Reproducing Athens: Menander's Comedy, Democratic Culture, and the Hellenistic City

Chapter 1
NARRATIVES OF RESISTANCE AND ROMANCE
DEMOCRACY AND COMEDY IN THE EARLY HELLENISTIC PERIOD
Resilient Democracy and the Rise of Romantic Comedy
Athenian history between the battle of Chaeronea in 338 B.C. and the end of the Chremonidean War in 260 is punctuated by one military disaster after another. At Chaeronea, Philip of Macedon won a decisive victory over Athens and its allies, enabling him to gain effective control of Athenian foreign policy. In 322 Athens suffered a much more catastrophic defeat in the Lamian War, the Greek-led rebellion against Macedonian rule. In the ensuing peace settlement, Antipater, the de facto ruler of Macedon, installed Macedonian troops in the city, replaced the democratic government with an oligarchy, executed leading democratic politicians, and relocated many disfranchised democrats to Thrace. These measures, despite their severity and scope, did little to disturb the Athenian commitment to democracy. Following Antipater's death in 319 the Athenians restored the democracy, apparently in the hope of regaining the pre-Lamian War status quo. The problems that erupted with Alexander's unforeseen death, however, had not really been solved. Alexander's would-be successors were still in the process of attempting to seize and define their own spheres of control. Accordingly, without the military power to defend themselves against the emergent military kingdoms, the Athenians were soon forced to capitulate yet again, this time to Antipater's son Cassander. Like his father before him, Cassander continued to employ highly coercive measures to control the Greek cities, including the imposition of oligarchic constitutions and the installation of military garrisons. While the wealth requirement for citizenship under this second oligarchic regime was fairly low, Cassander took an additional, more invasive, step of installing a manager of domestic affairs within the city itself. For the next ten years, Demetrius of Phaleron ruled Athens as a virtual regent on Cassander's behalf.1
Although Demetrius of Phaleron is generally credited with ruling well--even hostile sources acknowledge the material prosperity his regime brought to the city--the Athenians were only too eager to restore the democracy.2 They seized the first opportunity to oust him from power, even though doing so meant dealing with autocrats. When Demetrius Poliorcetes, one of Cassander's chief rivals in the struggle for the empire and the Greek cities, made an unexpected appearance in the Athenian harbor in 307, the Athenians readily accepted his assistance and reestablished the democracy.3 While fifteen years of oligarchic domination seems not to have diminished the Athenian preference for democracy, it did give the Athenians time to come to terms with the new realities of international politics and their city's diminished place within them. By 307 the Athenians were ready to compromise with external autocratic rulers for the sake of maintaining democracy in the city. In fact, the policy of liberating the Greek cities from oligarchic rule adopted by Demetrius Poliorcetes and his father, Antigonus Monophthalmus, made it seem like the Athenians were not compromising at all.
But the reality of Athens's subordinate position became clear when Demetrius Poliorcetes took up residence in the city and, according to some reports, actually moved into the Parthenon. Whatever the truth of the situation, his continued presence in Athens revealed the incompatibility between democracy and dependence on autocratic rule. Athenian relations with Demetrius deteriorated to such an extent that in 301 they refused him entrance to the city. Although Athens declared its neutrality in the affairs of the diadochoi (successors), in 295 Demetrius was able to regain control of the city. This time there seems to have been little or no attempt to make even a pretense of maintaining democratic proprieties; the period is explicitly described in later Athenian sources as an oligarchy.4 Once again, however, the familiar pattern recurs: in 287 the Athenians restored the democracy and, more significantly, managed to retain it for another twenty-five years or so in a period that was both intensely democratic and nationalistic. But in 260, Demetrius's son, Antigonus Gonatas, recaptured the city and imposed measures that seem to have finally and effectively curtailed the possibility of effective political resistance.5
The history of this period--roughly the transition to the Hellenistic age--might be told as a story of decline, the downfall of the polis and democracy in the face of the more powerful emergent military kingdoms. While this narrative characterizes Athens militarily, it does not capture the complexities of the domestic political scene. Although the constitutional seesawing of the period brought nearly 150 years of democratic stability to an end, Athens's insistent if ultimately ill-fated democratic rebellions speak to the continuity of democratic ideology--the set of beliefs and practices that sustained the identity of Athenian citizens as specifically democratic citizens.6 The more vigorously the Macedonians attempted to eliminate the democracy, the more passionately committed to it the Athenians became. The indelibility of democracy in the Athenian imagination is attested by a decree honoring the mercenary Kallias of Sphettos for (inter alia) abiding by democratic law during a period of oligarchic rule.7 By attributing an existence to the democracy during a period of oligarchic rule, the decree invests the democracy with an ontological permanence, declaring it impervious to the ephemeral Macedonian interventions.
The resiliency and intensity of Athens's democratic ethos during this period is remarkable and indeed puzzling because the conditions that made democracy possible were either interrupted, altered, or no longer in existence at all. Under the classical democracy, political institutions were the primary arena in which democratic ideals were instantiated and enacted.8 In addition, they provided the key site in which social and political tensions were mediated and negotiated.9 During the transition to the Hellenistic age, however, these institutions for many years ceased to operate according to democratic principles. At the same time, the emergence of Macedonian military kingdoms undermined the ideal of the citizen-soldier, a crucial pillar of the democracy's ideological foundation. The ability and duty of every citizen to fight for the state, whether as a hoplite or thete, underwrote the egalitarian logic of the democratic political order.10 Every citizen could claim an equal stake and standing within the democracy, no matter what his place in the social hierarchy, because in the end he was willing to fight and give his body in service to the state. Although the Macedonians took away this power, drastically attenuating the citizen-soldier ideal, all available evidence demonstrates that Athens's commitment to democracy remained strong, becoming perhaps even more deeply ingrained than before.
The persistence of the Athenian democratic ethos during a period in which the democracy had lost its institutional and military mooring raises a number of important questions. How was democratic culture produced and reproduced in the absence of democratic political institutions? How did individuals continue to identify as democratic citizens? What sources of democratic identity emerged to fill the gulf left by the loss of the citizen-soldier ideal and the suspension of democratic institutions? Lycurgus's prosecution of Leocrates contains an important clue. In the aftermath of the battle of Chaeronea, the Athenians passed a number of emergency measures, including one stipulating that every able-bodied man could be called on to defend the city against the Macedonian invasion that, at the time, seemed imminent (Lycur. 1.16-17, 1.41). Leocrates, however, fled the city, allegedly in violation of this decree. When he returned to the city eight years later, Lycurgus, architect of democratic renewal after Chaeronea and avid public prosecutor, sought to make an example of him by prosecuting him for treason. To emphasize the egregiousness of Leocrates' disloyalty and default on his civic obligation, and in effect to depict him as the sort of citizen who was really responsible for the defeat at Chaeronea, Lycurgus describes the atmosphere of desperation and panic in the city immediately after the battle:
When the defeat and disaster had been reported to the people and the city was tense with alarm at the news, the people's hope of safety had come to rest with the men over fifty. Free women could be seen crouching at the doors in terror inquiring for the safety of their husbands, fathers, or brothers, offering a spectacle degrading to themselves and to the city. The men who were far past their prime, advanced in life, exempt by law from service in the field, could be seen throughout the city, debilitated with age wretchedly scurrying with cloaks pinned double about them. Many sufferings were being visited upon the city; every citizen had felt misfortune at its worst; but the sight which would have most surely stirred the onlooker and moved him to tears over the sorrows of Athens was to see the people vote that slaves should be released, that aliens should become Athenians, and the disfranchised regain their rights: the nation that had once prided itself on being autochthonous and free. (Lycur. 1.40-41)11
Remarkably, Lycurgus does not claim that the most devastating consequence of Chaeronea was the catastrophic loss of citizen lives or even the city's desperate dependence on the elderly. Rather, it was the fact that the Athenians approved a proposal to free the slaves and to enfranchise foreigners and those who had been disfranchised. According to Lycurgus, this measure--proposed but never actually implemented--was the real tragedy of Chaeronea. The implementation of the emergency decree would have destroyed the city more completely than any mere battle, Lycurgus suggests, because it would have contaminated the autochthonous ancestry or "racial purity" that made the Athenians who they were and underwrote the city's democratic identity.12
The myth of autochthony was fundamental to the cultural imaginary of the Athenian democracy.13 To emphasize this point is not to make any claim about whether the Athenians literally believed their ancestor or ancestors were "sprung from the earth."14 Rather, the political significance of the myth arises from the kind of story it enabled the Athenians to tell about themselves. It supplied a narrative about the shared origins and ultimate relatedness of a people of diverse origins and statuses. In so doing, it provided a crucial theoretical justification for democratic egalitarianism and exclusivity.15 Supposed common kinship furnished a basis for commonality and hence equality between citizens and, at the same time, a reason for differentiating citizens from all noncitizens. But paradoxically, though the myth provides a model of generation that justifies the exclusion of foreigners and women from the political order, the Athenian discourse of autochthony is "inextricably tied to sexual reproduction,"16 and hence to the very realm of women it seems to exclude. This slippage was perhaps inevitable since in practice the autochthonous purity of the citizen body was maintained and secured through the polis's rules of sexual reproduction.
In 451/0, on Pericles' proposal, the Athenians passed a law limiting citizenship to those born from two native Athenians.17 Although the law as we have it does not mention marriage per se, it effectively redefined what counted as a legitimate marriage.18 Previously, the state had allowed a citizen to marry and father children with either an Athenian or a foreign-born woman. After the passage of the Periclean law, however, children born from foreign women were no longer eligible for citizenship, and correspondingly, foreign women were no longer eligible for Athenian marriage.19 Thus, the practical effect of the law's requirement was to invoke rules of sexual reproduction--that is, to delineate who could bear legitimate children with whom--in order to produce the democratic citizen body and to separate citizens from noncitizens.20 It has recently been argued that the passage of this law was a symbolic statement of autochthonous pride.21 Whether or not the Athenians were thinking in such terms when they passed the law, the operation of the law did, over time, foster the perception that Athenian citizens were racially distinct from other Greeks and from all noncitizens.22 The very requirement of bilateral native parentage for citizen status promoted the belief that both parents transmitted "Athenianness" to their children, and hence that the rules of sexual reproduction preserved the racial purity of the citizen body.23 While fidelity to the rules of sexual reproduction enshrined in the Periclean law was correlated to the generation of good Athenian and good democratic citizens, deviation from the state's reproductive rules was believed to produce "citizens" characterized by an innate hostility to the city and its democracy. To cite an extreme example, among the many abominations attributed to Alcibiades, the bad boy of the fifth-century democracy, was his having produced a son with a Melian slave woman, effectively breeding an enemy of the democratic state (And. 4.22-23).
The state's rules of sexual reproduction composed and maintained the internal and external boundaries of the citizen body. At the same time, they preserved and transmitted the Athenianness and autochthonous ancestry that underwrote democratic national ideology. It is thus not surprising that Lycurgus identifies these status distinctions as the one thing that the Athenian polis could not survive without. The Athenians could lose everything, Lycurgus suggests--men, military power, and their foreign policy--so long they retained the status distinctions (created and iterated by the rules of sexual reproduction) that effectively made them who they were. These long-standing associations indicate that it is quite possible (if indeed not probable) that the state's matrimonial citizenship system--and all practices, ideologies, and identifications that went with it--compensated for the attenuation of the traditional sources and practices of democratic identity in the period between Chaeronea and the Chremonidean War. Macedonian military supremacy and interventions in domestic democratic politics did nothing to interfere with the production of democratic citizens and civic ideology from below in the seemingly mundane practices of marriage and sexual reproduction. Unfortunately, lack of evidence makes it impossible to investigate whether and how actual marriage and gender practices assisted in reproducing democratic ideology during the period of Macedonian takeovers. Nevertheless, although we cannot evaluate the role of marriage and gender practices in compensating for the recurrent loss of democratic institutions and manhood practices, we can consider their depiction on the comic stage. By a remarkable coincidence, New Comedy, a genre whose plots obsessively adhere to and enact the Athenian state's matrimonial and reproductive norms, emerged in Athens at about the same time the Macedonians began their efforts to undermine and eradicate the democracy. In fact, New Comedy's productive period (the last "new" Athenian cultural form) exactly coincides with the tumultuous period of the successor wars (roughly 323-260 B.C.), out of which the settled pattern of Hellenistic kingdoms finally emerged.24
So far, out of the sixty-four known poets of New Comedy, only the works of Menander have been recovered to any extent.25 We have one complete play, the Dyskolos; one nearly complete play, the Samia; and substantial portions of five other plays, as well as scenes and fragments from many of Menander's works.26 In addition, there are seven certain Roman adaptations of Menander's plays that can be used to supplement the evidence. Although Menander's extant plays and fragments do not represent New Comedy in its entirety, they do constitute a considerable subtype of the genre.27 Moreover, Menander was not only a prolific exponent of the genre, writing more than one hundred plays in a career of about thirty years, but he was also, according to ancient authors, its star.28 And, in contrast to many New Comic playwrights, Menander was a native Athenian, the son of a flamboyant anti-Macedonian general, with an insider's knowledge of Athenian law and democratic culture.29
Yet, on the face of it, Menander's comedy seems to offer little insight into contemporary Athenian affairs. The extant plays and fragments not only generally eschew politics but also tell the same basic story of how a young citizen in love overcomes various obstacles to win the young woman of his choosing. In most cases, the plays culminate with the marriage of the citizen hero and heroine, or with the reconciliation of a marriage after an estrangement.30 Although the emergence of this cultural narrative--with its unprecedented focus on ordinary citizens who marry for love--has traditionally been thought to have nothing to do with democracy, the rise of Menander's family romances, I will argue, is inextricably tied to the continuity of Athenian democratic and transnational polis culture during the initial and most fraught period in the transition to the Hellenistic era. My central claim is that Menandrian comedy not only depicts and champions fundamental precepts of Athenian democratic ideology but that it also, in certain cases, offers reactions to and commentaries on immediate political events. Comic narratives defend polis life against the impinging Hellenistic kingdoms, often by transforming their representatives into proper inhabitants of the polis, and by breaking down internal divisions between citizens based on status and economic class.31 With such representations, the performance of Menander's comedies filled the void left by the suspension of democratic institutions and the attenuation of democratic manhood practices.32
Like several recent studies, this book attempts to resituate Menander's comedy in its contemporary political contexts.33 It gives an account of the role of Menander's comedy in the political struggles between the Hellenistic kingdoms and the Greek cities and in the reproduction and subversion of democratic status boundaries. To these ends, it draws on the New Historicist insight that literary representations do not reflect or mirror political and cultural histories taking place elsewhere--that is, outside the text--but rather are active participants in the cultural and political negotiations of their times.34 Comedy, I maintain, made things happen in the world by offering narratives that enabled civic audiences to make sense of the manifold changes taking place in the early Hellenistic period within a traditional polis-based conceptual framework, and at the same time crucially reinforced democratic matrimonial and gender practices. Thus, although like David Konstan and Vincent Rosivach, I attend to the ideology of comic texts, I focus primarily on comedy's role as a producer rather than as a product of ideology.35 If ideology is not natural but rather a distortion of the way "things really are," to paraphrase Althusser, then it follows that ideology must be constantly constructed and replenished to maintain its imaginary appearance as natural or real. Menander's family romances were just such producers of democratic orthodoxy: they make the democratic cultural order seem natural and thus the only one imaginable in spite of the manifold conditions challenging its dominance.
Comedy's constituting or ideological work can be conceptualized by likening the comic narrative to a performative speech act, an utterance that does what it says. Although comic narratives are fictional and consequently do not literally bring about citizen marriages, the marriages they enact promise the birth of new citizens and hence the perpetuation of the democratic polis. Thus, the performative efficacy of a comedy is not identical with the play itself, but rather arises from the narratives it offers audience members to think about and identify with.36 With its recurrent tales of citizen making, comedy scripts or performs the survival of democratic culture before the fact. By deploying certain conventions of perspective, plot pattern, character, and theme, comic narratives or speech acts interpellate theatergoers as citizens and acculturated polis inhabitants--which is just to say, they provide stories that enable audience members to identify as democratic citizens without reference to the political regime actually in power.37
Although I argue that the comic marriage plot operates as a vehicle for political and cultural reproduction, I am not claiming that these processes were either seamless or totalizing. My central thesis is that Menander's comedy is constituted by countervailing narrative trajectories to reproduce and resist the civic social order. When considered from the perspective of the contest between the Greek polis and the Hellenistic kingdom, comedy's propensity to preserve and reproduce democratic culture against encroachment from the Hellenistic kings and kingdoms appears paramount. In other words, the historical circumstances threatening the culture of the polis and democracy transform what under ordinary circumstances would be processes of cultural and political reproduction into vehicles of implicit political resistance. At the same time, however, comedy's family romances are often subversive of the democratic cultural order they instantiate. In part, this is because comedy's reproduction of democratic culture against various Hellenistic outsiders allows for a relaxation of the internal status boundaries that traditionally secured the citizen's place in the intrapolis hierarchy (i.e., the boundaries between free persons and slaves, men and women, and citizens and foreigners). In addition, the reproduction of democratic civic ideologies in the comic marriage plot makes all too clear what the official ideology normally elides: the contradictions and arbitrary exclusions of women, foreigners, and slaves on which the democratic political order was based. Finally, comedy's subversive emphasis also arises from its generic convention of empowering women to plot and promote the interests of the democratic polis and to serve as moral exemplars for men. By enabling women to act with more agency and moral authority than democratic culture traditionally allowed or recognized, comedy clears the terrain for a remodeling of conventional gender and status categories.
The Politics of Marriage and the Comic Marriage Plot
Menander's comedy has traditionally been judged nonpolitical on two grounds: because of what the comedies say and what they do not. To take the former point first, Menander's comedy is considered nonpolitical, or as representing an "escape" from politics, because its subject matter--stories of love, marriage, and romantic intrigue--has seemed to many commentators to be by its very nature nonpolitical.38 This position, however, tells us more about the culturally conditioned assumptions of modern critics than about the historically specific meanings of Menander's marriage plays. Marilyn Katz's recent work on the history of the study of ancient Greek women is helpful here. Katz convincingly argues that the categories through which ancient women have been studied--domesticity, education, marriage, and social life--are the legacy of the nineteenth-century cult of bourgeois domesticity and the naturalized conception of neatly demarcated public and private spheres on which it was based.39 In other words, according to Katz, classical scholars have not thought it relevant to investigate the political importance of women, including the theoretical and practical significance of their exclusion from political rights in Athens, because of unexamined assumptions about what properly constitutes the parameters of women's lives.
Although Katz is primarily concerned with the study of women in ancient Greece, her conclusions are equally applicable to the study of Menander's comedy. The preconceptions of modern critics concerning what can be construed as political have inhibited inquiry into the political and ideological significance of Menander's romantic comedies. Yet matters of marriage and the family are today highly political, as ongoing debates concerning polygamy and same-sex marriage well attest, and in ancient Athens they were no less so. In the United States, state governments define and so construct marriage by requiring that a person be married only to one person at a time and that marriage partners be of opposite sexes.40 Similarly, though ancient Greek has no precise word for marriage or the conjugal family, the democratic polis nevertheless defined marriage and the legitimate form of the citizen family by stipulating who could bear legitimate children with whom.41 Furthermore, in democratic Athens the link between marriage and the state was more pronounced and transparent than it is in modern Western nation-states. For the polis both defined what counted as a legitimate marriage and it also employed marriage to constitute, reproduce, and maintain the integrity of the citizen group.