, critic, and philologist who identified with Aristophanes’ Romaic-satirical bent and rendered seven of his comedies (as well as works of Euripides, Xenophon, Flaubert, and Moli`ere) into a radical, naturalistic form of Demotic Greek. The colonels were attempting, anachronistically, to maintain Kathareuousa as the official written tongue, and they even reversed some of the progressive educational changes of the mid-1960s. Only after their downfall did Demotic Greek become accepted as the state-sanctioned language of instruction and of all public functions. Hence Varnales’ Aristophanic translations, which in the minds of detractors “adulterated” the original texts, seemed particularly suspect to this as well as previous reactionary regimes. In 1958 Varnales had issued his Aesthetic and Critical Works. In a section of brief philological studies on the ancient Aristophanes, he proclaimed the playwright an advocate of peace and of an “enlightened democracy,” as in the era of Solon and of the Marathon fighters. He attacked the right-wing Karamanles government, in power at the time he wrote, for not embracing Aristophanes, who was feared as a threatening public symbol of true democratic liberty. To this ominous prefiguration of the political crisis caused by Koun’s Birds in the following year Varnales added a strong, anti-American assault against McCarthyism, identified by its characteristic anticommunist frenzy though not by name.25 In 1931 Varnales had published The True Apology of Socrates, a sociopolitical satire of interwar conservative Greece under the cover of ancient Athens and of Socratic philosophy; his Socrates defended himself in Marxist, not fourth-century B.C.E. Platonic, terms. He unmasked Athens as a mock democracy, discriminating against the poor and suppressing freedom of speech as well as critical thinking. The contemporary relevance of Varnales’ Apology captured renewed public interest after the 1967 insurgency. In the aftermath of the junta, the same work was superbly performed as a one-man show in 1977 by Giorgos Lazanes, leading actor of the Art Theater. Varnales’ politics, as presented in his critical writings, were clear: without question, Koun’s decision to cooperate with the leftist translator on the 1969 Lysistrata was ideologically loaded.

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Intertextuality on Stage Koun’s production of the 1959 Birds not only caused a huge political crisis, but it also had a lasting impact on art and popular culture. As the Birds and other comic plays were subsequently revived, it proved crucial in establishing an intricate web of communicative connections and dialectic relations—as Aristophanes himself had done with Euripidean tragedy. We can use the terms intertextuality or stage dialectics to describe this web, in which comic productions have not been isolated theatrical events but have instead responded to one another in the public forum of the summer festivals.26 Influenced by Koun and Rotas, and anxious to assert themselves with common Greek audiences, actors and artists were quick to exploit what they believed to be the modern leftist dynamics of all the plays of Aristophanes. Recognizing the political weight of seemingly innocent translations and adaptations, they realized the poet’s potential for dissident paravase under different cultural and historical conditions. These heirs and successors to the 1959 scandal, drawn both from within and from without the tradition of the Art Theater, enhanced the disruptive force of the comic revival stage and, in the process, called forth anew the enmity of the conservatives upholding the old sociopolitical order. In addition, the directors, translators, performers, and artists of the post-junta era displayed a greater tolerance for those aspects of Aristophanes’ language and stagecraft toned down by their predecessors—in particular, his ribald wordplay and parodying diction. Over time, demands for conservative translations diminished as well. Aristophanes thus consistently reached broader audiences than did any classical tragedian, especially among the popular strata of Greek society. BIRDS OF DIFFERENT FEATHERS

From the early 1960s on, Koun’s Birds was considered a theatrical landmark that would be hard for any comic production to surpass. One might wonder why there has been only a handful of significant Greek revivals of Aristophanes’ Birds since 1959, when his Lysistrata, for example, has appeared at least a dozen times. The answer may be that contemporary directors hesitate to compete with Koun’s version of the play. Those few important interpretations of the Birds were staged by the State Theater of Northern Greece under Kostes Michaelides in 1973, by the National Theater under Alexes Solomos in 1979, and by the Modern Theater of Giorgos Messalas in 1991; that is, only three new productions of the play were presented at the summer festivals in the thirty-two years from 1959 to 1991. To those who followed Koun, it was clear that the

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Art Theater’s Birds had shaped a historical moment and had become the example of a compelling interpretation of Aristophanes. It was equally obvious that for a long time, new adaptations of the same comedy could only be partially successful. Only recently has the burden of Koun’s creation lightened, and new stagings have appeared, less dependent on his prototype and less anxious about his influence. Since the mid-1990s, productions of the play that posed the greatest artistic challenges and was most closely linked to older subversive politics have finally found suitable forms of their own. Thus the 1994 Epidaurus Festival saw two new revivals of the Birds: one by Eues Gavrielides with the Cyprus Theater Organization, the other by Andreas Voutsinas with the State Theater of Northern Greece. By the time Kostes Michaelides staged the first major production of the Birds since Koun’s, fourteen years had passed. The play was performed at the ancient theater of Epidaurus during a brief thaw preceding the fall of the colonels, when strict state-imposed censorship had started to disintegrate. Michaelides chose the Birds because its symbolic dimension of political and ideological dissent was attached by modern Greek history rather than inherited from classical antiquity. No play other than the Birds could have expressed the same cry for complete freedom of speech, the same dignified stance of public disobedience of the junta. The dialectic quality of Michaelides’ production was reinforced by many theatrical allusions to Koun’s version. For instance, the director brought another priest on stage to parody Orthodox liturgy, conveying the initial meaning as well as new layers accrued during six years of military rule and of church-supported moral censorship of art and literature. The actors’ use of political anachronisms left no doubt about the intentions of Michaelides, who had already established a reputation for resisting the authoritarian regime. Thus the rebel birds spread out on Peisetaerus’ barbecue deserved capital punishment because they “opposed the rule of the people.” The protagonist explained: “These birds passed before the court-martial. Enough now with revolutions!”27 In 1979 Alexes Solomos staged his Birds at Epidaurus, still in dialogue if not open competition with Koun’s production of twenty years earlier. The revival was not a success, mainly because the director of the National Theater, in his defiant attempt not to imitate Koun, failed to advance any other convincing interpretation.28 Solomos concentrated on presenting a reading far removed from the 1959 model rather than on developing the play’s issues. Belatedly commenting on the former junta’s regime and on the clich´e that “power corrupts,” he saw Nephelococcygia as a contemporary dictatorship, a grim place of oppression with at best a tangential relationship to its ancient counterpart. It was no coincidence that Solomos waited for exactly two decades to put on his production of the

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Birds, after having gained experience staging all the other extant comedies of Aristophanes except for the Plutus (Koun had left his modern signature on that play in 1957 by inserting folk material as well as anachronistic sociopolitical and religious satire). Thus it long seemed that competing with Koun’s Birds was a lost cause. Many critics have admitted that contemporary Greek producers need a certain “audacity” to revive the Birds anew. Even Solomos, a director more than capable of formulating an innovative, coherent reading of a dramatic text—be it the most closely watched comedy—failed to shake off the burden of the Birds’ recent past. Ultimately, Aristophanes’ classical original—its transmitted text, reconstructed stagecraft, and hypothesized aesthetics—proved less important than the prevailing stage interpretation of Koun and its modern sociopolitical ramifications. With Giorgos Messalas and his Monterno Theatro, or Modern Theater, the Birds of the early 1990s entered the popular world of the free, commercialized Greek spectacle culture. The 1991 production still featured the priest scene of Koun’s version rather than Aristophanes’. This and other components indicated that the director, the cast, and the audience continued to associate the dramatic (re-)creation of the Birds with Koun. As Koun’s stage interpretation gained control over the ancient text, the latter merely receded to the background of philological and historical reception. Messalas lampooned the politicians who had been unable to avert the economic and electoral impasse of 1989–90. Within less than a year, Greece had seen several political scandals, two inconclusive elections, and a third electoral campaign that finally secured a narrow victory for the right-wing New Democracy Party of Konstantinos Metsotakes over the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) of Andreas Papandreou (Papandreou had led the first socialist party to achieve and maintain power in Greece, 1981–89). Messalas expressed his disillusionment with current politics: We flew high up in the sky, looked around, and were terrified: the world is a really wild scene! I also saw a tree, quite extraordinary, by the name of “politician”: indigestible itself, it does not bear any fruit of its own; all it does is to consume and to censor.29 SELF-REFERENTIALITY AND RESTORATION

The numerous repetitions of the Birds that the Art Theater itself put on following the junta’s fall became highly self-reflexive. After sixteen

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years’ suspension from the summer festivals, Koun’s production saw its first state-sponsored repeat performance at Epidaurus in 1975. Here, the public’s knowledge of the premiere was key to new anachronistic jokes far removed from Aristophanes’ ancient original, though not from the 1959 incident and its political aftermath. By the mid-seventies, the Birds symbolized regained freedom of speech, not only because it closely followed the junta years but also because it was permitted on the official stage under a new Karamanles regime (1974–81), and at the very start of the presidency of Konstantinos Tsatsos himself. The long-forbidden play had become the cause c´el`ebre of the Art Theater and of all advocates of artistic license. Hence the 1975 repetition functioned as a measure of the proclaimed liberalism of the new, post-junta rule of Karamanles. The free Birds ultimately symbolized a theatrical and public victory over the colonels and their censorship, as well as over the reactionary political and cultural predicament of the late fifties and early sixties. For Tsatsos and Karamanles to allow Koun’s performance at Epidaurus was an equally symbolic and positive step: they displayed the goodwill of their rightwing New Democracy Party (founded in 1974) while distancing themselves from the censorship rules enforced by the recent military dictators. In the opening scene of the Art Theater’s 1975 revival, Peisetaerus and his sidekick Euelpides announced that they went looking for a “land without juntas.” The scene with the priest and his parody of Orthodox liturgy was by far the most successful, and clearly had become obligatory for this and other Greek productions of the Birds. The 1986 and 1987 repeat performances of Koun’s play, more than a decade later, still featured the same priest. In the later version, intertextual references to the scandal of a generation earlier formed the basis of comic stage dialectics. Lazanes, alias Peisetaerus, declared to the priest (but in fact to the youth among the spectators): “You are young and you do not remember what we suffered twenty-eight years ago!”—a line that elicited tremendous applause. Thus individual words and lines assumed meanings that were new and significant yet shared, with the latest stage adaptations of the Birds aiming at as much of the original effect of Koun’s production as audience taste and understanding would allow. Repeat performances of the same comedy became stratified into different layers of humor, including readings built up from recent stagings. The play became loaded with these new overlays as well as with the meanings of the 1959 production, which itself had been a modern interpretation of the classical text. Those repetitions of Koun’s Birds paid homage to the premiere of the late fifties, seen as a classic in its own right with only indirect ties to Aristophanes. Indeed, ancient Greek society informed this comedy less than did the authoritarian political climate of the modern nation in 1959. Under the pressure of scandal, success, and sensation, the many perfor-

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mances of the Birds by the Art Theater were no longer allowed to change anything in the original version, so as not to lose the authentic quality of the by-then historic premiere. The Greek audience nostalgically wanted to see every later Birds performed as the company had done it in 1959, in order to share in the same experience, to become part of the history and theatrical career of the ur-production. This refusal to alter anything of Koun’s stage interpretation made each repetition of the play a restoration rather than an innovation, as the 1959 production had been. The Art Theater has deliberately preserved the translation, decor, costumes, and music used in the original version. This made it possible, for instance, for Lazanes (alias Dicaeopolis) to ask the war hero Lamachus, in a 1987 repeat performance of Koun’s Acharnians: “Is your feather perhaps from the birds (Birds)?” In a supreme moment of theatrical self-consciousness, he was humorously insinuating that the stingy director—himself—might have reused the same costumes for different productions. The model of Koun’s premiere stood ironically above its own material and dramatic content, with which subsequent actors and artists were able to play to the point of self-parody. At the same time, a comparison with the text of Acharnians 1154–55, or even Peace 174, shows how quintessentially Aristophanic Lazanes’ metatheatrical comment was. HAPPY BIRDSDAY, MR. KOUN!

In 1997 Giorgos Lazanes and Mimes Kougioumtzes joined together to present by far the most explicit version of the Birds as memorial event. On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of Koun’s death, they restaged the original production twice at the Epidaurus theater; a total of nearly 16,000 spectators gathered to partake in a veritable flashback of Greek cultural history. The 1959 Birds had gained the “agelessness” of a classic. In the spirit of commemoration, cast members, theater critics, and journalists discussed even these repeat performances in terms reminiscent of the rhetoric of “respect” typically accorded ancient tragedy by conservatives in the past. All insisted on the paradoxical emphasis on verbal and visual literalism for the sake of remaining “faithful” to Koun’s revisionist original. In Foucauldian terms, Aristophanes thus came to redefine and expand the established canon. On this commemorative occasion, his comedy reinscribed its own history, affirmed the received Greek legacy, and even produced its own language and power dynamics of “paying respect” (see figure 5). Aristophanes’ custodianship of tradition may prove temporary. His inclusion in the classical canon itself, however, is more likely to be permanent, especially under the inescapable pressures of increasing globalization and multiculturalism that, on a superficial level, pry apart the transhistorical ancient Greek texts from the modern transnational world with its audiovisual and synchronic fixation.

5. Drawing by Elly Solomonide-Balanou of the 1997 memorial production of Koun’s Birds. Reprinted with the artist’s permission.

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Ironically, Lazanes and Kougioumtzes celebrated the 1959 birth of Greek authorial theater by denying themselves directorial input in the memorial performances. Like the auteur filmmaker, Koun had become the “author” of a production that was decidedly his. He had presented the less-familiar ancient text in unsettlingly familiar guise, and his underlying vision had stamped the Birds with the seal of his ownership. Even as the formal ban initially curbed Koun’s directorial freedom, the general license of Greek authorial theater could not be revoked. Through the play’s subsequent success, Koun essentially legitimated even the marginal producer’s right to press his or her own ideas in reviving the classics. The Breeding Ground of the Birds In his repeated performances of the Birds, Koun tried to work with as many of the first protagonist-actors as possible. He did, however, introduce younger actors to the production by casting them in minor roles until he judged them ready for promotion to the leading parts. For nearly three decades, Koun’s Birds functioned as a training school for most actors attached to the Art Theater. Indirectly, Aristophanes’ comedy became central to the preparation and career development of a generation of modern Greek stage professionals, including not only actors but also producers, musicians and composers, set and costume designers, choreographers, technicians, and so on.30 Describing his company’s objectives, Koun stated that he aimed at creating a comprehensive stage ensemble, with actors who were disciplined in a unified form of dramatic teaching and expression and completely devoted to theater.31 The director’s lifelong endeavors to train his student body while stressing comic roles had negative effects as well, which show in the stereotyped, idiosyncratic delivery and acting style of some of his most prominent disciples and successors. Koun’s very demanding program of instruction was often criticized for being rigid, noninnovative, even androcentric. As he conditioned his students, sometimes for the rest of their careers, the “master” (daskalos) created a house style of acting whose limits remain easily discernible to the alert playgoer. Moreover, Koun replenished his company’s ranks with graduates from his own training school. For many years, his small theater-in-the-round was housed underground, hidden from public view, in the sometimes claustrophobic basement of the huge Athenian cinema Orpheas. These conditions surely contributed to his disciples’ perception of drama as requiring exclusive devotion to the master’s path of experimentation, which was itself fostered by the climate of isolation that reigned in the Orpheas’ close quarters. For Giorgos Lazanes (producer of the Knights in 1979, Wasps in 1981,

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and Clouds in 1991), who played leading roles in nearly all of Koun’s comic revivals, it was perhaps most difficult to shake off the weight of this career-long, consuming apprenticeship. Such innovations as Lazanes introduced have often merely addressed isolated questions of stagecraft of individual plays or even of specific scenes. Critics reminiscing about Koun’s vibrance called Lazanes’ diluted version of the master’s aesthetic politics effete. Other designated immediate heirs to the tradition of the Art Theater, Kougioumtzes (Frogs, 1992; Plutus, 1994) and Rene Pittake, took a more independent artistic approach. Least imprisoned in Koun’s vision and practice were the former trainees Kostas Bakas and Nikos Charalampous. From the 1980s on, Bakas staged at the National Theater six well-coordinated productions of Aristophanes, praised for their timelessness though often lacking in liveliness. Bakas’ aim was to stay true to the ancient text—to let the poet speak for himself, with minimal distractions, rather than subject him to a trendy interpretation. His revivals elicited critical responses that ranged from genuine enthusiasm to mild damnation. Charalampous’ emphasis has been quite different; his search for and experience of personal artistic freedom has undoubtedly been encouraged by his work in Cypriot and regional playhouses (e.g., Lysistrata in Kalamata, 1985), far removed from the established interpretive modes of the drama schools of Athens, long unchallenged as Greece’s theater capital. Textuality Revisited A wide range of modern Greek theater professionals and amateurs have rewritten and fed off the “intertextuality” of the Birds, other comedies, and their adaptations. They have radically subverted the traditional philological textuality of Aristophanes’ corpus. To some extent the 1959 premiere even reversed the conventional direction of influence of the prototype on any later reading, in that a contemporary interpretation affected every subsequent treatment of the classical original. Paradoxically, Koun’s Birds gained, over the years, something of the permanence and even the sacrosanctity typically attributed to ancient texts rather than to modern stage adaptations. His 1959 version became a text in its own right: not in the literal sense defined by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philologists, but in the eyes of those contemporary theater practitioners for whom the verbal and visual language of Koun, rather than of Aristophanes, stood as fixed. While other ancient comedies and their modern adaptations were viewed as plastic material that could be remolded when desired, the Art Theater’s production of the Birds became so heavily value-laden, so thoroughly coded with current public meaning, that the fifth-century B.C.E. original lost the competition, as it were.

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Rather than promoting the authentic text of Aristophanes, the reception of Koun’s new play-text seemed to find hardly any earlier beginnings than those interpretive judgments born of the 1959 sociopolitical predicament. Whereas the semi-autonomous Nachleben of Koun’s Birds only scantily acknowledged pre-1959 traditions, it heavily advertised Aristophanes’ indomitable popular-national spirit as resisting antidemocratic oppression of any kind, including that of the military dictators. The rightist animosity against Koun’s premiere, which was both qualitatively different from and similar to the junta’s ideological pressures and distortions, became a constitutive impulse of the play’s reception history, submerging its modern prototype in the service of later demands. This intricate process made it increasingly difficult to measure the impact of Aristophanes’ original in recent decades, as it was eclipsed by a concentration of receptive modes connected more directly to Koun’s interpretation than to the preserved ancient text. So compelling was the Art Theater’s version of the Birds that for nearly thirty-five years few other itineraries lay open for exploring a classic technically embedded in the Hellenic past rather than in the modern (extended) present. Only since the early 1990s have a small number of diverse readings of the Birds dispelled the taboo against altering the play’s “objective” and “lasting” interpretation—cast, ironically, in Koun’s single and determinate model. For today’s Greeks the literary and historical essence of the ancient comedy can no longer be determined independently of its recent performative and sociopolitical effect. Therefore, on the level of critical theory, the stage experience of Aristophanes in contemporary Greece reveals the real limitations and simplifications of reception aesthetics. It discloses the theory’s failure to account for the development of a tradition of public reperformance of a text, which frequently refers to an older value-laden playscript different from the classical original, and which fosters verbal and visual stage dialectics among living dramatic productions. In the modified receptive context of my study, any new interpretation chooses either to interact with or to displace a modern legacy’s authority. It ultimately re-members Aristophanes in its own way. Of course, the modern Greek custom of putting on repeat performances of older productions, a practice nearly unheard of in classical times, has enhanced theatrical intertextuality.32 Logically, the opportunities for stage dialectics among the premieres of Aristophanic revivals and the repetitions of their productions have increased. Also, repeat performances have reminded and informed the audience regarding the main characteristics of a premiere, of its first impact, and of a company’s typical approach to the ancient poet. Thus stage dialectics can easily come about between entire phases, or fashions, in the dramatic reading of Attic com-

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edy, working on the level of what belongs firmly to the extensive reception history of the Aristophanic corpus in modern Hellas. With every repetition, as with every novel production, collective and individual knowledge of the comic revival tradition is confirmed as well as (re)fractured, so that the image of the play and its author can be assembled anew. All I Ever Needed to Know Both the background and attitude of the average Greek theatergoer have unconsciously reinforced this intertextuality among comic revivals. In most cases, he or she brings limited formal reading knowledge of Aristophanes’ oeuvre to the theater. Greeks of varying ages and social classes verbally confirmed to me that both original and translated Attic comedy was missing from their secondary school curriculum after as well as before the Second World War. If instructors read Aristophanes at all in class, they chose his choral parts, generally free from vulgarities and preselected via a modern Greek textbook called the Anthology of Lyric Poetry (introduced in 1978). Not surprisingly, in the assigned subject of ancient drama only classical tragedy was taught.33 This absence of formal school training in Aristophanes has not diminished the enthusiasm with which the average modern Greek theatergoer has received revivals of his comedies. If anything, it has added to the poet’s popularity with all generations of the lower through middle ranks of society. Admittedly, this general public might blur the distinctions among the ancient original, (printed) translation, and contemporary acting version of any of the revived comedies, as do most audiences around the world. The modern Greeks, however, have both promoted and benefited from the longstanding stage tradition of Aristophanes, renewed every year since the mid-1950s with unsurpassed zeal. Loyal patrons of comic revivals of all dates and styles, the Greeks have learned their poet via the thriving legacy of theatrical performances, and they demonstrate an alertness for verbal as well as visual effects rarely gained through any classroom reading imposed on the texts. Thus the modern stage unconsciously reproduces many aspects of the fifth-century B.C.E. theatrical and social context of the ancient dramatists and their spectators. Greek society has been educated in and on Aristophanes—thoroughly educated through the authentic medium of public, interactive performances of the texts as playscripts. Moreover, the modern practice of repeating older productions has enhanced the impressive collective knowledge of the poet’s works. On the level of intertextuality, it has helped not only the general audience but also students and critics of drama to compare, constantly and confidently, new comic revivals to older ones, rather

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than to the classical originals or to the many published translations of Aristophanes’ oeuvre. Many Greeks enjoy the detailed knowledge and heightened consciousness that come with reperformance. Re-created plays prove superior to transmitted textual relics because they have been remade for modern Greeks rather than continuing to be possessed solely by the ancients. Reperformance makes the original largely a product of today’s world, the property of ordinary people, against the background of a malleable past manipulated to resemble the present. Teaching Topical Humor As we consider contemporary Greek stage dialectics, the difficulties that Aristophanic translators in all languages have perceived with the intricate cultural context of Old Comedy deserve at least parenthetical mention. The biggest translating problems have been posed by the playwright’s topical political gibes and personal attacks against ancient events and personalities that disappeared into oblivion centuries ago. Unlike printed editions, acting versions cannot supply explanatory notes. In order to avoid obscurity, translators for the comic stage have often advocated substituting modern equivalents for the most puzzling topical puns and jokes involving ancient political, institutional, artistic, and social references. Jeffrey Henderson, for instance, has argued for what he calls a “translation for theatricality”: even though intended primarily for a reading public, it should still be directed at an (imaginary) stage audience. His daring anachronisms, such as Godzilla, Medicare, and the Model T Ford, might render the text enjoyable and compelling for a contemporary American readership but puzzle foreign newcomers to that culture (like me), even if they are familiar with Aristophanic comedy. In general, translators following this practice run the risk of losing sight of reasonable limits. Moreover, radical anachronisms are often short-lived; they tend to grow outdated more quickly and irretrievably than the ancient topical jokes for which they substitute, leaving the modern public indifferent or frustrated at having been denied the chance to apply its imagination to Aristophanes’ words. Of course, sometimes a term or expression cannot be satisfactorily rendered in a modern language, or a literal pun would be ineffective or require too drastic a departure from the original. In such instances anachronisms are both desirable and essential. For this reason, the traditional philologists among Greek translators, who asserted their unique faithfulness to the classical text, deluded both themselves and their readers. Blindly honoring the (conjectural and therefore elusive) original deprives the playscript of unifying additions and modifications of interpretation that enhance the audience’s understanding of the prototype.

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Grappling with Aristophanes’ topicality, I draw attention to the possibility of educating the general audience on (part of) the poet’s presumably untranslatable humor, as well as to the need to give greater credit to spect-actor sensitivity and sophistication. Also, the public has a long collective memory. In contemporary Greece, loyal comedy-goers have seen enough revivals to appreciate even the jokes from classical times. They enjoy recognizing unchanging layers of humor in the ancient playscript, as well as the slight variations among different interpretations. The stage history of Koun’s Birds in particular demonstrates this dynamic, as audiences of later decades successfully “ remembered” an Aristophanes made more pointed in the context of the fifties and early sixties, by a premiere that had been directly concerned with its own sociopolitical moment. The 1959 production and every later repetition could, of course, be understood and appreciated separately; but drawn into one sequence with plentiful allusions to one another and back to the premiere, the performances have gained an echo effect, particularly for Aristophanes veterans. The large number of revivals of Koun’s Birds, together offering an unusually rich slice of Greek dramaturgy and culture, testifies to a lasting obsession with probing the bounds and possibilities of identical reperformance in the present and with testing present politics.

ARISTOPHANES

AND

GREEK MODERNISM

OF THE

1930S GENERATION

A La¨ıkos Aristophanes The Birds of 1959 precipitated an ideological clash that originated not only in Rotas’ politics but also in Koun’s aesthetic ideal of a la¨ıkos Aristophanes, the embodiment of the uninterrupted continuum of a “folk” spirit from the classical era through the present. Central to Koun’s innovative viewpoint, which was shocking at the time he formulated it, was the poet’s unquestioned allegiance to the people of ancient Hellas rather than to its texts, let alone its columns or ruins. The director of the Art Theater claimed to make Aristophanes accessible to his fellow modern Greeks according to the principles of his self-styled “Greek Folk Expressionism,” or Hellenikos La¨ıkos Expresionismos.34 As he explained in numerous interviews, he made the work of the comic playwright express various elements from Greek folk traditions, whether classical, Byzantine, or Ottoman, with special emphasis on the more recent popular legacies. Taken to its artistic extreme, this folkloric approach to ancient theater and to Attic comedy in particular was bound to clash with the cherished cultural tenets of state-supported Western Hellenism. After the 1959 Birds, however, the Art Theater found consistent modes of interpretation

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that did not fly directly in the face of officialdom while maintaining the ideal of la¨ıkoteta. The Greek words la¨ıkos and la¨ıkoteta defy exact translation, but they range in meaning from “popular” to “working-class,” and even to “folk(loric)” and “populist.” Such designations are inevitably, if often all too loosely, tied to social rank and status, as well as to diverging perceptions of the priorities of both modern Greek ethnicity and civilization. As widespread popular sentiments advocating native traditions, la¨ıkoteta and Romiosyne were typical products of an era of geographical and spiritual dislocation. Indeed, once the Smyrna Disaster of 1922 had given the coup de grˆace to the collapsing irredentist ideology, the ensuing malaise gradually altered the nation’s sense of Hellenic identity, which had been expressed primarily in political and ethnic territorial terms. Large-scale national problems following the Asia Minor debacle, such as the notorious “population exchange” and the socioeconomic burden of assimilating the huge numbers of Anatolian refugees displaced as a result, forced the Greeks to redefine their identity culturally. The country desperately needed a new national myth to validate a novel sense of belonging, in an era when its position in the Western world and its persistent sociopolitical and economic instability raised questions that would haunt Greek society and its artistic life for decades. Through the interwar years, the sensibility of la¨ıkoteta grew and the reassessment of all layers of the nation’s rich civilization, including the long-ignored strata of Orthodox, Byzantine, and Ottoman history, deepened. By the mid-1930s, the concept of la¨ıkoteta had become firmly attached to the camp of Romiosyne, and hence was used to oppose Western-Hellenic and cosmopolitan definitions of Greekness, which continued to stress the classical heritage. The task of the progressive intelligentsia at the time was to provide the nation with a new cultural identity that did not depend solely on the venerated ancient civilization, but linked the classical, medieval, and modern periods of Greek history. The central position of Romiosyne and of Byzantium, indisputable links between antiquity and modernity in this seamless, organic continuum, was inspired mainly by the massive pre-Demoticist work of Konstantinos Paparregopoulos titled History of the Hellenic Nation (Historia tou Hellenikou Ethnous, 1860– 72). The intellectuals’ rediscovery of neglected autochthonous culture generated the trend of the epistrophe stis peges, or “return to the origins,” a folkloric quest for the “sources” of popular Greekness in Byzantium and Orthodoxy, rural village customs and superstitions, ancestral folk arts and crafts—in sum, in the deep recesses of the native psyche. Until then the indigenous roots of music, song, dance, language, and poetry had received far less attention than the classical prototypes, and they had of-

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ten been suppressed by local and foreign scholars denouncing the modern nation as an unworthy heir and pale reflection of the revered past. Contempt for Greece’s relatively recent traditions had long been fueled by the fact that many popular cultural expressions stood as reminders of the “disgraceful” slavery to the Ottomans. The Generation of the Thirties The innovative, broad-scale reassessment of topos-bound civilization opened a path to a local form of modernism that dominated Greek society from the late 1920s through the early 1960s. The standard-bearer of the nation’s modernist movement was the “Generation of the Thirties,” a group of mostly European-educated artists, writers, and critics who gave a new impulse to Greek art and literature. The name was first coined by the team of innovative poets and novelists who issued the literary periodical Ta Nea Grammata (1935–44), but it has since been extended to cover those working in almost all genres. From this crucial framework sprang other innovative movements expressing alternative attitudes toward modernity, which helped replace old hierarchical social structures with Western and multicultural models. A particular problem of the new cosmopolitan and pluralist orientation was the Greek artist’s position within broadening horizons. This issue was first addressed by Giorgos Theotokas, whose liberal pamphlet titled Eleuthero Pneuma, or Free Spirit (1929), became the manifesto of the Generation of the Thirties. Directing his argument at Greek literati seeking international recognition by imitating the artistic expressions of their Western European counterparts, Theotokas insisted that contemporary writers had to decide between a traditionalist and a modernizing spirit. The choice was between, on the one hand, native legacies, no longer perceived as rigid and restrictive but rather as the dynamic carriers of renewed creative freedom, and, on the other hand, a quickly outdated, indiscriminate modernity mimicking Western European developments. According to Artemis Leontis, it was in the aesthetic principle of hellenikoteta, or “Hellenicity,” that Greek modernism managed to combine Western European Hellenism with a nativizing Romaic Hellenism.35 In varying degrees, the ideal of hellenikoteta subsumed the modern in the traditional, the Western in the autochthonous, the cosmopolitan in the Demotic. Launched by the Generation of the Thirties, it remained the touchstone of Greek artistic expression through the early 1960s.36 Under the rule of General Ioannes Metaxas (1936–41), however, a more dogmatic, official-nationalist form of the Hellenic movement dictated the reinscription of forgotten legacies: it urged artists and literati to tap “primitive” genres in order to “elevate” them and make them conform

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to the regime’s doctrine on the nature of Greek culture. In imitation of the Third Reich’s fascist intervention in art and its guiding national aesthetics, Metaxas’ semifascist order expounded the notion of the Third Hellenic Civilization, a modern amalgam of the basically contradictory values of pagan Greek antiquity and of Orthodox-Christian Byzantium.37 The creative period of 1930s Greek modernism, with famous literary representatives such as the poet and Nobel Prize winner George Seferis (1900–1971), essentially rested on much of the Demoticist position of the 1880s.38 The Demotic tongue, intelligible and close to real life, had long functioned as an indispensable constituent of Romiosyne and vice versa. Advocates of the vernacular had incorporated the Byzantine and Ottoman periods into their narrative of Greek history and had pursued broader knowledge of the laos, or the “people,” and of its literary and artistic expressions. Progress on the latter score had been deemed necessary to strengthen the nineteenth-century response to Jakob Fallmerayer. In the 1830s, this Austrian historian and journalist had cast doubts on the genealogical descent of the mainland Greeks from the ancient Hellenes, on their claims to cultural continuity with the classical past, and hence on the irredentist politics based on that continuity. Instead, Fallmerayer had argued that the racial pedigree of the Greeks was Slavic. The ensuing public outcry in Greece spawned a stream of national-historical works of refutation (e.g., Paparregopoulos’ History), as well as folklore studies (e.g., Nikolaos Polites’ ethnographic works) searching for convincing proof of ancient cultural remnants surviving in modern popular customs.39 To those in the 1930s demanding topos-bound la¨ıkoteta and hellenikoteta, the Demotic language and ideology promised a natural, organic union with the Greek laos—with its geographical landscape and with its vernacular art and poetry. By contrast, adherents of the formalistic Kathareuousa idiom vilified the integrity of the unsophisticated laos, scorned spontaneously developing speech and oral culture, and barred the illiterate mass from the privilege of education. At least these were the allegations of the more militant defenders of Demoticism, which had itself been undergoing a distinct populist makeover from the turn of the twentieth century onward.40 The 1930s History of Koun’s Folk Hero Aristophanes After Koun moved to Athens in the late 1920s, he started to partake in the new artistic, intellectual, and psychological climate of the self-assertive Greek modernism of the Generation of the Thirties. His encounter there with the writer, painter, and philosopher Photes Kontoglou (1897– 1965) proved decisive for his budding theatrical career and particularly

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for his views on the modern Greek stage reception of Aristophanes. Like Koun and Seferis, Kontoglou came from Asia Minor, the border region of Hellenism that saw the most traumatic uprooting of its Greek population during the catastrophic war with Turkey in 1922. His first book, Pedro Cazas (1923), was composed in an unusually vibrant language inspired by earlier vernacular writings. As a painter, Kontoglou was fascinated by what he regarded as the truly Greek heritage of the Byzantine, post-Byzantine, and Christian-Orthodox traditions. In his quest to free native art from dependence on foreign models, he turned away from Western and secular influences to develop a liturgical style of painting using medieval techniques. Kontoglou’s philosophy and visual art made a deep impact on Koun. But for the young director, Greek modernist innovation and avant-gardism were inevitably tied to the theater, particularly to a la¨ıkos Aristophanes, whom he first uncovered in student performances staged at Athens College in the 1930s. These amateur productions were based on the embryonic form of his theoretical framework of Greek Folk Expressionism.41 As in the 1957 professional Plutus of the Art Theater, for instance, Koun’s early student version of the same play featured a Blepsidemus crossing himself, while the character of Chremylus kept playing with popular Greek worry beads (kompolo¨ı). The farmers sat around like true, ragged mankes, enjoying a glass of retsina in a re-created local taverna. Tunes on an old-fashioned Western gramophone and of Anatolianstyle popular dances (tsamikos, ze¨ımpekikos, chasapikos) and folk songs, rempetika and amanedes, formed the anachronistic musical background composed by Manos Chatzidakis. Since the ancient choral parts—let alone the comic kordax dance—of the Plutus have not been preserved, Koun and Chatzidakis filled in musical intermezzi inspired by modern genres. Two years later they replaced even the existing lyrics of Aristophanes’ Birds with their own words, sung to Eastern folk music and dance. This proved a revolutionary solution to the problem of the classical chorus, the bˆete noire of both comic and tragic revival productions, and offered a welcome alternative to the speech-in-unison (itself a substitute for the original dancing and singing in unison) of other stagings. Although the oriental folk tunes appealed to the majority of the Greek populace, these daring insertions appeared particularly suspect to the rightist, Westernizing regime on sociopolitical grounds. The popular rempetika songs, typically performed to the accompaniment of the bouzouki, reminded the conservatives of the refugee and immigrant subculture of the marginalized rempetes musicians, which thrived in Greek cities from the 1920s through the immediate postwar era. At the time of Koun’s first professional Aristophanic productions, the Right still stigmatized rebetic song and music as subversive of established society because of their long-

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term associations with the poor urban lower class and with the criminal underworld linked to drugs and prostitution. Manos Chatzidakis and later Mikes Theodorakes both contributed to legitimizing this OttomanAnatolian folk legacy, often labeled as the modern Greek equivalent of American blues. Their overt promotion and stylization of rempetika vaulted the native musical tradition to immense success not only with the younger urban population of the fifties through mid-seventies, but also with foreign tourists to Greece.42 Given that Koun’s first three comic contributions to Athens Festivals of the pre-junta years were reworkings of his 1930s school plays (Plutus, 1957; Birds, 1959; and Frogs, 1966), it is fair to claim that Aristophanes provided Koun with the basis of, and initial testing ground for, his new aesthetic of Greek Folk Expressionism. Consistent with this innovative framework of stage interpretation, the director fused the classical, pagan heritage of Attic comedy with the popular culture and religion of recent centuries. He insisted that these and subsequent productions of Aristophanes should reflect indigenous folk traditions that, as they cut through ages of turbulent though uninterrupted native history, still connected the modern Greek laos to its ancient counterpart. Applied to Old Comedy in particular, this aesthetic ideal demanded the insertion of popular, down-to-earth references and elements of speech, music, choreography, sets, and costumes. For the first time in the Greek reception history of Aristophanes, it was possible to justify theoretically even the use of obscenities and of other marginal material in comic stage revivals. Koun explained: “I always looked for the very down-to-earth, the very Greek, the really popular element in Aristophanes. That’s what I relied on; on the marriage, the diachronic fusion of what is popular today and the ancient soul that lives in traditions. . . . Our characters were more the popular types. They were people I would meet in the Red Tavern at Tourkolimano. There were pure Aristophanic characters there, come to life before your very own eyes, joking . . . everything.”43 In 1934 Koun founded the La¨ıke Skene, or People’s Theater, a small but more professional initiative to help recover and preserve folk Greece for the contemporary stage. He enlisted both Kontoglou and his disciple, the painter and stage designer Giannes Tsarouches, for an innovative production of the Erophile of Georgios Chortatses. This play of the Cretan Renaissance period, representative of the Greek literary tradition as it survived on the island around 1600, was used by Koun to disclose other, more recent layers of the popular and oral culture. Unfortunately, the La¨ıke Skene disbanded when Ioannes Metaxas usurped power in 1936 and issued legislation imposing rigid, state-enforced censorship. Despite its brief existence, the company was able to function as a school of drama as well.

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The Foundation of the Theatro Technes Both the popular orientation and the training provided by the La¨ıke Skene frame this company as the prewar forerunner of the renowned Theatro Technes, or Art Theater, that Koun founded in 1942. Struggling under the Nazi Occupation, this troupe with bountiful creative energy started to perform plays from the Greek and international repertoire according to avant-gardist modes that required minimal capital outlay and modest technical support. Giorgos Sevastikoglou, a former Athens College pupil of Koun, perhaps best described the Resistance character of the newly founded company: in the basement of the Athenian Alike Theater, the director and his actors illegally studied works of liberal and foreign authors blacklisted by the Germans, with the titles and playwrights’ names falsified at the time of public performance.44 The Art Theater defied not only the censorship directives of the Nazi Occupation and of the collaborationist Greek government, but also other socioeconomic hardships of the extended war period of the 1940s that allowed limited room for public artistic activity. Nonetheless, according to the theater historian Giannes Sideres, playhouses that refused to comply with the censorship regulations drew large audiences, for they were seen as morally reinforcing the embattled guerrillas in the mountains. Sideres also states that after the liberation, large numbers of Greeks remained loyal to modern drama, which had provided a source of consolation during the war.45 Bridging the great temporal divide between pre-Metaxas artistic and democratic freedom and the nominal liberty of the 1950s, Koun consolidated his novel, modernist approach to revival and native drama. He profoundly altered Greek theatrical life, which, until the Second World War, had failed to realize its immense potential. His progressive work, spanning five decades, deeply influenced his disciples and successors. Moreover, the Greek avant-gardism of the Art Theater was prominently based on and applied to its stage interpretations of Aristophanes. Until Koun started reversing the tide of the early 1930s, Attic comedy had been aligned with genres belonging to the indigenous and foreign-imported popular spectacle culture. Often denigrated by critics advocating high art, Aristophanes’ plays had lost most ties with classical tragedy and with the Golden Age of Athens. Reintegrated into mainstream drama by Koun’s early experiments with Folk Expressionism, the ancient poet provided a perfect, flexible medium in the search for a new theatrical language. With Aristophanes spearheading its modernist stage iconography, the Theatro Technes made a widely noticed debut at the Athens Festivals of the late 1950s, when Alexes Solomos was also presenting the comic revivals of the National Theater. During his long career, Koun staged seven professional productions of Aristophanes and numerous repeat performances.

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In addition to the Plutus (1957) and Birds (1959), he produced the Frogs (1966), Lysistrata (1969), the Acharnians (1976), Peace (1977), and finally, two years before his death, the Thesmophoriazusae (1985). After and beyond the scandal of the Birds, the Art Theater’s marginal position was related to this persistent commitment to Aristophanes. Long-overdue recognition and state subsidies for Koun’s seminal work arrived only after the 1974 collapse of the junta. Koun’s Manifesto of Greek Folk Expressionism In a long theoretical statement, Koun set forth his reassessment of ancient drama in light of Greek Folk Expressionism. The language of this aesthetic manifesto bears special relevance to his reception of Aristophanes. Reprinted in full or in abridged form in nearly all playbills issued for comic revivals of the Art Theater, his pronouncement reads: As direct heirs of ancient Greek drama, we Greeks are considerably privileged when it comes to interpreting it on stage; but at the same time we have to face serious dangers. Great caution and a thorough knowledge of Greece is needed if we are to avoid all-too-clever directorial solutions and innovations, perfectly legitimate for a foreigner, but out of place in a purely Greek context, alien to Greek reality. On the other hand, neither must we be over-cautious or overscholarly out of misplaced respect, for that must surely result in a soulless museum piece, rendering only the outer trappings of ancient drama. As for our great advantages, they lie chiefly in the fact that we happen to live in the same country as the ancient Greeks, and this enables us to draw our sustenance from the same sources that they did and to make use of all that Greek tradition has created since those ancient times. No matter how many centuries have gone by, no matter how many changes our people have undergone over this long time-span, we cannot ignore the simple fact that we live under the same sky, under the same sun, on the same soil as our distant ancestors; we share the same geological and climatological conditions, which play such an important part in shaping everyday life and thought. We look upon the same seashores, the long line of the horizon where sea and sky meet, the same rocks and stones, the same sunbaked mountains, we enjoy the same endless evenings, and above all this, the same clear sky. Our thoughts and feelings today are inevitably shaped and coloured by the same natural environment that enfolded our forebears. Before sunrise, the shepherd comes upon the same stones and footpaths to take his flock grazing, and the fisherman beats the octopus he has just fished on the same rock. Street peddlers with their wares seek shade, away from the searing noon sun, just as they did long ago. In Greek villages and islands, anywhere in the country where modern technology has not yet infiltrated and where people still live and toil in

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immediate contact with nature, the tempo, the texture, the shapes and sounds must be remarkably similar to those experienced by the ancient Greeks. And so we modern Greeks have the great privilege of living from day to day among these forms, shapes, sounds, rhythms, in about the same way as the average ancient Greek did, but also as Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes did, the days bringing momentous or ordinary events, troubles or tranquillity, while their minds and spirits brought forth their great works. That is why if we want to interpret their plays in a truly creative manner, we must draw near them and discover all the things that penetrated their souls, consciously or unconsciously; we must discover anew all the great secrets that nature revealed to them—the sky, the sea, the rocks, the sun, the men who lived on those rocks and under that sun. These living elements that still surround us in this land will help us apprehend the thoughts and the poetry that pervade their work far better than all the ponderous, scholarly treatises that have been written on how ancient drama was staged. The cothurn, the masks, the dais, the “orchestra,” the question of whether the chorus moved singly or in groups, of how they danced and sang— all these matters have to do with historical knowledge, undoubtedly useful at times, but for the most part more relevant to an archaeological museum than to a living production. This kind of knowledge has the same value as the information that may be collected about us in a thousand years concerning our velvet stage curtains, our projectors, our wigs, our use of film in a production, our group recitations and our background music. Yet it would seem inadmissible to us if anybody asserted that these conventions of the modern theatre, these purely external aspects, constitute the essence or an integral part of a play by Lorca, Brecht, Pirandello, Eliot or any great playwright of our age. Such information, of course, may prove useful if one wants to stage a historical representation of ancient drama; they may even help a director as a starting-point opening the way to new solutions more in keeping with the theatre of his own times. But a more frequent consequence of the historical approach is that it distances the audience from the actual living pulse of the play and stops them from experiencing ancient drama as theatre. I believe that if Aeschylus, Sophocles or Euripides were to stage their plays today, they would surely take into account the modern theatre, the modern audience’s attitudes, the modern directors’ practices, in brief all the theatrical conventions that would go into achieving the best possible interpretation of their works, and they would reject any less viable, or already defunct, forms. One of the finest attributes of the ancient Greeks was their lucid and concise formulation of thought; but this does not mean that there is only one way to render this quality. Simplicity may appear in many guises, just as passion may strike more than a single chord. We inhabitants of this same land, we must look around us, and we are bound to discover many other ways,

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analogous to those singled out by the ancient Greeks, to present the modern audience with a thoroughly modern rendering of the plays they wrote without betraying them. This is where the dangers facing Greek interpreters of ancient Greek drama come in. A foreigner—a German, a Frenchman, an American—is under no other obligation than to understand and draw inspiration from the ancient text, and to present it in a vital, truly dramatic manner, having adapted it to the expectations of a modern audience. But we Greeks must be ruled, above all, by the obligation to beware of foreign directorial influences and to avoid foreign interpretations, even if they come to us from countries more advanced in stagecraft and with a longer theatrical tradition than ours. Even though the great fundamental emotions are common to all mankind, even though human beings react and respond in the same way all over the globe, the way they externalize these feelings and attitudes differs from country to country. In the East grandeur and reverential awe are not conveyed in the same way as in the West; a cry of despair in the face of calamity does not sound the same in the Equator and in the Siberian steppes. We Greeks have to ingest, to take to our hearts Greece as it is today, if we want to really come to know our ancient poets. So let us love and apprehend all that Greek reality has to offer us today, all the forms, rhythms, colours and sounds, all the mental and spiritual wealth, all that still survives in living form in our world from ancient times. Let us turn to the simple, natural truths that stirred our ancestors’ spirit, that shaped their thought and that invested their work with enduring meaning and poetry. Greece as it is today will guide us and steer us clear of all the dead matter that often clutters the outer form of ancient drama; it will help our directors and designers to approach—freely and imaginatively, in a manner adapted to the requirements of both theatre and audience in the present age—works that were written two thousand years ago, yet still remain essentially alive.46

Koun starts with the central tenet of Greek Folk Expressionism, the cultural continuity between classical and modern Hellas. This continuum of “all that Greek tradition has created” rests on the permanence of the country’s physical environment and of its natural resources. Time alone, not geographical space, separates the ancients from their modern heirs. Unlike foreign stage directors, contemporary Greek artists, including Koun himself, are privileged to have inherited a classical theater with legitimate topographical claims: they alone know how to preserve the purely Greek context and Greek reality; they can draw near the ancients, apprehend and “discover all the things that penetrated their souls, consciously or unconsciously.” Greek interpreters alone know how to avoid both the Scylla of all-too-clever directorial solutions and the Charybdis of

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overcautious or overscholarly misplaced respect that reduces ancient drama to a “soulless museum piece.” For Koun, the notion of continuity across time, of elements of a glorious past living on not as relics on display but as constituents of a living culture, ought to be perpetuated, for it authorizes an increased sense of duty, responsibility, and artistic authenticity guiding the—ideally—truly creative modern Greek interpretation of classical theater. Koun further describes Hellas’ unchanged natural environment as a rural locus amoenus; the modern Greeks are its direct inheritors and privileged inhabitants. This ideal landscape survives today not in the cities that house the bulk of the populace, a habitat altered by the infiltration of modern technology, but instead in the countryside, which is governed by the same geology and climate that shaped the ancients’ simple, bucolic lives in harmony with nature. It is the home of pure, living elements: the clear sky, the sun, the soil, the seashores, the sun-baked mountains. It is the inspiring landscape of simple, natural truths that have pervaded everyday life, thoughts, and feelings for centuries of unbroken Greek tradition, and that have invested the ancients’ work with “enduring meaning and poetry.” Notably, this archetypal place is not the repository of classical ruins, of the sacred historical and archaeological sites of Western Hellenism. In fact, Koun does not mention any monuments at all, an omission that would have been unthinkable in any laudatory description of the Greek land that anticipated Demoticist-modernist ideology. Even literary monuments, such as Homer and the tragedians, are ultimately products of the metaphysics of local nature. Metaphorical sites of nature, indeed, inspired excellence among the native inhabitants, whether great minds or common folk. This is the living and nourishing physis, Greece without columns: it ties the majority of Romaic people to their villages and islands, not to the minority culture of (foreign) scholars favoring logos over topos. Like the familiar stony footpaths that lead the shepherd through his unspoiled physical environment, the eternal Hellenic landscape directs the modern Greeks toward a deeper understanding of the tempo, texture, forms, shapes, sounds, rhythms, and colors experienced by their forebears. Greek interpreters of classical theater alone can apprehend “all the mental and spiritual wealth, all that still survives in living form in our world from ancient times.” The venerated natural topos of Hellas functions to initiate Greeks into dramatic poetry, in a rite inaccessible to foreigners. Hence Greek experience trumps all the ponderous, scholarly treatises that have been written on how classical theater was staged. Western-imported artifice threatens to destroy native simplicity, since its emblematic academic mind-set pays no heed to viable production or to a play’s living pulse. Instead, Koun continues, it concentrates on historical

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and archaeological conventions and external aspects of the stage, which are only sporadically useful. He even makes a disparaging reference to “all the dead matter that often clutters the outer form of ancient drama.” Since the historical approach ultimately distances the audience and prevents it from experiencing classical plays as plays, a unique mission remains for modern Greek interpreters: creating works that are truly alive. When they look around them at the land that is still the same and therefore still quintessentially Greek, they “are bound to discover many other ways, analogous to those singled out by the ancient Greeks, to present the modern audience with a thoroughly modern rendering of the plays they wrote without betraying them.” In Koun’s view, foreign artists will never be able to compete with the Greeks’ understanding of “the great secrets that nature revealed” to their ancestors. Nonetheless, this topos-bound process of direct inspiration and spontaneous apprehension by Koun and his colleagues entails serious dangers: dazzled by the more advanced stagecraft and longer dramatic tradition of other countries, they may let themselves be influenced by the foreigners. The inherent honesty of the native Greek approach, akin to the ancients’ “lucid and concise formulation of thought,” stands in stark contrast to these seductive, but essentially mediated, interpretations. This indigenous simplicity of the land of the “searing noon sun” is germane to the ideals of Hellenic authenticity and of cultural continuity imbedded in the Greek topos and in the Greek mind.47 Koun regarded the qualities of simplicity, lucidity, and truth, which had stirred the ancient “spirit” (pneuma) and which marked modern Greek interpretation of the classical dramatists, as irreconcilable with foreignconstructed modes of reception. In fact, he urged his contemporaries to beware of Western artistic and cultural influences, which might taint the purity and integrity of native Greek life and breach the autochthonous bonds to the topos of Hellas, undisturbed thus far. Fearing the foreign, he repeatedly warned that the immediate and local moment—particularly of Aristophanes’ stage—ought to be protected from dangerous alien mannerisms. Only Greeks could do justice to the playwright’s exuberant comic “spirit,” because they alone could guarantee continuity of the pure “folk wit,” or la¨ıko pneuma, which stays the same in all epochs. These modern Greek terms not only encapsulate both connotations of pneuma but also recall valid etymological ties between la¨ıkos and laos, or the “people” in the sense of a Herderian Volksgeist. Thus it was in the unique and permanent “folk wit” that Aristophanes’ oeuvre was rooted, at least in Koun’s nonacademic conception of Old Comedy’s prehistory—one of the most vexed problems of classical scholarship. Of the preserved fifthcentury B.C.E. dramatists, Aristophanes embodied most completely the indigenous origins of the laos.

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For the Art Theater, the urban Athenian playwright smoothly blended with the rural and spiritual Hellenic landscape, where he comfortably mingled with “the average ancient Greek,” the model for his comic (anti)hero, as well as with the simple shepherd, fisherman, and street peddler of classical through modern times. A key constituent of the eternal Hellenic topos, Aristophanes became the unique carrier of the resilient, vibrant spirit of its unsophisticated, honest people, of their collective folk traditions, and of their endogenous values and virtues. In turn, the perception of a la¨ıkos poet fed into the increasingly broad popular Greek identification with Aristophanes and with his comic heroes. It also corroborated the widespread belief in the continuity and eternal contemporaneity of his ancient plots.48 Most significant, the image of Aristophanes as exemplar of native folk genius confirmed for modern Greeks that “their” classical playwright should not be touched by foreigners. The poet was key to a Greek identity of exclusiveness, intolerant of threats to its ethnocentricity. Koun often expressed this cultural chauvinism, explaining, for example, “Stratford asked me once if I would like to produce comedy with them. I said no. Aristophanes is so much molded with Greek earth, and his characters are so Romaic, so very Greek, to the extent that they cannot be transposed elsewhere.”49 Koun’s anachronistic ascription of Romaic qualities to Aristophanes’ characters results from his aesthetic theory of diachronic identification of ancient, Byzantine, Ottoman, and modern Greece on the popular level. In this search for organic antecedents transcending any specific time and history, Aristophanes becomes a magnified version of his own literary and theatrical creations. A real figure made to exemplify timelessness, he becomes as much of a fictional personality as his imaginary protagonists. His individual pneuma is the age-defying “spirit” of simple Greek people, like that possessed by his characters and their historical and present audiences. For Koun, the numinous medium of Greek stage reception of the classical playwright channels a transmigration, as it were, of the pneuma of Aristophanes’ personae to the poet himself, to his ancient and modern indigenous interpreters, and finally to the common folk of his native soil. In a reversal of the usual process of interaction and communion, the spirit of the laos may disclose the poet’s transhistorical dimensions. Foreigners can only disturb this unbroken, exclusionary communication that links the nurturing culture and metaphysical landscape in an interdependent sphere. On this account, the permanence of the comic folk spirit, vouched for by modern Greek revival productions, has fostered tenets of popular-Romaic nationalism and even of xenophobic populism. The incorruptible folk pneuma, traced all the way back to Aristophanes, has proved crucial to even the homespun narratives that structure Romiosyne. It has helped cement the multiple historical, cultural, and mythic layers of a coherent Demoticist-modernist ideology of the Greek laos.

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“Ours Once More” Koun saw Aristophanic comedy as sprouting naturally from the living essence of the common Greek people, both ancient and modern, untouched by formal education and the influences of scholarship. Far from rejecting the Hellenic past, Koun’s avant-gardist modernity (or belated Demoticism) reinvented the hitherto lost folk spirit of the ancients by peeling off the Western-classicizing layers that philology and historicizing stage interpretation had been depositing for decades. Although the native reception of Attic comedy had to repel foreign academic and directorial intervention, Koun did not discourage worldwide interest in studying and reviving Greek tragedy. In his opinion, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides continued to move and impress with their universal messages, intelligible across geographical borders as well as across time and media.50 When on Greek territory, the director saw little need for modernizing original tragedies, often going so far as advocating the use of masks. Reflecting on the reception of all classics, Koun made a less rigorous case for modern Greek exceptionalism: “I believe that ancient drama belongs to the entire world, but its [stage] representation poses different standards for us. When foreigners produce ancient drama . . . they are permitted, I think, to ignore more aspects, to ignore a dimension which is entirely ours.”51 But the Art Theater’s position on Aristophanes remains stubborn, as Koun’s successor, Lazanes, makes clear: “Foreigners are entertained by the ancient texts, but do not interpret them. They open up some new horizons for us, but we cannot imitate them, because for us the text plays a more important role. . . . In comedy, it is more difficult for foreigners to intervene, exactly because comedy has folk origins reflecting the special characteristics of the Greek people.”52 In the process of laying exclusively Greek claim to Aristophanes and to the presumed popular roots of his comedy, Koun reformulated previously held, contrasting views of the classical poet and of his reception. He thus restated long-standing oppositions of native and original versus foreign and derivative interpretations, or of popular, living public performance versus dead text and learned scholarship. His aesthetic language, however, colored by populist rhetoric, set forth new cultural dichotomies as well, weighing natural, toposrooted against artificial and cultivated modes of reception, or Demoticism against alienating internationalization. His sympathies positioned Aristophanes within the sphere of native authenticity and spontaneous, organic nature. Leontis has identified a “nostalgic appeal to indigenous traditions” as a typical feature of a “peripheral modernism,” like that of Greece. These nostalgic musings are of a piece with a “conscious displacement of European cosmopolitanism.” Characteristic also is (the populist response to)

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“a national audience’s sense of outrage” at the appropriation of its ethnic past by outsiders.53 The threat of indiscriminate Westernization perceived by modern Greeks, along with their sense of isolation within the political and cultural constellation of Europe, has engendered an increasingly strong attachment to the indigenous Aristophanes “made in Greece.” Among his fellow countrymen, the poet has forged bonds of solidarity and native belonging. As they receive the classical playwright, they feel— and consciously want to feel—different from Western, international audiences. Accordingly, the artists of modern Greek theater have concentrated on protecting their own ethnic Aristophanic tradition from that of the “other,” which remained unknown and unexplored. They have tried, not without success, to prevent alien interpretive frameworks from demolishing the age-old indigenous foundations of Aristophanes. No Foreigners, Please! Since Koun, Greek theater professionals and amateurs, translators, critics, and audiences have been much more protectionist toward Aristophanes than toward ancient tragedy. They have laid more or less exclusive claims to his comic spirit and have persistently regarded foreign producers, actors, and artists who revive his plays as being at a disadvantage. This pervasive belief, affected by populist xenophobia, partly explains why the Greek National Tourist Organization (EOT) and the organizing committees of the summer festivals have allowed very few foreign productions of Aristophanes to be staged in the most prestigious settings. However, they have not spurned the revenues brought in by the large numbers of international tourists watching popular comic revivals from the stone benches of the theaters of Epidaurus and of Herodes Atticus. Thus far, the Cyprus Theater Organization has been the only foreign company regularly permitted to present Aristophanic productions at the Epidaurus and Athens Festivals. Of course, the language of its performances is still modern Greek, and many of those involved have trained with or worked for companies based in Greece. In 1985 the Italian producer Luca Ronconi, known for his earlier innovative work on Attic comedy, staged a discreet and sensitive version of the Plutus at Epidaurus. But Ronconi directed the National Theater of Greece, not a foreign company, and the production employed the modern Greek translation of Kostas Varnales. With the popular Greek actor Stauros Paravas as farmer Chremylus, the play was set in an early-twentieth-century agricultural world, heavily coded with allusions to postwar Italian cinema. Ronconi’s Plutus had a subtle, openended close: the protagonist groping in the dark, blinded by love of wealth. As of this writing, the Aristophanes of only one English-speaking company from abroad has been given access to the two most important

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festivals: the Lysistrata of the British Peter Hall Company was staged at the summer festivals of 1993 and 1994. The production was not well received, in part precisely because the playwright has long been so intensely regarded as off-limits for foreigners.54 Since the mid–nineteenth century, Aristophanes had been regarded as quintessentially Greek and therefore as ideally positioned to help divert from Greece successive tides of Western European influences. From the 1930s on, Koun’s view that the playwright’s native genius has eluded the rationalism of foreigners changed his revival history. The growing perception of Aristophanes as unlearned in the ways of art and artificiality, as the poet of local rural tradition and natural folk wit, has held sway among all levels of Greek society. In Koun’s hands, Attic comedy became classless, arising from and responding to its own people. Both artistic circles and the reading and theatergoing public of all ranks have styled “their” Aristophanes as the inalienable possession of their unspoiled topos, as an enduring bastion against corrupting internationalism and cultural annexation by the modernized West. At the time of my fieldwork, the Greeks frequently questioned me about how I, a Flemish foreigner, could write on “their” Aristophanes, and even encouraged me—in a friendly way—to stay away from other people’s history. My greatest claim to their (relative) acceptance always was that I speak Greek fluently. It was rarely my (foreign) training as a classicist, at times perceived as irrelevant or even disadvantageous to my research. The Greek response revealed all the characteristics of the indigenous, male Aristophanes fending off the perceived Western-Hellenic intruder that I seemed to embody at first encounter. My personal experience, however, has led me to believe strongly that contemporary Greek stage practitioners, critics, and scholars may gain immensely if they abandon isolationist attitudes and instead turn inquiring eyes on productions of the classics across their borders. At the moment, Greek revival drama finds itself facing an interpretive impasse and larger organizational problems of the (perhaps declining) festivals; artistic exchange, intercultural theater criticism, and scholarly communication with foreigners may provide solutions. (De-)Constructing Aristophanic Performance Koun’s directing practice, which was consistent with his theoretical manifesto of the la¨ıko-Romaic vision of the classics, laid the foundations for the modern Greek revival stage of the second half of the twentieth century. The producer saw Aristophanes as the enduring expression of native folk genius, living on in an unspoiled popular culture set in the enchanting physical environment of rural Greece. In cultivating the idealized and

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transhistorical Hellenic folk character, Koun had found a coherent interpretive scheme for Attic comedy. His aesthetic and ethic of Greek Folk Expressionism made verbal and visual the forms and themes from the shared indigenous and diachronic heritage of the people. It repossessed all layers of local history, even those associated with servitude to foreign conquerors. It was this Aristophanes, a product of Greek modernism, that Koun first made accessible to new and broader audiences, as well as to large numbers of students of drama. His chosen medium was the perfect fusion of art forms that perhaps only (good) theater presents: the blending of gesture, delivery, music, song, dance, sets, and costumes into one unified performance—a drama of life. Along with Koun, other modernist producers and artists, such as Alexes Solomos and the choreographer-director Rallou Manou, found in the expanding forum offered by Greek drama and by performance in general the innovative, functional means of expression they were seeking. In turn, they began to mine other popular-cultural resources from antiquity through modern times and made them more widely available. Critics also felt encouraged to view art, literature, and particularly comic revivals with new eyes. Koun’s Aristophanes showed an entire generation of theater professionals, amateurs, critics, and audiences the road to modernist creation and (re)discovery after the detours imposed by the war decade of the 1940s. With Koun, the modern Greek reception history of Attic comedy started to correspond closely with the evolution of native art, literature, and intellectual thought more generally. Already his manifesto echoed aesthetic ideals of Greek modernism of the 1930s through early 1960s in its almost pagan worship of the natural landscape, of the rural-Romaic laos, and of the resilient folk pneuma. Nor was the rhetoric of Koun’s quasimystical language describing the deathless Greek topos as well as “rootedness” in indigenous soil unique. On the contrary, the Art Theater’s director shared this sensibility with other literary proponents of the modernist movement, including the poet and Nobel laureate Odysseas Elytis (1911– 96). Koun contributed an avant-gardist exploration of drama to the larger Greek modernist wave of art and literature expressing an “aesthetic of native authenticity,” of Hellenic autochthony.55 Konstantinos Tsatsos, who banned the Art Theater’s Birds in 1959, had participated in this Greek aestheticism as well. In 1938 to 1939 he had engaged in a debate on the characteristics of hellenikoteta with the poet Seferis. Nonetheless, the onstage rebellion of popular Aristophanic comedy against the rightwing government twenty years later exposed some of the inherent contradictions of national cultures grafted onto what seemed at first sight to be purely aesthetic notions, la¨ıkoteta and Hellenicity. The conflicting interpretations of what the nation’s professed aesthetics should sponsor— that is, whether popular or official artistic tendencies should be en-

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dorsed—pointed to the diverging ways of understanding spoken and unspoken conceptions of cultural nationalism. After 1959 Koun’s Birds became a favorite symbol of popular-political resistance and cultural resilience. The play was perceived as a sharp reflection of Aristophanes’ everlasting folk spirit and satirical wit, which had unleashed the fierce official reaction to the premiere. The various artistic components of the Birds contributed to that general impression: Chatzidakis’ popular music and Anatolian dance tunes, Tsarouches’ unpretentious pale and earthen-colored costumes and unconventional, deconstructed sets, and Rotas’ Romaic-Demotic translation for the stage. Never before had the different constituents of a revival production, each radically innovative in its own right, been so well aligned with a director’s theoretical approach to Aristophanes. The Folk Expressionism of Koun and his circle conditioned this and subsequent revivals: the stage of Aristophanes became the stage of Romaic Greek life. Koun continued to select and commission adaptations from bold Demotic translators, such as Kostas Varnales. He taught his players to eschew an affected, overly sophisticated acting style and instead to adopt more realistic or even naturalistic registers of delivery and presentation. The comic productions of the Art Theater further offered the visual interest of period costumes, repeatedly borrowed from recent phases of the rural Greek past, such as the Ottoman vraka, or the rustic baggy trousers typical of certain villages and islands. Popular dress and simple, minimalist decor, often influenced by Greek na¨ıf paintings and folk images, evoked the physical setting and joyous atmosphere of a Romaic glenti or panegyri, local festivities with traditional, sometimes Orthodox, origins. This ambiance was reinforced by the frequent use of farcical and grotesque humor and by theatrical allusions to peasant idioms, customs, and superstitions. In his Birds, Koun captured this rural couleur locale and magic festival spirit most integrally.

KOUN

AND

KARAGHIOZES

Popular Shadow Theater Perhaps the most important—albeit controversial—dramatic constituent of Koun’s Aristophanic productions was also the most accessible to the broader Greek public: the scenic references to, and interactive borrowings from, Karaghiozes shadow theater. This component, like so much else in Koun’s work, originated in his endeavors to recover the OttomanOriental legacy of Romiosyne. The director saw Greece as positioned at the crossroads of East and West, partaking in Asian and African as well as European traditions.56 This spatial metaphor remained contested in the

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postwar, Western-oriented society of the 1950s through mid-1970s, although it could claim the prestige of ancient prefigurations. Indeed, the concept of Greece participating in both Eastern and Western cultures can already be found in the fifth-century B.C.E. historiographical writings of Herodotus. Koun was a pioneer in interpreting Aristophanic comedy via the rich popular amalgam of civilizations of recent centuries. Among the main carriers of a residual Ottoman presence in postindependence Greece was Karaghiozes, the beloved satirical hero of shadow puppet performances. Koun was the first to bring onto the revival stage half-stereotyped comic protagonists that resembled this trickster-hero. A cultural hybrid, Karaghiozes traces his ancestry to the Ottoman-Turkish Karag¨oz, according to current scholarly consensus. Present students of Eastern Mediterranean shadow theater have, fortunately, abandoned earlier quests for evidence of continuity between either Attic comedy or ancient mime and the modern Greek Karaghiozes. In the past, strained comparative studies have generally failed to demonstrate that any valid historical link exists between the various performative traditions. The older works of classicists interested in this issue, such as the American Cedric Whitman and the Greek Phanes Kakrides, are also unpersuasive. To be sure, both of these scholars modified the continuity argument and shifted the emphasis away from the search for an unbroken literary and theatrical highbrow culture; instead, they posited a more lowbrow Greek folk legacy from ancient through modern times as the common source of Aristophanic comedy and Karaghiozes shadow theater. But there is no common source for these independently invented traditions of humor, whose shared Balkan and Eastern Mediterranean features result from their adaptation to similar environments. A recent arrival to the world of the postindependence Greek lower classes, Karaghiozes was gradually assimilated and Hellenized. By the end of the nineteenth century, he was perceived as rooted in the soil of the Greek peninsula and hence as an ideal standard-bearer of Romaic values. These popular values and virtues included love of freedom from any foreign occupant, as much from the Westernizing Greek upper stratum as from the former Ottoman conqueror. By the early twentieth century, Karaghiozes shadow theater had lost its original obscene elements and had developed into a representative folk-national genre of performance. The most salient features of the comic antihero were his resilient, cynicalsatirical underdog character and his equally Romaic poneria—the “cleverness” or “shrewdness” that gained him the advantage in all situations. With these qualities, Karaghiozes challenged cultural preconceptions of the middle and upper echelons of society, and he also reflected the political and economic inferiority and resultant frustration of the public who identified with him. As the embodiment of the popular quasi-virtue of

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poneria, he craftily outwitted every enemy, who was typically foreign, wealthy, powerful, and never forced to go hungry like the destitute hero and his stock-in-trade relatives and companions. The collective lowerclass mind-set of Greek poneria was not above anarchist and unethical practices, either. This assertive folk wit and the instinctive tenacity of the “little man” helped Koun recast his Aristophanic protagonists, who had their own resilient la¨ıko pneuma, into Karaghiozes-type characters. Such ancient comic champions as Dicaeopolis, Trygaeus, and Xanthias were wedded to the beloved emblem of the modern Romaic underdog culture. Indeed, only after Koun disclosed analogies with the antiheroes and satirical humor of Attic comedy did Karaghiozes establish a permanent presence in better Athenian playhouses. As the sum of the male protagonists of his own making, Aristophanes himself also shared significant common ground with Karaghiozes. Koun managed to bridge details of time, place, and personality, merging the old and new heroes for the broad modern Greek public, even though Karaghiozes was an anachronistic presence in Attic comedy and Aristophanes had only recently arrived in the noncanonical domain of local folklore. Koun turned Karaghiozes, the ancient comic protagonists, and their creator into popular/ist symbols of the native Romioi, as he defined them: recognizable forces by means of which the underdog asserts and avenges itself against the high and mighty. Strengthened by their ties to shadow theater, Koun’s rewritten classical heroes and their poet conveyed the message that collective folk wit and the survival spirit continued to reside in the great majority of the little people. Koun’s theoretical and practical equation between the performative genres further advanced Aristophanes’ reputation for sociocultural resistance. Imbued with populist language and imagery, the Karaghiozesstyled rebel poet of the Art Theater contributed to a neorealist movement in both modern Greek revival and native drama of the 1950s through 1970s. This neorealism, one of the ways (along with ventures into existentialism and absurdism) in which contemporary playwrights (such as Iakovos Kampanelles) and poets of merit responded to the Civil War, contrasted sharply with the tenor of village melodrama and of farcical entertainment that survived in certain urban and provincial playhouses. Against the background of postwar foreign intervention in Greece and of local governments’ conservative and Western-oriented politics, the figure of the disempowered but pertinacious underdog-hero appealed to left-wing artists, playwrights, and audiences. Sensitive to contemporary realities and to leftist ideological frustration, Koun’s Aristophanes effectively dramatized the predicament of the small folk, pawns in the international political game.

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The 1976 Acharnians The Art Theater’s 1976 production of the Acharnians was based on an elaborate analogy with modern Greek shadow theater. Dicaeopolis, the ancient farmer struggling for survival through wartime, became reincarnated as the tragicomic Karaghiozes himself, with whom he shared disillusion and resentment, as well as the poneria of every true Romios. He personified popular Greekness with unquestioned transhistorical dimensions. Like many satirical Karaghiozes playscripts, the vibrant prose adaptation commissioned from Leonidas Zenakos contained a fair number of modern topical allusions—for example, to the colonels and the CIA.57 Most actors were dressed in the rustic Anatolian vraka characteristic of shadow theater figures. Lazanes, Koun’s favorite protagonist, spoke his lines in the drawn-out delivery typical of Karaghiozes performers. His acting style, too, especially his hunchback poses and broken gestures, were modeled on the conventional abrupt movements of the puppets of the berntes (cloth screen). Lazanes came well prepared to play an ancient as well as a modern underdog Karaghiozes. He had recently created the title role of Karaghiozes Almost Vizier, a modern, literary adaptation of Karaghiozes tales by Giorgos Skourtes, a Greek playwright and Aristophanic translator. This 1973 work of the Art Theater was intended as a protest act against the dictatorship by the “little guy,” the Greek who had been left to his own devices but who proudly continued to fight any enemy “other,” whether Greek or foreigner. Partly because of its close association with freedom-loving shadow theater, Koun’s folk version of the Acharnians became a landmark in the modern Greek reception history of Aristophanes. The play was first produced and frequently repeated when artistic and political liberty was regained, two years after the fall of the colonels: it celebrated the people’s collective survival of ultra-right-wing terror. The Romioi Greeks had withstood local and foreign oppression in a fashion similar to the headstrong Dicaeopolis-Karaghiozes, who embodied popular self-governance through self-assertion not only against the Spartan enemy but also against hostile fellow Athenians. In this spirit of recaptured Romaic license, Koun brought the first unexpurgated version of the Acharnians onto the official stage of the summer festivals. His public presentation of the comedy’s overt phallic symbolism, which had been toned down in the National Theater’s 1961 production of the same play, signaled the formal end of the classical poet’s decades of moral censorship, whether stateregulated or self-imposed. According to Koun, seeing the post-junta Romaic Acharnians freed both Aristophanic artists and audiences from all remaining false inhibitions. The public, he contended, might not be fully aware of this liberat-

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ing process, but intuitively it apprehended that Attic comedy stood for a different approach to sexuality. Aristophanes discharged modern Greek drama’s sense of guilt by rendering the theatrical fig leaf superfluous. Koun’s work seized on the disturbing morality of classical comedy, subsuming and naturalizing it in the aestheticism of Greek Folk Expressionism; he thereby turned both Aristophanes and Karaghiozes into prime carriers of an avant-gardism that gradually overcame negative, puritanical criticisms. Asked to comment on the general emancipating impact of folklorized Attic comedy, Koun stated: What fascinates me is that lack of limits: it allows me to proceed in my imagination, and to see everything that in Aristophanes can become surrealistic and take on different shapes and different sizes. . . . The opportunity to work with malleable forms is like the ability to mold various things from clay, to give them different forms and shapes. And this is not simply a game, it is an aesthetic need. . . . Even from a very young age, . . . I have always enjoyed the ability to play with images and with words in an entirely surrealistic way. I find that opportunity in Aristophanes, with respect not only to words but also to forms, colors, and ideas.58

Koun’s insistence on incorporating the lower bodily stratum, on obscenity and scatological humor, was essential to his interpretation of the Acharnians. His production closed the era of the colonels’ restrictive moralizing, and thus constituted a victory in the long struggle to set liberal parameters for modern Greek revival theater. In the director’s opinion, the play was not only an example of intense artistic experience but also a frank, uninhibited forum for publicizing that experience. Aristophanes stood, once again, as a fearless model of liberty. His work was thought to emanate, and draw from, free-spirited Romaic feeling. Embodying the values and virtues of the simple people, the poet spanned all eras of Greek folk history. Koun’s creative exchange with Karaghiozes shadow theater was part of his free, expressionist communication with native technique, poetry, landscape, and folklore. He continually searched for the most authentic modern Greek symbols and modern equivalents of elements in classical production so that he might create a contemporary local idiom to correspond with the verbal and visual components of Attic comedy. The integrated totality of all these constituents, amplified by a variety of actions, rhythms, colors, and movements, established a modernist code that made possible communion between Aristophanes’ classical texts and their twentieth-century audiences. For Koun, modern Greek analogies did not belie or adulterate the originals’ eternal pneuma; ideally, they affected contemporary theatergoers precisely as Aristophanes’ art had moved its own ancient audience. His demand for Hellenic folk idioms and his guid-

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ing ideal of diachronic authenticity sought to bring the classical playwright “back to his people,” to act out and interact with an illusion of eternal Greekness. Therefore Koun also urged his actors not merely to represent a play’s form and content, but also to stir the spectators’ emotions and thus secure their psychological participation. By drawing in folk spectacle such as Karaghiozes theater, and by merging high- and lowbrow art forms, he narrowed the natural distance between performer and viewer. The main thrust of Greek Folk Expressionism was to focus attention on how a play from the past could be made to communicate with its present audience by relying on surviving codes of transhistorical popular culture. By increasing the responsibilities not only of contemporary Aristophanic actors but also of the broad theatergoing public, Folk Expressionism effectively re-created part of Old Comedy’s direct interaction with its original fifth-century B.C.E. Athenian spectators.59

ARISTOPHANES

AND

FAKE-LORE?

Karaghiozes Remade Koun’s 1977 production of Aristophanes’ Peace, in the Romaic-Demotic translation of Varnales, also approximated a three-dimensional shadow theater performance. Lazanes, the same actor who had played Dicaeopolis-Karaghiozes, impersonated the peace-loving farmer Trygaeus. Some critics lauded this production as a successful follow-up to the Acharnians of the previous summer; others noticed alarming signs of a general lack of artistic renewal within the ranks of the Art Theater. For the latter, who objected to the mechanical rules of Koun’s aestheticism, the 1977 Peace signaled the death of the comic tradition grounded in what they condemned as the trite principles of Greek Folk Expressionism. The critic Kostas Georgousopoulos had denounced even the Acharnians as an example of la¨ıkistike graphikoteta, or “folkloristic picturesqueness,” which failed to do justice to the play’s much more complex urban dramatic nature.60 After starring in the two productions in successive years, Lazanes came under repeated attack for his stereotyped gestures and delivery of words. In the long run, Koun’s persistent demand for la¨ıkoteta not only led to exaggerations in his own work but also provided a kind of aesthetic mold for his trainees, some of whom developed easily recognizable routines and displayed interpretive clich´es. The concerted attempt to Demoticize the ancient text, on the one hand, and simultaneously apply a rigid form using stock-in-trade signs and characters, on the other hand, led the Art Theater to an impasse. Koun was aware of the danger that his company might fail to renew its aesthetic practice over time. In the 1943 founding document of the Art Theater, issued fourteen years prior to his first professional Aristophanic revival, he

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had warned against degrading a stage idiom of primitivism into an anachronistic mannerism, out of touch with living reality.61 In retrospect, the tenor of Koun’s comic revivals of the post-junta era only partially lived up to what the manifesto of Greek Folk Expressionism had promised. It hardly seems coincidental that after the 1977 Peace, Koun waited for eight years to put on a main-house production of the Thesmophoriazusae at Epidaurus.62 In this staging, he revitalized his old receptive method. The emphasis shifted from the rural dimension of Aristophanes’ oeuvre to distinctly mundane features. In a somewhat strained extension of his folk approach, Koun turned his last comic revival production into a spectacle of essentially urban folklore of the mid-1980s. The headstrong female protagonists, for instance, were cast as middleclass political activists from the contemporary city, set against the outdated Romaic background of yet another Karaghiozes show. By 1985 the authentic oral tradition of Greek shadow theater, enthusiastically rediscovered in the modernist quest for the Romaic, had lost much of its broad appeal; at the same time, scholarly interest in the subject had risen steadily. Commercial (tourist) puppet shows in the Plaka and mass media productions of Karaghiozes for children had reduced the number of truly popular, live, adult performances.63 Along with Karaghiozes the quasi-bohemian music and songs of the rempetika, from which Koun’s company borrowed regularly, had lost their function as symbolizing a viable outsider culture and the escapism that it offered into a folk Greece. After provoking the bourgeoisie of the interwar period, genuine rebetic music and folk dances had gained general popularity in the pre-junta years and had become a separate industry by the late 1970s. Moreover, the thoroughly commercialized rempetika faced fierce competition from the increasingly dominant waves of musical entertainment imported from the West, which appealed to younger Greeks.64 What was marginal and provocative in the 1930s did not express collective popular sensibility of the liberal post-junta era, notwithstanding its role and temporary social legitimacy during the intermediate phases of transformation. Taking this process of regressive folk legacies into consideration, we find that Koun’s last comic revival leaves important questions about his Aristophanic swan song unanswered. Was this Thesmophoriazusae a tour de force to preserve something of the aesthetic theory of Greek Folk Expressionism? Or was it a primitivist example of inauthentic folklore of the sort rejected by many present-day folklorists? Criticism of Acted La¨ıkoteta Many Greeks observed that by the late 1970s the comic revival tradition of the Art Theater was stagnating: Koun’s interpretation led him to rely on a limited set of gimmicks and stereotypes, including the signifiers of

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Karaghiozes spectacle and rebetic music and song. Perhaps unwittingly, the formerly innovative company had gradually reduced classical comedy to a backdrop against which it projected a formalistic view of folklore. It had itself become the establishment. In the words of the critic Giannes Varveres, the Art Theater had not only forged its own, popularized version of Aristophanes but had also fashioned the taste and receptive attitude of its Greek audience: “Especially in Attic comedy, the Art Theater has established an interpretive tradition, even if at the same time it mangled that tradition. Its duty is now to continue to seek successes at Epidaurus . . . since it inevitably took the lead in shaping the public’s taste.”65 Transformations of the post-junta society added to the growing criticism of Koun’s Folk Expressionism as aesthetic theory and practice. Greece was eagerly undergoing modernization and internationalization. With local Romaic culture rapidly losing ground, the issue of folk authenticity grew more urgent. The comic revival stage became less able to draw from real life as it sought to present indigenous strands convincingly to the Europeanizing generation of the late seventies through eighties. Instead, Greek autochthony grew increasingly dependent on the depictions of outsiders, blended with a nostalgia typical of the Art Theater. Consumers of native authenticity—a loaded notion in modern folklore theory worldwide and no less so in Greece—began to balk at postjunta representations of the Romaic legacy. They objected to a la¨ıkoteta that was frequently depicted not as it used to be, but as “others” wished to remember and perpetuate it. The critic Hero Vakalopoulou, for instance, attacked director Kostas Tsianos, a former disciple of Koun, for applying a forced, artificial la¨ıkoteta to his 1984 production of the Peace by the State Theater of Northern Greece: “La¨ıkoteta is a very confused and distorted concept nowadays. Indeed, when it is no longer spontaneous and natural, but is ‘acted’ on stage, alas! Then, even the ordinary people do not laugh, since they have the opportunity to go to the [local] coffee shop or to the vineyard, and to get it firsthand from the village jokester.”66 The rule of the junta formed a clear break in the related realms of modern Greek drama and society, and the split was no less evident in perceptions of cultural authenticity. Before and during the regime of the colonels, the Art Theater’s first professional comic revivals had transformed the classical poet into a dynamic, politicized, popular antihero. As such, Aristophanes had played a prominent role in the process of defining Greece’s folk identity and populist nationalism of the late 1950s through mid-1970s. By contrast, Koun’s post-junta productions of the Peace and Thesmophoriazusae took on undeniably baroque features. They pointed to changes as much in the public’s attitude toward Romiosyne as in the director’s approach to Attic comedy. Koun’s last decade of Aristophanic

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stage interpretation was marred by sheer exhaustion, apparent in the increasing number of exact repetitions of previous successes. Critics occasionally accused the “master” of approaching local folk culture as would a foreign tourist—one of the many international visitors who, following the colonels’ downfall, flocked to attend the annual summer festivals.67 Koun’s claim of Greek exceptionalism in reviving ancient drama, the thrust of his much-reprinted manifesto, came back to haunt him. Critics pointed out that the director had grown up not in Greece but in Bursa, one of the border regions of East and West, and had been born to parents from different origins: to a Greek mother and to a father who was half Greek Christian-Orthodox and half Polish-German Jew.68 After graduating from Robert College, an American-sponsored school established by missionaries in Constantinople, Koun studied at the Sorbonne in Paris for one year, which further enriched his extraordinary cultural background. This baggage, however, made him an outsider in Greece, which, as it entered its postmodern history, abandoned aspects of both Demoticism and 1930s modernism and no longer sought out folk-national treasures or heroes from the past. From the mid-seventies on, many former ideological divisions of Greek society were bridged. As Demotic became the official language and other components of popular culture were accepted, a more coherent national and international Greek identity started to emerge. In the new climate of postmodern Westernization and cosmopolitanism, there was less need for Koun’s Folk Expressionism to make a statement of nativist resistance. The Art Theater’s theoretical framework, rooted in the aestheticism of the Generation of the Thirties, had outlived its usefulness for effective stage exploration of Aristophanes. The practice of popularizing Attic comedy, an easy target of the new multicultural agenda, was commonly denounced as intuitive and empiricist. Such dismissals of the tastes of a previous generation, however, do not diminish the achievement of Koun’s interpretive model, which spanned several decades as a legitimate mode of reception. The director himself consistently referred even to his last Aristophanic productions as “popular” (la¨ıkes parastaseis). Although he kept stressing the similarities between the ancient and the modern countryside, rashly labeling them as survivals and continuities, he ignored the equally significant differences. Koun failed to recognize the inauthenticity of the escapist, fossilized Greek folk past that he was still consuming. He was in the end simply using popular iconography, which was itself always in danger of becoming disconnected from genuine rural and village life. His la¨ıkos Aristophanes became the medium of stylized, mythicized folklore (fake-lore?) for an avidly Westernizing Greek society, which (re)constructed what it viewed and remembered as popular—but not without making “the usual error about la¨ıkoteta.”69

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The Art Theater’s self-indulgent la¨ıkos Aristophanes played into the hands of the movement of cultural and political populism that raged through Greece in the late 1970s and 1980s and sought to extend the functional narrative of folk history. The poet’s populism could immediately include all classical and postclassical centuries that had preserved his plays, which were long known for blending sociopolitical and downto-earth comic material, for turning any subject into the most topical jest or obscene personal attack. The enfant terrible of nineteenth-century elitist philological purism, Aristophanes was ideally positioned to help reappropriate ancient legacies by way of their surviving Romaic-popular components.70 In the process, the poet became the carrier par excellence of the populist message that simple but immortal qualities, even ethnic superiority, have always resided in the Greek laos and in its folk pneuma. Thus the Art Theater partook in larger cultural trends, whether of modernist renewal or of populist mythification of folk symbols. Nonetheless, Koun will always stand as a pioneer in applying new practices to Greek and international classics of drama, and in particular to Attic comedy. With Aristophanes, the director searched not only for the poetic and verbal, but also for the theatrical and visual language of Greek modernism. He was the first to read the playwright’s texts as scripts expressing the collective, transcendent genius of the Greek people. In Koun’s hands, the Aristophanic corpus grew into the dramaturgical palimpsest of folk pneuma. Proclaimed the most authentic conduit of popular traditions since antiquity, Aristophanes effectively served as a leading model both for the current folk-aesthetic movement and for Romaic-populist ideology. Koun’s poet was not the mere product of derivative Western European avant-gardism dressed up in ethnic Greek guise, or of post-junta populist rhetoric: rather he was a symbol of rediscovered Demoticist and folk-nationalist autochthony, meaningful for nearly half a century. THE PARABASIS

OF THE

FROGS: SIDING

WITH THE

LEFT

OR THE

RIGHT?

Aristophanic comedy in Greece has provided a site for constructing modern culture and society. For example, as we have seen, Koun’s production of the Birds became the symbol of militant leftism, imbued with Civil War and cold war politics. In turn, the upheaval of the immediate prejunta years reinforced Aristophanes’ status as left-wing populist hero. In 1966 Koun opened his production of the Frogs at the Herodes Atticus Theater as part of the Athens Festival, and this new revival did not lack the typical neorealist, naturalistic dimension that Greek Folk Expressionism shared with Karaghiozes shows: Lazanes (alias Aeschylus), for instance, impersonated the male archetype of the tough mankas of the urban underworld, playing with worry beads (kompolo¨ı).71

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The most innovative part of Koun’s Frogs, however, was undoubtedly the modern presentation of the Old Comic parabasis. Ancient commentators had very much admired the parabasis of the original Frogs of 405 B.C.E., in which the chorus members, supposedly in Aristophanes’ own voice, offered political advice defending a group of conservatives. The chorus sought amnesty for the Athenian oligarchs of the repressive regime of the Council of the Four Hundred (which lasted a few months in 411 B.C.E.). In this plea, Aristophanes had resorted to the particularized imagery of recent changes in local coinage and of the concomitant economic inflation. Apparently, the parabasis and its elaborate metaphor pleased the ancients so much that they decided to allow an exceptional second performance of the play. The 1966 Frogs of the Art Theater, by contrast, spoke for the left-wing members of the audience.72 They understood the political plea of the transmitted parabasis (especially Frogs 687– 91) as supporting progressive, leftist sympathizers, both ancient and modern, at the expense of the right-wing conservatives punished after the abortive revolution of the Four Hundred. Reading this scene again in light of the relentless polarization of the cold war, they spontaneously cheered mentions of democracy as well as a historical proposal of amnesty for those holding a political ideology contrary to their own, as they applied it to negotiations on behalf of long-detained leftist prisoners of the Resistance and Civil War.73 Koun’s Frogs explored issues of current public concern by way of insights gleaned from Aristophanes. Attic comedy displayed its capacity to mean in ways relevant and particular to contemporary audiences. At any time, flashes of modern historical specificity could (re-)occur in the form of spectator reactions even to conservative translations. Theatergoers frisked Aristophanes, as it were, for the metaphorical weapons of words, passages, and short scenes, whether rendered verbatim or in modified, anachronistic versions, that they themselves could use. Those lines that the public pillaged did not so much appeal to universal themes as give meaning to its collective modern experience. Severed from the original, they privileged interpretations easily perceptible in the fabric of the comic drama of life. Different modern social contexts determined the reception of the very same passages. Thus the parabasis of the 1977 Frogs of Spyros Euangelatos, a nontraditional production that spanned the realms of diachronic clownery and contemporary cinema, generated echoes from the opposite end of the ideological spectrum. According to Euangelatos, his chosen translator, Kostas Tachtses, intended his rendition of the ancient amnesty request on behalf of the oligarchic Athenian revolutionaries to endorse a plea for lifting charges against leftist political prisoners and refugees.74 Nonetheless, conservative members of the audience inter-

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preted the proposal as favoring amnesty for sympathizers of the junta leaders, who had been condemned to life imprisonment. Whereas Koun’s 1966 Frogs brought to the fore unresolved leftist political frustration rooted in the traumatic 1940s, Tachtses’ version of only eleven years later unintentionally disclosed right-wing bitterness about severe legal penalties exacted against exponents of the fallen military regime. In the preface to the 1980 edition of his translations, Tachtses quoted a militant review of the post-junta Frogs written by the avowed leftist historian and critic Tasos Vournas (originally published in He Auge on 29 June 1977). Vournas accused Aristophanes of fostering the most conservative political and antidemocratic aims: Aristophanes is a bard of this world of social oppression and of persecuted democracy. A hard-core reactionary, one of the very few geniuses in world culture who nourished the spirit of tyranny and bigotry, [this poet] spills out all the poison of his political party against democracy, against its leaders and its intellectual representatives. . . . And we have to suppose that each time Aristophanes was being performed in Athens, the entire reactionary countryside descended upon the city on its carts, to make great fun at the expense of democracy. Just like nowadays, when they bring busloads of unenlightened masses to Athens to [attend] the political rallies of the Right.75

Tachtses retorted that Aristophanes had attacked the failings of fifth-century B.C.E. democracy rather than the institution of democracy itself. His opinion, interjected into the long-standing modern Greek and international debate concerning the playwright’s own political views, was widely held. For Tachtses, Euangelatos, Koun, and other leftists, Aristophanes continued to stand for anti-Right politics. But in the turmoil of the immediate pre- and post-junta years, the poet’s repeated paravase, or transgression of conservatism, was concentrated in the Frogs. In both productions, the Old Comic parabasis, the traditional locus of a dialogue between author and audience that conventionally ruptured the dramatic illusion, served as a separate forum for intertextuality or stage dialectics between ancient and modern times, between literary fiction and tangible reality.76 As contemporary artists and consumers of Old Comedy received this intertextual parabasis, the illusion of both the ancient play and the modern revival unexpectedly shattered under the impact of reverberating Greek actuality. They applied a self-reflexive interpretation saturated with immediate significance that tore down conventional boundaries between events onstage and offstage. Enriched by additional contemporary layers of meaning, whether anecdotal or historical, the twentieth-century Frogs became a paravase on a larger sociopolitical and metatheatrical scale.

Koun’s Birds of 1959

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RIGHT-WING PROPAGANDIST?: UNCOMFORTABLE FITS

A Strongman’s Slander Colonel Georgios Papadopoulos, the strongman of the 1967 coup, occasionally reinforced his moralizing rhetoric with self-serving invocations of Aristophanes. Did these perhaps reflect his individual attempt to undermine the ancient playwright’s reputation for modern sociopolitical transgression? Were they part of a larger conservative backlash that extended to the post-junta Frogs, understood as trying to repossess the poet? Or were they just the babbling of an insecure dictator, parroting the language of a popular symbol of unity? Perhaps all played a part, in varying degrees, in the unexpected recruitment of the classical playwright for the ultra-right-wing arena. This forced mobilization strikes us as ironic in an epoch when stateinstalled censorship committees kept a particularly close eye on all past and present contributors to the Greek Nachleben of Attic comedy. The colonels, however, obsessed with personal power and prestige and thus hypersensitive to insult and ridicule, could not have tolerated, let alone celebrated, Aristophanes’ comic license unless their own censorship legislation kept the poet securely removed from real-life politics. In 1971 Spiro Agnew, the American vice president of Greek descent (born Anagnostopoulos), became one of the few foreign dignitaries to visit Greece during the seven-year military regime. As early as September 1968, Agnew had delivered one of the strongest speeches by any U.S. politician endorsing the colonels and branding their opponents communist conspirators. The Nixon administration tolerated and even patronized the junta, which it viewed as a bastion of stability in the troubled Southern Balkans and Eastern Mediterranean. Hence, during his 1971 official visit Agnew was fˆeted by Papadopoulos, who considered mentioning Aristophanes appropriate among “fellow Greeks.” In his formal address to the vice president, Papadopoulos attacked the regime’s detractors with a rhetorical allusion to the classical poet: The sophists of Aristophanes we know, as well as their tactics. Let also the rest of the world try to unmask them. Then our civilization will be preserved intact, whereas now, unfortunately, it is being threatened by the outcries of contemporary sophists. These sophists have come dangerously close to convincing everyone, by means of their sophistry, and to impeding our endeavors to protect our civilization. . . . Perhaps we have made more than the necessary comments in light of protecting ourselves from the sophists. Let us promise that in Greece, as far as it depends on the bond and the alliance between the two countries [Greece and the United States], our civilization will not suffer any danger.77

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Papadopoulos contended that like Aristophanes, who exposed the sophists of antiquity, the junta leadership had been able to unmask its own anti-Right, and ipso facto communist, critics and their dangerous strategies. Let the rest of the world do the same, he urged, if together we want to protect our civilization from the harm done by contemporary sophists, who are regrettably influential. Unfortunately, Papadopoulos did not specify whether he had in mind Socrates, portrayed as the sophist par excellence in Aristophanes’ Clouds, or the philosopher’s students, or any ancient Athenian (such as Euripides) derided for his sophistries in other comedies. In fact, Papadopoulos’ general argument might have been far more convincing if he had referred to the sycophants instead of to the sophists ridiculed by Aristophanes. Aristophanes, Bolshevik-Fighter Papadopoulos’ reading of a reactionary Aristophanes, siding with the colonels and endorsing their doctrine, was similar to the poet’s appropriation by the military dictator Metaxas prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. From the sources available, I cannot conclude whether the junta’s reception of the playwright was directly and consciously inspired by the ultra-right-wing repossession of Aristophanes, particularly the Plutus, under the semifascist rule of the late 1930s. Hard evidence illustrating Metaxas’ reading of the poet has proved scarce. The colonels’ interpretation of Aristophanes might have been a side effect of the paternalistic rhetoric they shared with the prewar dictator. Under both repressive regimes, a stifling moral and political discourse was intended to undergird a common, professedly conservative, ethical dogma, as well as a shared hostility to the leftist-communist threat. In the years prior to the Second World War, a twenty-one-page pamphlet titled Aristophanes and Communism was issued by Antonios Philippos Chalas in the series Greek Traditions—Greek Civilization, at the author’s own Athenian publishing house. The pamphlet bears no date, but it must have been written before the Italian and German invasions of Greece (October 1940 and April 1941, respectively), judging by Chalas’ naive praise of both Mussolini and Hitler,78 as well as by the booklet’s thrust, to which I return below: he aligned his work with the tenor of Metaxas’ doctrine, widely promulgated between the years 1936 and 1941. Though copies of this particular pamphlet are now rare, it was typical ideological propaganda of the “Regime of the Fourth of August 1936,” as the general styled his own authoritarian rule. In turn, the dictator’s dogma was not isolated from other Greek and international political movements of the 1930s; as already noted, it copied many aspects of Hitler’s Third Reich, including the Nazi intervention in the arts and the

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insistence on a nationalist aesthetics to create a Third Hellenic Civilization.79 The Greek prewar dictatorship also shared with German Nazism and Italian Fascism a fierce hatred of communism. Under the authoritarian regime, Greek communists, real or supposed, bore the brunt of ideological intimidation and repression. Metaxas justified many of his policies by conjuring up the dangers posed by communist conspirators and their fellow travelers. Aristophanes was drawn into the state propaganda machine to help fight the spurious threat of an imminent leftist takeover of Greece. According to the historian David Close in his excellent discussion of Metaxas, the regime’s police forces under the direction of Konstantinos Maniadakes succeeded to an unprecedented extent in suppressing the communist enemy. In order to eradicate all ideological opposition, some police officers even assembled a library of leftist publications to gain more knowledge of their political foe.80 Chalas, the author of our anticommunist pamphlet, was also well informed about the enemy’s doctrine, party structure, and historical movement. He inserted a conservative strand into the interstices of Aristophanes’ modern Greek Nachleben: the moralizing, semi-allegorical Plutus, the comedy with the longest philological and didactic tradition. Ironically though not coincidentally, the historically high stature of the fourth-century B.C.E. play had first been thoroughly “disturbed” by the socialist-leftist reading of Chourmouzes and Karydes in the 1860s. But Chalas’ interpretation of the Plutus was a peculiar amalgam of rampant moralizing, religious fanaticism, and virulent political assaults, all supposedly authorized by the comedy. Chalas transformed Aristophanes into a fervent anticommunist avant la lettre: With his characteristic eagle’s vision, so to speak, the great comic playwright of Antiquity perceived the soul-corrupting bane of communism and its criminal nature, and undertook to write his comedy Plutus. With a virtuosity beyond all praise, he brings personifications of abstract ideas on stage, such as Wealth, Poverty, and Idleness. Thus he makes tangible and perceptible all the disastrous consequences of communism and of the common ownership of goods! Through this kind of personal stage experience, the spectators at last see with their very own eyes to what unimaginable misfortune, anarchy, unhappiness, and mental derangement these ideas about the common ownership of goods can lead, once they are put into practice. This is the main goal that Aristophanes’ Plutus pursues from beginning to end. (15; boldface emphases in the original)

Unlike Wealth and Poverty, Idleness is not among the allegorical figures of the original Plutus, though the classical play does not exclude its related connotations. Also, Chalas’ argument against “the disastrous con-

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sequences of communism and of the common ownership of goods” could have gained much from invoking certain parts of the Ecclesiazusae, but the inescapable allusions to the incredible sexual ramifications of Praxagora’s policy of common marriage would have undermined the puritanism of his case. Chalas portrays Aristophanes as attacking communist theory by having his Plutus endorse the Metaxas doctrine. The ancient playwright would have been surprised at being cast in the anachronistic role of modern Bolshevik-fighter: As by magic, Aristophanes brings us back to the truth, to harsh reality, and rejects (in a playful and jocose manner) all Bolshevik ideas. Two thousand three hundred years ago, he proved that Bolshevism—the common possession of goods—the indiscriminate distribution of available resources, leads to certain abyss, to Famine, and to Misfortune. What Aristophanes already foresaw in his time, the [First] World War brought home to us most convincingly in Russia. Such was the amazingly keen insight of the great Greek. (18)

A close comparison reveals striking similarities between Chalas’ onesided interpretation of the Plutus and the receptive mode of another document of the time: Nikolaos Philippas’ scholarly introduction to his 1938 version of the same comedy, rendered on strictly philological grounds. Here, the translator claimed that the Plutus most fully expressed Aristophanes’ philosophical perception of the human condition: namely, that labor is at the basis of society. Without labor, everything is bound to disintegrate. True wealth, true happiness lies in the satisfaction of having fulfilled one’s duty. According to Philippas, this is how Poverty’s defense and the entire Plutus should be understood. Thus Aristophanes’ work was strained to reinforce the correctness of the regime’s political and cultural choices. It was drawn into the antiplutocratic rhetoric of devotees of Metaxas, who, styling himself “First Peasant” and “First Worker,” tried to give his rule a veneer of populism—with the occasional help of the classical playwright. After Koun had pulled Aristophanes into the modernist movement of the early 1930s, defenders of Metaxas’ regime redefined the poet as an ultra-right-wing bulwark of Greek civilization and made him part of their dogmatic imposition of anticommunist Hellenicity. The Plutus served the dictatorial propaganda mill, which fed on the binarism pitting Right against Left and on the growing social splits as the havoc of war threatened. By the late 1950s, sociopolitical attitudes toward Aristophanes had once again been thoroughly inverted. With his 1957 Plutus, however, Koun did not appear to react against (or even to know of) Chalas’ anticommunist pamphlet. Most likely, the publication concocted by a dictatorship that was, in retrospect, becoming increasingly unpopular, no longer found a reading public. Koun’s 1959 Birds, in contrast, firmly

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established the cold war image of Aristophanes-the-communist, less than twenty-five years after Metaxas’ sympathizers had recruited the poet to help combat communism. Koun’s Birds transformed the playwright into an Aristero-phanes, or “Aristophanes the Leftist,” in the already-quoted words of Voula Damianakou, wife and adamant defender of the translator Rotas. A profoundly modern Greek creation of the cold war society of Karamanles, this anti-Right poet and politician-by-extension provided a late-fifties mirror of, and leftist outlet for, the ideological polarization that had continued from the time of Metaxas. WHAT DOES IT MEAN? The double pre- and post-junta reading of the parabasis of the Frogs—as well as the turnaround from Metaxas’ anti-Left Aristophanes to his precise opposite, the Aristero-phanes of Koun and Rotas—poses urgent questions concerning the political stance of the playwright himself. I tend to discount the search for sovereign authorial intention, including assumptions about the poet’s politics and morality. My answer of a non liquet accepts both the limits of our knowledge and some limits of interpretive imagination imposed by the text. Aristophanes can support multiple, sometimes diametrically opposed interpretations of his personality as well as of his works. Any director’s consistent treatment of a play lends an air of objectivity to what is no more than a possible reading. My case study of the wide variety of Greek uses of Aristophanes, including an emphasis on double meanings and contrasting ideological appropriations, leads me to conclude that his intent has never been clear beyond doubt or modification. There simply is no one answer to the problem of Aristophanes’ own political views. In modern theater studies, critics hotly debate whether questions of intentionality should even be asked, and related contentions that “this is what the text means” are out of place. “The play’s the thing,” says the motto of the revisionist stage, even if we don’t know what the play is. Perhaps classical scholarship could learn from that attitude, for the key problems will persist even after details of Aristophanes’ personal position have been clarified. Nonetheless, in modern Greek interpretation and criticism of revival drama, the practice of distilling the political and historical poet from the comic ideas and characters of his works has proved enduring. A telling example of this dynamic of derivation is the psychoanalytic work of N. N. Dracoulides, Psychanalyse d’Aristophane (de sa vie et de ses œuvres) (1967). The study describes Aristophanes as the psychological product of his female home environment, conditioned by a “phallic” mother and a subdued paternal figure. Dracoulides believes that this family milieu inspired the playwright’s conservative political position as well

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as his attitude toward women. Such assertions may speak volumes about the author’s own modern scholarly preoccupations, but the validity of projecting psychoanalytical concerns onto Aristophanes’ comedies and personality is highly questionable. Equally doubtful (though less extreme) may be the reading of certain plays—or, often, parts of plays—as evidence of the poet’s commitment to any specific policy of fifth- or early-fourth-century B.C.E. Athens. Yet belief in the inseparability of oeuvre and author, the tenet that underlies various face-value judgments, readily became dominant, given the dearth of substantial biographical information about Aristophanes. Different schools of classical scholars have endeavored to define Aristophanes’ relationship to the politics of his time, either mining his plays for historical references or rejecting the possibility of unmasking the poet’s personal beliefs. A. W. Gomme’s 1938 essay “Aristophanes and Politics” was perhaps the most decisive statement of the latter approach and spawned much debate.81 While my own argument appears to be aligned with Gomme’s, it rests on a more radical claim of the impossibility of reading singular intention, of determining final meaning (even of assuming that we can equate the author’s intentionality and the meaning of his or her text), given the multiple and contradictory deductions made by modern Greek translators and theater practitioners. In my view, the narrow search for ancient political allusions loses any possible justification when one takes into account the unpredictability of the plays’ impact on their public. As the different Frogs productions show, the same lines and scenes may unexpectedly acquire conflicting meanings, depending on altered conditions or horizons of reception, on the various psychological colorations that actors, artists, and audiences can add to any given work. Yet all readings derive from the same original text and the same playwright. Aristophanes has remained a living paradox, and his oeuvre has meant to modern Greeks precisely what they wanted it to mean. Even when contemporary assumptions are made consciously, they are never fully transparent. How the texts, or more commonly the productions, have been read has been a function of the interpreter—an effect of his or her receptive background, both diachronic and synchronic. Though sometimes defined as acts of apprehending without presuppositions, the Greeks’ literary and theatrical interpretations have unambiguously mirrored sociopolitical and broad cultural needs of the present time. The supposedly objective, historicizing results of those readings have often reflected modern conditions more than they have the “real” ancient context of Attic comedy. In Greece, the iconography of Aristophanes, more than of any other classical author, has brought out a shifting, diffuse set of meanings, taking shape when the original texts, or segments of them

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as small as individual words, find translations relevant to the circumstances and micropolitics of the present day. The Aristophanic sense with which contemporary events become invested discloses as much about the cognitive domain of modern Greece as it does about ancient society. Karolos Koun, avant-gardist of drama active from the 1930s through the 1980s, was the first to apply a radically new interpretation to Aristophanic comedy as bold public performance—itself the most useful legacy of the waning Lysistrata extravaganza. Yet from the start Koun based the comic revival stage on solid regular (i.e., nonpornographic) foundations. With him and with his la¨ıkos Aristophanes, the male-dominated lower through middle classes of Greek society continued steadily to frequent the mid-twentieth-century playhouses and summer festivals. Guided by the Art Theater, those social ranks developed interests in other genres as well and underwent new phases of cultural and aesthetic self-discovery. Audience building—in numbers, in quality, and in social diversity—was only one of the many prerequisites for new productions of ancient drama to supersede outmoded nineteenth-century approaches and to sustain a viable modern revival tradition. Other vital factors included the training of a professional pool of actors and artists, the discovery of a repertoire and of performance techniques relevant to the contemporary public, and a reasonable degree of financial stability and of official tolerance and recognition. Koun’s Art Theater was especially instrumental in the long struggle to secure all of those components for both revival and native modern Greek drama. The company brought Aristophanes from the margin to the very center of mainstream theatrical life. Koun himself embodied perhaps the most successful transition from stage amateurism to professionalism in Attic comedy. Both for the director and for ancient drama, the first results of this transition began to show by the mid-1950s, when professional and subsidized productions of the Greek classics first became a permanent reality. As early as 1932, Koun had started to experiment with Aristophanes. By the late fifties his rudimentary but earnest early attempts had evolved into a coherent performative response to the poet’s previous receptions by modern Greeks. The aesthetic movement led by Koun, Greek Folk Expressionism, engaged him in a lifelong search for remnants of native popular culture. The quintessential Hellenicity of the la¨ıkos Aristophanes discovered in this process was an hellenikoteta of recent centuries as well as of antiquity: it integrated a Romaic Greekness of the immediate past that partly overlapped with the traditions of Karaghiozes shadow theater and of rempetika music and song. Koun thereby disclosed an alternative continuum linking modern Greeks to the legacy of the Golden Age. His concept of a transhistorical Hellenic continuity did not resort to the typical ethnic and

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genetic arguments, nor did it invoke the long history of learning upheld by the nineteenth-century Greek educated elite. On the contrary, it was based on a belief in the unity of indigenous folk culture, a modernist position increasingly common among artists and intellectuals after the Asia Minor debacle of 1922. Aristophanes and his antiheroes in particular functioned as channels of direct access to the la¨ıkoteta and Romiosyne of the autochthonous people of a pristine rural Greek landscape. As these protagonists also conditioned the traditionalist narrative and image of the struggling laos, Koun extended the history of populism by centuries in just a few strokes. When taken to its theatrical extreme, however, Greek Folk Expressionism transformed some of his later Aristophanic productions, such as the Acharnians and Peace of the mid-1970s, into displays of la¨ıkoteta of questionable viability. As a tradition- and performance-oriented problematic, Koun’s Folk Expressionism relied most heavily on Aristophanes, thereby turning his oeuvre into a grassroots form of modern Greek theater and culture. This method elicited both imitation and rejection from local stage professionals, both actors and producers, whose ranks Koun helped build for more than half a century. The Aristophanic model established by the Art Theater also posed novel challenges to translators, composers, choreographers, and set and costume designers. Koun’s demands focused on the dramatic viability of each artistic element rather than on its philological and historical accuracy or academic quality. New acting versions, stage designs, and scores of music, song, and dance, as well as the ideologies of their creators, were frequently tested in massive public performances and their repetitions under changing sociopolitical circumstances. Meanwhile, Greek audiences, especially the lower and middle classes, grew increasingly well acquainted with Aristophanic comedy, and by extension with ancient drama, in new, interactive ways. The broader public, which had ignored the nineteenth-century textual and state-sponsored revivals, gained a theatrical education in classical comedy via the regular experience of a modern Greek performance culture that remained consistent. Koun’s innovations altered not only how Aristophanes’ plays were treated on stage but also how new productions were interpreted by critics and by reading and theatergoing audiences. His la¨ıkos Aristophanes handed contemporaries a key to overlooked layers of the Greek past; perhaps more important, he helped shape the country’s present and invent its future. The Greeks could come home to Aristophanes. Yet readings and appropriations of classical comedy have been multiple, like their creators and consumers. For modern Greeks, the Aristophanes of the past has presented a living configuration of lines, jokes, and characters; it opens up, fractures, and reconstructs itself at the hands of interpreters rooted in today’s sociopolitics. But no reading of Aris-

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tophanes from a specific point of view is ever totally isolated from issues raised during preceding phases of reception. Thus Koun’s innovative approach to Attic comedy, the most crucial link in the long chain of possession and repossession of the classical corpus, was marked by a duality: his quest for Greek authenticity via Aristophanes essentially stood as a longawaited response to (and even revenge on) decades of modern reception history that had paid too little attention to native artistic and cultural traditions. His novel assessment, however, not only entailed a subversion of previous forms but also tended to exaggerate differences of interpretation—which would in turn call for new reactions.

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Framing, Clowning, and Cloning Aristophanes

BECAUSE OF THE DIVERSITY of Aristophanes productions at the end of Koun’s life and after, the materials in this chapter are quite varied. Particularly since 1975, many comic revivals have set forth nonmainstream alternatives to major interpretations, whether those were the rural la¨ıkoteta of Koun or the National Theater’s archaizing formalism followed by a mode of urban conformism. One unifying theme, however, has been the realization of the “marketplace” of Aristophanes, both through the expansion of literary and theater criticism and through the institutionalization or “framing” of the comic revival stage. Together, the influential core of Greek critics and the independent and official institutions propagated and maintained tastes of a given epoch. Much work remains for scholars of Greek revival drama to analyze further those determinants of reception whose examination I begin here: ideological and economic burdens, theatrical seasons and feasible repertoires, locations and technical facilities of playhouses, training and working conditions of students at acting schools, and professional opportunities for young actors and artists. Another focus of this chapter is the dissident role of Aristophanes’ hugely popular Lysistrata. As Karen Van Dyck has noted, junta opponents eagerly adopted this classical symbol because of its striking textual and sexual ambiguities, both detested by the colonels.1 Whereas Van Dyck stresses the comedy’s ancient legacy of women-becoming-men, however, Greek creators of subversive Lysistratas saw the character also as an extension, whether in fantasy or in living memory, of the transformers’ stage and men-becoming-women (see chapter 3 above). In many ways that reach beyond Van Dyck’s claim, the comedy has staged “transgressions and mixe[d] allegiances of every sort”2: it has incorporated rich layers from the modern as well as from the classical Greek tradition. Lysistrata’s repeated double-dealing involving both types of gender crossing, which leaves a final image of androgynous “undecidability,” equipped her to take up different voices and to reframe comic rebellion as resistance against the junta’s tyranny.3 A third feature of the past decades might be called an ahistorical “anything goes.” All previous phases of Aristophanic reception were characterized by exclusions—of ordinary people, women, leftists, or foreigners—which were lifted in progressive stages; but along with these limitations, the quest for the definitive production was gradually aban-

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doned in this most recent period. At the same time, any impulse to protect the dead Aristophanes’ interests fell away. As a playwright who had no personality beyond his comedies, the modern Greek Aristophanesclown or -clone could be brought to bear on issues inspired by the 1960s and subsequent decades: the countercultural revolution, postmodernism, metatheater, and self-reflexive theoretical inquiry. CRITICS An influential core of Greek critics has always constituted Aristophanes’ loud, living reception in modern Greece. Whereas nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century journalists and reviewers had concentrated on the problem of “what has been done to Aristophanes?!” the postwar emphasis shifted toward an (open) question: “how can Attic comedy (best) be related to modern times?” By the late 1950s, social and economic transformations had changed how drama was evaluated; critics were prepared to politicize theatergoing and participation in revival comedy to the extreme, as they did with Koun’s Birds. Postwar discussion of varying receptive modes—translation, acting version, and visual stage technique—provided analytic tools, but the critics did not always use these in the service of art and its understanding, even though many were themselves playwrights or were otherwise associated with the stage. Few created a structured system for judging the comic revival tradition, or even assessed how well plays met the practical demands of theater or their full potential for verbal and visual humor. Despite the attention they showered on Aristophanic producers, actors, translators, composers, and stage designers, critics continued to work for the milieu that generated them: the opinionated Greek press, which was not above personal attacks or favoritism. Characteristically, the more selfconfident (at times overweening) critics of the second half of the twentieth century attached their names or (transparent) pseudonyms to their reviews published in newspapers and periodicals. By contrast, older generations of journalists judging the earliest Aristophanic stagings had often signed only their initials, or nothing at all. This shift toward identifying commentators and critics may reflect more general—Western European— practice, but it was also strongly supported by the growing Greek name and media culture of the postwar era. Modern politically engaged critics began to voice strong personal opinions about both Attic comedy and its interpreters, referring to significant past and contemporary productions of the local Greek companies, as well as occasionally to the international repertoire. It was never a secret, for instance, that the prolific reviewer Helene Ourane, writing under the male pen name Alkes Thrylos, preferred the Aristophanic productions of

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Alexes Solomos, director of the Greek National Theater, to those of his “master,” Koun. A rare woman journalist, Ourane was also a member of the Artistic Directing Committee of the state company. Koun, in turn, found a long-term devotee in Marios Plorites; and Spyros Euangelatos, founder of the Amphi-Theater, has been applauded on numerous occasions by Kostas Georgousopoulos (under the pseudonym K. Ch. Myres), a critic, translator, and university professor. All these critics concurred in their acceptance of modernized productions, adaptations, and translations of Aristophanes, with the exception of Vasos Varikas, who long opposed comic revivals altogether. To him they presented an insoluble dilemma: on the one hand, if a contemporary director excised ancient obscene and topical jokes, then much of Aristophanes’ humor would be irrevocably lost. On the other hand, if he or she put on the complete original, then modern sensibilities would most likely reject the playwright as uncouth.4 Constantine Trypanis, in a 1979 lecture at the British Academy, also stressed the impossibility of a true revival of classical drama.5 Most critics and journalists were active only locally and published their reviews in Greek citywide or national newspapers and periodicals. Later in their careers they sometimes reissued them in collections of related articles, essays, or both. Others, such as Kostas Nitsos, founded their own theater journals. Critical writings in whole or excerpted also appeared in playbills accompanying new and repeat performances of Aristophanes. Following the widespread political repercussions of Koun’s 1959 Birds, the critics of revival comedy began to take part directly in public debate, appearing regularly in their own columns even in political journals and at times on the front page of newspapers. As circulation of Greek print media rose after the war, the marketplace for reviewers of drama grew exponentially. At the same time, theater critics began to direct their writings to audiences of greater social and intellectual diversity—not just the educated bourgeois and upper-class circles, but increasingly also the lower and middle echelons attracted by Koun’s la¨ıkos Aristophanes. From the postwar period onward, the class composition of the expanding Greek reading and theatergoing public has been easier for researchers to establish, using evidence culled from a wide variety of oral and written sources, including letters to the editors of papers and periodicals. The audience of recent years has heeded a growing new generation of more or less independent, (semi)professional reviewers, yet it continues to tolerate—and even support the enlargement of—the ranks of amateur journalists and would-be critics. The complaint persists that drama review has been the province of anyone wanting to comment on plays. Nonetheless, the sheer quantity and diversity of both amateur and professional assessments of contemporary Aristophanic productions has helped legiti-

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mize a preoccupation with all aspects of the revival stage as valid objects for popularization, academic research, and literary and theater criticism, endeavors that all assist in reclaiming the performative and contextual status of the original text. INSTITUTIONS The more overt responses of theater critics constituted only one dimension of an altered postwar reception of Aristophanes. Another important determinant was a growing book and print culture that, in all its diversity, contributed to the spread of modern artistic tastes and fashions. Other factors that modified the theater market of Attic comedy included the mid-1950s foundation of the official summer festivals and the conservatism dominating the Greek National Theater, a prewar institution to which I return below. The impact of more recent phenomena is hard to measure. Departments of theater (theatrologia, to be precise) were founded at Greek universities in the 1980s and 1990s. Through teaching and research, specialists have sought to influence reception trends as well.6 But their examination of local directing and management, design and acting, has produced only a few studies in Greek, with almost no effect on English-language scholarship. Physical structures and infrastructures have also played an important part in forming taste and creating a public sphere that, as an intermediary between drama and society, surrounds Aristophanes: playhouses, lecture halls, and museums are monuments of a new civic pride invested in revival theater; even centers of social exchange such as literary clubs, tavernes, and kapheneia thrive on the Greeks’ voluntary association with their drama, arts, and literature. All of these components were essential in shaping the history of production and consumption of Aristophanes in public life. The Print Culture of Comedy The practice of issuing Demotic translations of Aristophanes, whether accompanied by performances or not, originated in the mid–nineteenth century. The increasing demand for the poet’s word in print, to which the modernist 1930s gave a special boost, has centered on leading publishing houses (typically based in Athens). From the late 1950s on, rapidly expanding distribution has guaranteed that the poet’s works can be read as frequently as seen. Nonetheless, the public has demanded and preferred performances, despite the steady growth of a middle-class pool of readers of both translated and adapted Attic comedy—often autodidactics in literature whose cultural interest has enhanced their social

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stature. Translations now range from the straitlaced to extremely ribald, as do acting versions of contemporary revivals. More comprehensive playbills, sold at theaters, have sometimes incorporated printed stage versions, which served both as a corollary to the production and as an enticement to further private reading. The print culture of playbills has surged along with the annual festivals. Few older examples of theater programs have been preserved, and the useful information they provide is often limited to a list of the names of the cast and other artists involved. The Summer Festivals Since the mid-1950s, the annual state-funded summer Festivals of Ancient Greek Drama at Athens and Epidaurus have made classical theater accessible to a broad audience of both Greeks and international tourists. Several individuals in the late twenties through mid-thirties were key to establishing these events, which secured the systematic revival of the ancient repertoire on the outdoor stage. As part of their Delphic Festivals of 1927 and 1930, the visionary poet Angelos Sikelianos (1884–1951) and his American spouse, Eva Palmer (1874–1952), put on the Prometheus Bound and later the Suppliants of Aeschylus in the theater preserved on the sanctuary site of Delphi.7 Their efforts inspired Greek commercial as well as amateur producers to stage classical tragedy themselves.8 In his youth, Sikelianos had been one of the so-called mystes, or player “initiates,” of Konstantinos Chrestomanos and his New Stage Company. After an unsuccessful acting career, he had turned to writing poetry as well as plays. Palmer Sikelianou, who was a friend of Isadora Duncan, the celebrated pioneer of modern dance, incarnated the classicizing spirit of contemporary American Philhellenism. She intensely studied museum vases and reliefs, for instance, in her quest for “authentic” choreographic movements and archaic-style costumes. She was one of the first theater practitioners in Greece to raise questions and to formulate answers about the skills required to produce open-air performances of ancient drama.9 Another important step was the 1936 foundation of the Classical Greek Drama Festival in Athens. This event was the brainchild of Demetres Ronteres, director general of the National Theater of Greece, which had been active since 1932. Ronteres opened the festival with a production of Sophocles’ Electra, performed outdoors at the Herodeion. Even though neither the Delphic or the Athenian festivals nor the statefinanced National Theater then managed to establish yearly open-air performances of ancient drama, at least they broadly advocated and made detailed plans for such a tradition. This in itself constituted a significant new development after decades during which professional stage companies, fearing financial losses, had avoided reviving classical tragedy.

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Delayed by the war years, Ronteres finally inaugurated the Epidaurus summer Festival of Ancient Greek Drama in 1954 and the Athens Festival one year later at the newly restored Herodeion. The Epidaurus Festival has always been dedicated to modern productions of the Greek classics, whereas the Athens Festival has also seen many native and international groups performing in various art forms. In 1965 a second permanent stage was added to the Athens Festival with the construction of the Lycabettus Theater, situated on Lycabettus Hill. Since the abolition of the 1967–74 military dictatorship, regional and provincial drama and arts festivals have sprung up throughout Greece, using local historic settings of all kinds. As open-air stagings have proliferated, the need for new methods of directing and acting different from those used for indoor productions has become obvious. Although the prestigious Epidaurus Festival purportedly aimed at presenting more of the classics to a much larger public, both Greek and foreign, the fierce competition to participate has led to a relatively narrow range of offerings. Its stage was accessible only to the National Theater until after the junta’s downfall. The management and funding of both festivals by the Greek National Tourist Organization (EOT), together with the Greek Ministry of Culture, have often been questioned, and with justice. Stage companies apply to these government agencies, and their proposed performances enter a secret and highly politicized selection process. Only the productions chosen, not necessarily those of the greatest merit, stand a chance of gaining a broad reception and thus of influencing subsequent revival trends. That productions are accepted does not prove their worth, yet once they are given access to the festivals they become the privileged few that may thereafter be regarded as good, if only because of their wider exposure. Therefore the festivals’ canonizing ways, which long favored conservatism and repetition over innovation and experimentation, as well as the role played by festival audiences as collective consumer, are valid subjects for investigation. Aristophanes, who from 1956 on was spotlighted by the privileged National Theater under Alexes Solomos, stands as a key example of this large-scale process of institutionalization by those controlling supply and eliciting demand. The ancient playwright changed from being the Romaic-popular, indigenous comic genius of Koun to become associated with the establishment, in particular with its Hellenic-national mission in art and literature. After all, the festival authorities and the directors of the National Theater insisted on advertising their revered Greek classics as the most representative native drama, whose brilliance, in their view, continued to inspire the Western stage tradition. The question of the extent to which this common official perspective impeded the spontaneous evolution of modern Greek theater remains widely contested. It had particular force in years when the country’s playhouses featured, be-

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sides revived ancient tragedy, only imported and translated Western European works. The National Theater of Greece During the first two decades of the existence of the National Theater of Greece (Ethniko Theatro Hellados, founded in 1932), Aristophanic comedy, along with native drama, withered under the shadow of both ancient tragedy and foreign classics, which formed the staples of the state company’s repertoire for more than half a century. Attic comedy did not suit the objectives of the first general and artistic directors of this professional, government-financed institution, who included Demetres Ronteres, Alexes Minotes, and Aimilios Chourmouzios. These managers envisioned the National Theater as an instrument for broad popular education in Western European and Greek classics of their own Hellenic-patriotic stamp. Ronteres, for instance, who promoted the foundation of yearly open-air festivals of ancient drama, viewed them as prime showcases for tragedy rather than for Attic comedy. A student of the Austrian producer Max Reinhardt (active in Germany), Ronteres functioned as a conduit for German influence, producing a solemn, operatic treatment of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. He thereby established a conservative style and consistent, formalistic expression of Western-Hellenist ideology to which the National Theater adhered for many years. By the mid-fifties, however, then-director Chourmouzios was advocating a moderate, responsible updating of classical tragedy. He also endorsed Alexes Solomos’ endeavors to present a modernized Aristophanes on the festival stages, which were realized in the summer of 1956, after a couple of semitragic revivals of Attic comedy in 1951 (discussed below). Nonetheless, until the mid-seventies, the National Theater was a bastion of conservative art. By exclusively devoting itself to the ancient tragedians for twenty years, at the expense of Aristophanes, it vividly manifested its traditionalism. That the company failed, in the meantime, in its goal of captivating large contemporary audiences had interesting repercussions for the expectations vested in the privileged medium of a state-sponsored national culture and aesthetics. External criticism and institutional infighting have also been salient traits of the workings of the National Theater throughout its existence. The print culture of newspaper and journal columns as well as of prefatory essays to translations provided a broad public forum for critical comments on dramatic and literary interpretations of Aristophanes; at the same time, these writings influenced and even consolidated trends in the poet’s modern Greek reception. Likewise, the state-supervised repertoires

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of the National Theater and of the Athens and Epidaurus Festivals conditioned, if not manipulated, the audience’s perception of Attic comedy and of classical theater in general. All of these factors affected how Aristophanes’ works were treated beyond the physical confines of the indoor or outdoor stage. The “sociology of drama” holds that the role of theater is inseparable from the specific conditions under which plays are produced in a given society. For Aristophanes, this means that the function of his art in contemporary Greece has not been divorced from the practical details of marketing and organizing translations and stage adaptations. Indeed, it has continuously been determined by both individual and collective relationships of sociopolitical power, often in its institutionalized form. While Greek theatergoing and reading audiences are vast, they have little power next to a small core of critics, publishers, stage managers, and government bureaucrats that has disproportionately influenced artistic tastes in revival comedy. Until the mid-1970s, these arbiters of national culture determined whether Aristophanic interpretations have been appreciated or rejected. With the radical democratization of Greek society following the collapse of the junta, their ability to establish aesthetic norms became less secure. As in antiquity, the comic revival stage has often made metatheatrical comments on the complex context of its own performance and on the general background of reception. It has displayed a consciousness of how trends are set, whether these processes are intrinsic or external to its own production and consumption. Frequently, this self-reflective stance has (humorously) called entrenched interpretive modes, institutional practices, or dominant aesthetic codes into question, in a move of paravase of a self-critical nature.

ALEXES SOLOMOS: HELLENIZING ARISTOPHANES The National’s Museum Productions As noted above, the conventional National Theater of Greece shied away from producing Aristophanes for its first two decades, but finally began to revive Attic comedy in 1951. First Sokrates Karantinos presented his quasi-tragic indoor premiere of the Clouds. The production followed a few weeks after the equally conservative Lysistrata of director Linos Karzes and his professional Thymelikos Thiasos (founded in 1931), named after the thymele, or Dionysus’ altar at the center of the orchestra. Both Karantinos and Karzes clung to the notion of an ancient mode of staging the Greek classics, grounded in historical and archaeological authenticity. Only in 1956 did Alexes Solomos, a former Athens College pupil of Koun, manage to modernize Aristophanes in a way acceptable to

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the National Theater. Over a four-year period he brought the Ecclesiazusae, Lysistrata, Thesmophoriazusae, and Frogs to Epidaurus or to the Herodeion. In the late fifties, only the Plutus and the ill-fated Birds of Koun presented any real competition to the novel Aristophanes of the state company under Solomos. By the late summer of 1959, six of the preserved comedies had made their debut at one of the two prestigious festivals. Unquestionably, the classical playwright owed his theatrical comeback of the postwar era to Koun and Solomos. The two directors, who by then were working independently of each other in very different practical conditions, revived the enduring tradition of bringing Aristophanes to the broad public, and thus made his ancient plays the most popular in Greece today. At the National Theater of the early 1950s, Sokrates Karantinos felt obliged to justify Aristophanes’ imminent arrival rather than the institution’s twenty-year-old reluctance to explore Attic comedy.10 Like Linos Karzes before him, he exhibited an all but obsessive tendency toward archaizing, treating the ancient comic corpus as if it were a mere extension of classical tragedy. In both cases, the result was an archconservative Aristophanes, hardly recognizable after decades of free Lysistrata adaptations and after Koun’s folklorized student versions of the 1930s. Karantinos and Karzes applied a similar formalistic leveling of comic elements and ignored the question of whether their fixation on historical detail took away from the play’s humor in performance. They insisted on using scenic armament such as masks, buskins (cothurni), body paddings, and costumes reproduced after ancient statues and vase paintings. Their actors moved about in a reconstructed proskenion-area, in front of classicallooking sets, while the orchestra was reserved for the dancing choruses. This division of space and action, which was thought to copy fifth-century B.C.E. stage practices, had rarely been used in modern Greek productions of Old Comedy. But on those occasions, it markedly reduced the interaction between the protagonists and the chorus, typically comprising twenty-four members. This lack of theatricality was often exacerbated by a far too neutral delivery of the text; its air of dry instruction sacrificed the individual personality and character of each player to the intended communication of “universal” meaning. Karantinos and Karzes also adopted monotonous music, song, and dance that tried to preserve the meter, rhythm, and structure of classical lyrics. In their archaiolatreia, or blind admiration for everything ancient, they refused to treat the play as a source of inspiration rather than as a defunct prototype. Like the 1868 Clouds of Rankaves, the two 1951 productions essentially transplanted, with minimal alterations, external features from the realm of tragedy to Aristophanic comedy. Both directors demanded philological and archaeological authenticity at a time when Koun had al-

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ready launched his own modernist vision of a la¨ıkos playwright. For Koun, the ideal of “authenticity” entailed a rehabilitation of popularRomaic roots; Karantinos and Karzes instead pursued a supposedly accurate restoration of both the text and performance of Attic comedy. The reconstructed and officially sanctioned revivals of the National Theater and of Karzes’ associated company subsequently were often denounced as mechanical “museum productions” that furtively reintroduced traditional nineteenth-century aesthetics and moral values. While Koun celebrated the intense experience of a past organically connected with the present, the antiquarianism of Karantinos and Karzes reduced comic stagings to fossilized cultural curiosities intended to represent the Golden Age in its classicizing-Hellenic re-creation. This outmoded pursuit of the ancient past diminished its object by isolating it in a lifeless world of its own, meaningless to the present. Solomos’ “Free Spirit” From 1956 on, Alexes Solomos guided the Aristophanes of the National Theater away from antiquarianism. His many productions had nothing of the academic, static, and declamatory nature of the work of his immediate predecessors, who had reduced the poet to a text rather than allowing him to be the author of living drama. Instead of indoor rehearsed readings, Solomos advocated true open-air performances in historic settings, with a realistic acting style, natural costumes and props, and three-dimensional sets. His Lysistrata, staged by the National Theater at Epidaurus in the same year as (and in competition with) Karzes’ production (1957), made his divergent approach stand out very clearly. Solomos made every effort to enliven the play while keeping it innocent, inoffensive, and elegantly refined. The liberal-minded director was the first to distance the Aristophanes of the National from an archaizing aesthetic that modeled comic performances on officially sanctioned norms of resuscitated tragedy. In contrast with Karantinos and Karzes, Solomos marked an era of forward-looking interpretation of Aristophanes through the lens of modern Greek and Western European civilization. He introduced dramatic and technical innovations that would have been impossible to institute at the time in productions either of classical tragedy or of native plays, which were still underrated as inferior or provincial. Solomos typically emphasized the tenor of the fifties and sixties, whereas Koun focused on local culture as a multilayered body of folk traditions dating from antiquity through the Romaic present and including recent ties with the marginal art forms of Karaghiozes and rempetika. Some critics went to great lengths to elevate the National above the Art Theater, praising the National Theater as the cradle in which Greek drama at large, including

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Aristophanes, was reborn.11 Not surprisingly, the issue of precedence in the radical modernization of Attic comedy was also contested between Solomos and Koun. The former’s Ecclesiazusae of 1956 heralded a novel approach within the National’s conservative system one year before the professional Plutus of the Theatro Technes. But Solomos (born 1918, in Athens) had been an actively involved student-participant in Koun’s amateur productions at Athens College in the 1930s. His treatment of Aristophanes was influenced by that of his teacher, rather than vice versa. This held especially true in his choice of music and choreography—precisely those areas in which the classical texts allowed most freedom of interpretation, if only because so little evidence of the original approach has been preserved. But Solomos, who also studied at the National’s drama school, as well as in London and in the United States, denied Koun’s early formative influence on him.12 Progressive though Solomos was in comparison with Karantinos and Karzes, his innovations were still anchored in traditional mores, especially under Karamanles’ right-wing regime of the mid-fifties through early sixties, when moral and political “decency” sold reasonably well. None of his seven comic revivals of the pre-junta years ever provoked a public outcry of the magnitude of Koun’s Birds, let alone an official ban. An important selling point of Solomos’ “proper” Aristophanes was his use of the sound Demotic verse translations of the poet and philologist Thrasyvoulos Staurou (1886–1979), employed in six productions. But over the years, Staurou’s complete corpus of Aristophanic renditions, though originally intended for the stage, lost much of its appeal to contemporary audiences. The translator typically cast his three main goals in terms of “respect”: respect for the playwright’s era and climate, respect for both the form and content of the comedies, and respect for “our new [Demotic] language” and its laws. In accordance with the last principle, Staurou transferred most of the classical iambic trimeters into iambic eleven-syllable lines. He either tempered or eliminated ancient vomolochies, banned anachronisms, and generalized topical jokes to mock an entire class of people or a common profession or shortcoming rather than any particular individual. In effect, he eschewed vulgarities as untrue not to the original, but to the National’s desired prototype. In several renditions, Staurou inserted versified explanatory comments, drawn from the hermeneutic scholia tradition, and he indicated these changes in notes.13 He asserted: “I may say something that the poet did not say, but never something that he could not have said.”14 Staurou’s alterations constituted a practice of making the plays conform to Aristophanes’ supposed objective, to a hypothetical streamlined past. In general, the vernacular translations chosen by Solomos were less radical in their verbal and textual modifications than the earlier militant-Demoticist renderings of both

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Varnales and Rotas. Usually the actual rewriting of Attic comedy was kept to an acceptable minimum. The reduction in changes itself signaled an important development in the cultural-linguistic perception of Aristophanes. Previous translators had hallowed the ancient playwright as a beacon of Demoticism; as far as Solomos was concerned, the poet had nothing further to prove on that score. Because obscene and anachronistic humor was taboo, Solomos and his chosen comic translators had to find new forms and qualities of performance to represent Aristophanes’ rewritten, smoothed-over heroes. Gaining propriety by relying on technical refinement and Western-style sophistication became crucial to the National’s team of actors and artists, who, like Mary Arone and Christophoros Nezer, cooperated with Solomos for many years.15 While composer Manos Chatzidakis wrote the rempetika scores for the first four (and perhaps most successful) Aristophanic revivals of 1956 to 1959, the Parisian-trained painter and stage designer Giorgos Vakalo (Vakalopoulos) added rich colors and geometric motifs for eye-catching costumes and scenery in nearly all the productions. Solomos’ stagings created an effective—though, in time, repetitious—synthesis of local, often naturalist Romaic color and Western European “charm” and “finesse.” Creators of the National Theater’s Aristophanes shared a common goal of making the playwright more decorous, more suited to the refined tastes of polite society. They gradually developed a period style for presenting Attic comedy: they cultivated light, affected delivery and musical forms, gestures, and facial expressions that mirrored contemporary bourgeois and upper-class manners. In Solomos’ revivals, then, we also discover a source of information about the receptive attitudes and expectations of his upscale audiences. Innovative within the limits of established tradition, the stylized Aristophanes of the National Theater revealed another facet of the Western-Hellenic cultural conservatism of state-subsidized drama. Already at the opening of the 1956 Ecclesiazusae, the poet and critic Titos Patrikios had disclosed the need for a more radical Aristophanic voice. He aired his disappointment that the playwright fashioned by the National Theater failed to take on a contemporary public role, that he perhaps lacked even the potential to assimilate changing historical and sociopolitical circumstances. This avoidance of politicized interpretations of Aristophanes continued under the Greek military dictatorship, when Solomos repeated his comic revivals only in their original, inoffensive form, keeping them far from current realities.16 Patrikios insisted on a very different stance, declaring: “Aristophanes is so deeply and quintessentially political that it seems only natural that he becomes indispensable in times of intense political ferment.”17

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Commercialization Plentiful visual and musical variety, with Anatolian-Greek dances substituting for lost classical choreography, enlivened at least the early comic revivals of Solomos. This feature was typical of witty operettas, light musicals, and epitheorese-style spectacles, with which the director’s productions were often compared. But over the years, Solomos’ lack of creative renewal became manifest as his stagings and those involved in them fell into formal, easily recognizable stereotypes. When recast in roles similar to the ones that had brought them acclaim, leading players continued to reprise many aspects of the revivals of the late 1950s. The result was the predictable Aristophanes of the summer festivals monopolized by the National in the sixties through mid-seventies, a commercialized fare that the Greek and international audience could digest without much intellectual effort.18 Solomos’ frequent, almost identical repetitions of the Lysistrata and Ecclesiazusae also proved that re-creations can, by their nature, be only partially successful. Especially during the junta era, when producers such as Koun and Euangelatos were rewriting the classical plays to address the contemporary predicament, the National Theater was operating within an institutionalized context that, in its unchanging repeat performances, ironed out many of the interpretive ambiguities and problematics spawned by Attic comedy. Solomos’ topical allusions were not so much genuine political comments as a game of pretending to play with taboos. His Aristophanes of the dictatorship years was in danger of becoming consumerist: under the pressure of terror and censorship, Solomos transformed comedy into a genre of escapism for Greeks seeking the calm of public and private certainties. At the same time, he managed to make the ancient poet work for ever-increasing audiences of international tourists, whose very presence imposed cross-cultural imperatives on the annual Greek festival performances. The National Theater somehow processed Aristophanes’ comedies for the tourist marketplace. Its outward-looking approach often had a greater effect on the revival productions mounted, even on the choice of plays, than a purely artistic appraisal would have had. The impact of Solomos’ stylization of Attic comedy first became visible in his Ecclesiazusae of 1956. The play presented fantaisiste spectacle with numerous musical, verbal, and visual effects, including the elegant appearance of the leading ladies with umbrellas, trousers, and cone-shaped hats. Solomos turned the grotesque finale with the young lovers facing the three old hags into an unproblematic happy ending, as the couple managed to escape. In 1958 Solomos rendered his Thesmophoriazusae more accessible to modern Greek theatergoers by replacing the comedy’s

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parody of Euripides’ less familiar Helen with a parody of his better-known Iphigenia in Tauris. Similarly, he exchanged paratragedic lines from Euripides’ lost Palamedes with lines from his extant Electra and, less often, from his Medea. After decades of Greek philological and theatrical concentration on classical tragedy, Solomos could apparently take his audience’s knowledge of, and intertextual thinking about, most of the preserved plays for granted. He gleaned insights from the modern reception of the ancient texts to resolve performance problems of a comedy whose humor was based largely on playscripts. In later restagings of the Thesmophoriazusae, as in the 1959 Frogs, Euripides made his appearance driving a motorcycle. This scenic aprosdoketon was, of course, an ingenious verbal and visual pun on the word mechane and its different meanings in ancient and modern Greek: “stage crane” and “motorbike,” respectively. And in the abridged agon of his Frogs, Solomos again substituted allusions to extant plays for lost ones by Aeschylus and Euripides. Even throughout the 1980s, Solomos’ Aristophanes remained conventional and continued to fulfill conservative aesthetic expectations. The productions were purged of sociopolitical satire and of explicit obscenities even in a decade when restrictions, whether on political or moral grounds, had long been lifted. Solomos’ repetitions were always formal, kathos prepei (“proper” in every single detail), and stylized along Western-Hellenic rather than Romaic-Greek lines. When Solomos later presented Attic comedy with his own Proskenio(n) company, which allowed him more directorial freedom, he still chose to perpetuate the receptive mode of his years at the National Theater. Thus in 1986, when his troupe staged the Lysistrata with the popular idol Alike Vougiouklake in the title role, the play was at best received as a “handsome restoration of an old production.”19 Other critics blamed the “star system” for contributing to the “demythologization of Epidaurus” in order to gain broader public attention and to guarantee commercial success. “The Living Aristophanes”? The frequency with which Solomos restaged the women’s plays in particular, whether with the National Theater or with his own Proskenio(n), led to the institutionalization and commercialization of his Aristophanes, who now tapped far richer financial and other material resources than those available to Koun’s version of the poet. But it also engendered theoretical and practical inquiry into the nature of the modern Greek reception of Attic comedy. As early as 1961, Solomos published a semischolarly book, later translated into English, on the subject of “the living Aristophanes.” “My purpose was not so much to present an artificial revival, as to prove a natural survival,” he explained.20 Thus underlying both

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the study and his production style ran the problematic theme of a spontaneous, organic survival, a diachronic continuity of the ancient playwright or rather of the Aristophanic “spirit” or pneuma. Solomos, however, appears to have assumed that his native and international reading public would have no difficulty grasping the meaning of this vaguely defined concept, reminiscent of Koun’s notion of a Romaic folk spirit, when he advocated the recovery of Aristophanes’ pneuma: “What must be faithfully revived in contemporary productions is not the aspect, but the essence, of ancient drama; not the letter, but the spirit; not a picture, but a vision. We must discover the laws and rhythms, the shapes and colors of the Aristophanic performance in the kaleidoscope of modern popular entertainment” (6). Despite his unusual vantage point as an internationally trained theater professional of Athenian origin, Solomos focused only on the surface of the theoretical and practical problems of reviving Attic comedy. But in proclaiming Aristophanes the eternal contemporary of the modern Greeks, he made a contention echoed by many native actors and artists who identified with the poet and his protagonists: We should always look upon his comic hero as our living contemporary. His home is next to ours; he drinks at the same taverns as we do; he has the same troubles with the Government or the Establishment as we have; he despairs of his wife’s over-efficiency or his son’s inefficiency, more or less as we do; and enjoys the company of pretty dancing girls, as, perhaps, we ought to do. The homo aristophanicus suffers deeply for the afflictions and miseries of his fellow human beings. And yet he laughs no end at their madness and stupidity. His sobs will always be followed by laughing hiccups.21 (10)

Like Koun, Solomos refused to embalm classical texts. He insisted that drama lives not in the past but in the present, and that each new generation re-creates its appearance and expression. Yet his Aristophanes was the elegantly refined poet of the state-financed theatrical establishment of Greece. It would be as wrong, however, to conclude that the Aristophanes of the pre-junta era was all spectacle as to infer that the late seventies and eighties have brought totally fresh modes of reception. LYSISTRATA

UNDER THE

T YRANNY

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In Solomos’ theater practice, the Lysistrata again proved to be the most popular Aristophanic comedy, a trend perpetuated in the post-junta era by rapidly sprouting professional and amateur Athenian and regional theaters. Solomos’ polished, picture-perfect version bridged the gap of the junta years, but at the same time other directors and artists answered it with a more dissident Lysistrata. This Lysistrata dialectic also set the

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scene for productions in the dictatorship’s immediate aftermath. Under the colonels the play reemerged in different, politicized forms: it put its theme of sexual subversion and its built-in potential for make-believe and double-dealing fully in the service of bolstering political subversion. In the Lysistrata’s emancipatory and gender-bending protagonists, the Greeks discovered substitute voices that could carry on the public contestation forbidden by the junta. Of course, the comedy’s reputation for obscenity, whether on paper or on the stage, immediately alerted the censors, who were called to the defense of the reactionary ideal of “Helleno-Christian civilization.” When hierarchical, authoritarian politics coincide with conservative morality, distinctions between dissident activity and the moral shock and insubordination of Lysistrata-style pandemonium collapse. Lysistrata herself stood as the visible deconstruction of totalitarianism and patriarchy, and her appeal grew directly out of the long-cultivated transgressive force of Aristophanes. From April 1967 through November 1969 the colonels exerted direct state-imposed censorship, making it virtually impossible for stage companies to mount anything capable of being construed, or misconstrued, as a challenge to their authoritarianism. Although tight preventive control and subsequent indirect censorship did change the normal conditions of production and reception, they were unable to eradicate the nonconformist Aristophanes or the satirical bent of the epitheorese. Both forms, equally representative of a long tradition of irreverence, were relatively successful in sidestepping these restrictions because the regime, with an occasional show of “liberal” self-promotion, allowed their performances to function as safety valves for venting dissent. In the ancient playwright, then, progressive theater professionals, writers and translators, and their audiences found popular and ideologically charged raw material with which to ridicule and criticize their rulers. As the junta insisted on a new political and cultural order, the treatment of Aristophanes’ works became more politicized, finding new dangers and exploring new opportunities in the old comic plots. Koun and the declared leftist Varnales, for instance, made their 1969 Lysistrata reflect the immediacy of present-day reality under cover of a thinly disguised past. In the voice of a classic they expressed discontent with a regime that, as a general rule, banned performances of modern opposition plays. For the production’s effect, they depended on the audience’s ability to recognize resemblances between the stage of life and the comic stage, whose political undercurrent they enhanced by how they interpreted rather than adapted the text. If the parallels between actual events and Aristophanic theater had been more overtly drawn, then the plays would have elicited immediate and harsh reactions from the authorities.

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While Koun’s Lysistrata raised the censors’ suspicion, and while Solomos conventionalized his frequent restagings, some Greek artists looked for alternative modes in which to re-create the tale of a private sex strike by women that had public repercussions. The modern medium of film provided one such way to partly deflect the attention of the censor’s bureau.22 Thus in 1972, Giorgos Zervoulakos of the Nea Kinematographia company produced a film Lysistrata in cooperation with Jenny Kareze and Kostas Kazakos, who were highly regarded for their innovative work in theater. The movie was a tremendous success with the Greek populace, and it won the First Gold Award at the Thessalonike Film Festival. In the newspaper Ta Nea the satirist Bost (the pseudonym for Menes Bostantzoglou) published a cartoon advertising the movie’s release (see figure 6). Kareze and Kazakos subordinated the forms and themes of Aristophanes’ play to their modern historical and ideological conception. They incorporated various popular/ist ingredients and even parodies of contemporary political opposition, which proved not always equally genuine in their form and motivation. Kareze, playing Lysistrata, cast herself as a militant heroine of the Greek War of Independence, yet toyed with Western-style feminism and with controversial American music and flags. Against the main backdrop of the hippie and pop culture of the late sixties and early seventies, her women constantly intimidated the pathetic older men who represented the junta leadership. Explicit sex scenes expanding the movie beyond Aristophanes’ text flouted the regime’s moral agenda and self-assigned mission to “save” Greece. The movie’s oversupply of miniskirts and the long hair of some male actors flew in the face of junta leaders such as Colonel Ioannes Ladas, director of the military police, who harbored a deep-seated dislike for both signs of gender-bending “decadence.”23 Ladas branded such men exponents of “the degenerate phenomenon of hippyism,” calling their hair “the hirsute flag of their nihilism.” In his eyes, hippies were “anti-social elements, drug-addicts, sex-maniacs, thieves, etc.”24 The dictators’ ethical propaganda, underwritten by and reflecting the demonology of the Greek Orthodox Church, also raged against the conspicuous red clothing—symbolic of the illegal Communist Party—featured prominently in the 1972 Lysistrata. In many respects, however, the filmmakers’ exploitation of forbidden themes, such as proscribed dress and personal conduct, proved a commercially attractive ploy to showcase (tropes of) nonconformism.25 While a broad repertoire of sociopolitical satire was alien to the National Theater and to the conventional literary forum of comic translation, other media found satire more congenial; and for those confronting official and self-imposed censorship, the universality of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata effaced differences and difficulties of medium. Political cartoons

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6. The Lysistrata of cartoonist Bost exhorts her female companions: “Girls, put it on strike, do not yield it, and you will no longer suffer wars or wear clothes of mourning. The ‘missionary position [revolt, stasis],’ at every age, will be punished severely by the court-martial.” One of Lysistrata’s fellow strikers replies with the famous rallying cry of the Spartan general Leonidas at Thermopylae (480 B.C.E.), spoken when the Persian enemy demanded that his three hundred soldiers lay down their arms: “Come and get [it]!” The deliberate spelling mistakes characteristic of Bost’s idiom must have offended the establishment all the more for subverting heroic words of antiquity. From Ta Nea, 13 November 1972.

offered another popular visual forum to present the comedy’s transgressive theme, whose vaunted immorality was a valid site of ideological protest against a regime that equated obscenity with subversive political activity. Thus, during the final months of the military regime, Kyr (i.e., Kyriakopoulos), a leading Greek cartoonist, published a comic strip version of the Lysistrata in the popular magazine Epikaira.26 Kyr reworked Aristophanes’ play to address current burning issues, such as the junta’s repression, capitalist consumerism, and the military and political intervention of the United States in Greece. Even after Greece had been freed from the clutches of the junta’s censors, Aristophanes’ Lysistrata continued to function prominently as a source of sociopolitical commentary. The playwright Kostas Mourselas,

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for instance, used its theme once again as a vehicle to critique modern political developments. He wrote a satirical sketch characteristically titled Another Lysistrata for a 1975 epitheorese called National Comedy. In that season, the Greek revue made a general comeback, using ample political material offered by the just-ended regime. Mourselas’ scene explored the controversial issue of personal responsibility under the oppressive establishment. It excoriated the loss of public consensus as well as the moral bankruptcy of those individuals who meekly bowed to the colonels. Mourselas’ Lysistrata-figure no longer exploited sexuality for the present and future well-being of her country. On the contrary, she withheld sexual favors from her husband as an act of personal, private revenge for his past, public actions: in her eyes, his blunt opportunism during the junta years had stripped him of his manliness. All these examples helped reinvigorate the Lysistrata tradition, an enduring symbol of both public and private-sexual rebellion or paravase. In its alternative forms, the comedy gained a modern political dimension and critical reception similar to the Birds’ relevance to the cold war. Using a range of innovative strategies, progressive artists and writers repossessed the play, relying on the audience’s sensitivity to larger context rather than on principles of conventional drama and politics. They deployed allusions, metaphors, and analogies—cultural cryptograms—to undermine and poke fun at the prolonged suspension of civic liberty. Together they shifted Aristophanes’ established theatrical marketplace and formal book culture to new platforms that, in the process, became more heavily politicized. Thus the intense reuse of the comedy encouraged the junta’s opponents to distance themselves further from the obligatory ideology of both obsolete moralism and antileftist bias; and by harboring this new dissident Aristophanes, the Greek public became implicated as well. Eyewitness Andrew Horton went so far as to say that the junta was effectively laughed out of office.27

THE “T YRANNY”

OF THE

POST-JUNTA FREE MARKET

“Aristophano-mania” The notion of “Aristophano-mania” offers only a glimpse of the maddening pursuit of Aristophanic subject matter, license, and popularity that gripped the post-junta market and gradually transformed it into a new system of framing and establishment. However, it helps unify some of the determinants discussed at the beginning of this chapter: ahistorical diversity and uninhibited experimentation, the manic pressures of the market and of leveling multimedia that condition consumers, the nihilist doubledealing in comic ideologies just because “Aristophanes has seen it all.” By the mid-1970s, the makers of revival comedy had become keenly

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aware of the genre’s properties, possibilities, and limitations, dramatic and political alike. The Lysistrata in its conventional as well as transgressive interpretation had been the main channel of initiation into this knowledge and self-knowledge, as it had been the primary conduit for negotiation between the male and female sphere, between reality and illusion, in the earlier semipornographic productions that to the fullest had played with—and learned from—feminine and dramatic resources (see chapter 3). The tools of enhanced (meta)theatricality and of social and cultural dialectics equipped post-junta interpreters to continue to set forth the diverse strands of Aristophanes’ work, while at the same time enabling them deliberately to transform their object and move in new directions. Amid the boom of consciousness-raising activities following the colonels’ downfall, live Aristophanic comedy again functioned as an exciting breeding ground for new talents and forms, as well as for interaction with responsive viewers and readers. Notwithstanding competition from foreign film, television, and other mass media, comic productions were also a profitable business—far more so than the national tradition of reviving classical tragedy. The range of styles and themes present in the poet’s reception from the mid-seventies on suggests that a variety of readings replaced the single track defined by older schools, whether Koun’s Romaic-folklorist interpretation or the National Theater’s more Hellenic one. What the younger generations of stage practitioners retained from the existing models, as well as what they rejected, reflected changes in public priorities. Whereas the colonels’ oppression had unified artists and audiences in their aim to recapture political freedom via Attic comedy, its lifting deprived Aristophanic stage revivals, adaptations, and translations of that guiding purpose: instead of perpetuating the broad leftist-progressive ideological commitment, fashioned in response to the cold war and the junta, new interpretations preferred to deal with more historically specific conflicts within contemporary Greek society, and to do so at a quickened pace. They shaded the older black-and-white picture of Right versus Left—or of “them versus us”—and made possible also the gray of alternative receptive approaches of new secular and avant-gardist modes— even productions more concerned with ticket sales and repeating commercial success than with politics or ideology. This evolution resulted not only from the post-junta stabilization of democracy but also from the gradually widening dialogue with international tourist audiences and with foreign readings of ancient drama. After outlasting the junta’s terror, artists faced a new challenge: to survive under democracy without overreacting. In general, however, sociopolitical relevance, albeit of a different nature, continued to provide the raison d’ˆetre for staging Aristophanes. The younger generations of theater practitioners who had come of age

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before and under the colonels generally demonstrated both the lingering influence of pre-junta artists and an equally strong rejection of their work. Anxious to dissociate themselves from the all-consuming politics and drama of the fifties through mid-seventies, and keen on establishing their own identity as postmodernists, they criticized earlier interpreters in a familiar pattern of both artistic and generational revolt. Their novel ways of dealing with old texts ranged from socially conscious presentations with a modern critical edge to samples of political and aesthetic fragmentation to stagings dominated by deadening routine and venality. The mix also included straightforward productions and reproductions of the past that returned Aristophanes to the classicizing matrix. More sensational, brutalizing, and semipornographic offerings found their way onto the comic revival stage as well, as did the souvenir-Aristophanes of the festivals, which functioned as tourist attractions (themselves examples of foreign annexation in its postmodern guise). By selecting not only different styles and technical media but also the poet’s less familiar works, artists further signaled that audiences should no longer expect conventional modes of interpretation. As the nature of comic expressions changed, the market for Aristophanes changed accordingly: it embraced television, film, and video; institutions of higher education and other public bodies; and children’s and comic books.28 Most central to the Aristophano-mania or Aristophanolatreia of the past twenty-five years has been the process of rethinking the “author-ity” of a unified reading of the poet’s playscripts in light of Greece’s postmodern society and of surrounding texts, performances, and cultures. New interpretive trends validated individual emphasis and response rather than aspiring to an “objective” consensus, whether in production or translating style or in the perception of critics and broader audiences. Nikos Charalampous, for instance, a former student of Koun who is active in regional, nonmainstream theaters, tellingly proclaimed an invigorating sense of directorial and dramatic freedom in the contemporary Greek reception of Attic comedy: “We believe that Aristophanes’ plays do not need an ideological ‘explanation’ today, nor do they have to be bound by a strict style or technique for tradition’s sake. Any director’s new production has the right to a personal approach, but it is not the ‘ultimate’ approach, it does not create a dogma.”29 After the Coup: Surviving Democracy In the mid- through late seventies, real threats to civic rights vanished, yet the Greeks’ memory of their recent experiences still set the political parameters for the contemporary reception of Aristophanes. Within the same transition period, the “New Left” (which included many nonpar-

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tisans who saw themselves merely as anti-Right) was granted a legitimate platform in the broad Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK, founded in 1974) of Andreas Papandreou. Artists of a leftist ideological persuasion were the first to rewrite Attic comedy for the purpose of raising public awareness. They, like Koun, cultivated a populist understanding of Aristophanes, yet the poet’s new popular image proved substantially different from the earlier one, to which the new leftist generation responded uneasily. As critics and artists debated whether pop culture was a valid modern expression of folklore, they turned Attic comedy again into an area of contention in which contemporary manifestations of power could be tested. A December 1974 production of the Knights can serve to exemplify the politicized Aristophanes of the immediate post-junta era. Vyron Tsampoulas directed the play with the experimental Theatrical Workshop of Thessalonike, one of the innovative, socially committed companies that had emerged (in 1972) under the military regime. Until this staging, the Knights had not been popular; moreover, its manifest agitational content had made it particularly suspect in the eyes of the censors.30 Instead of delivering the comedy’s authentic parabasis, the cast presented a parabasis of its own making, which amounted to an explicit denunciation of the recently abolished dictatorship.31 In the original lines, Aristophanes criticizes his competitors on the Athenian stage. This literary criticism in semicomic vein was transformed into a far more serious assault on modern political rivals: the colonels and their supporters. By repudiating the politics of fifth-century B.C.E. Athens and the demagoguery of a remote dictator, Tsampoulas’ adaptation spontaneously translated into an attack on the dictators of recent months. The classical parabasis, the conventional focal point of a dialogue between the audience and the actors speaking for (the persona of) the playwright, provided the perfect locus for a dialectic exchange between ancient and modern times, between fiction and reality, between literary and political commentary. The classical use of the parabasis as a propagandistic tool and crucible of militant “personal” opinion reemerged. Instead of being a component often found cumbersome in modern productions, this parabasis brought back the haunting potency of Old Comedy. As in the 1966 and 1977 productions of the Frogs (see chapter 4), the paravase of the original parabasis proved instantly effective. Seeing through the veil of the classical comedy, the Greeks played, as it were, the role of an ancient audience with inside knowledge of the twentieth-century predicament, a role they sustained remarkably well. Frequent interplay with the actors on the comic revival stage had prepared Aristophanes’ modern Greek public to put on its own persona, acting as the contemporary of the ancient performance while keeping on the alert for

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any analogies between past and present. In their guise as Athenians of the Golden Age, the theatergoers knew and expected the classical play’s dramatic illusion to be ruptured by the parabasis—itself still a stage act yet using a different, virtually spontaneous register of illusion—as in antiquity. Having been on close terms with Aristophanes for so many decades, they responded immediately to a reinvented parabasis that also dropped certain pretenses and fast-forwarded its audience back to the future. In the process, the poet of the Knights, cast as a rebel voice from the past, helped his modern public gain a new sense of collective community and of sociopolitical awareness. The Aristophanic public, and audiences of revival productions of the classics in general, have grown accustomed to being mentally transported back to the societal conditions of fifth- and early-fourth-century B.C.E. Athens. Some stagings, however, use the ploy of jolting their viewers back into tangible reality by thoroughly adapting the ancient plays to current circumstances. Greek theater veterans are culturally situated on a double level, both in the present and in the past, and participate in both spheres. For them, the classical comedy informs the modern stage adaptation, and vice versa. This process of vertical, diachronic exchange between acts of performance rather than texts is conditioned also by the usually more synchronic communication among new contemporary revivals and repetitions of older presentations, amounting to a huge body of modern Greek reception material that enters into each play of Aristophanes. Today’s Greek audiences bring to the theater a repertoire of personal and collective experiences of previous performances and, to a lesser extent, of translations and of alternative comic practices. For Aristophanes, who attracts segments of Greek society that do not otherwise frequent playhouses, that repertoire proves to be highly genre-specific. The State Theater of Northern Greece The State Theater of Northern Greece (Kratiko Theatro Voreiou Hellados), founded in 1961 and based in Thessalonike, played a significant role in the dramatic and cultural ferment of the pre- and post-junta years. To the best of my knowledge, however, its productions of the sixties through late seventies have not yet received the scholarly attention they deserve, nor has the city of Thessalonike itself, the “other” of the drama capital of Athens—both inquiries hampered by the lack of substantial, noncensored source material. Under the junta, the stage reception of Aristophanes was essentially in the hands of the directors and of the quasi-permanent actors and artists of only three important companies: the National Theater, the Art Theater, and the State Theater of Northern Greece, the most recently established of this group. Although the access

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of the latter two to the prestigious stage of the Epidaurus Festival was heavily restricted, they shouldered the burden of keeping Aristophanic performance alive and conscious of current reality, in degrees that varied with the intensity of direct and indirect state control. Moreover, they undercut the colonels’ officially upheld fantasy that Greece had only one unified and legitimate culture: the Hellenic-nationalist culture as espoused more or less vigorously by supporters of the National Theater. Their own broader repertoire of both plays and styles, along with that of newly emerging, experimental companies, not only challenged the regime’s reactionary agenda but also shook the conservative audiences typically served by the National. The second government-sponsored institution has generally left more room than the National Theater for separate, personal attempts at creative stage interpretation of classical drama, an undertaking restricted to Athens for too long. Although some of its older revivals still fell within the interpretive parameters defined by the earlier schools in Attic comedy (i.e., the legacies of Koun and Solomos), the State Theater of Northern Greece has innovated in ways involving more than isolated questions of stagecraft in specific plays or scenes. It has formulated comprehensive aesthetic answers to clarify the meaning and, in particular, the sociopolitical relevance of Aristophanes’ ancient texts. Under its auspices and using its relatively ample resources, several younger and less-established producers, including the first women directors of revival comedy, have had a chance to infuse the poet’s reception with new forms and ideas. In 1991 Demetres Exarchos staged a tragicomic, strongly pacifist adaptation of the Acharnians with the State Theater of Northern Greece. The performance opened with the spotlights falling upon an ancient sculptural high relief, from which one figure, the protagonist Dicaeopolis, slowly detached himself in order to revive, literally and symbolically, his own play in a different, nondescript time and place. The finale showed women, dressed in funereal black, putting little crosses on the scene turned battlefield. Then a military officer in modern uniform, a contemporary Lamachus, stepped forward to inspect the stage carefully, as if looking for another victim in Dicaeopolis, who meanwhile had again become part of the original sculpture and thereby returned, on a metaphorical level, to the composition of the classical comedy. Exarchos represented the new archaeological interest of a young avant-garde in showing correlations between envisioned ancient values and current principles, such as pacifism. On the official stage of Epidaurus, Diagoras Chronopoulos and the State Theater of Northern Greece presented the Knights in 1989, a year when the right-wing New Democracy replaced PASOK as ruling party and when both new and repeat performances of Attic comedy peaked. At

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times of Greek national elections, of which there were no fewer than three in 1989–90, usually there appears everywhere a politicized Aristophanes, who absorbs and punctures electoral rhetoric with remarkable ease. In this climate, as the PASOK populism of Andreas Papandreou waned and the rightist propaganda of his opponent Konstantinos Metsotakes rekindled, Chronopoulos staged the Knights as a current political satire; his characters dressed in costumes with militaristic touches drawn from all ages and played against the backdrop of a modern Athenian imitation-Voule, or Parliament building. Individual lines of his production received great applause, such as the memorable phrase of Demos (the figure personifying the Greek citizenry), reflecting on the newly unveiled embezzlement scandal of George Koskotas and his high-ranking accomplices: “Yes, of course, I have stolen, but only for the sake of the state.”32 Consistent with its more liberal approach, the State Theater of Northern Greece gave women producers their first chance to present Aristophanes on the official festival stage. Despite this and the broader postjunta Greek feminist awareness, only two female directors have thus far taken this opportunity. This very small number is surprising given that more than fifty women producers have been active in the general field of modern Greek drama over the past three decades.33 In 1986 Erse Vasilikiote directed the Clouds at Epidaurus; she had been preceded by Koula Antoniade, one of Koun’s former trainees of Cypriot descent, who chose to stage the women’s play Thesmophoriazusae there in 1982.34 Exploring concerns of her own sex, Antoniade superimposed a radical feminist message onto the classical parabasis, which historically and structurally is the ideal site for metatheatrical pronouncements of any length. Inspired by Aristophanes’ speech on the subject of Eros and the androgyne in Plato’s Symposium, Antoniade made her men-playing-women wear exaggerated sexual organs as well as two-dimensional, disproportionately large masks showing male features on one side and female features on the other. With those props and costumes, she intended to highlight the modern ambiguity in gender roles that results from a society’s long accepting only the male model as the authoritative norm. The autonomous verbal and visual discourse of sexuality in Antoniade’s comic revival, however, provoked a storm of criticism.35 In the eyes of female as well as male commentators, the director’s emphatically feminist reinscription of the classical text ignored other vital constituents of the Thesmophoriazusae, such as its lyricism and paratragedic humor. This critique, which noted the impact only of the production’s neorealist method, was to a large extent unfair, since Antoniade’s frank, iconoclastic approach tried hard to communicate a broader message to its main audience and to the circles of (male) reviewers. Although the number of Greek women playwrights and theater profes-

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sionals has increased over the past three decades, this evolution has still to effect drastic changes in the male-dominated reception of Aristophanes—not only in the practice of translating and producing but also in the critical discourse. In comic revivals, women have traditionally been permitted only to act and to choreograph: apparently, choreographing a play was considered a “feminine” task and therefore was to a large extent left for women to do. Spyros Euangelatos and the Amphi-Theater Spyros Euangelatos (born 1940) has played an important role in fostering the postmodern climate of cultural diversity and of declining ethnocentricity that has pervaded Greek artistic life since the early seventies. After Koun and Solomos, he embodied a new wave of theoretical inquiry into the local and international reception history of Aristophanes and of comedy in general. Loathed by some, loved by others, he has also been one of the most productive theater directors of the past three decades. I found him to be an extremely energetic stage professional and academic scholar who, more than anyone else in Greek artistic circles, was willing to share his ideas with an unknown, foreign interviewer. In 1975, after having worked for the State Theater of Northern Greece, Euangelatos established his own company, which he appropriately called Amphi-Theatro. Apart from alluding to the word amphitheater, the name also signaled his stated objective of bringing to drama an experimental approach that would transcend narrowly defined stage concerns by looking at plays from alternative (amphi-: “around,” “about,” “both”) perspectives. The company’s record of concentrating on marginalized texts of the eighteenth and nineteenth century is indicative of Euangelatos’ harmonious fusion of scholarly philological research and professional Greek and foreign dramaturgy. Initially the director’s innovative reading of Aristophanes reacted against the established schools of Koun and Solomos, but his treatment has been conditioned by precisely the views that it sought to correct. Euangelatos has consistently denied that he belongs to, or has created, his own school, yet his image of Aristophanes ultimately gelled and hardened in a steady stream of unorthodox comic productions: the Ecclesiazusae (State Theater of Northern Greece, 1969; completely revised for its revival in 1998), Lysistrata (1976), Frogs (1977), Plutus (1978), Peace (1984), and Clouds (1989). Perhaps the most radical turn from Koun’s rural and la¨ıkos Aristophanes was the new company’s recovery of the urban Greek dimension of Attic comedy. In this process Euangelatos was assisted by literary translators, who paid attention to the special characteristics of the poet as well as of specific plays. Typically they were accomplished Demotic prose

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writers, playwrights, and poets themselves, such as Kostas Tachtses and Paulos Matesis, who were commissioned for nearly all of the company’s true acting versions with urban cachet. Critics savaged the first Aristophanic rendition of the controversial Tachtses (1927–88): his Lysistrata for the Amphi-Theater’s 1976 production. Tachtses ironically juxtaposed lofty, classicizing idiom with street slang, generously applying obscenities to this and subsequent translations as well. When he still directed the State Theater of Northern Greece under the colonels, Euangelatos first embarked on his quest for an innovative verbal and visual language for Attic comedy. Most characteristic of the new iconography of Aristophanes was his departure from textual and dramaturgical causality in favor of a creative exploration of the older and current performance potential of comedy at large, Greek as well as international. Euangelatos’ Ecclesiazusae of 1969, subject to junta censorship, cautiously appropriated European avant-gardist innovations of the 1950s, particularly those of Bertolt Brecht, tragicomic circus, and music hall spectacle. The production’s neorealism broke with the fantaisiste tradition of the National Theater, which was largely based on Solomos’ Ecclesiazusae and Lysistrata of the late fifties. It can hardly be coincidence that Euangelatos, in order to distinguish his personal style from that of Solomos, chose to direct first the two plays on which his predecessor had built his own Aristophanes exegesis. Euangelatos’ Lysistrata of 1976 again searched the repertoire of heterogeneous performative genres, assimilating nontraditional materials from other theatrical, narrative, and even filmic sources. Along with Brechtian social symbolism and an existential sensibility, the mixed styles and historical time capsules informing this and subsequent productions of Aristophanes included blends of farce, burlesque, and buffoon comedy, circus and pantomime elements, cabaret and music hall, cinema, the theater of the absurd, the epitheorese and variety spectacle, and other organized acts of improvisation. Euangelatos’ productions drew from international stage design and music to help create a nostalgic and poetically abstract atmosphere. His synthesizing interpretive framework also allowed his Aristophanic performances to bring theater within the theater and to cross the border between dream and reality. In essence, the director first introduced Greek revival comedy to the diversity of forms, methods, and techniques generally taken for granted in the presentation of modern drama. Performed at the Herodes Atticus Theater, Euangelatos’ Lysistrata encapsulated his own reading not only of the classical text but also of its modern Greek receptive tradition. This first comic revival of his own Amphi-Theater was nothing less than an enacted reflection on the times when Aristophanic productions were monopolized by the so-called

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bouloukia. As I discussed in chapter 3, those small and independent commercial Greek troupes of the first decades of the twentieth century typically consisted of an all-male cast and performed for exclusively male audiences. They presented the three women’s plays in particular, in versions that exaggerated the obscene and sexual elements of the ancient originals. Euangelatos also gave the female roles to men, but his male cast of 1976 played the parts of early-twentieth-century Greek bouloukia members staging a remotely classical Lysistrata. His novel interpretation was supported by an effective musical score, reminiscent of Greek and international music and songs from decades earlier, and by “improvised” sets showing a portable theater with roll-up canvas scenery, ragged circus tents, and a bare wooden platform. This dramaturgical flashback to the Greek performance history of the Lysistrata added an elaborate diachronic dimension of theatrical intertextuality, creating a play-with(in)-the-play. Here was self-referential, dialectic interchange at work between a comedy’s various interpretations over time. Euangelatos’ reading covered at least three phases of Aristophanic reception, playing each one against the others: the fifth-century B.C.E. Athenian work was performed in its early-twentieth-century, virtually improvised version, but by actors and for an urban audience of the mid1970s. Thus his Lysistrata, impersonated by the effeminate cross-dresser who was himself played by a male actor, became the token figure of androgynous gender ambiguity: her double trans-vestism signaled the production’s double plane of trans-textuality. In other words, intertextuality was visualized by way of intersexuality; and their strong combination made it impossible to fix meanings, whether on the verbal or on the physical level. Euangelatos disclosed reversal and inversion as principles that, along with logical progress and causality, have governed the play’s diachronic evolution through modern Greek history. He both fragmented and reconstructed this evolution to present a Lysistrata that lacked palpable historical and receptive boundaries and to concentrate on dramaturgical concerns of a different nature instead. What interested the director was not the authentic depiction of either the past or the present, but the interaction between various “moments” as they reflected on issues of tragic and comic performance, of war and peace, and on their ubiquity. In fact, the past became subordinate to the notion of diversity and openness in history and society, as well as to the reality of the cultural hybridity of an avidly modernizing Greece. Cultural universality rather than philological accuracy determined the 1976 composition, which dramatized not just the Lysistrata tradition but the Lysistrata as seen through the lens of Greek postmodernism. The same production gained a deeper, melancholic scope with Euangelatos’ introduction of stylistic breaks or intermezzi into the flow of

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the ancient comedy: at regular, crucial intervals, a small chorus of six women, dressed in funereal black, came forward to recite war-related passages from Thucydides in a solemn Kathareuousa translation. Those comments on the classical play, expressions of the director’s nostalgic vision of the processes of politics and theater, were meant to jolt the modern audience back to harsh reality—not to the fifth-century B.C.E. Peloponnesian War but to the present, deliberately confounded with the past via layers of production and postproduction. Conventions of ancient comedy that pried the spectators loose from actuality were replaced by new metatheatrical and intertextual conventions paradoxically intended to highlight “the real.” Euangelatos’ tragicomic adaptation set forth a circular view of the history of war and of the drama of life: his actors, who performed or at least tried to perform a supposedly comic Lysistrata, were constantly interrupted by the larger play of tragic Greek history repeating itself. The post-junta audience grasped the point of this theater of interruption: the intricate web of diachronic and dramatic allusions between the play’s illusionary performance space and the world-as-stage (an often-hackneyed metaphor here deployed to great effect). With postmodern sensibility inspiring the fictitious as well as the “reality,” the imaginary situations of the Aristophanic model unexpectedly moved closer to the actual reign of war and terror recently experienced. Functioning on multiple receptive and self-referential levels, Euangelatos’ Lysistrata explored another facet of the paravase dimension of Aristophanic productions of the immediate post-junta era. In the classical parabasis, actors and chorus members (comically) reflected on past and present, on ancient Greek realities. On a larger scale, Euangelatos’ troupe “transgressed” both the expected classical and mid-seventies context of the Lysistrata to add unforeseen, anachronistic layers of modern commentary as well, thus staging a paravase in the metaphorical sense in a comedy composed without a structural, literal parabasis. For this purpose, the 1976 production relied heavily on the knowledge, as well as on the ambivalent appreciation, that the post-junta theatergoing public still had of the cultural past of this women’s play in the Greek soir´ee noire tradition. Euangelatos’ revival was a reception not just of earlier Aristophanic performances but of an entire, distinct period in modern Greek dramatic and historical sociology. Savvopoulos’ Acharnians: Aristophanes Grown Cynical Generational as well as artistic revolt took form in the Acharnians of Dionyses Savvopoulos, a composer and songwriter who created an idiosyncratic musical blend of American idioms and native traditions. In 1976 Savvopoulos wrote a score for Koun’s liberated Acharnians of the

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second Athens Festival without junta censorship (see chapter 4). When the director of the Art Theater gave preference to music by Chrestos Leontes, Savvopoulos transformed his own composition into an ultramodern and thoroughly politicized version of the ancient comedy, which he presented at a basement club in the Athenian Plaka quarter in the winter season of 1976–77. This free and abridged musical interpretation of the Acharnians, subsequently issued on record and in book form, stood as a total translation, adapting not merely the language of the text but all the theatrical language framing the action. The version owed its tremendous popularity to its vituperative attacks on the famous composer Mikes Theodorakes, symbol of political and cultural resistance against the colonels. It also ridiculed Giannes Ritsos, some of whose poems Theodorakes had put to music (e.g., Romiosyne, 1966). Savvopoulos mocked the ideology of the militant leftist opposition of the junta years, represented by both artists and their popular art song, although he himself had been among the (less activist) left-wingers of the same era.36 For instance, he transformed the paratragedy of the beggar’s address (Ach. 404–78) of Dicaeopolis, thinly disguised as a Karaghiozes-like antihero, into a parody of Theodorakes’ recent book titled The Debt (To Chreos), and of Ritsos’ recitation on the record Kapnismeno tsoukali.37 Thus, when Dicaeopolis/ Savvopoulos asks Euripides/Theodorakes for one of his rousing old songs “with the knife at the bone, the leash around the neck,” the audience understands that he is deriding the latter’s lyrics based on Ritsos.38 According to Gail Holst-Warhaft, the enormous success of Savvopoulos’ Acharnians signaled that a new cultural mode of cynicism had taken root in Greece. In his self-styled role of a modern Aristophanes/ Karaghiozes, Savvopoulos was able to cash in on this breakdown of beliefs and on a feeling of self-disgust, even of nihilism, typical of the late seventies, when the political euphoria of the months following the return to democracy had waned.39 Many comic revivals of the eighties through early nineties took a similar stance of disillusionment with the country’s apparently never-changing shortcomings. This mood of depression, though resistant to rigid ideological categorization, became particularly widespread after PASOK’s humiliating fall from power in 1988–89, when a much greater segment of the Greek populace started deprecating its once-charismatic leader, Andreas Papandreou. The social satire of comic productions began to scoff in more general terms at presumably inevitable political corruption and economic inflation, among other and larger chronic problems (wrongly) accepted as inherent in Greek society. Some revivals divided their focus between topical commentary and big issues of worldwide concern, such as capitalism, imperialism, feminism, war and violence, and poverty, in part as a response to a growing international audience at the Greek summer festivals. In other words, these

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comic stagings engaged with more general sociopolitical themes, an approach often easier to digest and more universally marketable than the alternatives—and sometimes lambasted as marking the development of a “soft” Aristophanes.40 The Populist Aristophanes of Thymios Karakatsanes Artists had more to deal with than a wave of cynicism; the nationalist populism of Greek politics of the eighties and nineties inspired some to intensify Aristophanes’ old reputation for refusing to conform to elitist and petit-bourgeois rules. Directors such as Thymios Karakatsanes and Demetres Kollatos, for example, harnessed the classical playwright to express their own political opinions, full of animosity toward “the system,” whether that encompassed the “corrupt” Greek state or what they perceived as outside forces countering individual freedom as well as national pride.41 Through the ancient poet’s voice they formulated their own hard-line populist version of the enduring narrative of the struggling Romioi. On the occasion of his first independent Aristophanes production (Clouds, 1985), Karakatsanes, a former student of Koun, asserted: “We want to climb up to the level of our people, and not to make the people reach our level, as the cultural snobs (koultouriaredes) say.”42 Fighting commonplace though not populist commercialization, the Nea Hellenike Skene (New Hellenic Stage) of Karakatsanes put on a 1993 Lysistrata with the director-manager and other male actors in the female protagonist roles. The extremely popular production ran through the following winter season at the indoor theater Akropol in downtown Athens. Because of the gross overbooking of seats and the quarrels that ensued among the seventeen thousand people present, the Epidaurus premiere of 3 July 1993 started two hours late, in the volatile atmosphere of a high-stakes soccer game. Ticket sales for the two performances of the opening weekend alone brought in a total of almost 35 million drachmas (approximately $160,000). By comparison, the National Theater’s Ecclesiazusae of the same Epidaurus season pulled in only about one-third of that amount, as did the five classical tragedies on average.43 The histrionics of the opening night of Karakatsanes’ Lysistrata fueled long-standing concerns about the behavior of Greek audiences and the public’s role as collective consumer of the summer festivals. The common comparison was once again made between the far from passive contemporary Greek theatergoers and the demanding and unruly ancient Athenian spectators who, as our classical sources indicate, sometimes used the food they brought for purposes other than snacking during the performance.44 Although the public’s undisciplined conduct has only rarely gone to the extreme of, say, carrying off the props from the set, as hap-

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pened at the Modern Theater’s 1985 Thesmophoriazusae, the influence of the audience at contemporary as well as at ancient Aristophanic productions should never be underestimated. Karakatsanes’ Lysistrata of 1993 brought out another key variable of both classical and modern comedy: the choice of the leading actor.45 The large majority of the seventeen thousand spectators present at the play’s chaotic premiere had doubtless come to see the indomitable comic genius of the director himself as he played a male-turned-female Lysistrata. A known master of verbal and visual humor conveyed in a radically upto-date, temperamental Aristophanes, Karakatsanes has time and again proved his ability to create an instant rapport with his Greek and international audience. In my view, however, the acting and production style of this Greek star has suffered from theatrical narcissism, for self-centered extravaganza erodes the balance and coherence of his plays. Karakatsanes often takes advantage of the open-ended structure of Aristophanes’ comic episodes, which invites thematic amplification and prolonged satire. His inclination to monopolize his own productions, to recast any Aristophanic hero as Karakatsanes himself, was obvious also in his revuestyle Clouds of 1985, which was based on the lively translation of the Greek playwright Giorgos Skourtes.46 Although Karakatsanes has publicly rejected many aspects of earlier political and theatrical approaches to Attic comedy and repudiated stifling institutionalization, he has not made a clean break with the directorial precepts, let alone with the commercial constraints, of previous generations of producers and actors. His Aristophanes is entrenched in, and vitally dependent on, leftist populism, albeit of a different, louder, but not necessarily more consistent nature than its earlier manifestation. Karakatsanes celebrates the mass commercialization of Attic comedy, trafficking both in new revivals and in numerous repeat performances. The popular success of his productions has not always indicated high artistic standards and quality. In general, the post-junta boom—or overproduction, perhaps—of comic revivals often resulted in a loss of quality, though it by no means harmed Aristophanes’ popularity. The poet remained beloved by a theatergoing public consisting of Greeks of all generations and social classes, and by a growing percentage of tourists. The critic Helene Varopoulou has observed that this audience has been less demanding when attending Attic comedy than when assessing performances of classical tragedy.47 Although the general public’s initial enthusiasm for tragic revivals at the festivals has ebbed, owing to the repetitiveness in repertoires and production styles, the Greek popular fondness for Aristophanes has continued, supported by the constant flow of more or less flamboyant stagings of the

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Romios-poet at Epidaurus and at the Herodeion. Revived Attic comedy has integrated a performing art and tradition in every sense; and, as a result, more of the general public in Greece has engaged with Aristophanes than has the public in any other country rich in theater activity. From the early eighties on, the establishment of numerous small companies in and around the big cities, together with the foundation of both regional playhouses and festivals across the country, has reinforced these trends, despite (or perhaps because of) recurring waves of Western influences. Among the small professional and amateur urban troupes, financial constraints have encouraged innovative, unorthodox modes of producing Attic comedy, often changing or fading after a few years. After PASOK enacted long-existing plans to decentralize Greek drama in 1985, professional state repertory theaters were (re)organized and generously subsidized in about a dozen provincial capitals. From Ioannina to Rhodes, from Komotine to Kalamata, Aristophanes has proved to be the one ancient and modern playwright who guarantees a full house. For more than four decades, the poet who not only fills Epidaurus and the Herodes Atticus Theater but also brings people to the regional festivals and wins the battle of the countryside has almost never had a slow year.48 Employing imaginative stage techniques, some dynamic artists have undoubtedly explored the outer limits of theatrical experimentation (e.g., Giannes Kakleas’ exposing the links between humanity and modern machinery via ancient comedy). Sometimes perhaps the fear of repetition added to the pressure to be different, to far surpass tradition. In the bold variety of plays and translations of all styles, however, Greek critics of the eighties and nineties have detected signs of a (temporary) exhaustion of the free reception of Aristophanes. Viewing the increased comic volume at festivals throughout the country more often as a blight than as a blessing, they have posed the crucial question of whether there still are new ways to play old texts. Some have suggested that novel theatrical and literary standards are needed to judge these productions; others have called for rehabilitating historicizing interpretation. For conservatives, eager to abolish the star system and facile pandering to mass tastes, the possibility of doing anything innovative has been so fraught with anxiety that they have proposed the nihilist solution of doing nothing at all, or at least cutting down the staging of comedies for several years. The past decade in particular has fostered a sense that “everything has already been done with Aristophanes,” that “all the good ideas have long been used.” These symptoms perhaps constitute the Greek equivalent of what W. Jackson Bate called “the burden of the past” in Shakespeare reception, and what Harold Bloom termed “the anxiety of influence.” At present it is impossible to predict which artistic directions will persist and what precise form they will take, beyond the certainty that they will show

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awareness of prior receptive modes and the likelihood that they will sustain their inquiries into Greek politics and society in the twenty-first century. The quest for Aristophanic communication with modern spirit will continue to drive translation, adaptation, performance, stage theory, and criticism. The ever-new interaction between ancient text and contemporary interpreter will continue to inform the modern Greek history of the poet’s work.

Epilogue

WHEN

THE

CURTAIN FALLS . . .

And I seek my way out of the dark, my first impulse is to try to capture the magnitude and grasp the impact of the Aristophanic performance that has left me overwhelmed. But I realize that there is no sense in reducing revival comedy to a single or completed narrative, because the Aristophanic experience is plural, transient, and above all open-ended. It would be contrary to the openness of the poet’s modern Greek future if I were to enforce historical closure as briskly as the curtain cut off the show. Where the finale calls for more, where no closing words suffice, I have found tentative closure in the effort to map and then to revisit plays, scenes, lines, and words: the totalizing visual representation has imprinted landmarks onto my own mind and the minds of others; and their cues, far more powerful than those based on reading the text, guide us from one dramatic highlight to the next. The practice and metaphor of mapping and charting allow us to come to grips—albeit always tentatively—with the world of the modern Greek Aristophanes. The playwright’s world emerged from the prerevolutionary horizon of knowledge and knowledge of horizons. The poet’s sphere has since coincided and grown along with the expanding world of Greece as he himself contested and opened up domestic, international, and intellectual boundaries. Aristophanes may be ancient like the old maps I admire, and surely some colors and performance fancies have faded as have the colors that first brought those maps to life. Nonetheless, we value his fusing of information about landmarks with visual delight and ongoing interpretation, even if in studying him we are only scratching the surface of his current realm. Like a map, Aristophanes has been essential to Greek survival, knowledge, and self-knowledge. He has mirrored the growth of Greek thought and has reflected how the country’s inhabitants grasped and charted the universe surrounding them. He has recorded the nation-state’s concerns and registered the ebb and flow of foreign penetration. He has shown the lay of the inert-looking landmass of the past and of roads and channels meandering in various directions only to become well-trodden, eroded, or trite. He has disclosed the controversial sites of open, experimental no-man’s-lands, of appropriated territory, of imposed structure, and even of adornment too smooth to be trustworthy. Like a nautical chart, revival comedy has incorporated plenty of official data and observers’ warning

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labels for safe sailing—that is, for hugging the stable coastline of revival tragedy. But the relevance of a map, as of Aristophanes, lies with the autonomous individual or collective interpreter and some readers have indeed preferred free exploration over security. Consciously or not, they headed for the excitement of cliffs, sandbars, and shoals and frowned on comfortable landings in safe harbors. Their quest was always for knowledge and adventure to be gained from the journey itself. MAPPING

THE

PROTEAN POET

The tables I introduce below offer only a glimpse of Aristophanes’ richness and open-endedness. They are my modest effort to chart nearly fifty years of modern Greek reception of the playwright for whom each generation of theater practitioners, critics, and audiences has invented its own tool or apparatus. Tables 1 and 2 map the frequency with which specific comedies enjoyed new productions over the last half century. They also plot the occurrence of these premieres against given moments of recent Greek history. To ensure clarity, the tables do not register repeat performances of older Aristophanic productions unless they were staged with substantial changes in cast and with different artistic contributors. I did not select the listed revivals on the criterion of their quality or success, but rather because of the bulk and diversity of their festival-based reception with both Greek theater circles and press critics. Also, the broader festivalgoing public of locals and foreigners occasionally left oral impressions and written evaluations of Aristophanic performances, which vary with the age, sex, education, and socioeconomic background of the audience member. The selected productions, those that spawned the widest range of receptive sources (not necessarily the best), have been performed in Athens or at Epidaurus (given a few exceptions) and have also tended to spring from professional urban dramaturgy. These tables provide only a limited answer to the question I was asked most frequently during my research: “Which plays of Aristophanes are most popular in Greece today?” There is no simple response to this question. In my view, popularity expressed in numbers of attendees at a performance fails to incorporate significant factors that are much harder to pinpoint, such as the sociopolitical forces encouraging comic revivals in the first place. The numbers of tickets sold, statistics that the Greek National Tourist Organization has issued regularly only for the past twentyfive years, do not necessarily express how satisfied the customers felt about their Aristophanic experiences. Therefore, I present not a true popularity count but rather diagrams aligning new comic productions with cues to Greek historical and sociopolitical events.

Year

51

KNT

52

53

54

AEK 4 Apostolou, Eleutheros Kyklos ANT 4 Apostolou, National Theater AST 4 Apostolou, State Theater of Northern Greece aST 4 Antoniade, State Theater of Northern Greece BNT 4 Bakas, National Theater CC 4 Charalampous (Cyprus) cC 4 Chronopoulos (Cyprus) cNT 4 Chronopoulos, National Theater CPS 4 Chourmouziades, Peiramatike Skene (Thess.)

Wasps

Knights

Birds

Acharnians

Peace

Frogs

Clouds

Plutus

Thesmophoriazusae

Ecclesiazusae

Lysistrata

Events

KTT

A. Papagos

X

Prime Minister

Elections

Greek Rally (Right-Wing)

Ruling Party/ Government

55

SNT

56

X

57

KAT

SNT

KAT

SNT

59

60

SNT

61

X

62

SNT

63

X

SNT KHT

64

X

TNT

VHS

KST

65

G. Papandreou

Center Union

CST 4 Charatsares, State Theater of Northern Greece cST 4 Chronopoulos, State Theater of Northern Greece DNT 4 Damates, National Theater EA 4 Euangelatos, Amphi-Theater EST 4 Euangelatos, State Theater of Northern Greece eST 4 Exarchos, State Theater of Northern Greece GC 4 Gavrielides (Cyprus) GST 4 Giannopoulos, State Theater of Northern Greece GTC 4 Gavrielides - Taliotes (Cyprus)

SNT

58

X

K. Karamanles

National Radical Union (Right-Wing)

TABLE 1 Modern Greek Stage Productions of Aristophanes, 1951–74

KAT

VHS

66

Crisis

AST

67

SNT

68

69

CST

EST

KAT

SNT

70

MST

SP

KNT

71

72

X

MST

73

TTE

AEK

MST

74

Invasion of Cyprus

GTE 4 Gakides, Theatriko Ergasteri (Thess.) KAT 4 Koun, Art Theater kAT 4 Kougioumtzes, Art Theater KAV 4 Karakatsanes, Thiasos “Aim. Veakes” KHT 4 Katseles, Harma Theatrou KNS 4 Karakatsanes, Nea Hellenike Skene KNT 4 Karantinos, National Theater KST 4 Karantinos, State Theater of Northern Greece KTT 4 Karzes, Thymelikos Thiasos (cont. in table 2)

Military Coup

Military Dictatorship (Censorship)

76

MST

81

82

LAT

Knights

(cont. from table 1) LAT 4 Lazanes, Art Theater MMT 4 Messalas, Modern Theater MNT 4 Margarites, National Theater MOT 4 G. Michaelides, Open Theater MST 4 K. Michaelides, State Theater of Northern Greece PE 4 Parikos, Aegean Theater Exodos PNT 4 Phasoules, National Theater PPS 4 N. Polites, Peiramatike Skene (Thess.)

Wasps

SNT

Birds

GST

KAT

Peace

Acharnians

EA

Frogs

BNT

LAT

83

BNT

VST

TST EA

BNT

CPS

84

GTE

KAV

RNT

MMT KAT

85

X

BNT

vST

VL SP

86

A. Papandreou

PASOK (Socialist)

MMT

MNT

87

88

RNT 4 Ronconi, National Theater RST 4 Remoundos, State Theater of Northern Greece rST 4 Regas, State Theater of Northern Greece SC 4 Siopachas (Cyprus) SNT 4 Solomos, National Theater SP 4 Solomos, Proskenio TC 4 Tsianos (Cyprus) TNT 4 Tsianos, National Theater TNT 4 Trivizas, National Theater

PPS

RST

CC

80

Clouds

V MST

79

ANT

78

EA

77

Plutus

KAT

EA

aST

Year

EC Entry

X

Thesmophoriazusae

Ecclesiazusae

Lysistrata

Events

75

K. Karamanles X

Prime Minister

Elections

New Democracy (Right-Wing)

Ruling Party/ Government

TABLE 2 Modern Greek Stage Productions of Aristophanes, 1975–98

cST

CC

EA

BNT

MMT

89

MOT

90

XXX

GTC

BNT

MMT

eST

LAT

91

tNT

KNS

93

X

VST GC

DNT

PNT kAT

94

cNT

MOT

95

A. Papandreou

TC

VNT

rST

96

X

PE

SC cNT

97

K. Semites

PASOK (Socialist)

MOT

cC

TNT

VST

EA

98

tNT 4 Theodosiades, National Theater TST 4 Tsianos, State Theater of Northern Greece TTE 4 Tsampoulas, Theatriko Ergasteri (Thess.) V 4 Volanakes VHS 4 Volanakes, Hellenike Skene VL 4 Voutsinas - Lazopoulos VNT 4 Voutsinas, National Theater VST 4 Voutsinas, State Theater of Northern Greece vST 4 Vasilikiote, State Theater of Northern Greece

kAT

92

K. Metsotakes

New Democracy (Right-Wing)

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Despite the lower absolute numbers of comic revivals staged in the first two decades of summer festival productions (1954–74), Aristophanic theater activity could still be called impressive. In general, contemporary directors first explored the classical comedies that invited curiosity and therefore guaranteed success, such as the three women’s plays, before the other works, even though by then the latter left them more dramatic freedom. The less popular a particular comedy was with the public, the longer producers waited to put it on (and vice versa). In the post-junta era the absolute numbers of comic revivals increased drastically. Among the peak years of the thriving Aristophanic stage reception of this period were 1984–86 and 1989, the years in which major elections and political confrontations took place.1 Aristophanes’ women’s plays stand out as the most popular group of comedies in modern Greece of the past decades, under all political circumstances. The Lysistrata in particular enjoyed over a dozen important premieres. In fact, never more than eight years went by without a new production of this work. What the tables do not show is that the Lysistrata was the favorite subject of repeat performances as well. It has also been the play that most invited both populist commercialization and alternative reuse of its theme. Under different historical and cultural conditions, those trends, as much as dramatic and sociopolitical reaction against the male-only versions of the transformers, sustained the comedy’s popularity won in the first four decades of the twentieth century. The Ecclesiazusae has proved to be the second most beloved women’s play, especially in the post-junta era, while the Thesmophoriazusae ranks third, partly because of the more topical nature of its extended paratragedy of Euripides. The Plutus has been popular most consistently throughout the long Greek history of Aristophanes. Following a rich Byzantine and humanist scholarly tradition, the play connected the textual reception and the first productions of the nineteenth and early twentieth century with the training school of the interwar period provided by Karolos Koun at Athens College. The same comedy was also the subject of Koun’s first professional Aristophanic stage revival in 1957 and of his innovative aesthetic movement, Greek Folk Expressionism. Throughout its modern reception history, the Plutus has served the most divergent political, economic, and ideological positions, including the ultra-right-wing propaganda of Metaxas. In recent decades, it has been one of the favorites of the government-sponsored stage companies, the National Theater and the State Theater of Northern Greece. The impressive number of premieres of the immediate post-junta decade (six, starting with the Plutus of Kanellos Apostolou) was, to a large extent, a dramatic response to Greece’s changing economic identity—growing inflation and the establishment of a Westernized consumer society. Despite its late arrival on the festival stage, Aristophanes’ Clouds ranks

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among the most beloved classical comedies, with regular productions since 1984. The Frogs has been rediscovered as well, though it poses the same dramaturgical difficulties as the Thesmophoriazusae, sharing Euripides as a comic victim: the problem of how to make ancient paratragedy not only relevant but also amusing for a contemporary theatergoing audience. Revivals of both works, however, proved not to need the thoroughgoing use of modern analogy advocated by some (and still shunned by others). By the mid-eighties, the Greek public had acquired enough familiarity with Aristophanes’ plays as plays, as well as with Euripides’ tragedies, to understand and appreciate even the paratragic lines. Koun left the signature of the Art Theater on both the Acharnians and the Birds of the cold war era, creating modern Greek classics in their own right that subsequent producers refused to compete with or tried hard not to imitate. The Panhellenic “pacifist” message of Aristophanes’ Peace translated into a large number of new productions, as it easily tied into the domestic Greek and international political realities—of the sixties’ cold war, for instance, and of the 1967 military coup. In fact, both the 1964 revivals of the Peace were staged during the short span of time between the assassination of President Kennedy and the escalation of the Vietnam War. Aristophanes’ Peace was also very popular in Germany in the early through mid-sixties. A liberal 1962 production of the play by the Deutsches Theater under director Benno Besson saw more than 250 performances over the next years.2 Not coincidentally, the three new stagings of the Peace of 1983–84 took place at the height of Western European demonstrations protesting the Reagan administration’s role in the intensification of the arms race. Ongoing turmoil in the Middle East struck home for Greece when, in June 1984, Shiite Muslim terrorists hijacked an American commercial airplane at Athens’ airport. These were also the years of Papandreou’s rallying cries for global peace and of his official support of the Peace Initiative of the Six, as Greece joined five other countries in their call for nuclear disarmament. The Knights and Wasps have seen the fewest modern Greek productions, not just during the annual festival seasons but in more than a century of Aristophanic stage reception generally. Also, compared to the early debut of the other comedies, they both appeared later on the official stage, because of their perceived high degree of ancient Greek topicality. Current demands for political relevance and diachronicity are perhaps most difficult to satisfy with the Wasps, given that the play’s caricature of the classical Athenian jury system does not readily lend itself to a modern theatrical analogue without drastic adaptation of the original text. Old maps show trading posts, and Greek revival comedy shows productions abustle with liberal enterprise and the exchange of goods and ideas. Yet both of them also zoom in on carefully guarded frontiers between

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Greek and “other” dominions and they tend to delay the acknowledgment of spheres of influence, colonization, and acculturation. They encourage nationalistic skirmishes over claiming and reclaiming the disputed domain of one and the same region or comedy, which has typically been crisscrossed and overwritten by opposing patterns of names and hegemonic colors. As interpreters we have a chance to observe, albeit after the historical fact, how many new territories were explored, surveyed, claimed, named, settled, and fought over, though not necessarily in that orderly fashion. From the actual sites of engagements, we can gauge the dynamics of wresting control, restating or erasing boundaries, trespassing and invading realms formerly impenetrable, and then relinquishing outposts to rebels turned traders and savvy business folk. Some facts remain unaccounted for but others have come into sharper focus as the mapping and interpretation process evolved in the hands of interpreters. Technological developments too have promoted the astonishing growth of the craft of comic production. Like a map, the modern Greek Aristophanes kept pace with the rapid progress in method and matter. The intricate levels of projection that he achieved become most evident when we read the maps in installments. A sequence of reception yields the treasured indications of changing areas and landmarks, of new claimants’ wishful thinking, and of old owners’ resentment. Again, many plans of interpretation are open to the viewer just because Aristophanic territorial conquest followed not crisp geometric lines but rather the elastic topography of Romiosyne, which the poet has represented in the popular Greek imagination. Just when you thought your map to Aristophanes covered it all, frontiers are made to appear artificial and arbitrary as you are reminded that they confine a small, selected territory. Boundaries are elusive because they prove always able to move beyond the transmitted, the received, and the expected. Just when a site limited by its flat two-dimensionality begins to disappoint, the poet enters the seemingly unrestricted world of the multidimensional website, which is the next medium to help capture knowledge of and via Aristophanes but which may also help break down barriers of Greek ethnocentrism. Open-minded interpreters will accept that much more remains to be covered by other maps, by other cartographers, and by other novel media; but most important, they will realize that they now have more diverse tools to use in exploring on their own. The exploration of territory hitherto left uncharted promises excitement and enjoyment because Aristophanes continually offers diversion from his own complex history in visually entrancing terms. He has made the power of relevance material by his ability to compress and abstract illusion as well as reality into a comprehensible image accessible to the many.

Notes

PREFACE 1. Ley, 73. 2. Slater, 3–4. 3. For a recent analytical and critical orientation to the vast bibliography on the ancient Greek Aristophanes, see Segal’s introduction. 4. See Beacham; Walton, “Revival: England”; and Arnott, “Revival: North America,” all collected in Living Greek Theatre, for discussions of revived ancient drama in Western Europe, England, and North America, respectively. See also Flashar’s comprehensive study, and Plorites et al. for visual documentation on modern productions staged all over the world, though mostly after 1950. 5. Subsequent Aristophanic productions at Cambridge were the Birds (1924, 1971), Peace (1927), Frogs (1936, 1947), Clouds (1962), and Lysistrata (1986). 6. On the 1966 Greek Drama Festival of Ypsilanti, Michigan, to which Alexes Solomos was invited as artistic director, and on its misadventure, see Arnott, “Revival: North America,” 364–66. On that occasion, the well-known actor Bert Lahr played Peisetaerus in the production of Aristophanes’ Birds using the translation of William Arrowsmith. 7. Both Solomos’ monograph, The Living Aristophanes, and Tsirimocou’s dissertation are disappointing. Despite his lifelong involvement with Greek revival drama, Solomos referred to hardly any specific translations or productions. Tsirimocou ended at a point prior to Aristophanes’ breakthrough in contemporary Greek theater, when Koun had merely started to shape the poet’s stage reception and its key players. 8. See the Epikairoteta series The Ancient Greek Theater, issued by Balaskas, Topouzes, et al., which includes catalogues of modern Greek productions of Aristophanes’ comedies. 9. Beaton paid regrettably little attention to Greek drama in his study of Greek literature. For his argument based on the lack of quality in pre-1940s theater, see 5–6. Modern Greek theater criticism on readings and revivals of ancient drama has also been ignored by scholars who favored Western theoretical models. Given that most of these native critical ideas have been scattered in Greek newspaper reviews and interviews, their absence in contemporary interpretations of classical theater is not surprising. But native theoretical thinking and writing has suffered from the Greek scholar Savvas Patsalides’ lack of attention as well. In his 1997 book ambitiously called Tensions and Dissentions: Classical Greek Tragedy and Twentieth-Century Theory, Patsalides admits to making only “scattered remarks” (skorpies anaphores, see his chapter 5) about the rich Greek theater practice as well as criticism. Yet he discusses plenty of Western critical and philosophical thinkers and their interpretations and appropriations of ancient tragedies—again without leaving room for even minimal analysis of theories on comedy. In not doing jus-

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tice to Greek critics, scholars, and producers of revival drama, he seems to reinstate the supremacy of Eurocentric theory over Greek thought. See also Constantinidis’ review of Patsalides. 10. The recent establishment of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama testifies to the renewed interest in the revival of the Greek classics, as well as to the awareness of the need for further data collection and original research. This archive, which functions under the joint directorship of Oliver Taplin and Edith Hall, is based at the European Humanities Research Centre of the University of Oxford. The Theater Department of Athens University has founded the Center of Research and Practical Documentation on Ancient Greek Drama “Desmoi” in Pankrati and has coordinated its networking and publication activities. Professor Platon Mauromoustakos supervised the publication of the performance catalogues and photographic materials that were included in the Epikairoteta series The Ancient Greek Theater (see note 8). Both Taplin and Mauromoustakos have been active in organizing the European Network of Research and Documentation of Ancient Greek Drama. At the University of Crete in Rethymno, Thodoros Chatzepantazes has established the Theater Archive of the Institute for Mediterranean Studies. PROLOGUE 1. Chapter 2 will show the importance of the mid-nineteenth-century (re)discovery of various layers of satirical and other humor buried between the ancient lines. Some scholars have called satire a centerpiece of classical performance as well, e.g., J. Henderson, “The Demos and the Comic Competition.” Others, like Silk, “Autonomy” and “Pathos,” focus on different characteristics. 2. Although the labels “right(ist)” and “left(ist),” or even “conservative” and “progressive,” are loaded and therefore highly problematic in referring to Greek history and politics, the lack of alternatives compels me to perpetuate their conventional usage, albeit with the necessary precautions. 3. I have followed Eagleton’s definition of ideology (16): “To say that the statement is ideological is then to claim that it is powered by an ulterior motive bound up with the legitimation of certain interests in a power struggle.” 4. See the standard theoretical works of Jauss and the Konstanz School, and the studies of Wolfgang Iser oriented toward reader-response criticism. Only in the past few years has the hermeneutic method of reception aesthetic received the full attention of English-speaking classical scholars (see Edmunds, From a Sabine Jar; and Martindale). 5. Anderson’s Imagined Communities has become the seminal text crossing over from the formal analysis of nationalism to the study of the impact of the state-building project. 6. As Leontis, 12, has warned, it remains a challenge for the Neohellenist to describe the interaction between Western Hellenism and Neohellenism without reducing this to a simple pattern of dominance and resistance, on the one hand, or of genesis and imitation, on the other. 7. Herzfeld, 21. 8. According to Leontis, 80 n. 30, the name romaios (romios in the vernacular)

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233

attached itself to the occupants of the Greek peninsula at some unspecified time after the Romans destroyed Corinth (146 B.C.E.). The name then became the self-designation of Greek inhabitants of the Eastern Roman Empire. Romiosyne is a vernacular Greek coinage of the late nineteenth century, technically the untranslatable nominalized form of the adjective romios. On the intricacies of defining modern Greek identity, see further Kitromilides, “Europe”; Lambropoulos; and Tziovas, Nationism and Transformations of Nationism. 9. See Gourgouris, 252–61; Kitromilides, “Intellectual Content of Greek Nationalism.” 10. Hubbard’s important study helps shed new light on the Old Comic parabasis, removed from the ritual and from the (previously dominant) minute topical-political approach. CHAPTER 1 POISONED GIFT FROM ANTIQUITY: ARISTOPHANES NATIONALIST IDEOLOGY

AS

PARAVASE

OF

KORAES’

1. Aristophanes himself complained about this lack of appreciation in the parabasis (518–62) of his second Clouds (420–417 B.C.E.), a revised version that probably never saw the contemporary stage. 2. As late as 1933, Elias Angelopoulos in Aristophanes and His Ideas on Socrates felt the need to prove that the playwright was not responsible for the philosopher’s condemnation and death. 3. Dover, Aristophanic Comedy, 226–27. 4. See Barish, 261. 5. On the Hellenic Library as a prominent example of patronized publishing sponsored by the Greek mercantile bourgeoisie, see Clogg, Anatolica, VI, 76–78. Koraes’ carefully prefaced editions of the texts covered various ancient literary genres and periods, and included medical treatises (Hippocrates), parts of Homer’s Iliad and of Aesop’s Fables, Theophrastus’ Characters, Strabo’s Geography, Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe, Heliodorus’ Aethiopics, and writings of Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, Isocrates, Plutarch (Parallel Lives), Arrian, Aelian, Polyaenus, and Marcus Aurelius. 6. See Beaton, 2, 23–30, for a detailed description of the cultural life and of the most important literary representatives of the expatriate Greek communities. 7. See, e.g., Koraes, Autobiography 1.1:6. 8. Ibid. See the studies by Tampake, “Greek Comedy” and Modern Greek Dramaturgy. 9. Beaton, 302, has pointed out that Koraes himself never used the term Kathareuousa, although the “correction” of the Greek language proposed by him was later invoked and often abused in the name of Kathareuousa. For an analysis of Koraes’ linguistic program and of the complex Language Question (Glossiko Zetema), to which I return in the next chapter, see ibid., 296–368, with an introduction to relevant bibliography on 370; Horrocks, 344–48; Mackridge. 10. Leontis, 7, argues that the preserved corpus of ancient literature was itself very much in need of a suitable site and spiritual homeland. It was therefore a most urgent matter that the liberated Greek state, rather than the Enlightenment

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Western European nations, provide the long-awaited topos for classical language and literature. The competing European sites had had a head start in presenting themselves as potentially more convenient homelands, with a better cultural and sociopolitical infrastructure to receive the displaced ancient Greek civilization. 11. For a comparison between linguistic purisms in antiquity and in modern Greece, see Swain, 35–40. 12. Voltaire, 98. 13. All subsequent references to Koraes’ Introductions in this chapter, cited as Prolegomena, are to the three-volume edition unless otherwise noted and appear parenthetically in the text. Koraes engaged in textual criticism on the manuscript tradition of Aristophanes’ plays, but only to a limited extent; see Christodoulou, 38, 39, 40, 45; I. Kakrides and Kavvadas, 146–55. Scholia (explanatory notes) found in the margins or between the lines of the Byzantine manuscripts of Aristophanes’ comedies date from the Hellenistic through Middle Byzantine period. The formidable challenge presented by Attic comedy, with its many topical allusions and enormous vocabulary, attracted the attention of some of the greatest Hellenistic scholars working in the library of Alexandria. Plenty of Byzantine scholia are themselves derived from the hermeneutic and lexicographic work undertaken by the Alexandrians. 14. Pointing out the general importance of Koraes’ commentaries on the ancient authors, Gourgouris, 90–91, called them “disguised observations on the present condition of the Greek language and suggestions as to its most efficient deployment for the building of a truly Neohellenic culture.” 15. Koraes made an earlier allusion to Plutus 676–81, in which the slave Cario recounts how, one night during incubation or ritual sleeping in Asclepius’ temple, he saw the priest stealing all the gift offerings. 16. For Koraes’ use of the “metaphorics of illness,” see Gourgouris, 104–7. 17. For some time during the fifth century B.C.E., the comic abuse of Athenian citizens by name appears to have been prohibited by law, although this is a vexed question among classical scholars. As a result of these restrictive measures, or of the threat of censorship, Old Comedy presumably abandoned the biting political satire so popular in its formative years. As is often claimed, the genre did not outlive the heyday of parrhesia, or “free speaking”; it gradually developed into Middle and then New Comedy, both of which toned down the frankness of earlier comic playwrights. However, on the basis of his study of fourth-century B.C.E. comic fragments, Dover, Aristophanic Comedy, 223–24, concluded that this common view is in need of modification. 18. Vince has made an attempt to unmask the “theatrical paradigm” of Aristotle’s Poetics as a “cultural-historical construct” in which the author encapsulated his late-fourth-century B.C.E. literary, philosophical, and scholarly concerns and conditions, which were already far removed from theater’s original ideological and communal Athenian climate. Aristotle’s reconstructed classical model has defined Western drama—particularly tragedy—and has also informed centuries of critical and theoretical writings about drama’s history. The Aristotelian paradigm was characterized by the scholarly focus not on visual or perceptual public performance but on a written text and on forms of artistic mimesis determined largely on literary grounds. The written dramatic text was historically seen as the crucible

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of the “true meaning” and as impervious to subsequent interpretation via acting, kinetic, musical, and other stage business. The idea that the play was the dramatic text, and that performance meant interpretation, inspired the creation and acceptance of canons of written texts to vouchsafe authenticity and “immutability.” Thus, for the French theorists and for Koraes, Greek tragedy carried an essential, “universally valid,” meaning, supported by nature and by reason, which stood independent from performance and therefore remained “true to its Greek roots.” 19. The names of about fifty comic playwrights who were contemporaries of Aristophanes, and many more titles of comedies, have been preserved. Among Aristophanes’ better-known rivals were Cratinus, Eupolis, Pherecrates, and Plato (Comicus). 20. On Plutarch’s prominent role in the didactic, philosophical, and historiographical program of the French Enlightenment, see Gourgouris, 97. 21. See, e.g., Highet, 120, 132. 22. Koraes, Correspondence 2:372. 23. Koraes, Dialogue of Two Greeks, 117–18. 24. Rousseau, 125–36. 25. Quoted and translated by Woodhouse, “Adamantios Korais,” 220. 26. Gourgouris, 104–7. 27. Papa Euthymiou 4:325–83. 28. Dover, Aristophanic Comedy, 226. The author further noted that Erasmus, who believed that students of ancient Greek should begin with the study of works that are in themselves interesting, placed Aristophanes first among poets for this reason. 29. Doukas’ text-critical work on Aristophanes was not followed by any other complete modern Greek edition of one or more of the eleven comedies until Phanes Kakrides published his edition of the Birds in 1974. The Cretan Markos Mousouros, active in Venice around 1500, is the first Greek known to have contributed to the textual study both of Aristophanes’ plays and of the accompanying scholia. Mousouros, who also taught classical comedy in Italy, cooperated with Aldus Manutius on the 1498 publication of the first printed edition of nine of the eleven comedies, excluding the Lysistrata and the Thesmophoriazusae. This editio princeps remained standard for nearly three centuries. 30. Koraes is quoted in “Where Do the Current Controversies of the Learned Come From?” 257–58. 31. Horrocks, 348–50. CHAPTER 2 ARISTOPHANES PARAVASE

IN

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THEATRICAL

1. Psychares is quoted by S. Pagiatakes, “Improvised Production,” He Kathemerine, 18 August 1991. All newspapers and popular journals cited in the notes are in Greek, unless otherwise noted. 2. As Leontis, 77 n. 23, states, Demoticists defended the vernacular not only in the name of the people, of nature, and of tradition but also in the name of the masters of world literature, all of whom wrote in the language of their own times.

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3. One must, however, be on guard against a too narrow Athenocentric focus, encouraged by overuse of Sideres, Ancient Theater. According to Puchner, “Methodological Problems,” 12–13, systematic research on the underexplored dramaturgy of the mainland Greek cities as well as on the diaspora communities will undoubtedly modify and enrich the map of theatrical activity of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 4. This excursus is indebted to Constantinidis, “Classical Greek Drama”; Myrsiades, “Struggle for Greek Theater”; and Sideres, Ancient Theater. See also G. Chatzedakes, “1821 and Theater,” He Kathemerine, 25 March 1998. 5. E. N. Phrankiskos, a Koraes expert and compiler of the index to the Hermes, suggested the name of Ioannes G. Makres as the author of this “Diatribe” (interview by author, February 1994). Makres was then active in Odessa, on the north shore of the Black Sea. 6. Souli, a relatively independent Greek district in Epirus, fought a series of wars against Ali Pasha, ruler of Ioannina. In the 1802 struggle, the heroic Souliot women threw themselves and their young children from the cliff of the Zalongo mountain in order to escape capture by the Turks and death. 7. Pikkolos’ prose tragedy was probably the first modern Greek play to be translated into English, by the Constantinopolitan G. Palaiologos (Cambridge: Harwood and Newby, 1824). His Demosthenes poisons himself to avoid death at the hands of the Macedonian enemy. In true Neohellenic spirit, however, his tragic suicide engenders the explicit hope that freedom will some day be restored to Greece. The orator’s death displays not so much a pagan-style victory of individual heroism as a Christian martyr’s sacrifice. 8. Quoted and translated by Bacopoulou-Halls, “Revival: Greece,” 264. 9. Myrsiades, “Struggle for Greek Theater,” 37. 10. Ibid., 49: “Attitudes necessary to create the state in a previous era were considered suspect in this one.” 11. Horrocks, 351–56. 12. Nineteenth-century Constantinopolitan troupes frequently took on the names of ancient dramatists, yet they were not particularly committed to producing their namesake’s works. From the 1870s on, several modern Greek thiasoi named “Aristophanes” were active. In Constantinople, these troupes preferred to stage plays of the Western European, not necessarily comic-satirical, repertoire in modern Greek translations. One better-known exception was the free Greek Theater Company Aristophanes (1895), based in Athens and managed by actor and director Anastasios Aperges. It was the only troupe to specialize in the staging of (a limited number of) ancient comedies. See chapter 3 and StamatopoulouVasilakou, passim. Entire theatrical families can be distinguished among the members of certain thiasoi. A poignant mid-twentieth-century image of such troupes of traveling players and relatives was captured in the 1975 film of Theodore Angelopoulos titled Ho Thiasos. 13. Sideres, Ancient Theater, 57; Modern Greek Theater, 212, 215. Papaioannou’s 1961 article is generally considered to have resolved the authorship problem of the anonymously published Plutus adaptation: instead of a name, three asterisks appeared in the first edition of 1861, printed at the press of the Athenian newspaper Merimna (Concern). Papaioannou collected plentiful evidence, on the

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basis of which he ascribed the anonymous work to the Phanariot Chourmouzes and rejected the older attribution to the educator Ioseph Gkinakas. He also engaged in a careful stylistic and comparative analysis of the Plutus paraphrase and of Chourmouzes’ other comedies (e.g., his Tychodioktes), which revealed many similarities in phraseology and in the author’s personal and political tone. Moreover, the Plutus paraphrase was given a new structure identical to that of Chourmouzes’ original comedies. To the abrupt end of the manuscript text the translator further added a choral ending of his own making, in which the farmers actually sing the merry song to which their ancient counterparts merely allude. This festive conclusion shows affinities with the finale of other comic plays of Chourmouzes. Lignades, Chourmouzes, made a comprehensive status quaestionis of the authorship debate and supported Papaioannou’s earlier attribution; he further pointed out how often Chourmouzes inserted quotations from Aristophanes in his own work (384). 14. Dimakis, 213, 307 n. 17; Papaioannou, 171–72. 15. S. Karydes, “Proem” (in Greek), Aristophanes and the Magnetized, no. 1 (1858). For some of Aristophanes’ own pronouncements about comedy’s public function in fifth-century B.C.E. Athens, see, e.g., Ach. 628–58 and Wasps 1029– 43. 16. P. P. Pegadiotes, Aristophanes, 23 November 1874. This description probably referred to the imminent clash of Greece’s irredentist ambitions in Macedonia with the rival nationalisms of the Bulgarians and Serbs. This crisis, which convulsed the Balkans between 1875 and 1878, was the focus of keen Great Power interest and resulted in the war of 1877–78 between Russia and the Ottoman Empire. See Clogg, Short History, 87–89. 17. The complex noun logiotatismos, defying precise translation, was fashioned after logios, “learned,” and logiotatos, “pedant.” 18. A few years after his first Aristophanes disappeared from the Athenian public scene in 1883, Pegadiotes started to publish a new satirical paper called Neos Aristophanes. From 1876 on, a smaller newspaper began to circulate under the title Mikros Aristophanes. Another satirical journal named Aristophanes Satyros appeared in Greece as late as 1921. 19. In 1837 Athens University was established as “the power house of the attempt to ‘re-hellenise’ the unredeemed Greek populations of the Ottoman Empire” (Clogg, Concise History, 50). As such, it attracted students not only from the new kingdom of Hellas but also from the Ottoman-occupied lands abroad. 20. Macintosh, 288. 21. Flashar, 82, 85. 22. Karydes is quoted by Sideres, Ancient Theater, 55. 23. E.g., A. R. Rankaves, “The Antigone at New Theaters,” Pandora, 15 April 1850. 24. For a brief discussion of the Boukouras Theater, see Skoumpourde, 35– 43. 25. Here I am highly indebted to Stamatopoulou-Vasilakou, whose monograph stands as the most complete study of nineteenth-century theatrical life in Constantinople. 26. On Greek production and consumption of books during the prerevolu-

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tionary decades, as well as on the practice of subscription publishing, see Clogg, Anatolica, VI, 73–82. 27. Lignades, Chourmouzes, 329, further suggested that this lethargic cultural climate compelled Karydes to found his personal thiasos so that he could stage his own and other contemporary Greek plays instead of foreign works. On most occasions, Karydes used the same Athens Theater in which the Plutus premiere took place. 28. The Greek term philotimo(n) defies exact translation. See Pollis, 34–36. 29. Chourmouzes, 7. This edition is hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 30. The titles of contemporary plays given by Stamatopoulou-Vasilakou, passim, do not include those cited by Chourmouzes. 31. Papaioannou, 168. 32. In a bizarre reversal, the propaganda mill of the right-wing dictator Ioannes Metaxas reappropriated Aristophanes’ Plutus to fight against socialist and especially communist ideology immediately prior to the Second World War (see chapter 4). 33. This hypothesis relates to the complex philological problem of dating Plato’s Republic (probably 370s B.C.E.) in relation to Aristophanes’ Ecclesiazusae (392?). In any case, some ideas about koinoktemosyne might have been circulating in Athens well before Plato actually composed his Republic. 34. Karageorgiou, “Modern Greek Translations,” 39–40. 35. Clogg, Concise History, 53, 55, 215. 36. Raptarches, 10–11. Hereafter this edition is cited parenthetically in the text. 37. This currently discredited approach was epitomized in F. M. Cornford’s standard work The Origin of Attic Comedy (1912). I do not subscribe to the reading of Aristophanes’ oeuvre in terms of its special derivation from phallic or other ritual. Aristotle inferred ritual behind comedy’s origins (Poetics 6.1449a10– 13), but the connection probably rested on the obscenity central to both forms. 38. Tampake, “Greek Comedy,” 38, 43 n. 4. The Athenian Philomousos Hetaireia, or Society of Friends of the Muses, founded in 1813, was one of a number of cultural societies and reading clubs that came into existence in the prerevolutionary years (Clogg, Anatolica, VI, 79). 39. Sideres, Ancient Theater, 26–28. 40. Lord Palmerston had imposed an earlier naval blockade of the port of Athens in 1850. 41. Constantinidis, “Classical Greek Drama,” 18–19; Sideres, Ancient Theater, 52. 42. On theater-related directives issued by the police, see Skoumpourde, 53. 43. Quoted by Sideres, Ancient Theater, 52. 44. One year later, however, the production was repeated at the Athens, or Boukouras, Theater (ibid.). 45. Spathes, “Deplorable Consequences,” 318–19. 46. Rankaves, Koutroules’ Wedding, 3. 47. King George I had actively contributed to the founding of the Royal Theater (Vasilikon Theatron), hence its name (Skoumpourde, 84–86).

Notes to Chapter 3 CHAPTER 3 THE LYSISTRATA EUPHORIA PARAVASE

OF

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1. Oikonomos 2:436. 2. Sideres, Ancient Theater, 280–81, 291, 386, and passim; “Modern Greek Interpretations,” 468. 3. For a sociological interpretation, see Loraux, 157–96. 4. Ph. Kakrides, “Lysistrata Superstar.” 5. Among the lesser-known transformers were Leonidas Ghilles, Herakles Chalkiopoulos, Praxiteles Tsolikes, and the later Zazas. 6. Following the chaotic rout of the Greek troops from Asia Minor, the Turks burned Smyrna and massacred much of the city’s Greek and Armenian Christian population. 7. On turn-of-the-century Greek feminism originating in the professional and middle classes, see Avdela and Psarra; Moschou-Sakorraphou; Varika, “Gender” and Revolt; and Xeradake. A forthcoming study by Constantinidis, entitled Theater without Sex?, will shed light on feminist voices earlier in the nineteenth century. 8. The concept of the male gaze is now a commonplace of feminist performance theory: it refers to the theatrical vision constructed in terms of male desire, pleasure, and power, which reinforces cultural assumptions about women, men, and male-dominated society. Jill Dolan holds that men fetishize women as objects to be looked at, thereby decreasing the threat of female sexual lack. 9. See Skoumpourde, 82, 96–97. She notes that the outdoor summer theaters were associated with lower social classes and broader repertoires than were the winter theaters of highbrow classicizing drama. 10. Among Nord’s popular revues were All In, All Out, Something Is the Matter, Out of This World, and The Golden Age. In English, he wrote God Strikes Back and Haven in the Dark. 11. From the late 1930s on, Maureas (1902–58) appeared in films as well. See Exarchos 2.1:269–70. 12. D. G., “At the Bloodstained Perroquet,” Hellenike, 15 June 1933; “Lysistrata,” Paparouna, 24 June 1933. See also “The Paparouna at the Perroquet,” Paparouna, 20 May 1933. Both Nord’s revue and his periodical were titled Paparouna (“poppy [flower]”), probably in euphemistic reference to drug abuse in the urban Athenian underworld. 13. The modern Greek colloquial word kolleteri usually denotes a burdensome (male) flirt or harasser, who “sticks to, attaches himself to” (kollao) his victim. Kolleteri is also the proper name of a character from Greek shadow theater: Karaghiozes’ son, who regularly receives a beating from his frustrated father. Another allusion to that genre can be found in the “truncated serpent” (kolovo pheidi) reminiscent of Karaghiozes’ “cursed snake” (katarameno phidi), both charged with phallic symbolism. 14. Apart from punning on the name Maureas, Lysistrata’s phrase, emaurise to mati mou, literally indicates that she “is desperate, no longer able to endure” the

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male strike depriving her of sex; but it also plays on the predilection that she suddenly develops for the black (katamauros) Othello. Here Lysistrata’s sexdriven call on men poses an additional racial challenge to the ethnically rather homogeneous Greek society of the 1930s, undermining the egos of white men by questioning their virility. 15. Philopappos’ comic aside plays with the modern Greek slang expression krato to phanari, “to tease secret lovers,” or “to be a fifth wheel.” 16. “Lysistrata,” Paparouna, 24 June 1933. 17. On Soures’ antifeminism in The Emancipation (He Cheiraphesia), see Kotzamani, “Aristophanes Our Contemporary.” 18. Kyvele (Adrianou) was a trainee from the Royal Theater. She was not known for her feminist sympathies and even wrote an article in support of denying women the right to vote (Xeradake, 93). 19. Sideres, Ancient Theater, 177. 20. Review of Soures’ Emancipation, Panathenaia, 31 October 1901. See N. Episkopopoulos, “The Women’s Issue,” Panathenaia, 5 January 1901; Anastasopoulou, “Feminist Awareness,” 161. 21. The 1970 reprint edition of Ho Romeos was a considerable success. Its satirical voice and Aristophanic humor were used anew to ridicule the military dictatorship of 1967 to 1974. 22. The Demotic fifteen-syllable rendition of Homer’s Iliad by Alexandros Palles, for instance, appeared only four years after the Clouds. 23. Soures, Ho Romeos, 435. Undoubtedly the metaphorical identification between Soures and Phasoules was facilitated by verbal and linguistic factors perceptible to modern Greek ears: both names, Sour´es and Pha-soul´es, are stressed on the last syllable. They become near homonyms when one considers that the liquids -r- and -l- are interchangeable in many modern Greek words. The name Phasoules itself, though derived from the Italian Fagiolino may pun on phasouli, ´ a particular kind of bean popular in Greek home cuisine. The “native” character Perikle(to)s is a humorously diminished spin-off from the fifth-century B.C.E. statesman Pericles. The wooden nature and broken movements of both Phasoules and Perikletos recall the material restrictions of puppets made for the shadow theater of the anarchic hybrid Karaghiozes. The two folk traditions have different origins, however. The Phasoules performance, imported from Italy via the Ionian Islands, appeared on the Greek scene sometime before 1870 (Myrsiades, Karagiozis Heroic Performance, 35). Both Phasoules and the Anatolian Karaghiozes invited a high degree of audience participation and topical commentary. They therefore established a model of interactive spectacle and performative behavior that influenced the popular demands placed on the modern Greek Aristophanes. 24. Karydes’ Phos, the oldest Greek satirical newspaper, essentially served as a training school for Soures. See Dimakis, 308 n. 28; Valetas 1:13–14. 25. “Z. P.,” author of “The Two Poets of the Clouds” in Skrip, 25 October 1900, drew an analogy between the 1821 war heroes and the fighters at Marathon. The journalist also compared the Athenians of the Peloponnesian War with their modern counterparts suffering the repercussions of the 1897 Greco-Turkish War. On 27 October 1900, in a review of the Clouds two days after its opening, the Skrip triumphantly announced: “The Athenians saw an ancient play for the

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first time.” The Greek artist Nikephoros Lytras captured the common approval of Soures’ work in a painting showing the adapter-producer and Aristophanes meeting each other in the clouds. Dressed in formal suit and carrying a zither, Soures shakes hands with and embraces the poet, who is in ancient garb, holding a lyre. The picture bears the characteristic title Vouna me vouna den smigoun. This modern Greek proverb, which means “Mountains do not meet,” implies that because people are not mountains, they can encounter each other despite (temporal and) geographical distance—as can Soures and Aristophanes, both representing peaks within the same genre. 26. See Kotzamani, “Aristophanes Our Contemporary.” 27. Sideres, Ancient Theater, 164–65. 28. The 1877 discovery of the famous Hermes statue at Olympia had caused great excitement in Greek and international scholarly circles. 29. Chatzedakes, 67; Sideres, Ancient Theater, 167–68. 30. “The Premiere of the Clouds,” Akropolis, 27 October 1900. 31. Lampsides, 9, refers to an unspecified law “concerning indecency” (peri asemnon) and to “other related regulations” as the official grounds for direct moral censorship at this time. See also Skoumpourde, 55. 32. Sideres, Ancient Theater, 168. 33. Despite the authorities’ “concern” for the morality of Athenian ladies—or for the reputation of men openly associating with such women—they did not hesitate to bestow official recognition and indirect financial support on Soures’ Clouds. See “The Premiere of the Clouds,” Akropolis, 27 October 1900; Sideres, Ancient Theater, 168 (referring to articles in To Asty, 4 and 6 December 1900). 34. The bibliography of studies on Karaghiozes is extensive; see Myrsiades, Karagiozis: Culture and Comedy and Karagiozis Heroic Performance; and Whitman, 281–93. 35. Scholars hotly debate whether women were allowed to attend any dramatic performances in Greek antiquity. Established classical stage practice required that only men could play the female roles of both comedy and tragedy, except for certain mute comic parts. Advocates of the early-twentieth-century prohibition, however, tended not to resort to the scholarly arguments explaining why the ancient Greeks excluded or restricted women. Yet classical and modern gender politics did intersect in the sexual and political dynamics of antagonism, which carried over from the ancient to the modern plays. The inconclusive evidence on women viewers in the classical theater has been treated in PickardCambridge, 263–65, 269. 36. The foreign actresses of Italian and French operetta and melodrama enjoyed great popularity among the nineteenth-century Greek urban elite. In contrast, the common people, who regarded many aspects of drama as anti-Christian, fiercely objected to women’s presence on stage and saw actresses as depraved, satanic figures (Myrsiades, “Struggle for Greek Theater,” 49; Puchner, “Methodological Problems,” 106). The Hellenic Herald of May 1909, paraphrasing a lecture given by the theater historian Nikolaos Laskares, related a characteristic anecdote from the early postrevolutionary years of native Greek drama in Nauplio, where Rankaves awaited the staging of one of his own comedies: “A wellnigh fatal obstacle interposed: all the ladies invited refused absolutely to take any

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part. After much thought Rhangabes hit upon the idea of a play containing feminine characters who were not feminine. Two days hard work, and he laid before his colleagues the play, A Marriage without a Wife. . . . The ladies of Nauplia carried their anti-histrionic ardour even to the extent of refusing to take part in certain pantomimic representations, and the feminine parts had to be taken by boys” (“The Early Years of the Neo-Greek Theatre” [in English]). For the difficulties in recruiting women for the (agit-prop) Theater of the Mountains (organized by the Greek Resistance in World War Two), which attest to the tenacity of popular (rural) prejudices against female performers, see Hart, 208–9; Myrsiades and Myrsiades, 135–37. 37. Sideres, Ancient Theater, 210–11. 38. On Aperges, see Exarchos 1:63–64. 39. Sideres, Ancient Theater, 210, 212–13, 221, 228, 230, 234, 237–41, 244, 246. 40. Soures, Ho Romeos, 434. In ancient Greek folklore Coesyra figured as a grande dame, an elegant but haughty Athenian lady. See Clouds 48, 800, and Ach. 614; Dover, Clouds, 99–100. Hyperbolus and Cleonymus were among Aristophanes’ favorite comic victims. 41. Antithetical images of Eastern versus Western women, with the former mimicking the latter and thereby subverting patriarchy’s codes of morality and conduct, could already be found in Soures’ 1882 one-act comedy The Arab, which featured a sex strike of the local women on the model of the Lysistrata. 42. The illiteracy rate among Greek women dropped from 82 percent in 1907 to 60 percent in 1921, but it remained embarrassingly high for a democratic country. Full elementary education was considered not essential but acceptable for girls from wealthier families. According to Hart, 112, state policy changed only after 1917 to permit the foundation of special schools and gymnasia for Greek girls—and those institutions of middle education were soon flooded with female pupils. 43. Cf. Avdela and Psarra, 30–31. 44. Reproduced by Xeradake, 64–65 insert. 45. Close, 17, 75. 46. Xeradake, 58. The first election in which women voted was organized in April 1944 by the National Liberation Front (Ethnikon Apeleutherotikon Metopon, or EAM). This was the largest communist-inspired resistance movement in German-occupied Greece, and it mobilized large numbers of women to public action. Yet despite high female participation in the battle against the Nazis, very few women achieved positions of political or military responsibility. The large majority partook in EAM sections requiring traditional domestic skills: running the commissariat, providing relief, nursing, and teaching. For an account of the effects of the Second World War and its anticommunist aftermath on Greek women’s emancipation experience, see Hart. 47. Varika, Revolt, 205, 209; Xeradake, 60–61. See also Anastasopoulou, “Feminist Awareness” and “Feminist Discourse.” 48. Kotzamani, “Aristophanes Our Contemporary,” 128. 49. Varika, Revolt, 211. 50. Miller, 121. 51. Varika, Revolt, 194.

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52. Ibid., 191. 53. See, for example, two satirical poems in Ho Romeos predating the 1900 Clouds: “University Matters and the Female Student Roka” (25 February 1895) and “The Women’s Conference, the Frightening One Indeed” (11 May 1896). 54. K. Parren, “Satire has Lost Its Strength” and “The Amazons and Emancipation,” Ephemeris, 21 and 28 October 1901. See Kotzamani, “Aristophanes Our Contemporary,” 131. 55. Demetrakopoulos’ works, consisting of epitheoreseis, librettos, and comic and tragic plays, as well as translations of Aristophanes, total about eighty pieces. In 1996 Andreas Voutsinas and the National Theater revived Demetrakopoulos’ Ecclesiazusae for a production at the Epidaurus Festival. For his mid-nineties theatergoers who would no longer be shocked by the adaptation’s vulgarity, the director removed obscenities in order to shock by their absence. For the same reason he expurgated the script of his 1998 Clouds. 56. See Maurikou-Anagnostou. 57. Chrestomanos, 3–4; translated by Bacopoulou-Halls, “Revival: Greece,” 265. 58. Review of Ecclesiazusae, Hestia, 11 August 1904. In 1687 the Turks’ powder supply stored in the Parthenon was hit by a cannonball fired by Venetians under Morosini. The magazine exploded and the ancient temple was torn apart. 59. Reviews of Ecclesiazusae: Kairoi, 12 August 1904; Hestia, 11 August 1904. See also Athenai, 11 and 13 August 1904; Hestia, 7 August 1904. 60. Reviews of Ecclesiazusae: Athenai, 13 August 1904; and To Asty, 2 August 1904. See also Maurikou-Anagnostou, 119; Sideres, Ancient Theater, 204–5. In another review of the Ecclesiazusae, “Ph.” of the Panathenaia, 31 August 1904, interpreted the director’s “poor choices” as a desperate attempt to overcome the financial impasse in which the company found itself after three years of operation. 61. The view of Chrestomanos as idealist is fervently defended by Chatzedakes, 69–73. On Chrestomanos’ aestheticized naturalism, see Puchner, “Northern Literatures,” 99. 62. For a more detailed discussion of contemporary reviews and subsequent scholarly readings of the 1904 Ecclesiazusae, see my dissertation, “Aristophanes in Modern Greece,” 152–58. 63. Sideres, Ancient Theater, 213. 64. Demetrakopoulos, in Athenai, 13 March 1911; quoted in ibid., 247. 65. Phexes issued Augeres’ translations of the Acharnians, Peace, Knights, Wasps, Thesmophoriazusae, and Plutus in the years 1911 and 1912. As a rule, these renditions were accompanied by short scholarly introductions and footnotes, and they avoided comic anachronisms. In a common, self-contradictory deviation from the purported goal of translating “faithfully,” Augeres understated or restyled obscenities and vulgar scenes. He also translated Sophocles’ Electra, Aeschylus’ Suppliants, and foreign works, including the Memoirs of Distinguished Fellow Workers of Lenin, which may be taken as another indication of his known leftist sympathies (Nikolopoulos, 54–55). Most Greek translators of Aristophanes of the first half of the twentieth century—traditionally, classical philologists selected by established academic publishing houses—adhered to the ambivalent principle of “respect” for the original. Their conventional, literal renditions usu-

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ally accompanied the classical texts printed in the same volume and were meant to advance readers’ understanding of ancient Greek. Yet by defining “respect” morally rather than as faithfulness to the letter of the original, translators were free to tone down or eliminate Aristophanes’ uncouth speech. The entire subsequent history of Aristophanic stage reception demonstrates, however, that producers rarely chose these philological renderings, which often lacked a basic sense of the comic and theatrical, as acting versions for their revivals. Nonetheless, the classicist translators reflected progress—not so much in their academic views and writing style as in their radical choice of the Demotic language and often of the fifteen-syllable stressed verse, which was regarded as the national verse form. In the 1900s this conscious application of the vernacular to classical tragedy and to other sacrosanct texts, and the implied appropriation of ancient authors as Demotic writers, still was shocking; I return to this point later in this chapter. 66. In Athens in 1910 a French troupe performed Edmond Rostand’s romanticist bird-play Le Chantecler, which had disappointed Paris after the high expectations raised by his better-known Cyrano de Bergerac (1897). Because Le Chantecler still enjoyed great success with (francophile) Athenian audiences, Demetrakopoulos felt provoked to adapt the “true” bird fantasy, Aristophanes’ fifth-century B.C.E. comedy. As he announced in the Panathenaia, 15 March 1910, his goal was “for the present-day Athenians to learn what Chantecler their ancient compatriots watched” (quoted by Sideres, Ancient Theater, 240). Vindicating national pride via Aristophanes, Demetrakopoulos translated and in March 1911 produced the Birds. Meanwhile, the final impulse for the premiere occurred: Aristophanes had become enmeshed in the Language Question. An official modern Greek tongue, defined as the formal idiom of the 1911 constitution, had been imposed, which split the Kathareuousianoi and the Malliaroi (“Hairy Ones”) further apart. Malliaroi was the disparaging name given to radical Demoticists, followers of Psychares, on account of their allegedly hirsute bohemian appearance. Demetrakopoulos then pulled his Birds translation into production in order to wage war against the Malliaroi. Though committed to Demotic himself, he disagreed with militant Psycharismos, which he also attacked in the daily press. The 1911 Birds premiere (in cooperation with the League of Greek Actors) highlighted two extensive scenes featuring unwanted guests in Nephelococcygia: the long-haired (malliaros) poet and the dithyrambic poet Cinesias. Aristophanes’ further parody of poetic language and literature in the original sketches readily lent itself to adaptation by the modern translator. Publicizing his revival as a sensational event, Demetrakopoulos promised that “the Malliaroi of Aristophanes’ time would be ridiculed and beaten up deservedly” (Athenai, 13 March 1911; quoted by Sideres, Ancient Theater, 247). His comic victimization of the Malliaroi was a reality-inspired motif that could equally well have been raised in his own or others’ Athenian revues. See also Sideres, Ancient Theater, 238–40, 246–47, 263. On this phase of the Language Question, see Beaton, 318–20, 341–42. 67. Prochasson, 121–47. The links between the modern Greek epitheorese and French, German, and British transvestite culture open up a vast domain for future inquiry, which may cover issues of female cross-dressing and the inversion of the male gaze, and of homosexuality’s repression and empowerment via the discovery

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of the (transvestite) stage and of ancient Greek homoeroticism; on a larger scale, they raise questions of the significance of membership in public life as itself highly gendered. See also Garber. 68. In his 1987 study, Segel describes the exponents of this veritable cabaret mania in Paris, Barcelona, Berlin, Munich, and Central and Eastern Europe. He omits, however, any discussion of the parallel phenomenon of the Greek epitheorese, a lacuna that my necessarily brief outline here challenges. 69. Chatzepantazes and Maraka 2:36–37, 3:456–60. 70. Varika, Revolt, 191–92. 71. Demetrakopoulos et al., 21–22. 72. Chatzepantazes and Maraka 1:56. Later adaptations often toned down the original choral songs, collapsed them into simple similes, or eliminated them altogether, practices that frequently were criticized as leading to an easy modernization disrespectful of classical lyricism. 73. Demetrakopoulos, [Epitheorese] Songs, 43–45. 74. See About Marika Kotopoule. The Theater of Homonoia took Kotopoule’s name in 1912 (Skoumpourde, 71, 73). Only one repeat performance of this Lysistrata, in Alexandria in 1928, is known (Sideres, Ancient Theater, 390). 75. Kotzamani, “Lysistrata,” 11–89. 76. Ibid., 34–35; Pourvoyeur, 4. 77. The 1908 bawdy Lysistrata of the celebrated Austrian theater director Max Reinhardt might have caused a reaffirmation of Aristophanes’ Romaic Greek identity similar to that spurred by Kotopoule. The tremendously popular Berlin production, again with women in the female roles, seems to have left hardly any other traces on the poet’s reception in Greece. By contrast, Reinhardt’s innovative productions of ancient tragedy, such as his very successful 1910 Oedipus Rex, as well as his theoretical inquiries, did establish a recognizable interpretive strand in Greek revival drama (Constantinidis, “Classical Greek Drama,” 26). See further Beacham, 303–5; Flashar, 126, 349–50 n. 83, 398; Kotzamani, “Lysistrata,” 90–174. 78. Kotzamani, “Lysistrata,” 40–41, 47. 79. This section presents a sketch—necessarily imperfect—of modern Greek theater and revival tragedy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It can be read as a continuation of the outline offered in the first section of chapter 2, “The Debut of Greek Revival Theater.” 80. Anastasopoulou, “Feminist Discourse,” 4–7, 11–12, 23. 81. This polarization of language continued until a 1976 Act of Parliament proclaimed Demotic as the norm (Beaton, 14, 311–14). 82. Skoumpourde, 48–52. 83. Beaton, 335, 342. 84. For a brief study and basic edition of representative examples of the komeidyllio, see Chatzepantazes. 85. L. Polites, 217, 261. 86. In a tour de force intended to make Homer a Demotic writer, Alexandros Palles rendered the Iliad in Demotic fifteen-syllable verse (1904) and even popularized the epic heroes’ names. 87. In fact, the adaptation of Georgios Soteriades was based on Hanz Ob-

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erl¨ander’s abridged version of the German translation of Aeschylus’ Oresteia made by Ulrich von Wilamowitz-M¨ollendorff. See Flashar, 140–41; Horrocks, 357–58; Sideres, Ancient Theater, 169, 188–99. 88. Myrsiades, “Struggle for Greek Theater,” 38, 49–52. 89. Constantinidis, “Classical Greek Drama,” 19–20. 90. The staging of the first modern Olympic Games, held in Athens in 1896, was crucial in helping commercial companies to secure a large enough audience (both local and international) to profit from producing tragedies. 91. Constantinidis, “Classical Greek Drama,” 17. 92. Ibid., 25. 93. Puchner, “Northern Literatures,” 96; Skoumpourde, 103–15. 94. Constantinidis, “Classical Greek Drama,” 20–21. 95. Quoted and translated in ibid., 20. 96. Sideres, Ancient Greek Theater, 174–75. 97. Founded to propagate Demoticism, the Noumas (1903–22) quickly grew into a leading literary periodical. See Beaton, 317–18; Horrocks, 358. 98. Sideres, Ancient Greek Theater, 203. 99. The Acropolis and the Parthenon were contested symbolic landmarks in Western European as well as in Neohellenic culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Westerners in Greece typically described these sacred sites not as being physical places but as the inherited discursive extensions of their own home space (Leontis, 10–11). 100. Xenopoulos is quoted in Sideres, Ancient Greek Theater, 218. 101. Mistriotes is quoted in ibid., 134. 102. Beaton, 316–17. 103. Xenopoulos is quoted in Sideres, “Pioneers,” 1380. 104. Puchner, “Northern Literatures,” 95, 97–99. 105. Leontis, 84 n. 42, explains that the word irredentism derives from the Italian irredenta, which incorporates the theological metaphor of an “unredeemed” nation. She defines irredentism as the state policy of expanding borders to redeem the nation’s settlement areas in which ethnic compatriots dwell under foreign control. Once implemented, the Greek Great Idea placed intolerable strains on society’s cohesion. The chaotic 1922 rout of Greeks in Asia Minor by Turkish nationalists and the tragic burning of Smyrna precipitated the idea’s collapse. The Asia Minor Catastrophe set the scene for many sociopolitical and cultural problems of twentieth-century Greece, among them the massive influx of refugees into an unprepared native country. 106. Restoration of the ancient stadium had begun in 1895 so that it might house athletic events of the first modern Olympics. In the stadium’s sphendone, or rounded end, past and present theater managers have created a semicircular performance space by erecting a background stage (building) across the end of the race track, thereby blocking modern traffic from the spectators’ view. The sphendone thus becomes the center stage of the surrounding semicircular seating area of limited capacity. Cut out in this manner, the entire performance space holds modern equivalents of the classical skene, orchestra, and koilon. 107. My brief characterization of Greek social ranks draws mainly on Close,

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13–16. For other views, see Mavrogordatos and the Marxist historians Mouzelis and Tsoucalas. 108. On women’s possible “messianic” role in the face of late-nineteenth-century societal and nationalist demands, see Anastasopoulou, “Feminist Discourse,” and Varika, “Gender.” CHAPTER 4 KOUN’S BIRDS

OF

1959: PARAVASE

OF

RIGHT-WING POLITICS

1. Thrylos, review of Birds, 1246. Alkes Thrylos was the male nom de plume of Helene Ourane, a prolific conservative critic and member of the Artistic Directing Committee of the Greek National Theater. Originally published in newspapers and periodicals, Ourane’s reviews were reissued in the collection Greek Theater. 2. The ancient text (Birds 864–88) deliberately leaves ambiguous whether the sacrifice is meant for the old Olympian gods or for the newfangled deities of the birds. See Sommerstein, Birds, 255–58. 3. Decades later, newspapers claimed that Giorgos Mauro¨ıdes had admitted to being the first one to start protesting. Mauro¨ıdes was a professor of fine arts and a personal friend of Konstantinos Tsatsos, who intervened officially (V. Georgakopoulou, “The Birds and the . . . Cocks of Orthodoxy,” Eleutherotypia, 24 July 1997). 4. Compare the left-wing He Auge of 1 September 1959 (in “The Intellectual World Condemned with Indignation the Cancellation of the Performances of Aristophanes”)—“two to three people wanting to cause trouble during the performance”—with the vague statement of the centrist To Vema (in Angelos Terzakes’ “The Birds, a Fiasco”) of the same day: “The audience was divided: . . . one part of it had become hostile, while the other wavered.” This phrasing leaves the impression that possibly as much as half of the audience disapproved. 5. Tsatsos is quoted in “The Production of the Birds Provoked the Protest of the Public,” He Kathemerine, 1 September 1959. 6. Journal of the Parliament Debates 5, 5 A (1960): 413, meeting 110. 7. “The Intellectual World Condemned the Cancellation” and A. Tsouparopoulos, “Aristophanes, the Outlaw of the Festival,” He Auge, 1 September 1959. In both ancient and modern sources, Cleon, the influential fifth-century B.C.E. politician, is most frequently characterized as the bitter archenemy of Aristophanes, agitating against the latter’s public criticisms. For a different treatment of the relationship between Cleon and Aristophanes, see Edmunds, Cleon. 8. The Eleutheria of 1 September 1959 captured the same sense of “anarchic danger” when its headline declared: “The Birds are tearing down the henhouse of Mr. Tsatsos!” (article by “M. Pl.”). 9. Myrsiades and Myrsiades, 107. Until 1942 the Germans controlled Greek drama via the censorship laws of the dictator Metaxas (ruled 1936–41), complemented with ad hoc police regulations. In the same year, however, the local collaborationist government issued a new law that addressed theatrical censorship more comprehensively and approved of only a short list of plays. Some examples of the enemy-inspired rules may show to what extremes these went: it was forbid-

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den to mention on stage the terrible winter famines. Dressing characters in ethnic Greek costumes, such as the phoustanella, was not allowed. Sets could not depict mountains or hills: the censors feared that showing the landscapes in which the Resistance was fought would naturally excite the audience. After the Battle of Crete in May 1941, Cretan mantinades (improvised distichs or serenades) were banned from Greek theater. Only plays from countries under Axis control could be performed. Anglo-Saxon and Russian playwrights were forbidden, with the exception of Irish drama. Some of the Greek classics had already been banned from the stage: General Metaxas had declared that Sophocles’ Antigone could not be performed. The ancient heroine embodied and publicly proclaimed disobedience to the self-serving laws of tyranny. The military dictator excluded also Pericles’ famous “Epitaphios Logos” (“Funeral Oration”) from school readings of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War (2.34–47). Metaxas believed that the new Hellenic generation should not be brought up with the ideals of democracy as expounded by the ancient Greeks. See further Dizelos, 452–62; Myrsiades and Myrsiades; Van Steen, “Censorship.” 10. In 1962 American civil aid came to an end, though military assistance continued (Woodhouse, Modern Greece, 282). 11. Leontis, 126–28. The notion of Hellenicity is discussed later in this chapter. 12. Karolos Koun, interview by V. Charalampidou, Thessalonike, 12 September 1984. 13. See the parallel argument of Dicaeopolis in Ach. 502–8. He refers to Cleon’s older allegation that Aristophanes had defamed Athens in his Babylonians, performed during the formal, state-sanctioned festival of the Great Dionysia, which was open to foreigners. The close relationship in ancient times between a specific play, the festival setting (the very public Dionysia versus the more intimate Lenaea), and the civic order of the Athenian city-state had magnified the impact of Aristophanes’ defamation, at least in Cleon’s eyes and in the playwright’s own comic narration of the incident of the year 426 B.C.E. 14. Rotas, Works of Aristophanes: “Birds,” 86. 15. K. Nitsos, interviews by author, March 1994. 16. Close, 219. 17. Dromazos, Stage and Curtain, 113. 18. Damianakou, 78. 19. On this institutionalization of diglossia and its political repercussions, see Beaton, 321–23; Horrocks, 357–62. 20. Greek opponents of communism had laid claim to the loaded ideological motto ethnikophrosyne (which defies exact translation) since the 1920s and 1930s. The antileftist security legislation of the prewar Metaxas dictatorship made the police responsible for issuing loyalty certificates. This politically expedient move enabled the Greek Right to control legality until 1974: the measure was revived by the reactionary governments of the 1950s and 1960s and again by the colonels. Postwar emphasis on ethnikophrosyne was particularly destructive in that applicants to key positions in the civil service, public office, journalism, or law were required to submit a “certificate of social beliefs.” Similar official documentation was demanded of those seeking a wide range of permits and licenses. It testified that the

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applicant had never harbored leftist sympathies or that he or she had abandoned leftist tendencies of the past to become ethnikophron, “of sound patriotic views.” Moreover, arrested former Resistance fighters, EAM participants, and any real or supposed communists were coerced into signing a so-called statement of repentance (delose metanoias), which contained the written promise that they would not engage in any further “antinational” activities. Again, the delose certified “sound”—that is, noncommunist—allegiance, as the signers were forced to declare themselves traitors for joining the Resistance and the EAM organization. As a condition of release, the procedure sometimes required that the (often tortured) prisoner betray other leftist activists or sympathizers. Whoever refused to endorse the declaration was in danger of being executed or of remaining in jail, sometimes for terms that lasted into or even past the early 1960s. See also Close, 42–43. 21. K. Koun, interview by G. K. Pelichos, Ta Nea, 4 October 1973. 22. In May 1967 Colonel Georgios Papadopoulos sent an order concerning “the preventive control” of theater to all Greek playhouses and to the police. This document was published in Britain by the activist opposition journal Greek Report, an uncensored monthly magazine intended to keep international public attention focused on the junta terror. In its issue of April 1969, Papadopoulos’ censorship directives read in English: All theatrical pieces or musicals [i.e., mainly epitheoreseis] and public shows of any kind are forbidden which: (1) Can disturb public order; (2) Propagate subversive theories; (3) Defame nationally or touristically our country; (4) Undermine the healthy social tradition of the Greek people and their ancestral habits and customs; (5) Touch on Christian religion; (6) Attack the person of the King, the members of the royal family and the Government; (7) Exercise a harmful influence on youth; (8) Exercise a distorting influence on the aesthetic evolution of the people. (“Art and Censorship,” 17) Papadopoulos’ circular resurrected legislation first passed and enacted under the Nazi Occupation of Greece, which had subsequently fallen into disuse. In addition to regulation of the theater, more than one thousand books were banned. They included comedies by Aristophanes, tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, works of Aristotle, and studies by classical philologists and historians, such as George Finlay and George Thomson. Among the blacklisted modern writers were Jean-Paul Sartre, Thomas Mann, T. S. Eliot, Albert Camus, and Maxim Gorky. Many films were also forbidden, in particular all movies starring the activist leftist actress Melina Mercouri or featuring musical scores by the composer Mikes Theodorakes. The colonels issued a total ban on the music and songs of Theodorakes, who held views they condemned. But their action boomeranged, making almost all of the composer’s works potentially political and thus more beloved by the public. During the junta years the popular art song, to which both Theodorakes and Chatzidakis were committed, gained increasing importance as a dynamic expression of broad civic resistance. See further Van Steen, “Censorship.” 23. In July 1970 some writers, who tried to undermine the perceived threat of indirectly imposed self-censorship by combining overt compliance and covert mockery, published a collective protest volume called Eighteen Texts. See Beaton, 267–69; R. MacDonald, passim; Van Dyck, 20, 27.

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24. Chatzaras, 54, 56–57; Flashar, 213–14. Unfortunately, the relevant public sources cannot corroborate Koun’s claim. Newspapers of the junta years, under heavy pressure from the censorship bureaus, did not publish any substantial data on rejected works. This makes it very difficult to assemble evidence for cases in which plays were not granted an official license. Oral testimonies are often biased and tend to magnify the interviewee’s “heroic” stance of resistance against the repressive establishment. 25. Varnales, Aesthetic and Critical Works 2:12, 39–42. He criticized the action of the New York Academy, which in the mid-1950s cut 130 lines from Praxagora’s speech “because they contained revolutionary, communist ideas.” In response, the author defended the Ecclesiazusae and the classical playwright in a statement that speaks volumes about his own black-and-white ideological alignment: “Aristophanes is an enemy of the barbarian foreign [American] ‘aids,’ and an enemy of the politicos, who live off civil hatred” (39). 26. See further Green, 11. 27. These lines are quoted and criticized by Makres, review of Birds, 1538. Papadopoulos lost power in November 1973, after his regime had faced an abortive naval mutiny as well as student demonstrations, the “revolutions” of the spring of 1973. Michaelides’ mention of the laokratia was probably an ironic allusion to the “presidential parliamentary republic” proclaimed by Papadopoulos in June of the same year. The dictator was then elected president in a farcical referendum held under martial law. Papadopoulos had been the only candidate in this plebiscite, which took place a few weeks prior to Michaelides’ production of the Birds. 28. H. Varopoulou, “Aristophanes’ Birds,” Pro¨ıne, 1 August 1979. 29. Messalas is quoted in V. Angelikopoulos, “[Our] Contemporary Politicians . . . Inspire Aristophanes,” To Vema, 18 August 1991. 30. Among Koun’s trainees were the actors and later stage producers G. Lazanes, M. Kougioumtzes, K. Bakas, N. Charalampous, and Th. Karakatsanes; the actors G. Michalakopoulos and E. Logothetes; and the actresses R. Pittake and M. Mercouri, the late Greek minister of culture. Several of Koun’s Athens College pupils also became distinguished actors and directors, including A. Solomos, T. Horn, G. Stephanelles, and G. Sevastikoglou. The late political leader Andreas Papandreou was one of Koun’s young amateur actors at the college as well. 31. See Koun’s published lecture of 1943, delivered on 17 August as a manifesto to the Friends of the newly founded Art Theater and titled The Social Position and the Aesthetic Principles of the Art Theater. 32. We have no epigraphical record in the didaskaliai that Aristophanes was reperformed in classical and postclassical times. These didaskaliai, a series of inscriptions from a (probably) third-century B.C.E. building on the south slope of the Acropolis, cover about 350 years of historical data on drama, and list numerous names of poets and actors. Unfortunately, very little of this information pertains to the strictly classical period. See Csapo and Slater, 40–41. 33. Papakonstantinou, 64–65, 105, 145, and tables III and IV (secondary school programs of 1969 and 1978). 34. Koun, Conversations, 14; interview by Maronites, 46–47; Twenty-five Years, 7–8.

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35. Leontis, 90–92, 124. See also Jusdanis, 78–81, who associated hellenikoteta with “liberal bourgeois elements” in particular. 36. The words of Rallou Manou, quoted below, exemplify the aesthetic language that characterized the Greek modernist phase of the late fifties and early sixties, to which Koun’s Birds belonged. Koun, Chatzidakis, Tsarouches, and other contemporary artists and intellectuals were associated with the influential and close-knit dance troupe, founded in 1951 by Manou, called the Helleniko Chorodrama. One of the most successful cultural initiatives of the pre-junta years, the Chorodrama encouraged each of its members to find ways to express the “popular roots” (la¨ıkes rizes) of his or her artistic inspiration with personal creative means. In a 1982 playbill note to the Chorodrama’s Fantasy on Aristophanes, a ballet-fantasy on the “pacifist” poet, Manou explained that the company’s main objective was “to use choreography, rhythm, and costumes, drawn from the rich Hellenic tradition, in order to create a characteristically Greek theatrical dance art, and to preserve our national traditions in Greece and abroad by means of the dance. At the same time, however, it seeks to be a pioneer in Art, as much in dance as in music and stage design” (italics mine). In the late 1960s, Manou’s group had started to perform a complete ballet called The Birds, based on her choreography for Koun’s original production (Manou, passim). Chatzidakis also turned his musical contribution into an autonomous performance. 37. Clogg, Concise History, 118–19. Metaxas’ imitation of the Western European fascist models of Hitler and Mussolini came to an abrupt end following the Italian ultimatum of 28 October 1940 demanding free passage through Greece to Africa, which occasioned the dictator’s legendary reply of Ochi, “No!” The Greek army was successful at repelling the ensuing Italian invasion, and it even launched a counterattack into Albania. Metaxas himself died about two months before the Germans invaded Greece in April 1941. 38. Leontis, 124. 39. Gourgouris, 140–51. 40. On modern Greek populism, its rhetoric, and its relationship with the Demoticist and modernist movement, see Leontis, 184–88. Of particular interest is her claim that the conspiratory narrative of the Greek populist discourse typically set a doctrine of productive roots against the supposed deadlock of Westernization. 41. Koun’s first treatment of the Birds was inspired by a 1929 production of the same comedy by Spyros Melas (founder of an earlier Theatro Technes, in 1925) and Metsos Myrat, who then directed the Free Stage Company (Eleuthere Skene) of Marika Kotopoule. Melas, in turn, had modeled his Birds on a 1928 Parisian production of Charles Dullin, a satirical revue (adapted by B. Zimmer) that he had himself attended at the Th´eaˆ tre de l’Atelier, but that also became a topic of discussion in Athenian critical circles (Sideres, Ancient Theater, 385, 398–402). Thus Koun had indirectly been exposed to Dullin’s modernist stage technique and to his vision of th´eatre ˆ du peuple, i.e., the ideal of creating (leftist) politicized popular drama, which Koun reiterated in the Greek notion and practice of his la¨ıkos Aristophanes. 42. The Western craving for rebetic music, song, and dance was greatly boosted following the 1960 release of the film Never on Sunday, starring Melina Mercouri; its musical score won Chatzidakis an Oscar. Another boom of rem-

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petika swept throughout Greece and Western Europe after the 1965 appearance of the popular movie Zorba the Greek, with music by Theodorakes. But the increasing commercialization of all bouzouki tunes signaled the gradual death of this original folk genre. See the studies listed in the bibliography by Cowan, Holst-Warhaft, Papandreou, Petropoulos, and Torp. Petropoulos was thrown in jail by the junta for publishing his pioneering study and anthology of rebetic songs. 43. Koun is quoted and translated by Bacopoulou-Halls, “Revival: Greece,” 281. 44. Sevastikoglou, 659–65. 45. Sideres, “Neugriechische Theater,” 38–39. 46. Koun’s statement is quoted in its entirety in the comprehensive 1993 Athens Festival brochure (English edition, published by the Greek National Tourist Organization), 156–60. 47. On the symbolic, mystical role of the Aegean sunlight in the language of modernist aestheticism, see Leontis, 125, 128; Tziovas, Greek Modernism, 4. 48. Horton, “Aristophanic Spirit.” 49. Koun is quoted in M. Thermou, “Karolos Koun, the Man Who ‘Liberated’ Aristophanes,” Ta Nea, 4 August 1985; H. Petase, “Thesmophoriazusae with Karaghiozes and the . . . ‘Cursed Snake’!” To Vema, 30 July 1985. 50. In tragedy, Koun felt most attracted to Aeschylus, all of whose plays he staged except for the Suppliants: Libation-Bearers (1945), Persians (1965), Seven against Thebes (1975), Oresteia (1980), and Prometheus Bound (1983). Koun produced two tragedies of Sophocles as well: Oedipus Rex (1969) and Electra (1984). In the 1930s, he put on the Cyclops and the Alcestis of Euripides, and, in the late 1970s, his Bacchae (1977) and Troades (1979). See also BacopoulouHalls, “Revival: Greece,” 284. 51. Koun, interview by Maronites, 48. 52. Lazanes is quoted in H. Petase, “The Acharnians Are the Hit of the Festivals,” To Vema, 21 July 1985. 53. Leontis, 130. Against the background of late 1970s’ electoral politics, Andreas Papandreou, leader of the center/left PASOK party, countered Karamanles’ motto, “Greece belongs to the West,” with the nationalist slogan “Greece belongs to the Greeks” (Clogg, Concise History, 179). On the discursive history of populism and the signifiers of populist-inspired Greek nationalism, see Leontis, 184–88. 54. Cf. K. Georgousopoulos, “Undocumented Bubbles/Babbles,” Ta Nea, 2 September 1997, written in the heat of the renewed debate on modern Greek ownership of the classics generated by Matthias Langhoff’s staging of Euripides’ Bacchae in Thessalonike. Georgousopoulos lists examples of long-standing Greek openness to foreign stage interpretations, critical analyses, and printed editions of—typically, almost exclusively—ancient tragedy. But according to Savvas Patsalides, Georgousopoulos has himself been one of the most staunch defenders of modern Greek proprietorship of classical drama and has thus exerted a baleful influence on other critics as on the general public opinion (Tensions and Dissentions, 19). 55. Leontis, 125 and passim.

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56. Koun, interview by Maronites, 48. 57. MacKinnon, 172. 58. Koun, interview by Maronites, 46–47. 59. See, among other studies, Goldhill, 167–222; J. Henderson, “The Demos and the Comic Competition”; Redfield. 60. Georgousopoulos, Keys and Codes 1:118–19. 61. Koun, Social Position, 20–21. 62. Admittedly, Lazanes, who was being groomed as one of the Art Theater’s heirs, put on his Knights (1979) and Wasps (1981) during that long interval. In both stagings, the hand of the “master” was clearly present. 63. A noteworthy exception is the 1978 musical version of Karaghiozes and the Frogs, issued on record by the puppeteer Eugenios Spathares. This Karaghiozes-style adaptation of Aristophanes’ Frogs made fun of both Mikes Theodorakes and Manos Chatzidakis, the famous rival composers of postwar Greece. The comedy’s literary agon between the ancient tragedians was transformed into a very personal, politicized debate between Aischylakes and Euripidakes, representing Theodorakes and Chatzidakis, respectively. The diminutive suffix -akes added to the classical playwrights’ names both alluded to and belittled the modern artists as being inferior to their ancient counterparts. The reworked agon further used tunes and lines from the best-known works of both composers to emphasize the differences between their musical styles and temperaments. But after Aischylakes/Theodorakes had (literally and metaphorically) beaten Euripidakes, both artists had to stay in Hades on the orders of Pluto. Upon this unexpected finale, Xanthias/Karaghiozes and the Greek Minister Dionysus, whose mission of bringing one of them back to life had now failed, consoled themselves by pointing to the musical responsibilities of living composers. Thus the show ended not only with the implicit claim that by the late seventies, the music of Theodorakes and Chatzidakis essentially belonged to the past (or to the dead), but also with a critical comment on active Greek composers, who had yet to fulfill the high expectations weighing on them. 64. Holst-Warhaft, Theodorakis, 214–15; Papandreou, 124. The modern Greek writer and Aristophanic translator Kostas Tachtses attacked the commercialization of the rempetika in two essays included in his work My Grandma Athens (1979). 65. Varveres, Theater Criticism 2:63–64. 66. H. Vakalopoulou, “Aristophanes Pushed over the Edge,” Thessalonike, 10 August 1984. 67. Makres, review of Peace, 1237. 68. Bacopoulou-Halls, “Revival: Greece,” 279. 69. Makres, review of Knights, 1387. See also Kokkore, passim. 70. Leontis, passim, identifies populism and the metaphysics of landscape as two effective strategies by which Greek modernism recaptured elements of classical culture from their appropriation by purists. She also warns of the difficulties inherent in combining populist intentions and artistic autonomy. 71. According to Kougioumtzes, Koun was dissatisfied with the critics’ response to the Frogs and chose not to stage any repeat performances of the play after the following year. Kougioumtzes is quoted by V. Angelikopoulos, “A . . .

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‘Wimp’ in Ancient Athens,” To Vema, 9 August 1992. Koun’s heir, who revived the Frogs in 1992, claimed that the “master” saw problems particularly with the avant-garde music of Giannes Chrestou. During his short career, Chrestou transformed the whole concept of scores for revival theater by drawing from heterogeneous sources of modern and folk music. Of course, Koun’s reported reason does not rule out underlying political motives. Junta censorship must also have discouraged repetitions after 1967. 72. Dromazos, Ancient Drama, 156. 73. See “Frogs Still in the Political Swim.” 74. Euangelatos, interviews by author, spring 1994. 75. Vournas is quoted in Tachtses, Aristophanes’ “Lysistrata,” “Frogs,” xvi. 76. On the intertextual nature of the classical parabasis, see Hubbard. 77. Papadopoulos 7:140. 78. Chalas, 12–13; references to this pamphlet will hereafter be parenthetical in the text. 79. While controlling cultural life via censorship laws, Metaxas, unlike the colonels, favored the Demotic language (Beaton, 322). His vision of the “Third Hellenic Civilization” was influenced by the modernist aesthetic principle of hellenikoteta. In this admittedly far less dogmatic ideal of Hellenicity, earlier exponents of the Generation of the Thirties had endeavored to assimilate classicizing Western-style Hellenism, on the one hand, and a more or less stylized, traditionalist Romiosyne, on the other. In its doctrinal, state-nationalist variant, however, hellenikoteta urged Greek artists to re-create the diachronic local patrimony in order to enhance the perception of transhistorical Hellenic culture both domestically and internationally. It was not surprising that the officially declared quest for a harmonious integration of multiple Hellenic legacies rediscovered Aristophanes. Inherited from pagan antiquity, transmitted via Byzantine and postByzantine learning, and imbued with the purism as well as the Demoticism of recent decades, Aristophanes incorporated all strata of Greek civilization throughout the ages. This was essentially the 1930s tenor attached to Koun’s early student productions of the classical playwright, but it was no less part of the subsequent reappropriation of the Plutus by the official cultural doctrine of Metaxas. See also Leontis, 90–92. 80. Close, 47. 81. See Segal, xii, xv. For a recent return to the topical-political treatment, see Vickers. CHAPTER 5 FRAMING, CLOWNING,

AND

CLONING ARISTOPHANES

1. Van Dyck, 105, 125. 2. Ibid., 110. 3. On the term “undecidability,” see ibid., 2 n. 1. 4. See, e.g., Varikas, 27–31, 331–34. On Varikas as a critic, see L. Polites, 329–30. 5. Trypanis, “Modern Productions of Ancient Dramas.” 6. Constantinidis, “Modern Greek Drama,” 2, 4.

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7. Part of the 1927 Prometheus production was filmed (MacKinnon, 43–48). 8. Constantinidis, “Classical Greek Drama,” 27–29; Macintosh, 305–9; Sideres, Ancient Theater, 347–445. 9. See further Anton and the special issue of Eos on Palmer Sikelianou. 10. See Karantinos, Ancient Comedy, which prints the lecture he delivered prior to the opening of the Clouds. The company’s final acceptance of Attic comedy, even in ultra-conservative guise, was not to be taken for granted. In To Vema on 14 November 1951, in “[Taking] the Children to the Clouds,” P. Palaiologos protested the idea of taking secondary school children to watch the Clouds. He blamed the Greek state for supporting, via the National Theater, the kopromanes (scatologist), vomolochos, and sycophant of antiquity. To similar critical protest, Karzes had brought the ill-reputed Lysistrata to the Herodes Atticus Theater earlier in 1951. He cast the renowned actress Kyvele (Adrianou, 1887–1978) in the title part, however. The appearance of this grande dame of the Greek stage, who had distinguished herself in leading female roles of native and European drama, dampened some of the controversy over the play. Karzes’ production gained as much prestige from its main actress as from its reliance on historical origins and archaeological setting. 11. See, e.g., Lignades, “Brief Venture,” and Thrylos. 12. Solomos made his first appearance as a stage director in New York in 1947. For his claims to an Aristophanic reading all his own, see There Is Theater, 44. 13. For the similar though more arbitrary technique of Demetrakopoulos, see chapter 3. 14. Staurou, 27. 15. In a career spanning six decades, the dynamic Nezer played key roles in all eleven plays of Attic comedy. 16. In a most ironic twist of history, the National’s 1974 Lysistrata, scheduled for 20 and 21 July at Epidaurus, was canceled because of the general mobilization in the prospect of war with Turkey. In other words, the drama of life, calling Greek men to real war, overtook the drama of Aristophanes. On 20 July 1974, Turkey invaded the northern part of Cyprus. The regime of the colonels fell three days later. Karamanles then returned to Greece from exile in France to oversee the restoration of democratic, civilian government. 17. Patrikios, 159. 18. Georgousopoulos, Keys and Codes 1:122, went so far as to call Solomos’ Aristophanes a “polished anti-Aristophanes.” 19. T. Lignades, “Handsome Restoration of an Old Production,” He Kathemerine, 9 July 1986. 20. Solomos, Living Aristophanes, 11. This edition is hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 21. A reference to Plato’s Symposium, in which Aristophanes appears as a character. 22. Van Dyck, 84, points out that opponents of the junta embraced the visual culture—especially films, cartoons, and comic strips—which they deemed particularly resistant to censorship. 23. Murtagh, 117; Van Dyck, 25, 104. 24. Ladas is quoted by Clogg, in Clogg and Yannopoulos, 42.

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25. Van Steen, “Censorship.” 26. Starting 18 January 1974, and issued in thirty-seven weekly installments, Kyr’s strip continued through the return to democracy in late July of the same year. See Van Dyck, 106–14. 27. Horton, Soviet Film Satire, 11. 28. These last include the children’s series issued by S. Zarampouka and the popular comic strips of the 1980s published by T. Apostolides and G. Akokalides. See further Antoniou; Grammatas, “Transcription”; and He Kathemerine, 2 August 1998 (special issue on comics). 29. Quoted from Charalampous’ note in the English-language brochure accompanying the productions staged at the International Meeting of Ancient Greek Drama at Delphi in 4–25 June 1985. 30. The censors’ suspicions were far from surprising, since Tsampoulas’ production mirrored a Greek-German staging of the Knights, directed by the expatriate Stauros Douphexes, that had a strong anti-junta punch. It opened in Nuremberg in October 1967, i.e., a few months after the colonels had seized power. Douphexes transformed the knights into the long-haired intellectuals of the hippie and beat culture detested by the junta dictators. With the transformation of the chorus came a new parabasis, which warned against the demagoguery and political agitation of the Paphlagonian-Cleon-Papadopoulos, all consolidated in one repudiated character. See Flashar, 211–13; Trilse, 238–47. 31. See the playbill and “The Theatrical Workshop of Thessalonike.” 32. Actor Nikos Vrettos, quoted in G. Sykka, “The Knights Galloped at the Speed of the Elections,” He Kathemerine, 27 August 1989. Other personal gibes in Chronopoulos’ Knights did not escape the public’s notice either. The actor Dionyses Kalos (alias Paphlagon) ridiculed Andreas Papandreou by imitating his voice and vocabulary, including his overuse of the word “tha . . . ,” the otherwise innocuous constituent of the modern Greek future tense. But applied to the soon to be eclipsed prime minister, this repeated tha suggested a lot of promising but not delivering, as when the actor-manager Thymios Karakatsanes joked in his Clouds of the election year 1985: “I want to be the best of all the Greeks at saying ‘tha . . .’ ” 33. Patsalides, “Greek Women Dramatists,” 98. For a less optimistic view of women’s presence among Greek theater practitioners, see Sakellaridou. 34. Note that a few mistakes crept into Patsalides’ brief mention (“Greek Women Dramatists,” 98) of the Thesmophoriazusae of Antoniade: the production dates not from 1984, but from two years earlier, and it was staged not with the National Theater but, significantly, with the State Theater of Northern Greece. 35. For reviews and criticism of Antoniade’s production, see “The Actors ‘Acted Up’ in the Thesmophoriazusae,” He Kathemerine, 31 August 1982; H. Petase, “About . . . Organs and Waters,” To Vema, 29 August 1982; Th. D. Phrankopoulos, review of Thesmophoriazusae; M. Thermou, “A Contemporary Woman Directs Aristophanes,” He Kathemerine, 10 June 1982; Varveres, Theater Criticism 1:158. On the 1986 production, see T. Lignades, “With the Alibi of Rock [’n’ Roll],” He Kathemerine, 7 September 1986; H. Varopoulou, “Electra and Clouds,” To Vema, 31 August 1986; Varveres, Theater Criticism 2:136–37. 36. Savvopoulos, interview by P. Grivas, 24.

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37. Holst-Warhaft, Theodorakis, 217–18; Sifakis, 65–68. Kapnismeno tsoukali, which literally means “Blackened Pot,” is the title of one of Ritsos’ overtly political poems. The music to which this poem is recited was by Ch. Leontes. It was also Leontes whom Koun, turning down Savvopoulos, had asked to contribute to his 1976 Acharnians. Leontes then fused his own choral songs and musical scores of five Aristophanic productions into one concert titled Exodus of Aristophanes (1993). 38. Holst-Warhaft, Theodorakis, 5. 39. Holst-Warhaft, “Savvopoulos’ Acharneis.” 40. H. Varopoulou, “Ecclesiazusae of Aristophanes, by the National Theater at Epidaurus,” To Vema, 1 August 1993, uses the English word “soft.” 41. In the early 1990s, against the background of resurgent nationalism in the Balkans and of Greece’s strained relations with its northern neighbors, Kollatos raised a storm of protest with his plan to stage an anti-Catholic production of Aristophanes’ Peace in Skopje, in which he intended to refute all non-Greek claims to Macedonia. 42. Karakatsanes is quoted in M. Valyndras, “Clouds and Cloudings,” Eikones, 3 June 1985. 43. G. Saregiannes, “Festival Too,” Ta Nea, 25 September 1993. 44. On the modern Athenian public, see, e.g., Tinkiles. On the ancient Greek audience, see Csapo and Slater, 290; Wallace. 45. From about 447 B.C.E. on, a prize was awarded to actors at the Great Dionysia and, shortly afterward, to comic actors at the Lenaea. The significance of the actor continued to grow and was enhanced by the postclassical practice of reperformance, which essentially removed the original poet-director from prize consideration. See Csapo and Slater, 39–40. 46. Skourtes’ rendition adequately covered the two spiritual worlds represented in the Clouds: Karakatsanes, cut out for the part of a rustic-la¨ıkos Strepsiades, spoke the very popular language of the median Greek, whereas the “intelligentsia” of Socrates’ circle conversed in a Kathareuousa-inspired jargon, incomprehensible to the baffled protagonist. 47. H. Varopoulou, “Knights and Clouds,” To Vema, 27 August 1989; and “Ecclesiazusae of Aristophanes.” 48. V. Demou, “The Alibi of Aristophanes,” Hena, 18 September 1991. In Eleutherotypia, 18 July 1988, Thodoros Kretikos rightly observed that 1988 was an unusually slow year for Aristophanic productions (“Knights and Ecclesiazusae at the Lycabettus”). This may be related to the recent death of Koun and to the lack of his strong lead, which together brought a temporary sense of loss and impotence not only to the master’s successors at the Art Theater but also to other Greek interpreters of Attic comedy. EPILOGUE 1. See further G. Chatzedakes, “Abuse of Aristophanes,” Kyriakatike, 30 July 1995. 2. Flashar, 209–11.

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Index

Acharnians, 62, 64, 66, 145, 172, 213, 219, 226, 227, 229, 237n.15, 242n.40, 243n.65, 248n.13; of Koun, 145, 159, 172–74, 188, 218–19, 226, 227, 229, 257n.37; of Raptarches, 63–68; of Savvopoulos, 218–19 Acropolis, 71, 83, 88, 102, 126, 246n.99, 250n.32 Aeschylus, 45, 46, 50, 113, 115, 138, 160, 165, 178, 194, 196, 203, 243n.65, 246n.87, 249n.22, 252n.50, 253n.63 agon, 10, 203, 253n.63 Albania, 130, 251n.37 Alexandria, 97, 234n.13, 245n.74. See also Egypt Alkaios, Th., 47 Amphi-Theater. See Euangelatos anachronism, 8, 60–62, 65, 66–67, 69, 70, 80, 88, 92, 103, 105, 124, 130, 142, 143, 144, 151, 156, 164, 171, 172, 175, 179, 184, 200, 201, 218, 243n.65 Anastasopoulos, N., 77 Anatolia, 49, 79, 103, 124, 153, 156, 157, 169, 172, 202, 240n.23. See also Asia Minor Anderson, B., 74, 132–33, 232n.5 Anninos, B., 108 antifeminism, 76, 80, 81, 89, 90, 91, 97, 100–102, 108, 111, 112, 117, 119, 120–21, 240n.17 Antoniade, K., 214, 226, 227, 256nn.34 and 35 Aperges, A., 96–97, 236n.12 Apostolou, K., 226, 227, 228 aprosdoketon, 8, 90, 203 archaeology, 7, 54, 71, 72, 92, 94, 115, 160, 162, 163, 197, 198, 213, 241n.28, 255n.10 Aristero-phanes, 131–32, 185 Aristotle, 26, 27, 233n.5, 234n.18, 238n.37, 249n.22 Arone, M., 201 Art Theater. See Koun Asia Minor, 79, 153, 156, 188, 239n.6, 246n.105. See also Anatolia

Athens Festival. See festivals Athens Theater (Boukouras Theater), 50, 55, 238nn. 27 and 44 Athens Theater Museum, 76, 77 Athens University, 54, 102, 113, 118, 128, 232n.10, 237n.19 Attic (dialect), 15, 22–23, 29, 31, 34, 35, 36, 62 Atticism, 21, 22 Augeres, M., 104, 243n.65 authenticity, 9, 13, 41, 46, 47, 71, 72, 80, 115, 116, 136, 145, 162, 163, 164, 165, 168, 173–74, 175, 176, 177, 178, 189, 194, 197, 198– 99, 217, 235n.18 Babylonians, 248n.13 Bakas, K., 148, 226, 227, 250n.30 Bakhtin, 13 Balkans, 5, 170, 181, 237n.16, 257n.41 ban, 4, 15, 47, 126, 127, 129, 131, 133, 135, 147, 168, 200, 205, 248n.9, 249n.22. See also censorship Bate, W. J., 222 Beaton, R., 231n.9, 233nn. 6 and 9 Besson, B., 229 Birds, 69, 70, 109, 121, 142, 226, 227, 229, 231nn. 5 and 6, 235n.29, 247n.2, 251n.36; of Demetrakopoulos, 104, 105, 109, 244n.66; of Koun, 3, 15, 124–50, 152, 156, 157, 159, 168, 169, 178, 184–85, 191, 192, 198, 200, 208, 226, 229, 251nn. 36 and 41; of Messalas, 141, 143, 227; of Michaelides, 141–42, 226, 227, 250n.27; of Solomos, 142–43, 227 Bloom, H., 222 Bolshevism, 119, 182, 184 Bost, M. (Bostantzoglou), 206, 207 Boukouras Theater. See Athens Theater Brecht, B., 160, 216 Britain, 18, 54, 66, 67, 128, 167, 192, 231n.4, 244n.67, 248n.9, 249n.22. See also London Brook, P., xii Bulgaria, 118, 237n.16 Byron, 81, 82, 87

276

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Byzantium, 11, 12, 17, 18, 19, 22, 33, 35, 36, 49, 51, 74, 77, 113, 118, 125, 152, 153, 155, 156, 164, 228, 234n.13, 254n.79 canon, 8, 9, 11, 12, 21–23, 30–33, 35, 37, 40, 41, 62, 64, 122, 133, 145, 171, 195, 235n.18 cartoons, 134, 135, 136, 137, 206–7, 255n.22 censorship, 4, 9, 47, 52, 54, 94, 95, 108, 114, 120, 122, 127, 143, 234n.17, 241n.31; and colonels, 139, 142, 144, 172, 173, 181, 202, 203, 204–6, 211, 212, 216, 219, 226, 234n.17, 249nn. 22 and 23, 250n.24, 254n.71, 255n.22, 256n.30; and Koraes, 32, 33–34, 35, 36; and Koun’s Birds, 125, 126, 133; under Metaxas and Nazi Occupation, 157, 158, 247–48n.9, 254n.79; as selfcensorship, 172, 243n.55, 243– 44n.65, 249n.23; and women, 95–96, 103. See also ban Center Union Party, 130, 226 Chalas, A. Ph., 182–85 Charalampous, N., 148, 210, 226, 227, 250n.30 Chat Noir, 107, 110, 111 Chatzedakes, G., 243n.61 Chatzepantazes, Th., 232n.10, 245n.84 Chatzidakis, M., 124, 156, 157, 169, 201, 249n.22, 251n.36, 251–52n.42, 253n.63 Chortatses, G., 157 chorus, 8, 13, 49, 51, 62, 64, 70, 109, 114, 115, 136–37, 138, 150, 156, 160, 179, 198, 218, 237n.13, 245n.72, 256n.30, 257n.37 Chourmouzes, M., 15, 50–52, 54, 55–63, 64, 65, 66, 68, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 92, 183, 236–37n.13 Chourmouzios, A., 196 Chrestomanos, K., 102–3, 110, 115, 194, 243nn. 60 and 61 Christianity, 17, 19, 31, 32, 36, 51, 95, 126, 155, 156, 177, 205, 236n.7, 239n.6, 241n.36, 249n.22 Christodoulou, G., 76, 78, 79 Christopoulos, A., 46 Chronopoulos, D., 213–14, 226, 227, 256n.32

class, middle, 27, 49, 51, 52, 57, 59, 73, 74, 93, 100, 104, 107, 109, 112, 114, 117, 119, 120, 150, 170, 175, 187, 188, 192, 193, 239n.7; upper, 40, 41, 43, 47, 48, 49, 59, 74, 99, 114, 117, 170, 192, 201 Cleon, 25, 26, 126, 131, 247n.7, 248n.13, 256n.30 Close, D. H., 183, 246–47n.107 Clouds, 16–17, 24, 36, 37, 148, 182, 214, 226, 227, 228–29, 231n.5, 233n.1, 242n.40, 243n.55; of Euangelatos, 215, 226, 227; of Karakatsanes, 220, 221, 226, 227, 256n.32, 257n.46; of Karantinos, 197, 226, 255n.10; of Rankaves, 7, 55, 56, 68–72, 73, 74, 94, 114, 115, 119, 198; of Soures, 73, 91–95, 96, 97, 98, 101, 102, 103, 111, 112, 113, 115, 116, 121, 138, 240n.22, 240–41n.25, 241n.33, 243n.53 colonels. See dictatorship: junta; Papadopoulos Com´edie Fran¸caise, 48 comics, 210, 255n.22, 256nn. 26 and 28 commercialization, 4, 96–97, 143, 175, 190, 202–3, 206, 208–9, 210, 220, 221, 228, 252n.42, 253n.64 communism, 99, 100, 120, 127, 128, 129, 131–32, 140, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 238n.32, 242n.46, 248–49n.20, 250n.25 Communist Party of Greece, 128, 206 Comp`ere, 82, 85, 88, 89 Constantinidis, S. E., 232n.9, 239n.7 Constantinople, 18, 50, 51, 57, 58, 59, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 96, 177, 236nn. 7 and 12, 237n.25 constitution, 61, 132, 244n.66 continuity, claim to, 10, 11, 12, 14, 20, 21, 34, 44, 70, 71, 95, 99, 103, 113, 116, 152, 153, 155, 159, 161, 162, 163, 164, 170, 177–78, 187–88, 204 Cornford, F. M., 238n.37 courtesans, 110, 111 Crete, 77, 89, 157, 232n.10, 235n.29, 248n.9 cynicism, 218–19, 220 Cyprus Theater Organization, 142, 166, 226, 227 Cyprus, 96, 148, 214, 226, 227, 255n.16

Index Damianakou, V., 131–32, 185 Delphi, 2, 194, 256n.29. See also festivals Demetrakopoulos, P. T., 76, 92, 96, 97, 100, 102, 103–6, 107, 108, 109, 110– 11, 112, 115, 116, 120, 121, 243n.55, 244n.66, 255n.13 Demetriades, Ph., 135, 136. See also cartoons democracy, 4, 6, 15, 16, 17, 18, 23, 24, 26, 28, 29, 30, 45, 46, 56, 61, 125, 126, 130, 132, 140, 149, 158, 179, 180, 197, 209, 210, 219, 242n.42, 248n.9, 255n.16, 256n.26 Demopoulos, M., 78 Demosthenes, 29, 30, 46, 236n.7 Demoticism, 39, 43, 44, 49, 92, 112, 113, 115, 116, 117, 120, 132, 139, 153, 155, 162, 164, 165, 174, 177, 178, 200, 201, 235n.2, 244n.66, 246n.97, 251n.40, 254n.79 diaspora, Greek communities of the, 11, 18, 19, 34, 40, 45, 46, 78, 100, 114, 138, 233n.6, 236n.3 “Diatribe of a Greek,” 45–46, 236n.5 dictatorship, 61; junta, 15, 138–40, 142, 144, 149, 159, 172, 173, 176, 180, 181–82, 190, 195, 197, 201, 202, 204– 8, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 216, 218, 219, 226, 229, 240n.21, 248n.20, 249n.22, 250nn. 24 and 27, 252n.42, 254nn. 71 and 79, 255nn. 16 and 22, 256n.30. See also Papadopoulos; of Metaxas, 154–55, 157, 158, 182–85, 228, 238n.32, 247–48n.9, 248n.20, 251n.37, 254n.79. See also Metaxas Dionysia, 16, 118, 248n.13, 257n.45 Dionysus Theater, 71, 102, 118 Dolan, J., 239n.8 Donnay, M., 110–12 Doukas, N., 37–38, 235n.29 Douphexes, S., 256n.30 Dover, K. J., 36, 234n.17, 235n.28 Dracoulides, N. N., 185–86 Dullin, C., 251n.41 EAM (National Liberation Front), 127, 128, 242n.46, 249n.20. See also Resistance EC (European Community), 129, 227 Ecclesiazusae, 39, 40, 60, 70, 78, 91, 100, 184, 220, 226, 227, 228, 238n.33,

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250n.25; of Chrestomanos, 102–3, 243n.62; of Euangelatos, 215, 216, 226, 227; of Solomos, 198, 200, 201, 202, 216, 226, 227; of the transvestites, 76, 78, 104, 105, 106 Edmunds, L., 232n.4, 247n.7 effeminacy, 79, 80, 86, 87, 111, 112, 121, 217 Egypt, 96, 97. See also Alexandria elections, 61, 89, 128, 129, 130, 143, 214, 226, 227, 228, 242n.46, 250n.27, 252n.53, 256n.32 Eliot, T. S., 160, 249n.22 elitism, 3, 13, 19, 26, 40, 41, 44, 48, 53, 71, 75, 96, 103, 117, 120, 122, 132, 178, 220 Elytis, O., 168 encyclopedians, 34–35, 65, 75, 77 Enlightenment, 10, 11, 15, 17, 18–20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 31, 33, 34, 36, 37, 38, 39, 45, 46, 53, 55, 67, 72, 95, 233n.10, 235n.20 Epidaurus. See festivals epitheorese. See revue Erasmus, 235n.28; Erasmian pronunciation, 118 ethnicity, 10, 11, 12, 20, 34, 86, 118, 153, 155, 164, 178, 187, 215, 230, 240n.14, 246n.105 ethnikophrosyne, 131–32, 248–49n.20 Euangelatos, S. (Amphi-Theater), 15, 139, 179–80, 192, 202, 215–18, 226, 227 Euripides, 45, 46, 48, 50, 66, 102, 115, 140, 141, 160, 165, 166, 182, 196, 203, 219, 228, 229, 249n.22, 252nn. 50 and 54, 253n.63 Exarchos, D., 213, 226, 227 Fallmerayer, J., 155 farce, 23, 27, 169, 171, 216 fascism, 127, 132, 155, 182, 183, 251n.37 feminism, 4, 80, 86, 90, 91, 93, 97, 99– 102, 108, 110, 112, 119, 120, 121, 206, 214, 219, 239nn. 7 and 8, 240n.18 festivals, 6, 33, 125, 138–39, 141, 144, 166, 167, 172, 177, 187, 193, 194–96, 202, 210, 214, 219, 220, 221, 222, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229, 231n.6, 248n.13; Athens Festival, 15, 124, 125, 126, 130, 135, 138, 157, 158, 166,

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festivals (cont.) 167, 178, 194, 195, 197, 198, 219, 225, 252n.46; Classical Greek Drama Festival, 194; Delphic Festivals, 194; Epidaurus Festival, 15, 135, 138, 142, 144, 145, 166, 167, 175, 176, 194, 195, 197, 198, 199, 203, 213, 214, 220, 222, 225, 243n.55, 255n.16 film, 147, 160, 166, 179, 206, 209, 210, 216, 236n.12, 239n.11, 249n.22, 251– 52n.42, 255nn. 7 and 22 finances, 7, 49, 50, 51, 82, 97, 101, 104, 105, 107, 111, 114, 115, 117, 127, 139, 187, 194, 195, 196, 203, 204, 220, 222, 241n.33, 243n.60, 246n.90 folklore, 112, 113, 117, 152–53, 155, 171, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 198, 209, 211, 242n.40 foreigners, 8–9, 63, 67–68, 116, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166–67, 177, 190 Foucault, 9, 145 France, 18, 20, 57, 58, 59, 63, 64, 66, 67, 98–99, 107, 117–18, 130, 161, 255n.16; drama and spectacle from, 45, 47, 48, 49, 54, 55, 57, 64, 69, 78, 80, 81–82, 106–7, 110–12, 114, 117–18, 121, 218, 241n.36, 244nn. 66 and 67, 245n.68; novels from, 57, 58–59, 63, 64, 68; theory from, 17, 23, 26, 34, 235nn. 18 and 20. See also Koraes: and the French; Paris French Revolution, 18 Frogs, 36, 52, 53, 148, 179, 226, 227, 229, 231n.5, 253n.63; of Euangelatos, 179–80, 181, 185, 186, 211, 215, 226, 227; of Koun, 127, 157, 159, 178–80, 185, 186, 211, 226, 253–54n.71; of Solomos, 198, 203, 226, 227; of the transvestites, 105 Gavrielides, E., 142, 226, 227 gaze, 87; civic, 6, 13; male, 79, 80, 87, 95, 108, 239n.8, 244n.67 Generation of the Thirties, 152, 154–55, 177, 254n.79 George I, King, 54, 238n.47 Georgousopoulos, K., 174, 192, 252n.54, 255n.18 Germany, 18, 51, 54–55, 70, 72, 127, 132, 158, 161, 177, 182, 183, 196,

229, 242n.46, 244n.67, 245nn. 68 and 77, 247n.9, 251n.37, 256n.30 Goethe, xiii Goldoni, 47, 57 Gomme, A. W., 186 Goudi, Bourgeois Revolt of, 119 Gourgouris, S., 234nn.14 and 16, 235n.20 Great Idea, 118, 246n.105 Greek Folk Expressionism. See Koun Greek National Tourist Organization, 166, 195, 225, 252n.46 Greek Rally, 128, 226 Greek Report, 249n.22 Hades, 52, 53, 253n.63 Hall, E., 232n.10 Hall, P., 167 “hedonist theater,” 77, 78, 81, 86, 90, 91, 103, 104, 111–12 Hellene, 10, 12, 21, 23, 32, 38, 123, 155 Hellenicity, 128, 154–55, 168, 184, 187, 248n.11, 251n.35, 254n.79 Henderson, J. J., 151 Herodes Atticus Theater (Herodeion), 54, 55, 56, 68, 71, 114, 118, 124, 125, 166, 178, 194, 195, 198, 216, 222, 255n.10 Herodotus, 170 Herzfeld, M., 11 Hitler, 130, 182, 251n.37 Holst-Warhaft, G., 219 Homer, 58–59, 68, 160, 162, 233n.5, 240n.22, 245n.86 Homonoia Theater (Kotopoule Theater), 102, 108, 110, 245n.74 Horton, A. S., 208 Hubbard, T. K., 233n.10, 254n.76 humanism, 11, 15, 19, 20, 22, 31, 36, 228 Ibsen, 118 illusion, dramatic, 14, 180, 212, 218 immigrants, 79, 80, 153, 156, 246n.105 intertextuality, 141, 144, 148–50, 180, 203, 217, 218 irredentism, 118, 119, 153, 155, 237n.16, 246n.105 Isocrates, 29, 30, 233n.5 Italy, 18, 48, 70, 127, 132, 166, 182, 183, 235n.29, 251n.37; art forms from, 45, 47, 48, 55, 57, 64, 69, 114, 166, 240n.23, 241n.36

Index Jauss, H. R., 9, 232n.4 Jews, 125, 177 junta. See dictatorship; Papadopoulos Jusdanis, G., 251n.35 Kakleas, G., 222 Kakrides, Ph. I., 170, 235n.29 Kampanelles, I., 171 Karaghiozes, 13, 49, 96, 169–71, 172, 173, 174, 175–76, 178, 187, 199, 219, 239n.13, 240n.23, 253n.63 Karakatsanes, Th., 220–21, 226, 227, 250n.30, 256n.32, 257n.46 Karamanles, K., 125, 126, 127, 128–29, 130–31, 135, 140, 144, 185, 200, 226, 227, 252n.53, 255n.16 Karantinos, S., 197, 198–99, 200, 226, 255n.10 Kareze, J., 206 Karydes, S., 15, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54–56, 59–60, 63, 68, 69, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 92, 93, 183, 238n.27, 240n.24 Karzes, L., 197, 198–99, 200, 226, 255n.10 Kathareuousa, 20, 21, 34, 42, 43, 44, 48, 49, 50, 54, 55, 57, 58, 63, 64, 69, 70, 71, 72, 74, 75, 92, 100, 114, 117, 132, 133, 140, 155, 218, 233n.9, 257n.46 Kathareuousianoi, 112, 244n.66 Katseles, P., 130, 226 Kazakos, K., 206 Knights, 147, 211–12, 213–14, 226, 227, 229, 243n.65, 253n.62, 256nn. 30 and 32 Kolettes, I., 61 Kollatos, D., 220, 257n.41 komeidyllio, 49, 112, 117, 245n.84 Kommetas, S., 35, 38 Kontoglou, Ph., 155–56, 157 Koraes, A., 15, 16–42, 45, 104; and canon formation, 21–23, 30–33, 35, 37, 40, 41; and censorship, 32, 33–34, 35, 36; correspondence of, 18, 28, 29, 38; Dialogue of Two Greeks of, 32–33; and the French, 18, 19– 20, 23, 24–25, 26, 27, 29, 30, 33, 235n.18; Hellenic Library of, 18, 233n.5; and Hermes Ho Logios, 37, 45, 236n.5; Introductions to the Ancient Greek Authors (Prolegomena) of, 23–24, 25, 27, 28, 29, 34, 234nn.13, and 14; in the Korakistika, 39–40; lan-

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guage program of, 20– 23, 33, 34, 37, 38, 39, 40, 233n.9; as mentor and model, 34, 40–41, 64, 77, 117, 132; and the Peace, 37–39; and the Plutus, 15, 33–37, 234n.15 Kotopoule, M., 50, 78, 100, 110–12, 115, 245nn. 74 and 77, 251n.41; Kotopoule Theater. See Homonoia Theater Kotopoules, D., 50 Kougioumtzes, M., 145, 147, 148, 226, 227, 250n.30, 253–54n.71 Koun, K. (Art Theater), 15, 124–89, 190, 192, 195, 198, 199, 200, 202, 203, 204, 209, 211, 212, 213, 215, 226, 227, 229, 231n.7, 252n.50, 257n.48; at Athens College, 127, 156, 158, 197, 200, 228, 250n.30, 254n.79; Greek Folk Expressionism of, 152, 155–57, 158, 159–61, 167– 69, 173–74, 175, 176, 177, 178, 187, 188, 228; La¨ıke Skene of, 157– 58; students and successors of, 147–48, 158, 165, 174, 176, 197, 198, 200, 210, 214, 220, 250n.30, 253n.62, 257n.48 productions of: Acharnians, 145, 159, 172–74, 188, 218–19, 226, 227, 229, 257n.37; Birds, 3, 15, 124–50, 152, 156, 157, 159, 168, 169, 178, 184–85, 191, 192, 198, 200, 208, 226, 229, 251nn. 36 and 41; Frogs, 127, 157, 159, 178–80, 185, 186, 211, 226, 253–54n.71; Lysistrata, 139–40, 159, 205–6, 226; Peace, 159, 174, 175, 176, 188, 226, 227; Plutus, 56, 124, 127, 143, 156, 157, 159, 184, 198, 200, 226, 228; Thesmophoriazusae, 159, 175, 176, 226, 227 Kyr (I. Kyriakopoulos), 207, 256n.26 Kyros, K., 78, 105–6 Kyvele (Adrianou), 78, 91, 115, 240n.18, 255n.10 Ladas, I., 206 la¨ıkoteta, la¨ıkos, 152–54, 155, 156, 163, 164, 167, 168, 171, 174, 175– 78, 187–88, 190, 192, 199, 215, 251n.41, 257n.46 Lampros, M., 108 Lampsides, G. N., 241n.31 Language Question, 21, 33, 37, 43–44, 48, 75, 112, 113, 117, 132–33, 233n.9, 244n.66, 245n.81

280

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Index

laos, 155, 157, 163, 164, 168, 178, 188 Laskares, N., 241n.36 Lassanes, G., 46 Lazanes, G., 140, 144, 145, 147–48, 165, 172, 174, 178, 227, 250n.30, 253n.62 League of Greek Actors, 104, 244n.66 Left, leftist, 9, 13, 15, 99, 113, 119, 120, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131–32, 133, 135, 140, 141, 171, 178, 179, 180, 182, 183, 184, 185, 190, 205, 208, 209, 210–11, 219, 221, 232n.2, 243n.65, 247n.4, 248–49n.20, 249n.22, 251n.41, 252n.53; New Left, 210–11 Lenaea, 248n.13, 257n.45 Leninism, 100, 243n.65 Leontes, Ch., 219, 257n.37 Leontis, A., 21, 154, 165, 232nn. 6 and 8, 233–34n.10, 235n.2, 246nn. 99 and 105, 251n.40, 252nn. 47 and 53, 253n.70 Ley, G., xi Liberal Party, 89, 128 Lignades, T., 237n.13, 238n.27 literacy, 12, 18, 31, 40, 44, 99, 104, 132, 155, 242n.42 logiotatismos, logios, 37, 53, 56, 57, 73, 75, 77, 238n.17 London, 130, 138, 139, 200. See also Britain Lycabettus, 126, 138, 195 Lysistrata, 40, 77–78, 91, 100, 102, 108, 119, 148, 167, 190, 204–8, 209, 226, 227, 228, 231n.5, 235n.29, 242n.41, 245n.77; of Euangelatos, 215, 216–18, 226, 227; of Karakatsanes, 220, 221, 226, 227; of Karzes, 197, 226, 255n.10; of Kotopoule, 110–12, 245nn. 74 and 77; of Koun, 139–40, 159, 205–6, 226; of Solomos, 139, 141, 198, 199, 202, 203, 204, 206, 216, 226, 227, 255n.16; of the transvestites, 76–91, 92, 97, 104– 5, 112, 119, 120, 121–22, 187, 190, 198, 209, 216–17, 228 Macedonia, 118, 236n.7, 237n.16, 257n.41 malliarismos, malliaros, 105, 112, 244n.66 Maniadakes, K., 183 Manos Brothers, 78, 79 Manou, R., 124, 135, 168, 251n.36 manuscripts, 18, 234n.13

Manutius, A., 77, 235n.29 Marathon, 140, 240n.25 Marx, K., 60 Marxism, 99, 112, 120, 129, 132, 139, 140, 247n.107 masks, 13, 79, 95–96, 160, 165, 198, 214 Matesis, P., 216 Maureas, K., 82, 87, 89, 239nn. 11 and 14 Mauromoustakos, P., 232n.10 Melas, S., 251n.41 Menander, 16, 17, 27, 28, 36. See also New Comedy Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, F., 54 Mercouri, M., 249n.22, 250n.30, 251n.42 Messalas, G., 141, 143, 221, 227 Metastasio, P., 46 metatheater, metatheatricality, 9, 79, 87, 88, 143–45, 180, 191, 197, 209, 214, 217, 218 Metaxas, I., 154–55, 157, 158, 182–85, 228, 238n.32, 247–48n.9, 248n.20, 251n.37, 254n.79. See also dictatorship Metsotakes, K., 143, 214, 227 Michaelides, K., 141–42, 226, 227, 250n.27 Middle Ages, 28, 31, 33, 35, 36, 153, 156 Middle Comedy, 36, 51, 62, 234n.17 Miller, W., 76, 100 Minotes, A., 196 Mistriotes, G., 94, 102, 113, 115–18, 119, 122 Modern Theater. See Messalas Moli`ere, 20, 39, 47, 57, 140 Mourselas, K., 207–8 Mousouros, M., 77, 235n.29 multimedia, 4, 208, 209, 210, 230 Municipal Theater of Athens, 48, 91, 95, 103–4, 112, 118 Municipal Theater of Piraeus, 91 Murray, G., xi Muses, 54–55, 77, 88, 238n.38 music, 8, 54, 78, 79, 103, 107, 108, 124, 125, 129, 136, 145, 147, 153, 156, 157, 160, 168, 169, 188, 198, 200, 201, 202, 206, 216, 217, 218, 219, 235n.18, 249n.22, 251n.36, 253n.63, 254n.71, 257n.37; rebetic, 79, 103, 156–57, 175, 176, 187, 199, 201, 251– 52n.42, 253n.64 Mussolini, 182, 251n.37 Myrsiades, L. S., 236n.10, 240n.23

Index National Radical Union, 128, 226 National Theater of Greece, 96, 127, 137, 138, 139, 141, 142, 148, 158, 166, 172, 190, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196– 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 206, 209, 212, 213, 216, 220, 226, 227, 228, 243n.55, 247n.1, 255nn. 10 and 16, 256n.34 NATO, 129 naturalism, 103, 107, 112, 118, 140, 169, 178, 201, 243n.61 Nazism, 127, 132, 140, 158, 182, 183, 242n.46, 249n.22 neoclassicism, in drama, 11, 17, 26, 36, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 54, 55, 57, 70, 72, 114, 117 Neohellene, 20, 23, 37, 40 Neohellenism, 9, 11, 15, 19–20, 21, 22, 24, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 41, 43, 44, 47, 53, 65, 72, 75, 116, 117, 232n.6, 234n.14, 236n.7, 246n.99 Neroulos, I. R., 39–40 New Comedy, 16, 17, 27–28, 36, 51, 62, 234n.17. See also Menander New Democracy (Party), 143, 144, 213, 227 New Hellenic Stage. See Karakatsanes New Stage Company. See Chrestomanos newspapers and journals (Greek), 52, 53, 56, 57, 63, 68, 69, 77, 82, 91, 93, 94, 95, 97, 100, 101, 103, 110, 116, 120, 124, 125–27, 134, 135, 136–37, 154, 191, 192, 196, 206, 207, 231n.9, 235n.1, 236n.13, 239n.12, 240n.25, 244n.66, 246n.97, 247nn. 1, 3, 4, and 8, 250n.24; satirical, 52–54, 82, 90, 92, 93, 94, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 109, 121, 237n.18, 240nn. 21, 23, and 24, 243n.53 Nezer, Ch., 201, 255n.15 Nikolaras, A. D., 93 Nikoloude, Z., 135–36 Nirvanas, P., 94 Nitsos, K., 130, 192 Nord, P. (N. Nikola¨ıdes), 82, 87, 90, 239nn.10 and 12 Odessa, 18, 45, 46, 96, 236n.5 Odysseus, 58–59 Offenbach, J., 111 Oikonomos, K., 77 Oikonomou, Th., 75, 96, 113, 115

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281

Old Comedy, 3, 13, 14, 16, 27–28, 32, 51, 64, 65, 70, 78, 151, 157, 163, 174, 179, 180, 198, 211, 233n.10, 234n.17; playwrights (other than Aristophanes) of, 25, 27, 28, 211, 234n.17, 235n.19 Olympic Games, 50, 58, 246nn. 90 and 106 Oresteiaka, 113, 114, 115, 117. See also Mistriotes Orthodoxy, Orthodox Church, 11, 12, 45, 51, 125, 128, 133, 142, 144, 153, 155, 156, 169, 177, 206 Othello, 82, 84, 85, 87, 89, 240n.14. See also Shakespeare Otto I, King, 48, 51, 52, 54, 58, 60, 61, 66 Ottomans, 10, 11, 12, 18, 19, 21, 23, 39, 45, 46, 47, 49, 51, 63, 66, 73, 74, 118, 152, 153, 154, 155, 157, 164, 169, 170, 236n.6, 237nn. 16 and 19, 240n.25, 243n.58 Palamas, K., 43, 94, 112 Palles, A., 113, 240n.22, 245n.86 Palmer-Sikelianou, E., 194 Panathenaia revue, 108 Panathenaic Stadium, 118, 246n.106 Panhellenism, 38, 39, 126, 229 Papa Euthymiou, V. P., 34 Papadopoulos, G., 181–82, 249n.22, 250n.27, 256n.30. See also dictatorship: junta Papagos, A., 128, 226 Papaioannou, M. M., 236–37n.13 Papandreou, A., 143, 211, 214, 219, 227, 229, 250n.30, 252n.53, 256n.32 Papandreou, G., 130, 226 Paparouna revue, 82, 89, 239n.12 Paparregopoulos, K., 12, 153, 155 parabasis, 12–14, 65, 66, 70, 78, 178, 179, 180, 184, 211–12, 214, 218, 233nn. 10 and 1, 256n.30 Paraskeuopoulou, E., 103 paratragedy, 203, 214, 219, 228, 229 paravase, 13–14, 15, 16, 41, 43, 55, 62, 68, 74, 75, 76, 113, 121, 124, 134, 141, 180, 197, 208, 211, 218 Paris, 18, 48, 49, 107, 110–12, 114, 117– 18, 137, 177, 201, 244n.66, 245n.68, 251n.41. See also France parliament, 126, 214, 245n.81

282

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Index

parody, 79, 92, 100, 107, 110, 111, 125, 131, 141, 142, 144, 145, 203, 206, 219, 244n.66 Parren, K., 100, 101, 120, 243n.54 Parthenon, 102–3, 116, 243n.58, 246n.99 PASOK (Panhellenic Socialist Movement), 143, 211, 213, 214, 219, 222, 227, 252n.53 Patousas, I., 35 patriarchy, 81, 88, 90, 122, 205, 242n.41 Patrikios, T., 201 patriotism, 15, 21, 33, 39, 45, 46, 47, 48, 50, 54, 59, 61, 64, 67, 68, 69, 71, 73, 74, 97, 115, 117, 118, 119, 120, 131– 32, 133, 196, 249n.20 Patsalides, S., 231–32n.9, 252n.54, 256n.34 Paul, King, 130 Peace, 69, 70, 130–31, 145, 176, 215, 226, 227, 229, 231n.5, 243n.65, 257n.41; and Koraes, 37–39; of Koun, 159, 174, 175, 176, 188, 226, 227 Pegadiotes, P. P., 52–53, 93, 237n.18 performance, popular genres of, 32–33, 49, 57, 110 Pericles, 46, 71, 116, 240n.23, 248n.9 Perikletos, 93, 94, 98, 109, 240n.23 Perroquet Theater, 81 Phasoules, 93, 94, 97–98, 109, 240n.23 Phexes Library, 104, 243n.65 Philhellenism, 19, 35, 39, 138, 194 Philike Hetaireia, 46 Philippas, N. S., 184 Philopappos, 82–83, 84, 85, 87, 88, 89, 240n.15 Phrankiskos, E. N., 236n.5 Pikkolos, N., 46, 236n.7 Piraeus, 66, 67, 91, 238n.40 Pittake, R., 148, 250n.30 Plato, 6, 16, 17, 29, 31, 33, 60, 140, 214, 233n.5, 238n.33, 255n.21 Plautus, 36 Plorites, M., 192, 231n.4 Plutarch, 16, 24, 28, 233n.5, 235n.20 Plutus, 34–37, 44, 51, 65, 66, 75, 96, 148, 166, 183, 215, 226, 227, 228, 243n.65; of Chalas, 182–85, 238n.32, 254n.79; of Chourmouzes-Karydes, 15, 50–63, 66, 68, 69, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 92, 93, 96, 183, 236–37n.13, 238n.27; and Koraes, 15, 33–37,

234n.15; of Koun, 56, 124, 127, 143, 156, 157, 159, 184, 198, 200, 226, 228 pneuma, 14, 52, 97, 133, 163, 164, 168, 171, 173, 178, 204 poison, 13, 15, 16, 17, 29, 30, 180, 236n.7 police, 68–69, 95, 113, 114, 127, 183, 206, 238n.42, 247n.9, 248n.20, 249n.22 Polites, N., 155 Polites, Ph., 127 poneria, 12, 13, 52, 170–71, 172 populism, 59, 74, 120, 153, 155, 164, 165, 166, 171, 176, 178, 184, 188, 206, 211, 214, 220, 221, 228, 251n.40, 252n.53, 253n.70 postmodernism, 6, 177, 191, 210, 215, 217, 218 progress, 11, 12, 19, 20, 21, 24, 25, 27, 38, 46, 50, 51, 99, 230, 244n.65 propaganda, 38, 127, 132, 181, 182, 183, 184, 206, 211, 214, 228, 238n.32 provinces, theater in the, 148, 171, 195, 204, 210, 222 Psychares, I., 43, 48–49, 112, 244n.66 Psycharismos, 112, 244n.66 Puchner, W., 236n.3, 243n.61 Racine, xiii, 48 Rankaves, A. R., 54, 70, 237n.23, 241– 42n.36; Clouds of, 7, 55, 56, 68–72, 73, 74, 94, 114, 115, 119, 198 Raptarches, I. M., 63–68, 74, 92 realism, 13, 107, 112, 169, 171, 178, 199, 214, 216 Reinhardt, M., xiii, 196, 245n.77 Renaissance, 11, 18, 19, 28, 31, 33, 35, 36 Resistance, 127, 128, 130, 158, 179, 242nn. 36 and 46, 248n.9, 249n.20. See also EAM revue (epitheorese), 3, 49, 79, 81, 82, 89, 102, 105, 106–8, 109, 112, 113, 117, 119, 202, 205, 208, 216, 221, 239nn. 10 and 12, 243n.55, 244nn. 66 and 67, 245n.68, 249n.22, 251n.41 Right, rightist, 4, 9, 89, 124, 125, 128, 129, 130, 131–32, 133, 140, 143, 144, 149, 156, 168, 172, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 200, 209, 211, 213, 214, 226, 227, 228, 232n.2, 238n.32, 248–49n.20

Index Ritsos, G., 219, 257n.37 Romans, 17, 23, 28, 36, 55, 71, 87, 233n.8 romanticism, 54, 55, 57, 70, 244n.66 Romios, 10, 11, 12, 51, 100, 171, 172, 220, 222, 232–33n.8 Romiosyne, Romaic, 11, 12, 13, 14, 19, 21, 39, 40, 41, 44, 51, 55, 59, 62, 63, 67, 68, 73, 74, 75, 92, 93, 94, 96, 99, 100, 101, 105, 110, 111, 112, 113, 116, 117, 120–21, 122, 129, 133–34, 140, 153, 154, 155, 162, 164, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 178, 187, 188, 195, 199, 201, 203, 204, 209, 219, 230, 233n.8, 245n.77, 254n.79 Ronconi, L., 166, 227 Ronteres, D., 194–95, 196 Rostand, E., 244n.66 Rotas, V., 124, 125, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 140, 141, 152, 169, 185, 200 Rotza¨ıron, M., 76, 78, 79, 83, 87, 106 Rousopoulos, A., 54 Rousseau, J.-J., 17, 33 Royal Theater, 75, 96, 102, 113, 115, 238n.47, 240n.18 Russia, 46, 54, 66, 184, 237n.16, 248n.9 Sakellarides, Th., 103 Sakellaridou, E., 256n.33 Saliveros, M. I., 104 Savvopoulos, D., 218–20, 257n.37 Schiller, xiii scholia, 17, 29, 30, 43, 105, 200, 234n.13, 235n.29 Seferis, G., 128, 155, 156, 168 Semites, K., 3, 227 Sevastikoglou, G., 158, 250n.30 shadow theater. See Karaghiozes Shakespeare, xii, 87, 222. See also Othello Sideres, G., xv, 77, 91, 158, 236n.3 Sideres, Z., 116 Sikelianos, A., 82, 89, 194 Skourtes, G., 172, 221, 257n.46 Slater, N. W., xii Smyrna, 18, 77, 79, 96, 153, 239n.6, 246n.105 socialism, 3, 15, 50, 60, 62, 74, 99–100, 120, 143, 183, 227, 238n.32. See also PASOK

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283

Society for Staging Ancient Greek Drama. See Mistriotes Socrates, 16–17, 23, 24, 25, 29, 30, 84, 85, 88, 95, 140, 182, 233n.2, 257n.46 solidarity, 74, 87, 91, 92, 100, 101, 119, 166 Solomos, A., 15, 158, 168, 192, 195, 196, 197–98, 199, 200–204, 206, 213, 215, 226, 227, 231nn. 6 and 7, 250n.30, 255nn. 12 and 18; Birds of, 142–43, 227; Ecclesiazusae of, 198, 200, 201, 202, 216, 226, 227; Frogs, 198, 203, 226, 227; Lysistrata of, 139, 141, 198, 199, 202, 203, 204, 206, 216, 226, 227, 255n.16; Thesmophoriazusae of, 198, 202–3, 226, 227 Solomos, D., 39 Solomos, Th., 96 Sophocles, 45, 46, 47, 48, 50, 54, 55, 69, 70, 71, 72, 102, 115–16, 160, 165, 194, 196, 243n.65, 245n.77, 248n.9, 249n.22, 252n.50 Soteriades, G., 113, 245n.87 Soures, G., 102, 105, 106, 108, 116, 120, 121, 240n.24, 242n.41; Clouds of, 73, 91–95, 96, 97, 98, 101, 102, 103, 111, 112, 113, 115, 116, 121, 138, 240n.22, 240–41n.25, 241n.33, 243n.53; Emancipation of, 91, 100, 101, 240n.17; Ho Romeos of, 92, 93, 94, 97–99, 100, 101, 109, 240nn. 21 and 23, 243n.53 Sparta, 33, 66, 88, 139, 172, 207 Spathares, E., 253n.63 State Theater of Northern Greece, 139, 141, 142, 176, 212–15, 216, 226, 227, 228, 256n.34 Staurou, Th., 200 Strateges, G., 94 suffragettes, 104, 106, 121 sycophancy, 24, 37, 60, 127, 182, 255n.10 Tachtses, K., 179–80, 216, 253n.64 Taplin, O., 232n.10 technology, 159, 162, 222, 230 Terence, 17, 28, 36 Terzakes, A., 247n.4 Theater of the Mountains, 127, 242n.36 Theatrical Workshop of Thessalonike, 211, 226, 227 Theodorakes, M., 129, 157, 219, 249n.22, 252n.42, 253n.63 Theotokas, G., 154

284

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Index

Thesmophoriazusae, 77, 78, 214, 221, 226, 227, 228, 229, 235n.29, 243n.65, 256n.34; of Koun, 159, 175, 176, 226, 227; of Solomos, 198, 202–3, 226, 227; of the transvestites, 78, 105–6 Thessalonike, 206, 211, 212, 226, 227, 252n.54 Thrylos, A. (H. Ourane), 191–92, 247n.1 Thucydides, 218, 248n.9 Thymelikos Thiasos. See Karzes topicality, in humor, 26, 27, 28, 29, 36, 66, 77, 89, 105, 151–52, 172, 179, 192, 200, 202, 228, 229, 234nn.13, and 17 topos, 55, 71, 102, 154, 155, 162, 163, 164, 165, 167, 168, 233–34n.10 tourism, 15, 138, 157, 166, 175, 177, 194, 202, 209, 210, 219, 221, 249n.22 transvestism, transvestites, 4, 15, 78–79, 81, 82, 86, 87, 88, 90, 91, 92, 96, 97, 104–6, 107, 110, 111, 112, 119, 121, 122, 190, 216–17, 228, 239n.5, 244– 45n.67 Trypanis, C., 192 Tsaldares, P., 85, 89 Tsampoulas, V., 211, 226, 227, 256n.30 Tsarouches, G., 124, 157, 169, 251n.36 Tsatsos, K., 125–26, 127, 128–29, 134, 135, 144, 168, 247n.3 Tsianos, K., 176, 227 Tsirimocou, E., 231n.7 Tsokopoulos, G., 108 Tsouparopoulos, A., 126–27, 130 Turkey, 156, 239n.6, 246n.105, 255n.16 Tzetzes, I., 17 United Democratic Left, 128 United States, 18, 124, 125, 127, 128, 129, 130, 138, 139, 140, 151, 157, 161, 170, 177, 181, 194, 200, 206, 207, 218, 229, 231n.4, 248n.10, 250n.25 Vakalo, G., 201 Vakalopoulou, H., 176

Van Dyck, K., 190, 255n.22 Varikas, V., 192 Varnales, K., 112, 129, 139–40, 166, 169, 174, 200, 205, 250n.25 Varopoulou, H., 221, 257n.40 Varveres, G., 176 Vasileiades, S., 57 Vasilikiote, E., 214, 227 Venice, 18, 35, 77, 84, 235n.29, 243n.58 Venizelos, E., 84, 89, 119 Vernardakes, D., 48 Vince, R., 234–35n.18 Volanakes, M., xiv, 226, 227 Voltaire, 15, 16–17, 18, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 31 vomolochia, 27–30, 32, 33–34, 65, 92, 122, 200 vomolochos, 28, 29, 30, 40, 58, 122, 255n.10 Vougiouklake, A., 203 Vournas, T., 180 Voutsinas, A., 142, 227, 243n.55 Vyzantios, D. K., 40 Walton, J. M., xiii War, Civil, 126, 128, 129, 130, 171, 178, 179; cold, 15, 127–28, 129, 131, 133, 178, 179, 185, 208, 209, 229; First World, 108, 184; of Independence, 19, 37, 45, 46, 47, 51, 206, 240n.25; Peloponnesian, 78, 88, 218, 240n.25, 248n.9; Second World, 77, 127, 150, 158, 182, 238n.32, 242nn.36, and 46, 247–48n.9 Wasps, 27, 147, 226, 227, 229, 237n.15, 243n.65, 253n.62 Whitman, C. H., 170 Xenophon, 29, 30, 140, 233n.5 Xenopoulos, G., 48, 116, 117–18 Zampelios, I., 47, 48 Zenakos, L., 172 Zervoulakos, G., 206, 207 Zoeros, A., 57