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UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Slaves, Sex, and Transgression in Greek Old Comedy Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6jg983tp Author Walin, Daniel Christopher Publication Date 2012 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Slaves, Sex, and Transgression in Greek Old Comedy By Daniel Christopher Walin A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Classics in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Mark Griffith, Chair Professor Donald J. Mastronarde Professor Kathleen McCarthy Professor Emily Mackil Spring 2012 1 Abstract Slaves, Sex, and Transgression in Greek Old Comedy by Daniel Christopher Walin Doctor of Philosophy in Classics University of California, Berkeley Professor Mark Griffith, Chair This dissertation examines the often surprising role of the slave characters of Greek Old Comedy in sexual humor, building on work I began in my 2009 Classical Quarterly article ("An Aristophanic Slave: Peace 819–1126"). The slave characters of New and Roman comedy have long been the subject of productive scholarly interest; slave characters in Old Comedy, by contrast, have received relatively little attention (the sole extensive study being Stefanis 1980). Yet a closer look at the ancestors of the later, more familiar comic slaves offers new perspectives on Greek attitudes toward sex and social status, as well as what an Athenian audience expected from and enjoyed in Old Comedy. Moreover, my arguments about how to read several passages involving slave characters, if accepted, will have larger implications for our interpretation of individual plays. The first chapter sets the stage for the discussion of "sexually presumptive" slave characters by treating the idea of sexual relations between slaves and free women in Greek literature generally and Old Comedy in particular. I first examine the various (non-comic) treatments of this theme in Greek historiography, then its exploitation for comic effect in the fifth mimiamb of Herodas and in Machon's Chreiai. Finally, I argue that humorous references to sexual relations between slaves and free women in the extant comedies blur the line between free and slave in order to maintain a more rigid distinction between relatively wealthy Athenian citizen males and a lower class comprising slaves, metics, foreigners, and the poorest Athenian citizens. Chapter two examines what I term the "sexually presumptive" slave characters of Old Comedy. I argue that the audience is sometimes made to identify with a male speaking slave character who threatens to usurp the sexual role of his master and/or exposes free female characters to sexual comment, jokes, manhandling, and innuendo. I demonstrate that this phenomenon is more prominent in the genre than is generally recognized, in part through new interpretations of several passages. The latest extant play, Wealth (388 BC), affords the most interesting examples; 2 I argue that the slave character Cario, who shares the role of comic hero with his master in alternating scenes, repeatedly reverts to sexual humor that is multiply determined as transgressive (i.e., the location, specific sex acts, participants, manner of narration, and associations involved are all conspicuously contrary to ordinary ancient Greek social norms). The third chapter addresses scenes with slave characters who make sexual jokes that do not threaten to usurp the dominant position of their masters, but may be jokes at their own or another character's expense. I examine in depth the final scene of the Ecclesiazusae, where (as I argue) a female speaking slave character engages in playful sexual innuendo with both her master and the Athenian audience. Finally, a close reading of the sexually aggressive, parodic, transformative game of song-exchange played at Wealth 290–321 by the slave Cario on the one hand and the chorus on the other further illuminates the interaction between slave and free characters in the context of sexual humor on the comic stage and the probable reactions of the audience to such material. In chapter four, I balance out my arguments for slave characters as the active instigators and beneficiaries of sexual humor by noting that slaves in Aristophanic comedy are often treated as sexual objects for the sake of a joke. Such slaves are either brought onto the stage as silent characters or imagined verbally as the passive recipients of aggressive sexual action (often in song). This phenomenon, as I argue, is closely connected with the tendency of Old Comedy to use sex as a symbol for comic victory and rejuvenation. Further, I argue that the silent female slave characters of Greek Old Comedy were played by real female slaves, whose bodies were sometimes exposed to the audience in order to unite them in shared erotic desire. Because these mute female slave characters tend to appear in the celebratory final scenes of the plays and often take on the role of alluring symposiastic entertainers (such as aulos players and dancers), I argue that their exposure creates the impression that the members of the audience are participating together in a public symposium. Finally, my fifth chapter treats the association of slave characters with non-sexual violence in the extant comedies. As with sexual humor, I argue that in physically abusive humor slaves play roles on both sides of the equation: they are beaten or threatened onstage for the amusement of the audience, but they also function as tools of violence against others. First I examine scenes in which slaves function as passive objects of staged or threatened physical abuse—as presented in South Italian vase paintings and in the texts of our extant comedies themselves—and consider what effect such humor might have had on ancient audiences. Finally I consider the corresponding evidence for the use of slaves (both private and public) as instruments of physical violence in comedy, and their occasional instigation of violent acts on their own initiative. 1 Introduction Slave Characters and Multiple Transgression Old Comedy is an inherently transgressive genre, descended in part from the invective of the iambographic tradition and situated in a festival context which celebrated a transgressive god.1 It is characterized by transgression and the inversion of the ordinary both at the macro level of the plot and at the micro level of the humorous speech and interactions of characters within individual scenes. In Old Comedy the individual can triumph over the state (Acharnians), death (Frogs), or even the gods (Peace, Birds, Wealth), and women can triumph over men (Lysistrata, Ecclesiazusae). In all these cases the audience derives some emotional benefit from their identification with these characters who accomplish the impossible, even when they believe that such things should not (and not merely could not) happen in real life. Likewise, the transgressive elements within individual scenes are designed to elicit from the audience a certain frisson: a slave character behaves insolently toward his master or other free people, and the audience, identifying with that slave character if only for a moment, experiences the thrill of violating a social norm. Even better, one character on stage may physically assault another, engaging in a type of behavior surely attractive to members of the Athenian audience at times in their own lives but strictly regulated by a legal system under which assault on another citizen (or even a metic or another person's slave) could carry serious penalties.2 Or perhaps a character has mentioned what should not be mentioned by making a sexual or scatological joke; in that case the audience does not even need to identify with the character to experience the thrill of transgression, for they themselves as hearers are already party to the act.3 These seemingly disparate transgressive elements have in common an effect on the audience that was indispensable to Old Comedy as a genre. For this reason they are often found in concert: the same joke may be simultaneously sexual and gluttonous (oral sex jokes are ubiquitous) with a scatological element as well (coprophilia) or may feature in addition another element of transgression, as for instance when a slave character attempts to use sexual humor to displace his master, often at the same time appearing to make a sexual advance toward an at least nominally free woman.4 Transgression thus admits not only of degree (so for instance some sex acts in a given culture tend to be more taboo than others) but also of multiple kinds (sexual, gluttonous, scatological, violent, transgressive of the boundaries of social class, sacrilegious) that can coexist within the same utterance or stage action. Jokes that are multiply determined as transgressive were funnier, if their increasing incidence and complication over time is any indication. By virtue of their marginal position at the bottom of the Athenian social ladder, slave characters were uniquely suited to add an element of transgression of appropriate class 1 For Old Comedy's relationship to the iambographic tradition, Rosen 1988 is an excellent resource. Both genres abuse individuals by name (onomasti kōmōidein) and make free use of obscenity to humorous effect. Both the major venues at which Athenian comedies were performed (the Lenaia in January and the City Dionysia in March) were festivals in honor of Dionysus. 2 Cf. [Xen.] Ath. Pol. 1.10. 3 Henderson 1991, 9–12 offers a useful model for how obscenity can establish a rapport between two entities (particularly between a character and the audience) at the expense of a third party (another character or a victim of onomasti kōmōidein). 4 For this phenomenon, cf. Walin 2009 and Chapter Two below. 2 boundaries to any joke they told or action they took in the presence of or with reference to free people.
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