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The Idler's Paradise in Attic Comedy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

H. C. Baldry
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This article is chiefly concerned with a well-known passage of that extraordinary miscellany, the Deipnosophistae of Athenaeus, in which the author follows his usual habit of illustrating a thesis by quoting from comedy. In the pages considered here (vi. 267e–270a) he draws his examples from a series of plays now lost—the Plutuses of Cratinus, the Beasts of Crates, the Amphictyons of Telecleides, the Miners and Persians attributed to Pherecrates, the Sirens of Nicophon, and the Thurio-Persians of Metagenes. This string of quotations, full of cookery-book vocabulary, constitutes our main evidence about the comic poets' treatment of the theme of the land of Cockaigne, Schlaraffenland, the idler's or glutton's paradise. On the basis of this evidence many sweeping generalizations on this subject have been made, some of them so wide of the mark that it may perhaps be worth while to attempt one more review of a passage already often discussed, in the hope of arriving at a fresh assessment of its true significance.

Discussion of such a passage usually involves study of the extracts cited, and leads on to the hazardous business of trying to form some conception of the plays from which they are drawn. But before one follows this well-trodden path there is a more general question to be considered, the answer to which may give some guidance on the way. What is it that Athenaeus' quotations illustrate? The speaker in this part of the symposium, the philosopher Democritus of Nicomedia, has been discoursing about servants, and has already cited the Savages of Pherecrates to show that there was a time when people had no slaves, but did all their own work (263 b).

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Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 22 , Issue 65 , June 1953, pp. 49 - 60
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1953

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References

page 2 note 1 Nor are they descriptions of the ‘good old days’ to be linked—as Gomme links them in his Commentary on Thucydides (i, p. 104)—with other comic passages describing better times in the earlier history of Athens. If the pictures they give us are luxurious, as Gomme emphasizes, exaggeration of the notion of τò ἀÙτματoν is the reason, rather than any tradition of easier days in the time of Themistocles or Solon.

page 3 note 1 Aristotle, , Ath. Pol. xvi. 7Google Scholar; [Plato] Hipparchus 229 b.

page 3 note 2 Athenaeus (or his source) probably used Didascaliae as means of dating the plays, and the unproduced plays would not be included.

page 4 note 1 I follow the text given by Page, D. L. in his Greek Literary Papyri, i (Loeb Library, 1942).Google Scholar

page 4 note 2 Several commentators have identified them with the δαíμoν∊ς πλυτoδóται of Hesiod (Works and Days 122–6). But these are έπιχθóνιoι, and if, as the recurrence of the phrase φúλακ∊ς θνητν ἀνθρὡπων suggests, they are to be identified with the 30,000 spirits of 11. 252—5, they are servants of Zeus, not his opponents. Probably Cratinus' idea is derived from a general tradition, of which Hesiod's δαμоν∊ς and those in Plato's portrayals of the age of Kronos (Politicus 271 d, Laws 713 d) are other versions.

page 5 note 1 Goossens (Revue des Études Anciennes, xxxvii (1935), pp. 429–30), empha-sizing that ἀνí∊ι means ‘sent up’, identifies ‘the god’ with Pluto, or with Kronos after his relegation to Tartarus, and regards τоĩσι as oι δικαíως πλoυτoũντ∊ς.But surely it can mean that Kronos, without being underground himself, made the fruits of the earth grow up out of the ground for his subjects?

page 5 note 2 Cf. Xen. Mem. ii. 7. 13; Callimachus, fr. 87 (Schneider).

page 6 note 1 C.Q. 1935, PP. 186–7.

page 8 note 1 363 c—d. Tr. Cornford.

page 8 note 2 Op. cit., p. 105, n. 2.

page 8 note 3 δρ∊πανoυργóς, which occurs here and in Ar. Peace 548, is translated ‘sword-maker, armourer’ by Liddell and Scott, and ‘armourer’ by Gulick. But in the Peace it clearly refers to a member of the audience who has benefited by the ending of war—a ‘scythe-maker’ or ‘sickle-maker’; and the same meaning fits the Pherecrates passage also.

page 9 note 1 Gesch. d. gr. Lit. iv, p. 105.

page 9 note 2 Is there perhaps an allusion to the words ἀμ∊τρì μзαν δoντ∊ς in the oracle followed by the founders of Thurii? Cf. Diod. Sic. xii. 10.

page 10 note 1 Cf. Ovid, Met. xv. 315–16; Theocr. v. 124–7. On the history of Thurii, see Freeman, K. in Greece and Rome, x (1940-1), pp. 49–64.Google Scholar

page 11 note 1 680 K. Various emendations have been proposed.

page 12 note 1 It is significant for the contents of this play that it is not mentioned in this passage by Athenaeus, though he quotes from it elsewhere. Evidently it did not travesty the legend of the ‘golden age’.