Politics and Poetry in Aristophanes' Wasps

Abstract

In an important recent article, David Konstan has attempted to make sense of the political ideology implicit in Aristophanes' Wasps by arguing that the play turns on an elaborate dramatic and intellectual sleight of hand.' The old hero Philokleon is wealthy, Konstan suggests, and engages in jury-service only because he is obsessed with it. The Chorus, on the other hand, are desperately impoverished and need the miserable three obols they make each day as jurors in order to survive. The fact that Philokleon is presented as the Chorus' peer when he consents to having his son support him in a happy, easy retirement from the law-courts (esp. V 869-73) thus reveals the drama's ideological machinery at work: although Wasps poses as a simple little story with a moral (V 64) about how the life of the Athenian Shios could be improved, it valorizes a view of the world which is fundamentally aristocratic, for only the rich can afford to retire from public life into their houses. In this paper, I will argue that the political ideology implicit in Wasps is far less anti-democratic and the play as a whole far more coherent and dramatically sophisticated than either Konstan's analysis or those of earlier critics have suggested.2

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 96 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.