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Fantasy, Irony, and Economic Justice in Aristophanes' Assemblywomen and Wealth

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 August 2006

JOHN ZUMBRUNNEN
JOHN ZUMBRUNNEN
Affiliation:
Union College
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Abstract

In his final two surviving plays, Assemblywomen and Wealth, Aristophanes turns his comic art toward a consideration of the possibilities of radical economic change. His presentation of those possibilities has been read as either indulging in fantasy or as ironically reinforcing the economic status quo. This essay argues that the two plays in fact work to instill in their audience a complex and challenging sensibility that holds fantasy and irony in tension with one another. Drawing on recent arguments about the relationship and relative priority of economic redistribution and cultural recognition as political goals, I suggest that this sensibility provides an attractive model for theorists and ordinary citizens alike as they grapple with issues of economic and social justice.

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American Political Science Review , Volume 100 , Issue 3 , August 2006, pp. 319 - 333
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© 2006 by the American Political Science Association

Scholarly studies and popular accounts alike attest to the enduring presence and continuing growth of poverty and economic inequality in contemporary America (American Political Science Association [APSA] Task Force 2004; Rank 2004). For those who consider such economic realities problematic—as, for example, reflecting or reinforcing political inequality (Pizzigatti 2004; Weir 2004); or as reducing quality of life in any number of ways (Scott 2005; Wilkinson 2005); or as simply unjust—a pressing question becomes how best to move politically to advance fundamental economic change. In the at least nominally democratic context of mainstream American electoral politics, the question in part is how to motivate ordinary citizens to favor such change. Put less normatively, the challenge is to understand the relationship of economic concerns to other political issues in the thinking of those citizens. Along these lines, witness the critique of the contemporary right for its alleged tendency to use cultural or moral issues to obscure the centrality of economic matters in most people's lives (Frank 2004; Wallis 2005); or consider the controversy surrounding the role of “values” in the 2004 election (Hillygus and Shields 2005; Meyer 2004) and the consequent tumult reported among Democrats over whether appealing to “progressive values” or, instead, pursuing an agenda of “economic populism” would change the results next time around (Nagourney 2005; Sirota 2004).

This debate over the relative importance of economic and cultural issues in the political thinking of ordinary citizens has a rough analog in an ongoing debate among social theorists regarding the relationship between economic redistribution and cultural politics in “postsocialist” political action (Feldman 2002; Fraser and Honneth 2003). The debate here goes beyond the narrow confines of electoral politics to consider the nature of progressive social and political movements more broadly. And the cultural goals that here challenge the priority of economic change center not on the preservation of a supposedly endangered morality but, rather, on demands for recognition brought by previously oppressed or excluded identity groups. But the broad concern is similar: how ought we to understand the possibility of economic change in and through democratic politics, particularly in the face of potentially competing political or cultural goals? That broad concern—together with the just discussed two specific manifestations of it—motivates my turn here to Assemblywomen and Wealth, the final two extant comedies of the Greek playwright Aristophanes.

Aristophanic comedy may seem an odd, even absurd, choice as a resource for thinking about the pursuit of economic justice in contemporary democratic politics. I offer two preliminary justifications. First, as a form of art that might speak to social and political concerns, Aristophanic comedy is peculiarly democratic. By this I mean, on the one hand, that Aristophanes' plays make special appeal to and reflect the life of the ordinary citizen, in no small part by making ordinary citizens their heroes and heroines (Ehrenberg 1951; Henderson 1993; Zumbrunnen 2004). But Aristophanes' art is democratic in another sense as well. The complexity of its comic appeal reflects the complexity of the demos, the Greek term that can refer either to the common people or to the people as a whole. As we will see, Aristophanes explicitly claims that his comedy is diverse and inclusive, not only appealing to the ordinary citizen but also operating on a level of interest to intellectuals. Indeed, I claim here that we can use social theorists' arguments about recognition and redistribution as an interpretive heuristic for understanding Aristophanes' engagement with issues of economic justice in Assemblywomen and Wealth. I also claim that the plays can, in turn, make a particular contribution to the recognition–redistribution debate. True to the complexly democratic character of Aristophanes' art, though, this theoretical contribution comes not through analytical argument but through a poet's reflection on what is required of ordinary citizens if we are seriously to hope for fundamental economic reform.

The possibility of such serious hope points toward my second justification for turning to Aristophanic comedy: its curiously powerful juxtaposition of fantastical and ironic perspectives on political, social, and economic change. In Assemblywomen and Wealth, that juxtaposition points toward a sensibility on the part of ordinary citizens that overcomes any simplistic dichotomy between dreaming impossible dreams and cynically accepting the status quo. I ultimately approach this sensibility by tracing the emergence, particularly in Wealth, of what I will term “comic recognition.” Holding fantasy and irony in productive tension with each another, comic recognition enables an understanding of the cultural and its relation to the economic, and thus an understanding of the relationship of recognition to redistribution, that differ markedly from contemporary ways of thinking. In short, taking Aristophanic comedy seriously promises to complicate in a meaningful way the fundamental terms of current debates about social and economic justice. A central challenge in redeeming that promise, though, is to avoid eviscerating comedy's potential precisely by taking it all too seriously (Euben 1997, 103–4, 138). Aristophanes surely meant first to make his audience laugh, even if he also meant simultaneously to make them think. In the end, understanding the bearing of Assemblywomen and Wealth on our contemporary concerns thus depends crucially on our ability to appreciate Aristophanes' unique comic spirit. I turn first, then, to consider the complex nature of Aristophanes' art.

SETTING THE STAGE

Taking Comedy Seriously

Near the end of Assemblywomen, Aristophanes has the leader of the chorus turn from the action onstage to address the theater audience directly:

…I have a small suggestion for the judges: if you're intelligent [sophois], remember the intelligent [sophōn] parts and vote for me; if you've got a sense of humor [gelōsi], remember the jokes [gelōn] and vote for me. Yes, it's virtually all of you that I'm asking to vote for me. (1155–56)1

Unless otherwise noted, I have relied on the Greek text of Assemblywomen and Wealth and the accompanying translations of Jeffrey Henderson in Aristophanes 2002. I cite the plays parenthetically by line number. On the sort of break in the always-tenuous dramatic illusion of comedy reflected in the passage cited here and found frequently in Aristophanes' plays, see Dover 1972, chapter 4; and Hubbard 1992.

Certainly in principle and at least occasionally in practice, one can be intelligent and yet also have a sense of humor, a possibility Aristophanes no doubt both embodied and recognized. The Greek term sophōs, translated here as intelligent, calls to mind not only sophia, the wisdom loved by the philosopher, but also the sort of cleverness with words that Plato and Socrates derided in the sophists. In the passage at hand, it is sometimes translated as “witty,” reflecting the possibility that an intelligent cleverness may itself tend toward the comic. Aristophanes' terms for “humor” and “jokes” here—forms of gelaō—do point more specifically toward the sort of personal and satirical invective that constitutes much Aristophanic humor (and which many “intelligent” spectators surely enjoyed too). But as this playful passage itself suggests, Aristophanes aimed to appeal to all sorts of comic sensibilities. His plays thus draw on the crude and the witty, the joyous and the satiric, the fantastic and the ironic.2

The resulting comic brew complicates the general task of taking comedy seriously as a way of thinking about politics. With some notable exceptions (Euben 1997; Saxonhouse 1992; Strauss 1966) political theorists have in general paid relatively little attention to most of Aristophanes' plays. Classicists, on the other hand, have long debated the political implications of Aristophanes' work. A fundamental question has been whether we can find any serious political comment at all in Aristophanes, given that he aimed first and foremost to make audiences laugh and thereby to win the competitions for comic dramas at the great Athenian civic festivals (Edwards 1991; Euben 1997; Gomme 1938; Halliwell 1984; Heath 1987; Konstan 1995; Ober 2002). As Aristophanes himself suggests in the passage just discussed, there is no reason to think that laughter and serious thought are mutually exclusive. The challenge, again, is to take comedy seriously without thereby losing one's sense of humor.

Recent work has particularly stressed the importance of fantasy alongside the bodily humor and mocking of contemporary figures that mark all of Aristophanes' plays (Goldhill 1990; 1991; Halliwell 1991; Longo 1990; Reckford 1987; Winkler and Zeitlin 1990). The English term fantasy has etymological roots in the Greek phantazomai, to appear, and phantasia, imagination. Though Aristophanes uses neither term, I here draw from Assemblywomen and Wealth an understanding of fantasy as the imagining of possibilities that involve overcoming limits or boundaries imposed by everyday reality. In this sense, the fantasy of fundamental material redistribution stands as a central element of the comic appeal of both plays. In Assemblywomen, the intrepid Praxagora leads the women of Athens in a plot to seize control of the city from the men; once in power, they institute a scheme of communal property designed to ensure economic equality for all. The hero of Wealth, an ordinary citizen named Chremylus, discovers that the just souls among us are poor because the god Wealth is, literally, blind; after he manages to restore the god's sight, the just become wealthy and the unjust soon enough change their ways so that they too might regain their riches. Beyond their appeal as a particular mode of comedy, these fantasies of social justice can be seen in part as responses to the economic realities of early fourth-century Athens. Alan Sommerstein (1984) has gone so far as to see in Assemblywomen and Wealth a radical transformation in the politics of Aristophanes, away from the traditional aristocratic posture of his earlier work and toward a greater sympathy for the suffering of the ordinary Athenian citizen.3

Aristophanes' political commitments have often been seen as predominantly aristocratic (Cartledge 1990, chapter 5; and Handley 1993 de Ste. Croix 1972, 357–59; Dover 1972; 33f). I work here from the basic assumption that Aristophanes need not have been a committed democrat to have valuable insights into democracy.

Sommerstein's (1984) insistence that the plots of Assemblywomen and Wealth reflect Aristophanes' sincere interest in economic reform stands against a more widespread reading of the plays as deeply ironic (McGlew 1997; Rothwell 1990; Sommerstein 1984). Here Aristophanes' suggestion of varying comic sensibilities among his audience is particularly to the point. For the sort of ordinary spectators who “have a sense of humor,” who like to laugh at crude jokes and, more generally, to escape from everyday life, Assemblywomen and Wealth offer up their fantasies of riches for all. For those more intelligent or clever or witty spectators, on the other hand, the plays point in one way or another toward the impossibility of such fantasies ever becoming reality. Thus Olson (1990, 225), for example, writes that whatever is suggested by a cursory examination of its basic plot, Wealth is “an essentially conservative text, whose deeper ideological aims are not necessarily identical with its apparent surface concerns.” For those with a proper feel for the ironic, Assemblywomen and Wealth in fact continue to preach Aristophanes' aristocratic politics.

This latter reading no doubt has wide appeal for a variety of reasons. It promises admittance to the elite group of those “in the know,” allowing us to participate in the sort of “presumed superiority” that often marks irony (Nehamas 1998, 51); it perhaps resonates in what Richard Rorty (1989, 94) calls “our increasingly ironist culture;” and, more particularly for the political theorist, it falls in line with the longstanding philosophical interest in irony from Socrates (Nehamas 1998; Vlastos 1991) to some postmodern thinkers (Colebrook 2002, 2004). Still, I find ironic readings of Assemblywomen and Wealth lacking, in part, because they typically rest on a narrow understanding of irony as denoting the presence of alternative meanings that are more or less the opposite of the plays' apparent meanings. In particular, such readings tend to see the plays as subtly reinforcing the real impermeability of the limits or boundaries that fantasy imagines overcoming. As I suggest later, a more serviceable definition of irony allows for a wider range of alternative meanings that need not simply oppose or supplant the apparent meaning. More broadly, merely choosing one way of reading the comedy and thus the political upshot of Assemblywomen and Wealth seems too simple to me. Instead, I will argue that we must with Sommerstein retain a sense of the power of fantasy while at the same time recognizing that the two plays do indeed offer material for the ironic puncturing of the fantasies they present. This is to say that Aristophanes' plays call forth a complex of comic sensibilities not only among spectators but within each spectator.4

In so doing, I would add, Aristophanes suggests that an appreciation for irony need not be limited to a smug elite and so, in a sense, he casts an ironic light on the division of his audience which he playfully suggests in the passage from Assemblywomen quoted previously.

I aim, then, to explore the interplay between irony and fantasy embodied in Assemblywomen and Wealth.

Class, Status, and Politics—Ancient and Contemporary

Aristophanes produced Assemblywomen in the late 390s B.C.E. and Wealth in 388 B.C.E. We can identify both long-term and more immediate contexts that might account for his engagement in these plays with issues of material distribution. Ober (1989, 17–19, 194–96) emphasizes the clear and consistent distinction drawn in Greek texts of various periods between rich (plousioi) and poor (penetēs), suggesting at the least an ongoing acknowledgement of material inequality. No doubt the issue of inequality—and more generally the basic matter of material suffering—took on particular significance for Aristophanes in the 390s. Athens at the time still felt the more lasting effects of the Peloponnesian War, including the loss of its lucrative empire, the dislocation of its rural population, and the destruction wrought by the Spartan army during its annual invasions of the Attic countryside. There exists some scholarly disagreement over just how far Athens' fortunes fell and just when they began to rebound; and we cannot say with absolute certainty that inequality in fact grew worse during the period, because the fortunes of wealthy Athenians will themselves have declined (Bowie 1993; Strauss 1986). Clearly, though, Aristophanes wrote his final plays with an eye toward the suffering of the ordinary Athenian in particular and, more generally, toward the issue of distribution (French 1991; Mossé 1995; Sommerstein 1984). This suggests the basic potential relevance of Assemblywomen and Wealth to a contemporary engagement with economic change.

That potential, though, will remain limited if Aristophanes' understanding of the economic and its relationship to the cultural and the political differs too drastically from our own. Following the pioneering work of Karl Polanyi (1968, 1977), the prevailing “primitivist” approach to the study of economic activity in the ancient world raises precisely this possibility (Austin and Vidal-Naquet 1977; Burke 1992; Mossé 1995). Polanyi argues that in “primitive societies” like classical Greece “the elements of the economy [were] embedded in noneconomic institutions” (Polanyi 1968, 84; cf. Polanyi 1977, 51–2). As a result, economic activities and attitudes were shaped by cultural practices and values. The Greeks, for example, “took pains to describe the only activity that in addition to war and politics they deemed worthy of a free man, that is, the working of the land” (Mossé 1995, 24). The resulting “hierarchy of occupations” consistently placed agriculture above the “banausic” activities of trade and manufacturing (Austin and Vidal-Naquet 1977, 11f), but this distinction was based more on cultural or moral considerations than on purely economic calculations (Burke 1992; Finley 1985; Ober 1991). To this sort of intermingling of the economic and the cultural, Polanyi contrasts the vaunted independence of the “disembedded” capitalist economic sphere. There market mechanisms supposedly shape production and consumption without interference from “blood-tie, legal compulsion, religious obligation, fealty or magic” (1968, 81–2).

Although Polanyi rejects this latter way of thinking as an “obsolete market mentality,” its continued prevalence lends credence to the idea that the Greeks may have had a fundamentally different understanding of economic life. Classicists and historians, again, have taken this idea quite seriously. Both de Ste. Croix (1972, 1981) and Finley (1985), though they react in widely divergent ways to the insights of the primitivist approach, thus depict Aristophanes in particular as focusing chiefly on extra-economic matters of status. Finley in fact defends “status” as an appropriate concept for the study of embedded ancient economic activity, calling it “an admirably vague word” that can capture a person's place in a tangle of “criss-crossing categories,” including citizenship and landownership (51). de Ste. Croix (1981, 125), on the other hand, insists on the relevance of a Marxist analysis of ancient class struggle, centering on the exploitation of the working class (both free and slave), and freed from the ideological misdirection that follows from paying too much attention to matters of status, as our elite ancient sources do. He thus dismisses Aristophanes as an aristocratic “snob” who judged material life according to precisely the sort of status markers Finley emphasizes (de Ste. Croix 1981, 125), though one who occasionally showed a patronizing sympathy for the poor (de Ste. Croix 1972, 357).

From the perspective of either Finley (1985) or de Ste. Croix (1972, 1981), Aristophanes' reflection of the embeddedness of ancient economic life, or at least his participation in the ideology of status that masked ancient economic realities, limits his contemporary relevance. Other work, although adhering to the basic insights of the primitivist approach, opens more interpretive space. Ellen Meiksins Wood thus explores the potentially fruitful contrasts to be drawn between the interrelation of the economic, cultural, and political in the ancient world and the supposed independence of the economic in capitalism. Writing of democratic Athens, Wood concludes that “as in capitalism, the right to citizenship was not determined by socio-economic status, but unlike capitalism, relations between classes were directly and profoundly affected by civic status” (Wood 1995, 202). As this formulation suggests, Wood, unlike Finley and de Ste. Croix, finds concepts of both status and class relevant to the ancient world (see also Ober, 1989, 194–96, 248–49). The status of citizen was, of course, particularly central in ancient Athens. The definition of the citizen, while it did not depend on class and so allowed for the empowerment of what Wood calls the “peasant citizen,” did turn on other status markers including gender (117–18), free birth as opposed to slavery (110–15) and, after the imposition of Pericles' citizenship laws in 450/451, Athenian lineage (Ober 1989, 80–1).

As Ober (1989, 249f) makes clear, other status markers—noble birth, education, and the like— continued to matter in interactions among those defined as citizens. Despite this centrality of status, though, the basic class division between rich and poor remained alive as a chief concern of the political activity of the polis (Ober; Wood 1995). The Athenians through their democratic politics routinely redistributed wealth by requiring wealthy citizens to undertake liturgies such as the trierarchy and the choregia (Austin and Vidal-Naquet 1977, 121–23; Finley 1985, 36–37) and by paying citizens for attending the assembly or serving on juries (Austin and Vidal-Naquet, 119–20; Ober, 81). Then, too, Polanyi depicts the Athenian agora or marketplace not as an independent institution driven by the laws of supply and demand, but as an “an artificial construct” of the polis (1968, 311). The agora, Polanyi argues, had equalizing effects both of a directly material nature—by ensuring a steady supply of cheap food (1968, 314)—and of a more indirect political or social sort—by creating within its bounds a certain “equality of status” (1968, 316). In this context, the question for those granted the status of citizen was not whether to redistribute, but how and how much to redistribute. My suggestion will be that Aristophanes engages with the question of redistribution understood in this way and, more generally, with the intertwining of what we sometimes separate as the political, the cultural, and the economic.

This more complex approach to the place of economic matters in ancient Athenian life and so at least potentially in Aristophanes' plays also makes the ongoing debate among social theorists over the relative priority of “recognition” and “redistribution” a useful point of contemporary contact. I have in mind in particular the controversy spawned by the work of Nancy Fraser on the relationship of cultural recognition and economic redistribution (Fraser 1995a, 1995b, 1997, 2000, 2001; Fraser and Honneth 2003, Fraser and Naples 2004). In Justice Interruptus, Fraser (1997, 1–3) identifies three aspects of the “postsocialist condition”: first, the “absence of any credible progressive vision” of comprehensive social justice (Fraser 1997, 2); second, the renewed strength of economic liberalism; third, and most centrally for Fraser's work, a “shift in the grammar of political claims making” toward calls for “the recognition of group difference” which at times “eclipse” calls for redistribution. Worried that this last development imposes a false choice between pushing for economic redistribution or seeking recognition for excluded groups, Fraser argues for a comprehensive understanding of social justice that encompasses both goals, while properly holding them as analytically distinct. In developing this argument about the distinctiveness of redistribution and recognition, Fraser (2000, 116) acknowledges the influence of Weber's (1958) discussion of class, status and party. Issues of redistribution, then, focus on class, whereas issues of recognition properly focus on status. Fraser also imagines a third dimension of social (in)justice concerned with specifically political exclusion and corresponding to Weber's idea of party, though to date this third dimension remains underdeveloped (Feldman 2002; Fraser 2004, 1116–17).

Fraser insists that the distinctions she wants to draw work only at the analytical level. In political practice, recognition and redistribution are inevitably intertwined in the pursuit of “participatory parity” for all members of society, which Fraser (2001, 29) calls the “normative core” of her conception of justice. Although her argument has met serious criticism from a variety of directions (Butler 1998; Phillips 1997; Young 1997), I here want briefly to highlight the critique offered by Axel Honneth, who argues that the analytical distinctions Fraser draws are artificial and thus untenable. Honneth contends that attempts to bring about redistribution can in fact be understood as struggles within the three “spheres of recognition”—love, law, and achievement—that together constitute the “capitalist recognition order” (Fraser and Honneth 2003, 138–39). In particular, redistribution struggles aim at “mobilizing social rights” by appeal to the law or are “definitional conflicts over … the current application of the achievement principle” (Fraser and Honneth, 154). In either case, they fundamentally aim at recognition—of the equal legal status of the oppressed or at their achievement of the status of productive citizens—with redistribution following as rights are recognized or principles redefined.

Broadly speaking, the redistribution–recognition debate hinges on an issue familiar from the contemporary study of the ancient economy: the relationship between economic life and matters that fall under the broad rubrics of culture, status, or identity. That is, in thinking about our own time no less than in thinking about the ancient world, we must at the very least call into question the notion of a separate and distinct economic sphere of human activity. The debate among Fraser, Honneth, and others suggests that in considering the possibility of redistribution, we must consider whether such fundamental economic change is in fact separable, analytically or otherwise, from changes in the cultural sphere—in matters of status and identity. I mean to suggest that Aristophanes did something akin to this in Assemblywomen and Wealth, responding both to changed economic circumstances and to the intertwining of class, status, and politics as described in particular by Wood. Borrowing contemporary language, we might say that in these late plays, Aristophanes explored the possibility of radical economic redistribution and it's intertwining with issues of recognition in and through democratic politics. Of course, such a claim risks serious anachronism unless, in addition to the broad similarities I have been emphasizing, we take stock of some important differences between Aristophanes' time and our own. Before turning to the plays, I want to give proper play to those differences.

Redistribution and Recognition

That we can usefully relate Aristophanes' plays to our contemporary concerns makes them relevant; that the conceptual fit will always prove imperfect makes such a move interesting rather than simply pedantic. Two concepts, redistribution and recognition, are particularly crucial to my reading of Assemblywomen and Wealth. Of the two, redistribution poses relatively few difficulties, though some important differences between Aristophanes' time and our own emerge that are worth noting. In discussing redistribution, Fraser (Fraser and Honneth 2003, 74) distinguishes between “transformative strategies,” which aim to “change the division of labor, the forms of ownership and other deep structures of the economic system” and “affirmative strategies,” which seek “to redress maldistribution through income transfers” and thereby “to increase the consumption of the disadvantaged.” Drawing on his argument that class in a Marxist sense had little or no meaning in the ancient world and referring in particular to Aristophanes, Finley (1985, 144) argues that “ancient Utopian schemes…concentrated on consumption” rather than on changing the relations of production. Again, the reminder that there can be little point in attempting to make a Marxist of Aristophanes is important. He indeed emphasizes the potential pleasures of redistributing food, drink, and other consumer goods; and especially in Assemblywomen the changes he imagines assume the continued existence of slavery. And yet Finley perhaps overstates the case. In both Assemblywomen and Wealth, Aristophanes imagines a redistribution of land, surely a fundamental factor of production in the Greek world. In this and other details, he seems to envision, to borrow Fraser's term, “transformative” changes in the life of the ordinary citizen.

Differences in contemporary and Greek ideas of “recognition” are more central to my argument that Aristophanes, by exploring a sort of “comic recognition,” might usefully complicate the terms of contemporary debates about social justice. Two contemporary understandings of recognition are relevant here. The first might be called “identity-based recognition.” Articulated most influentially in Charles Taylor's “The Politics of Recognition,” it draws ultimately on Hegel and focuses upon individuals' mutual recognition of one another based on a “presumption of equal worth” of their cultural identities. Such proper recognition of one's identity works as a salve for the “real damage, real distortion” imposed by “non-recognition or misrecognition” by others, which “can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being” (Taylor 1994, 25). Now comedies frequently enough rely on the plot device of mistaken identity followed by recognition, and Aristophanes is no exception. Both Assemblywomen and Wealth include moments of misrecognized individual identity. Aristophanes, though, shows little interest in the psychic consequences of mistaken identity, and so the type of recognition that appears in the plays will be of little comfort to those contemporary theorists who do have such concerns.

A second recent understanding of recognition, which I will refer to here as “status-based recognition,” emerges from Fraser's critique of the politics of recognition as depicted by Taylor and others. As I have already suggested, Fraser thinks of recognition as “a question of social status,” thus rejecting what she calls the “identity model of recognition,” which she sees as tending to reify group identity in dangerous ways (2000, 113). The relevant harm done by misrecognition or non-recognition for Fraser consists not in some sort of psychic distortion or injury but in preventing those denied proper recognition from “participating as a peer in social life” (Fraser 2000, 112–16; Fraser and Honneth 2003, 26f). Recognition in turn aims “not at valorizing group identity but at overcoming subordination” (2000, 114). Along with an element of basic mistaken identity, I will suggest that Assemblywomen envisions something like Fraser's status-centered and parity-focused recognition occurring for the women of Athens.

In turning to Wealth, though, we will need a more particularly Greek notion of recognition. Patchen Markell's (2003) recent work on “tragic recognition” or “tragic acknowledgment” serves as something of a model for me on this score. By considering the centrality of recognition to Sophoclean tragedy, Markell means to challenge the contemporary idea of recognition as an exercise of sovereign agency over one's identity, reflected in particular in the work of Taylor. Against this, he considers Aristotle's analysis of anagnôrisis in the Poetics and the action of Sophocles' Antigone. He finds there an understanding that gaining recognition of one's identity, including and especially self-recognition, is both “impossible and dangerous” (2003, 63). Tragedy thus depends on the prevalence, even inevitability, of misrecognition and, paradoxically, on the dramatic power of moments of recognition—though the paradox fades somewhat when recognition is conceived not only as coming to know oneself (as commanded by the oracle at Delphi) but also as a dawning awareness of every human's powerlessness over matters of action and identity. Alongside this fundamental impossibility of achieving true recognition of one's identity, tragedy for Markell ultimately points to the possibility that some assertions of identity and their accompanying demands for recognition—including Creon's “tyrannical” insistence on his inviolable role as ruler—in fact serve to support “social relations of subordination” (2003, 73, 89).

What we might call a kind of “comic recognition” emerges in Aristophanes' late plays and especially in Wealth. Like Greek tragic recognition, it directs our attention to moments in which particular individuals struggle to assert their agency and in the process gain insight into their own being and its place in the cosmos. These moments reveal the fragility of particular humans, and they raise questions about the power or powerlessness of humanity. As Markell suggests of tragic recognition, a consideration of Aristophanic comic recognition can ultimately help to complicate the contemporary debates I have been considering. More precisely, the sort of recognition that occurs in Wealth, appearing most clearly as the hero of the play argues with the goddess Poverty, deals not with status or identity among humans but with the relationship between humans and forces beyond their control. This recognition draws on a different understanding of the cultural and thus a possible intertwining of the cultural and the economic for which contemporary discussions of recognition and redistribution cannot easily account. True to the complexity of Aristophanes' artistic spirit, this comic recognition allows for a measure of fantasy and thus holds out somewhat more hope than tragic recognition—though not foolish hope, for Aristophanes always juxtaposes fantasy with irony.

Again, the latter two types of recognition—status-based recognition and comic recognition—figure prominently in my readings of Assemblywomen and Wealth and particularly in my understanding of three interrelated movements from the former to the latter. Given the complexity of those movements, let me present them schematically here using the language of recognition and redistribution. First, Aristophanes moves from a presentation of redistribution and recognition as distinct dramatic and political moments in Assemblywomen to a presentation of redistribution subsumed in a moment of recognition in Wealth. The vision of social and economic change in Assemblywomen is thus broadly analogous to that offered by Fraser, with a change in the status of women followed by a redistribution that erases the class distinction between rich and poor. Wealth, though, does not somehow return to the position defended by Fraser's critics, for it, much more than Assemblywomen, relies on the sort of comic recognition just sketched. That is to say that the second movement I find from Assemblywomen to Wealth takes us toward an understanding of recognition that reflects some of the deepest questions of Greek culture. Finally, Aristophanes' portrayal of comic recognition in Wealth reflects a different deployment of fantasy and irony. In Assemblywomen, fantasy and irony stand juxtaposed as different perspectives on the possibility of radical change; in Wealth, they stand in tension with one another as elements of comic recognition and of the sort of sensibility Aristophanes seems to have hoped for in his fellow Athenians.

ASSEMBLYWOMEN

Ironically enough, the action of Assemblywomen [Ecclēsiazousai], despite the play's name, never takes us to the Athenian assembly (or ecclesia). The play's plot hinges on a decision made in a particular meeting of that assembly to give all political power to the women of the city. But rather than show that meeting, Aristophanes has the character Chremes offer an after-the-fact account of the proceedings. Chremes describes the subject of that day's assembly as “the salvation [sôtērias] of the city” (396). In practicing the speech she intends to give at the assembly, Praxagora—the leader of the women—similarly promises her imagined audience, “trust my counsels and you may be saved [sôthēsesth']” (210).5

I here draw on Jack Lindsay's translation in Aristophanes 1984.

Whatever elements of irony or satire we find in the play, and there are many, Assemblywomen thus most basically presents a fantasy. Aristophanes asks the theater audience to imagine and to enjoy the wondrous results of two fantastic transformations in the collective life of the city: the granting of political power to women and the use of that power to enact a scheme of communal property. Drawing on contemporary terms, we might say that the fantasy of Assemblywomen thus depends on a moment of status-based recognition, followed by a moment of redistribution. Each of these moments admits of an ironic as well as a fantastic reading. Taken together, the interplay of fantasy and irony in the play's presentation of recognition and redistribution serves to thematize the limits or boundaries of democratic politics understood as persuasion among fellow citizens about the city's well-being.

The opening lines of Assemblywomen make clear the centrality of recognition of some sort to the play's comic situation. Praxagora walks on stage, speaking to the lamp she carries through the dark night. She both demands that the lamp “broadcast now the fiery signal” summoning her co-conspirators and praises the lamp's discretion:

You alone we make privy to our plot, and rightly, for also in our bedrooms you stand close by as we essay Aphrodite's maneuvers; and when our bodies are flexed, no one banishes from the room your supervisory eye … and you stand by us when stealthily we open pantries stocked with bread and the liquor of Bacchus; and you're an accomplice that never blabs to the neighbors. (5–15).

The lamp, as “supervisory eye,” sees or sheds light on that which is usually hidden—here sex and theft—but also, as an “accomplice” whose light spreads only so far, allows for the keeping of secrets. Here the lamp serves as a means by which the women of Athens might recognize one another as they emerge from the private space of their homes to embark on a most public scheme; but, Praxagora insists, the lamp alone can be trusted to witness the enactment of that scheme.

Praxagora's address to the lamp point towards the complex strategy that she has urged upon the women of Athens (Bowie 1993, 255–57; Saxonhouse 1992, 4–7; Strauss 1966, 263). She has told them to get “false beards” and to “swipe their husbands' clothes,” for they are to appear in the Athenian assembly as men and, thus disguised, to carry their proposal that power be given over to women. As the women gather round Praxagora and her lamp, there ensues a rehearsal scene that demonstrates both the comic potential and the practical difficulties of such a scheme (Ober 2002, 135–38; Saxonhouse, 4–9). The women find it relatively easy to take on the physical appearance of men: “I threw my razor out of the house right away, so that I'd get hairy all over and not look female at all,” one exclaims (65–6). But it proves rather more difficult for them to mimic male mannerisms and ways of speaking. As they practice speaking before the Assembly, one woman mistakenly swears “by the Two Goddesses” (155); another, “by Aphrodite” (189), as no man would. Another to Praxagora's dismay greets the “assembled ladies” (165–66). Frustrated, Praxagora insists that everything be “exactly right” before they proceed (163).6

In considering the efforts of Praxagora and the other women to take on the appearance and mannerisms of men, we should not overlook the fact that these “women” will themselves have been played by male actors on the Athenian stage. Thus Aristophanes manages to double the play on gender roles here, having men portray women portraying men. The playwright perhaps here also engages in the theatrical self-referentiality that marks old comedy in general (Dover 1971; Hubbard 1992; Segal 1995).

In offering up the idea that women somehow gaining political power in Athens might be key to the city's salvation, Aristophanes' introduces one of the key elements of the play's fantasy.7

That women gaining power in the city remained a fanciful idea in 4th century Athens need not mean it was an unfamiliar one. Dover (1972, 201) thus describes “the assumption of some degree of social and political initiative by women” as a “comic tradition” and reminds us that Aristophanes has already presented the possibility in Lysistrata and Women at the Thesmophoria. Then, too, the broad theme of women exceeding the limits imposed by their status in Greek society appears in tragedy as well, with Sophocles' Antigone as perhaps the most obvious example.

But these opening scenes also suggest much about the reality of citizenship in Athens. The playwright clearly points toward the fact that full participation in the affairs of the polis requires recognition as a citizen and toward the additional fact that gaining the status of citizen requires appearing to one's fellow citizens as a man. Without recognition as a man/citizen, one may not enter the Assembly, where speeches are made and heard and decisions are taken. This poses a seemingly paradoxical necessity to Praxagora and the other women: they must first make sure to be misrecognized if they are to achieve proper recognition as citizens. In contemporary terms, we might say that to achieve recognition as political equals (or, as it turns out, rulers), the women must forfeit recognition of their identities as women. From such a contemporary perspective, we might see Assemblywomen as suggesting a basic tension between status-based recognition and identity-based recognition. But, again, Aristophanes shows little concern with the consequences of mistaken identity for the women as individuals. Instead, he uses the strategy of mistaken identity as a comic point of entry for exploring status-based recognition as a boundary on democratic politics.

Precisely what Aristophanes means to say about this boundary remains unclear. On one hand, we might see these opening scenes as revealing how ridiculous the Athenian exclusion of women qua women is. After all, the differences between men and women appear remarkably superficial, turning out to be a matter of physical attributes that can be artificially recreated and ways of speaking and bearing oneself that can be learned or at least imitated tolerably well. On this level, the play invites the audience to imagine the fantastic possibility of getting beyond these differences and thinking solely about what is best for the city. On the other hand, we might read these scenes as enacting standard stereotypes of women as fundamentally scheming, deceptive beings who also, somewhat incongruously, struggle to find a proper political pitch as they try to implement their plans. In any event, a more ironic reading would emphasize that Praxagora and her followers have to become men in order to gain power for women. In a sense, the apparently fantastic overcoming of boundaries they achieve in fact reinforces the presence of those boundaries in the real world (MacDowell 1995, 309; Rothwell 1990, 82–92, 103).

Whether we lean more toward fantasy or irony in understanding the recognition of the women of Athens as citizens will ultimately depend in part on what we make of the scheme of communal property that Praxagora enacts.8

Praxagora's scheme for communal property leads, too, to a communal scheme for sexual relations, though I focus my attention on the former sort of redistribution here. The latter scheme hinges on Praxagora's declaration that unattractive women and old men will have their choice of sexual mates first and thus will not lose out to the young and attractive (lines 610–20); it ends with a weakening of family ties familiar from Plato's Republic. Scholars have long argued over the potential link between Plato's communal scheme and Praxagora's. A general consensus exists that while such ideas may have been in the air in Athens generally, Aristophanes is not parodying Plato's thinking in particular here, especially since he presented Assemblywomen some time before the Republic was written. See, for example, MacDowell 1995, 314; Ober 2002, 154–5; and Reckford 1987, 348. On the significance of the dissolution of the boundaries between families in Assemblywomen, see especially Saxonhouse 1992, Chapter 1.

Put simply, the success of that scheme would lend credence to the idea that Aristophanes means us to see the empowerment of women as a good thing, to view it through the lens of a joyous fantasy rather than with a knowingly ironic, even cynical eye. The meaning of status-based recognition and redistribution are in this sense inextricably linked in Assemblywomen.9

Dover (1972, 200) explores the deeper links between the place of women and the nature of property in Greek society and thus the easy “confluence” of “two comic traditions” in Assemblywomen. MacDowell (1995, 320), on the other hand, concludes that the “two main subjects” of the play—“women attending the Assembly to take control of the state, and the communistic organization of property and sex”—“have no necessary connection with one another.”

And yet Aristophanes seems to go out of his way to establish the two as dramatically distinct moments. Despite the frustrations she endures during the women's rehearsal, Praxagora's strategy of mistaken identity works amazingly well, and she will soon move to implement her plan for radical redistribution in Athens. As noted previously, though, Aristophanes does not have us witness the actual assembly meeting in which the women present and carry their proposal. He instead has a neighbor named Chremes relate the remarkable outcome of the meeting to Praxagora's husband, Blepyrus. Chremes tells of how a “pale, good-looking young man”—in fact, the disguised Praxagora—“made a case for handing the city over to women” (427–30) and, in the end, carried the day. Hearing this, Belyprus soon turns to give to Praxagora, who has shed her beard and man's cloak and who feigns surprise, the news of her own success. One effect of this bit of indirection is to reinforce the complexity of the issue of recognition or, for the contemporary reader, to point again toward the tension between identity-based and status-based recognition. Even as they gain political status, we who know the true identity of the conspirators as women are not to see them acting politically. A more immediate effect is to distance the strategy of mistaken identity from the scheme of redistribution, at least dramatically.

Though she still does not take credit for bringing women to political power, Praxagora soon introduces her central reform:

I propose that everyone should own everything in common [koinōnein], and draw an equal living. No more rich man [ploutein] here, poor man [athlion] there, or a man with a big farm and a man without land enough for his own grave, or a man with many slaves and a man without even an attendant. No, I will establish one and the same standard of life for everyone. (588–92).

The following scenes by and large bear out Finley's (1985, 144) conclusion that ancient Utopian schemes focused essentially on consumption. Blepyrus does, it is true, briefly raise the issue of production, asking “who will there be to farm the land” once it is held in common. Praxagora responds simply “the slaves,” thus affirming that, however much the life of the free farmer or peasant may change under her scheme, the basic mode of production will remain the same. If, with de Ste. Croix (1981), we see the ancient world as a site of class-based exploitation—drawing, again, on a Marxist notion of class as defined by relation to the means of production—then Praxagora's scheme, and Aristophanes' outlook, is hardly revolutionary. On the other hand, her aim in equalizing distribution is nothing less than a fantastic alteration in the motivations of human action. Her central claim is that “No one will be doing anything as a result of poverty [penia] because everyone will have all the necessities” (605–6) and so there will be “no more mugging, no more envying the next guy, no more wearing rags, no more poor people, no more wrangling, no more dunning and repossessing” (565–67). She thus, for example, meets Bleyprus' concern about whether those who lose lawsuits will be able to pay the judgments imposed by noting that there will be nothing left to sue over (335).

Praxagora wins over Blepyrus with her fantasy of a work and conflict-free existence, but Aristophanes soon introduces a more abiding challenge to the redistributive scheme. As the two make their way off to the agora so that Praxagora can collect everyone's private property, there ensues a conversation between their neighbor and a “Dissident” who doubts the very basis of Praxagora's plan.10

This character is in fact denoted simply as “man [anēr].” I follow Sommerstein (1984, 316) and Rothwell (1990, 7) in using Dissident. Henderson, in Aristophanes 2002, uses “selfish man.”

The neighbor will eventually cry out against the “total skepticism [apistōn] of this man.” In part, the Dissident's skepticism follows from a claim about what drives human beings in general and Athenians in particular: it is “not in our national character,” he says, to give up private goods. This skepticism about the possibility of removing the desire for gain (or, in Praxagora's formulation, the goad of poverty) merges with a skepticism about the worth of grand claims like Praxagora's. The Dissident thus concludes that “on the strength of mere words I'm hardly about to throw away the fruits of my sweat and thrift in this sort of mindless way” (750) and declares “I intend to be cautious, until I see what most people do” (770). At the core of the Dissident's concerns, then, are doubts about the power of “mere words” to change “what most people do.” Chremes, Blepyrus and most of their fellow citizens hurry off to the agora to turn in their private property; but the Dissident remains recalcitrant. He, for one, thinks it absurd to imagine the citizens of Athens willingly parting with their goods.

Much depends on what importance we attach to the presence of the Dissident in Assemblywomen. Perhaps Aristophanes means his skepticism as a convenient foil soon overtaken by the power of Praxagora's fantastic vision. Or perhaps the Dissident reflects the ironic undercurrent of the play, pointing toward the ultimate unfeasibility of any radical redistribution of wealth in the face of both basic human greed and the somewhat more palatable human attachment to treasured goods. If we resist simply choosing between these two possible readings (cf. Reckford 1987, 353), we can see their juxtaposition as both locating and problematizing redistribution as the outer limit of democratic politics. Praxagora sees the fantasy of a redistribution that fundamentally alters the basis of human action as possible through persuasion. The Dissident, and readers more attuned to irony, will see the material motivations of humans as marking the bounds of persuasion's power.11

Although I focus on the doubts of the Dissident here, those who see an ironic undermining of Assemblywomen's fantasy point to other aspects of the play as well. The scheme of sexual communism, for example, plays out in ways that suggest that its success may be threatened by the selfish desires of individuals. More generally, Saxonhouse 1992 argues that the implementation of that scheme reveals the consequences of attempting to abolish difference in favor of seamless unity in the city. On another note, despite the play's ending with the joyous announcement of a great communal feast, some focus on Blepyrus' apparent suggestion that everyone must “hurry home” if they are to enjoy that feast (lines 1144–47) as evidence that the idea of providing for all from common stores is unrealistic. For discussion of the ironic reading of these scenes, see especially Sommerstein 1984 and Rothwell 1990, 6–7.

The dramatic separation of recognition and redistribution in Assemblywomen thus co-exists with a thematic link. The two appear as boundaries at opposite ends of democratic politics. The dynamics of status-based recognition determine the constitution of the body of citizens (and bodies of citizens) that will be party to the process of persuasion. Ideas of redistribution, in turn, test just how far such persuasion can go.

Read in this way, Assemblywomen suggests a view of Athenian democracy that accords with Wood's arguments, discussed earlier, about the place of status and class in ancient politics—matters of status determining who has a political voice, issues of class providing much of the fodder for political debate and action. We can also see a resemblance to Fraser's argument that in contemporary politics recognition and redistribution are analytically distinct though often pragmatically related in progressive political action. Iris Marion Young (1997, 152) emphasizes this pragmatic relationship in concluding that “what Fraser calls ‘recognition’ is a means to the economic and social equality and freedom that she brings under the category of ‘redistribution.’” Similarly, Assemblywomen's fantasy of social change involves a movement for redistribution that follows on a movement to recognize the equality of a group previously relegated to lower cultural, social, and civic cultural status. Still, the dramatic distance between recognition and redistribution in the play suggests that the link between the two remains, as in Fraser's analysis, pragmatic and contingent rather than inherent or necessary.

In his recent reading of Assemblywomen, Josiah Ober has explored a similar set of themes in the play and arrived at an interpretive conclusion similar in some ways to my own. Ober (2002) argues that the critical force of the play comes from Aristophanes' “comic exaggeration” of political principles that most Athenians accepted without much thought. The play thus takes the basic Athenian commitment to equality to two logical conclusions: equal (or more) political power for women and the equal distribution of property and wealth. As the Dissident's doubts suggest, Praxagora's scheme also takes to the extreme the Athenian idea that the social order and even nature itself can be reordered through politics as persuasion. For Ober, these comic exaggerations serve to invite “members of the audience to confront their contradictory norms and values” (154). Again, I have something similar in mind: by enabling both fantastic and ironic readings of the central moments of recognition and redistribution in Assemblywomen, Aristophanes renders the boundaries of democratic politics problematic. In effect, he encourages the audience to consider how firm those boundaries are and whether they can or ought to be overcome.

But Ober's (2002) emphasis on the revelation to the audience of contradictions in their ways of thinking poses a potential problem—which is to say it raises an interesting question. On Ober's reading, Assemblywomen ultimately suggests to the Athenians that they are not as committed to equality as they think, for they are also, for example, committed to private wealth. Their holding equality dear thus means something other—something less—than they think it does. If irony involves the recognition of an alternative meaning beyond the apparent meaning, then we might say that Assemblywomen for Ober ultimately aims to make the Athenians see the irony in their political thinking. In the end, that is, Ober's reading seems to emphasize Assemblywomen's ironic impact or the way in which the play can be seen to highlight the hidden contradictions, and thus the limits more than the possibilities, of democratic politics in Athens or elsewhere.12

Ober himself presents his reading as an alternative to seeing Assemblywomen as simply “an ironic or absurdist fantasy” (2002, 126). My suggestion here is that his argument in fact implies a reading of the fantasy of Assemblywomen as inherently ironic. On irony as revealing the limits of any particular “vocabulary,” see Rorty 1989, chapter 4.

Perhaps that is inevitable—perhaps once a spectator or reader sees ironic limits, the possibilities of fantasy fade. If so, then my reading of Assemblywomen, in emphasizing the juxtaposition of irony and fantasy rather than choosing one or the other, stops one step too soon. To think further about whether one can in fact simultaneously hold on to both fantasy and irony—particularly in thinking about issues of recognition and redistribution–we need to turn to Wealth.

WEALTH

As with Assemblywomen, the opening scene of Wealth revolves around vision and light, secrecy and revelation. The play begins with the complaints of Cario, slave to the hero of the play, an Athenian named Chremylus. Cario points to his master, who enters behind an old man as all three make their way home from a visit to the Oracle at Delphi. Chremylus is, Cario tells us, “following a blind person, exactly the opposite of what he should be doing: we who can see should lead the blind” (12–15).13

Especially given Aristophanes' frequent parodying of tragedy—most explicitly in Frogs but in fact throughout his comedies (Dover 1972, esp. 72f; Segal 1995)—Wealth's condition suggests at least oblique reference to the centrality of blindness in Greek tragedy. The comparison with Sophocles' Oedipus is perhaps particularly telling on the different attitudes of tragedy and comedy. Where Oedipus Rex ends with Oedipus being led away, having blinded himself in the wake of realizing the horror of his deeds, Wealth begins with the blindness of Wealth as posing the central dramatic conflict to be resolved.

What is more, Cario complains, Chremylus refuses to reveal his true motives. Faced with Cario's demands, Chremylus finally agrees to tell all, saying “I won't keep you in the dark.” Chremylus says that he had gone to Delphi out of concern for the future of his only son. Though he considers himself “a just and godfearing man,” he nonetheless has “always been poor and unsuccessful.” His question to the Oracle was whether his son should follow his just ways or “become a criminal, unjust, completely unwholesome, considering that's the way to get ahead in life” (37–8). The god's answer was, of course, a riddle: “the first person I encountered on leaving the shrine I was told to stick to and persuade to come home with me,” Chremylus explains. That first person was none other than the blind old man he follows, whose identity remains unknown until with some not-so-gentle prodding by Chremylus and Cario he reveals himself to be the god Wealth.

This revelation of the identity of Wealth marks the general thematization of what we might, again, consider broadly as matters of recognition. Beyond the struggle to resolve Wealth's originally mistaken identity, Aristophanes casts the blindness of Wealth as a problem of recognition. He has the god explain to Chremylus and Cario:

Zeus did this to me because he resents mankind. You see, when I was a boy I vowed that I'd only visit the houses of just, wise and decent people, so Zeus made me blind, to keep me from recognizing [diagignōskoimi] any of them. That's how much he resents good [chrēstoisi] people. (87–92).14

Wealth, then, appears as something like a latter day Prometheus, who Zeus punished for giving to human beings the gifts of fire and technical skills. Although in Aeschylus' version Prometheus appears as a tragic hero, Heisod's version stresses his delivery of the drudgery of labor to humankind (Austin and Vidal-Naquet 1977, 12; Wood 1988, 140–1). Aristophanes' Wealth as humans' benefactor in a sense combines the best of both worlds (to considerable comic effect), benefiting humankind not by offering them the technical means to improve their lives but, rather, by directly alleviating their suffering simply by making them rich.

Two things are worth noting here. First, from the outset, Wealth presents issues of recognition and (re)distribution not as dramatically distinct though thematically connected—as in Assemblywomen—but as inherently intertwined. Second, recognition and redistribution are in turn bound up in Wealth with issues of justice and goodness. As things stand, there cannot be a just or good distribution of wealth because Wealth cannot recognize whom he should and should not “visit.”15

The Greek translated as “recognize” carries connotations of diagnosing or, perhaps more to the point here, distinguishing between. Wealth's point is precisely that he is unable to see a central difference among humans: that some are good and some are not.

In Assemblywomen, recognition centered on determining who qualified as a citizen; redistribution, a separate and distinct issue, might (or might not) result from the deliberations of those recognized as citizens. In both cases, the overriding goal was not justice per se, but rather the salvation of the city. By contrast, the setup of Wealth holds out the possibility of a single dramatic moment in which a just redistribution of wealth is bound up with a restored capacity for the recognition of the goodness of particular human beings. Seeing the meaning of the riddling message of the oracle, the obvious solution occurs to Chremylus. He tells Wealth, “I think, yes I think, and I hope to god [theō] its true, that I can cure this sickness and restore your sight” (115).

The hope lurking at the center of Chremylus' plan reflects, broadly speaking, the fantasy of economic change that Wealth shares with Assemblywomen; it also points to another key difference between the two plays. It remains unclear precisely to which god Chremylus appeals, but the play obviously revolves not around the affairs of the polis, as Assemblywomen does, but rather around the interaction of humans and gods. This reinforces the sense that a different notion of recognition is at work here. The action of Wealth does not hinge on the sort of recognition that occurs in Assemblywomen, which involves the granting of properly equal status to previously marginalized groups. Nor, however, does it turn, as many contemporary accounts of recognition do, on human beings acknowledging the equal worth of one another's authentic identities. Rather, the fantasy of Wealth sees just redistribution as requiring the mutual recognition of gods and humans. That is, Wealth must come to recognize good human beings like Chremylus, and Chremylus must recognize Wealth and the power that he, along with Zeus, exerts over human life. The restoring of Wealth's sight provides the impetus for the play's plot; but the deeper interest of Wealth lies in Chremylus' complex—and, I will suggest, comic—recognition of human beings' relationship with the gods, or, more generally, with forces beyond their control.

Chremylus' hope marks him as a basically pious man. So, too, does his initial decision to seek guidance from Apollo and his frequent invocations of various gods by name (364, 359 and 396). Often enough, Aristophanes uses these invocations to draw a laugh, as he does in the following exchange between Chremylus and his friend Blepsidemus, who questions Chremylus' claim to have found Wealth:

Blepsidemus: You swear by Hestia?

Chremylus: By Poseidon, yes.

Belpsidemus: The sea god, right?

Chremylus: If there's another Poseidon, I swear by him, too. (393–96)

Chremylus' willingness to swear by Poseidon—by any Poseidon, even if he hasn't previously heard of him—suggests the potential absurdity of extreme piety. But the plot and action of Wealth call for its audience to have some respect and sympathy for the desperation felt by Chremylus and those he describes as allies: “righteous people [dikaiois] who've gone without their daily bread” (219).

Given his suffering and his desperation, Chremylus' piety has its limits. Certainly it does not prevent him from entering into quarrels with and among the gods. He thus does not hesitate to take up the cause of restoring the vision of Wealth even though it will pit him against Zeus (Bowie 1993, 278–84; Strauss 1966, 285). It is Wealth himself who hesitates, saying that Zeus “scares the pants off me” (Aristophanes 2002, 122). Chremylus, though, sees Wealth as “the most puissant [krastiste] of all divinities [daimonōn],” for he has power over both men and gods. In Chremylus' view of the world, everything humans do derives from their desire for wealth. “All crafts and skills known to mankind were invented for your sake,” he says in trying to persuade Wealth of his own power (160–1). Later he concludes that “it's you and you alone who motivate everything, the good and the bad alike; you can be sure of that” (180–1). In the course of the play, this will mean that Wealth, his sight restored, not only rewards the just, but in doing so also motivates the unjust to change their ways.16

Some find in this movement from enriching those who have always been just to enriching everyone a significant inconsistency in the plot of Wealth. See, for example, Konstan and Dillon (1981), who take this inconsistency as part of Aristophanes' subtle—and ultimately conservative–diffusion of tensions in Athenian ideology. Dover (1972, 204) and MacDowell (1995, 345) note but remain relatively untroubled by the inconsistency here, which both see as common in Aristophanic comedy.

Because his power extends beyond humans to the gods, the effects of this transformation are far-reaching. Wealth motivates Zeus himself in two ways. First, Zeus' rule over the gods, Chremylus claims, rests on his riches, because “he's got the most” (130). Second, the steady flow of sacrifices offered to Zeus from humans depends upon their having sufficient wealth to make sacrifices and on their continued need to ask Zeus to bless them with wealth, which is always “their very first prayer” (133). If Wealth regains his sight and eventually visits all humans as they become just, Chremylus argues, there will be no prayers or sacrifices to Zeus and the power of Zeus' own wealth will diminish.

Beyond the economic redistribution it promises, Chremylus' scheme for restoring Wealth's ability to recognize goodness and justice thus portends a radical, fantastic reworking of the relationship between gods and humans. With off-stage help from Asclepius, the god of healing, this is precisely what happens. The slave Cario reports the story of the healing in the temple of Asclepius to Chremylus' wife, Chremylus himself having slept through it. The tale is a mixture of lowbrow humor mingled with comedy's respect for magical transformations (Reckford 1987, chapters 2–4):

Panacea wrapped [Wealth's] head and whole face in crimson cloth. Then the god whistled, and two serpents darted from the temple, extraordinarily large ones … They slipped quietly beneath the crimson cloth and started licking his eyelids, I suppose. And sooner then you could drink five pints of wine, mistress, our Wealth stood up and could see. (730–38)

Wealth's sight restored, the expected effects on both humans and gods follow forthwith.

In typical Aristophanic fashion, the second half of the play encompasses several short scenes reflecting the results of the resolution of the plot's main conflict. First there enters a character known simply as Just Man, “once ruined, but now fortunate” (825), who brings his tattered old cloak to dedicate to Wealth (840). Next comes an Informer, whose scurrilous activities in Athens had brought him riches, but will no more. Not all the consequences are so straightforwardly salutary. An Old Woman who with her riches had attracted the attention of a Young Man, now finds herself scorned by him. Though it is difficult to join in the joy and laughter of the Young Man, Aristophanes seems to have expected his audience to do precisely that. But, finally, there comes the god Hermes, who reports that Zeus is indeed furious, for the newly wealthy humans have stopped making sacrifices: “no incense, no bay, no barley cake, no victim, not a single thing” (1115–16). The play ends with Zeus and the Olympian gods powerless and with a singing, dancing procession following the newly ascendant Wealth to the treasury of Athena on the Acropolis, where he will be installed as guardian and attended accordingly.

This joyous ending suggests that Chremylus has found a way to overcome the limits of human action in the face of the divine, reinforcing the sense of fantasy and possibility that undergirds much of the play's action. Having recognized the source of his suffering in the quarrels of the gods, our hero has on his own initiative reversed Zeus' blinding of Wealth and thereby brought about a reordering not just of economic reality among humans but of the power structure among the gods as well. As with Assemblywomen, though, Wealth admits of a reading that sees Chremylus' triumph as absurd and thus Aristophanes' intent in the play as ironic. The ironic reading finds its strongest support in an earlier scene involving an exchange between Chremylus and his friend Blepsidemus, on the one hand, and, on the other, the god Poverty. Rather than simply undermining the play's fantasy, though, that exchange reveals the true complexity of Chremylus' understanding of the relationship of gods and humans, pointing toward the comic nature of the recognition Chremylus achieves. That comic recognition, I will argue, sees both the power of the gods and the real promise of human action from a perspective that holds fantasy and irony in productive tension with each another.

Poverty, appearing as an old women with a “crazed and tragic look” (423),17

McGlew (1997) and Sommerstein (1984) both emphasize the frightful appearance of Poverty as designed in part to elicit the audiences' sympathy with Chremylus and Blepsidemus. Aristophanes also plays here with gender stereotypes. Chremylus in admonishing Blepsidemus to stay for the agon with Poverty asks, “Do you want it said that two men fled in terror from one woman?” As in Assemblywomen and elsewhere, the joke can cut either way. On the one hand, it suggests a general sense of women as weaker than men, as nothing to be feared. On the other hand, it reminds the audience of the power of this particular goddess.

in effect offers an alternative to Chremylus' worldview, arguing that humans are driven not by the allure of wealth but by the goad of poverty. Aghast at Chremylus' scheme to restore Wealth's sight and banish her from Greece, Poverty claims to be “the sole source of all your blessings” (470–1). In this view of things, Poverty “sits by the artisan like a taskmaster, compelling him…to seek his livelihood” (533–34). Although with Wealth “you'll find men with gout, potbellies, bloated legs and disgustingly fat,…with [Poverty] they're lean, wasp-waisted and hard on the enemy” (557–59). Poverty brings “good behavior,” whereas Wealth breeds “arrogance,” as witnessed in politicians, who when poor “do right by the people” but “when they get rich on public funds … immediately become wrongdoers, plotting against the masses and warring against the people” (565–70). In place of Chremylus' vision of a world where wealth rewards justice, Poverty depicts a world where hunger, need, and the fear of deprivation not only motivate the productive behavior necessary for human life but also ensure some semblance of personal and civic virtue.

To the arguments of Poverty, Chremylus and Blepsidemus offer responses that are alternatively half-hearted and bombastic. The broad consensus among scholars is that Poverty wins this rhetorical agon; it is a short interpretative step from this reading to the conclusion that Aristophanes means by Poverty's victory to point to the hollow absurdity of Chremylus' later success (Bowie 1993, 290; Strauss 1966, 295–96; MacDowell 1995, 334–35). Whatever dreams men like Chremylus may have of transcending this world with the unjust suffering it imposes on the good and the material rewards it heaps on the bad, his exchange with Poverty, on this reading, pulls us back to reality. Here wealth and corruption go hand in hand and only the threat of poverty motivates humans to act productively. Nothing humans do can, or from Poverty's point of view should, change this. This is in a way a return to, or perhaps a development of, the perspective of the Dissident in Assemblywomen. The Dissident had thought it unlikely that his fellow citizens would give up the security of their private property in favor of the possible common good of shared wealth. Poverty offers what amounts to a theory of human motives to buttress this concern. What the Dissident only senses is precisely what Poverty clearly identifies as the universal human desire to avoid being poor. Better to rely on the power of this desire than to hope for some miraculous future in which all humans become just and, when recognized by the gods as just, come to enjoy universal and equal wealth. Better to remain in this world, dealing with one another through reasonable, rational persuasion bounded by a respect for limits imposed by the realities of human nature.

Once again, the lure of the ironic reading is powerful. If we see the relative effectiveness of Poverty's arguments, then the temptation is to think we have seen through Chremylus' fantasy—and thus to dismiss that fantasy as mere entertainment for the more simpleminded spectator. At first glance, Chremylus' final response to Poverty and the worldview she presents provides little reason to think otherwise, for it borders on the nonsensical: “now get lost and stop your grumbling,” he shouts, “not another word! You won't persuade [peiseis] me even if you convince [peisēs] me” (599–600). Henderson's translation of the last sentence tends to down play the paradoxical nature of the claim Chremylus makes. The double appearance of forms of peitho suggests that we read the line more literally as “you won't persuade me even if you persuade me.” The line no doubt drew a laugh in performance. And we might well read it, as per the common interpretation of the agon in general, as reflecting the weakness of Chremylus' reasoning skills in the face of Poverty's more realistic arguments. But, before leaving Wealth, I want to try to take Chremylus' claim more seriously.

At the beginning of the Republic, Socrates responds to the group that seeks to detain him for a conversation by suggesting the possibility that he try to persuade them to let him go. The young Glaucon retorts, “but could you persuade us, if we won't listen?” (Plato 1992, 327c). In the context, the implication is that the group so firmly intends to detain Socrates that they would resort to force rather than risk even listening to his quite probably persuasive arguments. By the time Chremylus makes his paradoxical claim he has, in fact, already heard Poverty's arguments; he cannot simply mean that he will refuse to listen. One possibility is that Chremylus, having listened, simply thinks himself able to stop the process of persuasion before it really comes to fruition. That is, he can somehow sense that he is about to be persuaded and yet refuse to allow it—hence his demand that Poverty stop speaking. If this is what happens, it would in itself be a remarkable feat involving some capacity on Chremylus' part for seeing and standing apart from himself as a target of rhetorical ploys. But Chremylus in fact makes a stronger claim: he suggests that even if the process of persuasion has achieved its end, he will still not be persuaded. That is, he can at the same time both be persuaded and not be persuaded. In the specific context of the play, this means that he can both return to the world of normal politics, recognizing the power of arguments that, like those of Poverty, remain within the limited field of vision that demarcates that world and—while doing this—still transcend that world by recognizing possibilities that go beyond the limits it tries to impose. In other words, we can see Chremylus as claiming that he somehow combines faithfulness to his fantastic redistributive schemes with an ironic sense that they are indeed fantasies.

We might dismiss this possibility of holding fantasy and irony together as itself a fantasy: insofar as irony reveals fantasy as an absurd ignoring of limits, no one can do what Chremylus claims. And this is true in a literal sense: if we believe the arguments of Poverty, then we cannot also believe in the possibility of Chremylus' fantasy becoming a reality. Aristophanes is not so foolish as to suggest anything of this sort. Rather, I think he means to point toward the possibility of somehow holding fantasy and irony together as a particular sensibility, an attitude toward the world and toward change that might allow an ordinary citizen like Chremylus to recognize both the possibilities and the limits of human action. From this perspective, Wealth offers at least two more concrete clues as to the sensibility Chremylus brings to matters of economic justice. First, both Chremylus' sense of the world Poverty depicts and his hope for better things to come are connected to his recognition of the mundane realities of human suffering, which goes beyond the mechanistic motivational world view of poverty. To Poverty's claim that she motivates humans to produce all that they need and want, Chremylus replies:

What benefits can you provide, except blisters in the bathhouse and masses of hungry children and old ladies? Not to mention the lice, gnats, and fleas, too numerous to enumerate, that annoy us by buzzing around our heads and waking us up with the warning, “get up or you'll go hungry!” And on top of that, you have us wearing rags, not coats, and sleeping not on a bed but a bug-infested twine mat that doesn't let you get any sleep, under threadbare burlap instead of a blanket, with our heads not on a pillow but a hefty stone. And to eat, not bread but mallow shoots, not cake but withered radish leaves. We sit not on chairs but on broken crocks, and instead of a kneading trough we get one side of a barrel, and that's broken too. Now haven't I revealed the many blessings you bring to all humanity? (535–47)

Second, Chremylus' reaction to this sense of suffering is guided by his on-again, off-again piety. As we have seen, he reveres the gods and their power in human life, but he does not hesitate to become involved in their quarrels in order to bring about change.

Chremylus' understanding of the material life of humans, then, is deeply intertwined with his understanding of and relationship to the gods. His experience of the economic is indeed deeply embedded in his cultural reality. He sees the material life of human beings as shaped not only by the cruel tyranny of Zeus but also, at least potentially, by the quasi-Promethean sympathy for humankind shown by Wealth. More generally, we might say that Chremylus arrives at a complex understanding of the limits of human action that merges cultural and economic considerations. He acknowledges that we are ruled by forces that seem in the course of everyday life to elude us, whether they appear as gods or as supposed dictates of (human) nature. Chremylus, though, rejects the idea that these forces are purely and simply beyond our control. His appreciation of both the possibility and the challenge of alleviating human suffering through redistribution thus simultaneously depends on and reflects a deep recognition of the human condition. We might, again, call that recognition comic insofar as it requires a sensibility that allows for fantastical possibilities without simply becoming absurd. Brought to the rhetorical agon, this comic recognition allows the ordinary citizen like Chremylus to resist the sort of arguments made by Poverty, arguments to this day marshaled by those who would persuade us of the impossibility of fundamental change.

CONCLUSION

Earlier, I suggested a basic parallel between the complex relationship of the economic to the cultural in the ancient world and the contemporary controversy over the relationship between recognition and redistribution. Important though it is to remain wary of reading the present into the past, that parallel proves useful in working through the complex issues that emerge from Assemblywomen and Wealth. In contemporary terms, we can see Aristophanes moving from a treatment of recognition and redistribution as distinct dramatic and political moments in Assemblywomen toward a vision of economic justice in Wealth that sees redistribution and recognition as indissolubly linked. With this movement comes the emergence in Wealth of what I have here termed comic recognition.

That comic recognition, not surprisingly, differs significantly from the sort of recognition that figures in contemporary struggles for social justice. Recognition today (whether identity based or status based) tends to focus on the shared identities of particular groups—gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation. Although Assemblywomen considers the struggle of Athenian women to overcome their exclusion from Athenian politics (and the ironies implicit in their strategy of deliberate mistaken identity), the sort of recognition we find in Wealth tends, if anything, to elide differences among identity-based groups (Saxonhouse 1992). In particular, the latter play does not address the status of women as the former does. This is not to say that Wealth somehow moves toward the sort of abstract liberal individualism rejected by advocates of the politics of recognition. The action of Wealth hinges upon the recognition—by gods and humans alike–of the status of the ordinary human being who suffers unjust deprivation and yet dreams of justice. As the central role of Chremylus' slave Cario suggests, other markers of social status matter less in Wealth than the shared fact of suffering under the mis-rule of Zeus (Dover 1972, 204–8). The great fantasy of Wealth is that ordinary human beings might join together to achieve recognition of their shared status—and thus, through the consequent redistribution, to ameliorate their suffering.

As we have seen, it would be wrong to say that Aristophanes offers the fantasy of Wealth as a realistic solution to the predicament of ordinary citizens in his day. Fantasy as I have been using the term imagines an escape from the limits of everyday reality. Those aspects of both Assemblywomen and Wealth that support ironic readings of the plays serve to remind us of this basic fact, tend to bring us back to earth. As I have tried to insist on here, though, it would be equally wrong to conclude that the irony embedded in the plays marks their fantasies as meaningless—as so much entertainment for the weaker wits in the audience who lack the ability to see the playwright's true, more cynical message. Such a conclusion rests on an understanding of irony in which the apparent meaning of an utterance or text or action is in fact the opposite of its intended meaning. But that, again, seems an overly restricted way of reading irony in general and Aristophanic irony in particular. Irony, as I said earlier, can also point more vaguely to a meaning that is simply different from the apparent meaning (Colebrook 2004, 27–8; Nehamas 1998, 53–7). And so in the case of Assemblywomen and Wealth, we can reject the idea that Aristophanes sees sudden, radical redistribution as a realistic possibility without drawing the opposite conclusion that he must support the maintenance of the unequal, unjust status quo. Instead, the plays suggest a different possibility of some sort.

Assemblywomen's simultaneous enabling of both ironic responses and the sincere celebration of fantasy points toward that different possibility. It finds fuller expression in the comic recognition that emerges in Wealth and the attendant sensibility displayed by Chremylus. That sensibility takes the hope that fantasy promises and the appreciation of the limits of reality that irony demands and brings them together, holding them in an ongoing imaginative tension with one another.18

As part of his exploration of “the principle of hope,” Bloch ([1938–1947] 1985) describes “the utopian capacity” as “the point of contact between dreams and life, without which dreams only yield abstract utopia, life only triviality” (145–6). This, I think, suggests a similar sensibility to that Aristophanes creates in Chremylus. Bloch, though, sees Aristophanes as a “reactionary” who “created several of his best comedies at the expense of revolutionary hope,” referring specifically to Birds and Assemblywomen (435–36).

Rather than falsely promising easy answers or, on the other hand, suggesting the ultimate inevitability of the status-quo, Aristophanes offers Chremylus' sensibility as a sort of model. In our “post-socialist condition” with its “exhaustion of utopian energies,” we might draw on that model as inspiration for a kind of theory that imagines seemingly fantastic possibilities without falling back into the sort of metanarratives that our age, with its penchant for irony, has come to mistrust. Ultimately, though, Aristophanes suggests that the best possibility for progressive change can be found in the underlying good sense of ordinary citizens sensitive to the realities of economic injustice, on guard against rhetoric that suggests the impossibility of reform, and alive with the hope for a better future. At its core, Aristophanes' comic art aims at the education of such citizens.

I thank Amy Gangl, the editor, and three anonymous reviewers for reading and commenting on earlier drafts of this essay.

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