Except that unknown to him he doesn’t kill her. She is snatched away by the gods, who can’t accept this injustice, and spirited away to the land of the Taurians, a wild and savage tribe who live at the end of the world. There she becomes their priestess, her duty to sacrifice to the gods all Greeks who are captured and brought before her. Now, in one of Euripides’ last plays, Iphigenia among the Taurians, a young man is brought before her, victim of a shipwreck. In a beautiful and moving recognition scene, she realizes he is her little brother, Orestes. She determines to try to save both him and herself.
She does save them both, but only with the help of Athene and only in circumstances made so absurd by Euripides that you know he doesn’t mean it. Great goddesses don’t appear in real life and rescue mariners from storms and enemy warships. For that matter, chariots drawn by dragons don’t rescue women like Medea from their husbands and the law. As always, Euripides uses the myth on which his play is based to comment on the ordinary lives we all live. There is cruelty and bestiality in the world, and wishing it were not there, or counting on the gods to correct it, will not help us. We must face the humanity within us, fearlessly and frankly, and learn to live the best lives we can. That we will never do as long as we lie to ourselves and believe ourselves to be better than we are.
ARISTOPHANES
450?–380? BCE
Acharnians
Peace
Lysistrata
Clouds
Birds
Frogs
Aristophanes was born circa 450 BCE—certainly, a very long time ago. Curiously, if he had been born in 350, only a century later, it would not have seemed such a long time ago. The reason is that during the century from 450 to 350 the so-called New Comedy was invented, and New Comedy is essentially what comedy is today. In New Comedy boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy finds girl again, the ingénue is delectable but dumb, the boy is a scapegrace but highly forgivable, there are one or more rascally servants who turn out in the end to have hearts of gold, and the play ends with everybody looking foolish but happy on a stage full of lovers. These formulas were developed in the fourth century BCE, perfected by the Roman comic dramatists Plautus and Terence, further perfected by such “modern” dramatists as Shakespeare, Molière, Sheridan, and Shaw, and adapted in many hit comedies and, especially, present-day musicals.
Aristophanes was a practitioner—the greatest of all—of the so-called Old Comedy. This had a strong religious bent and made full use of a chorus that played an important role. The characters were often gods or demigods, like Dionysus or Herakles, and the dialogue and action were often extremely lascivious and utterly ridiculous. The plays of Aristophanes are deliciously funny if you like that sort of thing. Most people do.
The best way to introduce Aristophanes is to describe the absurd situations of some of his plays. Acharnians, his first play (he probably wrote about forty, but only eleven survive), follows a farmer, Dicaeopolis, who, sick and tired of the war that has been going on for years between Athens and Sparta, goes to Sparta to negotiate his own private peace treaty. The fact that such an action is impossible and would be considered treason in the real world only makes the point more strongly: war is folly. The play contains two ironic scenes—skits, we would call them—that take place in the marketplace of Athens, the Agora. In the first, a needy Megarian, impoverished by the war, enters with a bag over his back in which, he says, are two piglets. A buyer sticks his hand in the “poke” and finds indisputable evidence that the contents are two naked little girls, not two little pigs. The Megarian then admits that he’s selling his daughters rather than have them starve to death at home. In the second skit a rich Boeotian wants to take back a really typical Athenian item from the fair and ends up buying an informer. The satire throughout the play is heavy but funny.
Peace was staged in 421 BCE, several months after both the Spartan and the Athenian leaders of the respective war parties had been killed in battle and shortly before the Peace of Nicias was signed, interrupting but not ending the Peloponnesian War. Peace is a lovely young girl, quite nude, who is immured in a cave. The action of the play involves various attempts to release her. Finally Peace emerges, triumphant in her beauty, and everybody celebrates. What a fine idea!
Lysistrata (411) also has a relevant background in the politics of the day. Athens has suffered devastating defeats. A revolt of the Athenian oligarchs has led to a new government that may or may not intend to sue for peace. The heroine, Lysistrata, leads a revolt of the women of Athens, who seize the Acropolis and undertake a sex strike that will not be ended until the men declare peace. The men of course endeavor to have sex with their women without having to pay the price of peace, but (in the play, at least) they fail. Another fine idea.
Clouds (circa 423) is a satirical attack on the Sophists, or professional intellectuals and teachers of the day. The hero, named Socrates, runs a Think Shop where young people are taught to win arguments in ridiculous ways. The real Socrates is said to have sat in the first row when the comedy was performed and laughed harder at it than anyone else, although some scholars believe this attack on him by Aristophanes—an unfair attack, they point out, because no one was more opposed to the Sophists than the real Socrates—did him no good when he was later tried and convicted for corrupting the Athenian youth.
Maybe the two best plays of Aristophanes are Birds (414) and Frogs (415). The birds in the comedy named after them have banded together to create a utopian community, Cloudcuckooland, where there is permanent peace and everyone loves one another. The play is funny yet bittersweet too, because—again—of the evident impossibility of such a good government ever actually existing on Earth. Aristophanes is thought by some critics to have been responding to Socrates’ and Plato’s ideas in this play: Cloudcuckooland is the comic version of the Platonic Republic. The play is a profound study of utopianism as well as being funny.
Frogs takes place in Hell. Dionysus, god of drama (as well as other things), has disguised himself as the hero Herakles and has set out to bring back to life his favorite tragedian, who is Euripides. When Dionysus arrives in Hades he also meets Aeschylus, and a literary competition is arranged. Aeschylus wins, not Euripides, and so Dionysus returns with Aeschylus in tow, instead. The literary subtleties are brilliant but the play is intelligible to anyone whether he or she knows the works of Aeschylus and Euripides or not.
The combination in Aristophanes of broad farce and dirty jokes, profound satiric themes, and lovely choral songs may be unique in the history of drama.