Hi there I’m Mike Rugnetta.
Welcome to Crash Course Theater.
Today we’ll be covering Greek satyr plays and classical Greek comedy.
We’ll also take a look at Aristophanes’ “Lysistrata,” a play in which the women
of Athens and Sparta decide to ban sexual intercourse until their husbands stop fighting
a war.
It might get a little lewd, but this play is actually a lot less lewd than most Greek
comedies that came before it.
The next time you’re at a museum, staring up at some noble piece of ancient marble statuary,
just remember: those folks LOVED a good fart joke.
INTRO Satyr plays are the raunchy plays that appear
at the conclusion of each tragic trilogy.
They’re meant to cheer an audience up after all of that pity, fear and purgation.
And what did audiences find most cheerful?
You guessed it: phalli.
Like tragedies, satyr plays were usually derived from mythological stories.
Unlike tragedies, satyr plays featured a chorus dressed as satyrs—ears, tails, shaggy legs
and … tie-on phalluses.
Satyr plays presented goofy versions of important legends: here’s your typical myth, going
along as planned, and then who shows up: Satyrs!
These plays normally focus on how fun-loving, drunk, and cowardly the satyrs are... but
there are often a few human characters who engage in serious moral debate at some point.
Only one complete satyr play survives and that’s Euripides “Cyclops,” based on
an episode in the “Odyssey.”
It’s almost a retelling of Odyssey’s version, except there are a lot of satyrs on the Cyclops’s
island and they’re the ones who get Odysseus into trouble with Mean Ole Mr Unipupil.
While trying to avoid being eaten, Odysseus takes a moment to engage the Cyclops in an
earnest debate on whether duty or pleasure-seeking is the key to a happy life.
After that the Cyclops and the head satyr Silenus get very drunk and Silenus gets dragged
off to maybe do Cyclops sex stuff, but then Odysseus blinds the Cyclops and it ends happily
for all.
Except the Cyclops who is blinded and was probably like UGH THAT WAS MY ONE.
GOOD.
EYE.
You may remember from a couple episodes ago, the Drama Contests of Dionsyia.
In 486 BCE, a separate contest for comedy was established, with five competitors each
year.
In classical Greece, comedy was pretty raucous and pretty ribald.
The word “comedy” came to us from the Greek word komoidia, which literally means
party song.
After forty years or so, comedy got popular enough that it had its own festival, the Lenaea,
held in winter for Athenians only.
No foreign dignitaries, which makes sense because these comedies were probably not how
Athens wanted to represent itself to the world.
Like tragedies, comedies were inspired by the philosophies and problems of present-day
Athens.
But while tragedies tended to cloak their relevance in the mythic past or foreign lands,
comedies were typically set in contemporary Athens, poking merciless fun at contemporaneous
life.
They kept themselves safe by being so wild and crazy you couldn’t take their political
attacks seriously, though there are records of a couple lawsuits.
SPOILSPORTS.
Comedies differed from tragedies in that they often depended on spectacular effects and
featured funny costumes like padded stomachs and butts, and yes, of course, say it with
me now–though I would totally understand if it makes you uncomfortable and you super
don’t want to– phalluses.
Most of the formal elements—dialogic scenes interspersed with choral odes—were similar
to tragedy, but comedy included something new.
It was the parabasis, a speech in which the chorus addresses the audience directly.
And while tragedies focus on some noble figure falling, comedies are often about the little
guy struggling to rise.
Though as we’ll see with “The Lysistrata,” comedies can deal with great figures and serious
subjects, as well.
Unfortunately, few examples survive from the golden age of classical comedy and all the
ones that do are by Aristophanes.
But we have fragments by many others, including sections from the plays of Eupolis, a comedy
writer so beloved that legend has it that when he died fighting a war, the government
passed a law exempting all poets from military service.
Let’s take a moment to look at what separates comedies from satyr plays.
Satyr plays are situated in a mythic past, comedies in the present.
Satyr plays are typically rural.
Comedies are usually urban.
Satyr plays are about messing things up.
Comedies are about putting things back together.
They tend to return social order and conclude with a compromise of some kind: a peace treaty,
a constitution, a marriage.
There’s not necessarily any reconciliation at the end of a satyr play, while comedies
are about offering absurd suggestions to real problems.
Aristophanes is the most famous figure of classical comedy for the very good reason
that his plays are the ones that … uhhh… still exist.
Invading hordes: You.
Are.
The Worst.
He wrote at least forty plays.
We have eleven.
Aristophanes was born into a wealthy Athenian family sometime in the 450s.
He started writing early and he was almost immediately known for his splendid poetry,
and for relentlessly mocking specific political figures.
In fact he was sued at least once for “unpatriotic behavior”.
But, undeterred, Aristophanes kept the poetry and dirty jokes and mockery coming for quite
some time.
Late in the fifth century BCE, though, Athens started losing the Peloponnesian War to Sparta
and a lot of things changed, including comedy.
Suddenly it wasn’t a great idea to satirize political figures.
And Athens didn’t have as much money to spend on spectacular effects and fancy choruses.
So Aristophanes made a mid-career switch.
He started writing plays for smaller choruses and with composite comic figures rather than
specific, real-life politicians.
Aristophanes has a lot of famous plays—The Birds, The Clouds, The Frogs.
But, today we’re going to look at “The Lysistrata,” which we chose for a couple
of reasons.
For one, it’s still relevant today.
In the early days of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, thousands of theater companies
staged readings and productions of the play.
The Lysistrata’s frustration at the senselessness of wars and the tolls they exact won’t seem
very ancient to us.
Also it’s one of the rare ancient comedies in which the women get to be really funny.
So that’s nice.
(But remember, all the actors in ancient Greek theater were men!
And all the playwrights, too.)
Let’s go to the Thoughtbubble.
The Lysistrata won first prize in 411 BCE, at which point the Peloponnesian War had waged
for about twenty years.
Athens and Sparta together defeated an enemy once thought unstoppable: the Persians.
But after their victory, they squabbled over colonies.
Sparta had the superior land army, Athens had the superior navy.
Athens was a democracy, Sparta was an oligarchy.
Athens had a lot of money, Sparta had a lot of staying power.
Things got ugly and stayed ugly.
Also Athens had a plague that killed a lot of its citizens and its great leader Pericles.
That didn’t help.
This … is the background story for The Lysistrata, at the start of which, the women of Athens
are fed up.
They’re tired of war, they’re tired of being poor and they’re really, really tired
of their husbands leaving to fight.
Because when their husbands are away, they can’t have sex.
And in The Lysistrata, these women really want to have sex.
So led by a woman named Lysistrata, they devise a so-far-fetched-it-just-might-work plan.
They seize control of the Acropolis, which is where Athens keeps all its money, and they
say they’re not going to give up the siege and they will not have any sex until the men
stop fighting.
To show that they’re really serious, they get a bunch of women from warring areas, like
Sparta and Corinth, to join them.
The women swear an oath and achieve a truce, showing the men that it can be done.
Thanks, Thoughtbubble.
I’d love to quote the chaste ladies oath for you.
But it’s a family show and this oath is filthy, which is sort of the point.
To begin, the women prepare a sacrificial victim, but instead of killing an animal,
the sacrifice they make is to open a jug of wine, which they’re obviously going to chug.
And then they swear to not let any man near them, but the joke is that the oath they take
is really, really specific.
It’s not just that they’re swearing off sex, they’re swearing in great detail about
exactly the kind of sex they’re not going to have—like…EXACTLY.
EXACTINGLY EXACT This is one of the things Greek comedy does.
It makes fun of beliefs and rituals that are often held sacred, but doesn’t satirize.
The point isn’t to show that oaths are ridiculous or that the goals of the women are absurd.
The point is to make fun of social conventions with the end goal of creating a better and
happier society.
So cheers to that.
In a patriarchal society like ancient Greece, by the way, the idea of women seizing power
was also pretty funny in itself--for the men--because it was so impossible.
The women might have had different ideas.
Most of the jokes are about how difficult it is to go without sex.
Women keep pretending to be hurt or pregnant in order to sneak out of the Acropolis.
Men come to try to entice their wives back into bed.
And in one of the funniest scenes, a wife agrees, but then she keeps making more demands
of her husband—she needs a mattress, she needs a pillow—and then runs back into the
Acropolis at the last minute, leaving her husband with an epic case of… frustration.
Good times.
At the end, Lysistrata comes out of the Acropolis and meets with Athenian and Spartan delegates.
She reminds them of what they owe to each other and how ridiculous this conflict is.
Yet they agree to peace not because Lysistrata is so wise, but because the goddess of Reconciliation
is there, personified as a naked woman, and they all want to have sex with her.
Which is creepy.
And misogynist.
And violent.
Then, there’s a banquet and all the newly reconciled men and women sing and dance together.
From this you can get a sense of how delightful and radical Greek comedy is, while also being
kinda troubling.
Suggesting the absurdity of a vicious and expensive war is a pretty racy thing for an
Athenian play to do when Athens is still in the middle of that war.
But this isn’t a bleak satire.
It has a happy ending, with its enthusiastic embrace of food, wine, singing and dancing,
and it tries to show that peace is possible and preferable… if maybe kind of ruined
by creepin’ dudes.
Typical.
Thanks for watching.
Next time we’ll look at the transition from Greek theater to Roman theater and the rise
of popular entertainments that’ll make The Lysistrata seem tame.
Until then… curtain!