Revising Clouds for publication some five years after its third-place showing in the City Dionysia of 423 b.c., Aristophanes retooled the first parabasis (lines 510–626) to praise the play's propriety, omitting as it did distasteful matter and gratuitous buffoonery, which—along with the judges’ crassness—accounted, he says, for its failure. He writes (537–44):

The word σκύτι[ν]ον makes clear that, like its cousin, the dildo (Lys. 108-10, Herod. 6.72), the theatrical phallus was made of leather (σκῦτος), and so hails from the cobbler, who, moreover, made it just for the comic stage; phalli used in Dionysiac processions, often enormous, were likely of stiffer stuff (Hdt. 2.48-9; Ar. Ach. 243).Footnote ¹ The present note argues that the stick (βακτηρία), also mentioned here, has the same provenance.

Martin Revermann has shown that the few stage directions (παρεπιγραφαί) in Aristophanes’ MSS are likely from a hand later than his own.Footnote ² While he embedded some mise en scène into his dialogue, we should recall Eduard Fraenkel's dictum, taken as a rule of thumb by Oliver Taplin, that ‘it is never allowable to invent stage directions which are not related to some definite utterance in the dialogue’.Footnote ³ Aristophanes affords few such hints.Footnote ⁴

Even so, he often shows one character (usually a master) threatening to beat another (his slave). The eponymous chorus of Acharnians call their sticks their only bulwark against abuse (682). In Clouds Strepsiades threatens a slave for putting too thick a wick into his lamp (58–9). Later his son, Pheidippides, gives a reasoned defence of a child's right to strike his parents (1399–451). Twice in Birds Peisetaerus uses threatened blows to drive from his colony, Nephelococcygia, interlopers who would profit from the new venture (1029, 1327). At Wealth 21-3 Chremylus threatens to pull off his slave Carion's crown to beat him with impunity. Finally, the leader of the chorus of Chremylus’ old friends asks Carion how he dare lie to him, given that he has a stick (272).Footnote ⁵

Moreover, some characters actually beat others offstage with a stick (βακτηρία, vel sim.). In Wasps 1292–325 Xanthias describes how the old man, Philocleon, drunk at a party, ‘tattooed’ him with his stick (yet when the fellow finally comes on stage, he wields a torch instead, 1326). More difficult is Peace 741–7, where, in a parabasis much like that in Clouds, the chorus say that Aristophanes has purged comedy of such unseemly things as a crying slave brought in so his fellow serf can mock his wounds and ask: ὦ κακόδαιμον, τί τὸ δέρμ' ἔπαθες; μῶν ὑστριχὶς εἰσέβαλέν σοι | εἰς τὰς πλευρὰς πολλῇ στρατιᾷ κἀδενδροτόμησε τὸ νῶτον; (‘O wretch, what's up with your skin? Has the cat-o’-nine-tails assaulted your | ribs with a great army, and deforested your back?’, 746–7). Given the echo in Clouds, the weapon intended may be a stick, with the whip (ὑστριχίς), no more literally than the ‘deforestation’, a rhetorical part of the mockery. Just once is a beating explicitly administered onstage with a piece of wood (ξύλον)—apparently a walking-stick, viz. Peace 1119–21, where the farmer, Trygaeus, orders a slave to beat the oracle-monger, Hierocles.Footnote ⁶

Certain pots, called Phlyax vases (for historical reasons, though they have nothing to do with Rhinthon of Tarentum's ἱλαροτραγῳδία or φλύαξ, but often illustrate Attic Middle Comedy), arm a quarter of the males they portray with sticks.Footnote ⁷ Likewise, Aristophanes mentions βακτηρίαι in connection with three specific character-types, who carry them as part of their costume:Footnote ⁸ old men like the πρεσβύτης mentioned in our Clouds-passage (frr. 141, 142 Kassel−Austin from Γηρᾶς), men attending the assembly (Vesp. 33, Eccl. 74, etc.) and beggars (Ach. 448), for whom they serve variously as aids to locomotion, symbols of authority and potential weapons.

With an eye to the last-named function, the sticks may have been specially fashioned to add sound as well as a visual aspect to the action.Footnote ⁹ Clearly Aristophanes considered this side of stage-business, as when Peisetaerus encourages Euelpides to kick the Hoopoe's rock with his foot, and his companion suggests he hit it with his head instead, ‘so the noise will be twice as loud’ (Av. 54–5).Footnote ¹⁰ Greeks lavished much care on the acoustics of their theatres;Footnote ¹¹ sound effects often had a place in doorway-scenes, for it was an Old Comic convention that knocking, however timid, was always too loud (Nub. 136; Ran. 39; Plut. 1097–102);Footnote ¹² and machinists and makers of stage properties (μηχανοποιοί, σκηνοποιοί) embraced artificial sound effects like the ‘thunder machine’ (Poll. 4.130 s.v. βροντεῖον), used—unless the scholia merely infer from later theatrical practice—at Clouds 290 (schol. Thomas-Triclinius 292d) and Birds 1729.Footnote ¹³

Indeed, such an ‘acoustically enhanced’ stick is well known from later theatrical history. The commedia dell'arte outfitted Harlequin (who with poetic justice is no master, but rather a servant or zanni) with the batocio or ‘slapstick’,Footnote ¹⁴ consisting of two roughly metre-long laths fastened together at one end over a shim that forced them to flare slightly at the other, which he often used in slapstick-scenes such as Aristophanes ostensibly rejects.Footnote ¹⁵ Blows dealt by this device cause less pain than noise, like the breakaway sugar glass and balsa-wood furniture used for fight-scenes in modern movies and television. It is child's play to make such a thing, once one has thought of it. But whence could the idea have come?

The branch of the Museum of Greek Folk Art called ‘Man and Tools’ (22 Panos Street, Athens), which collects tools from all over Greece predominantly from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, displays an object (Catalogue #16839) best described as two roughly metre-long laths fastened together at one end over a shim that forces them to flare slightly at the other. It came from a cobbler's shop, where it served as a pair of giant tweezers or hand-held vice to secure leather, and so protect one's fingers, while cutting it. It is called a τσάκα. The morpheme /ts/ did not commend itself to Ancient Greek, with the possible exception of Cretan,Footnote ¹⁶ and occurs in the modern tongue mainly in Turkish loan words. Turkish Hak is an onomatopoeic representation of clashing metals; Hakildak is ‘clapper’ or ‘rattle.’Footnote ¹⁷ In other words, the τσάκα most likely gets its name via Turkish from the noise it makes, rather than from its form or function. This in turn suggests that the noise is distinctive.Footnote ¹⁸

Like Attic Old Comedy, the commedia dell'arte had close ties to cobblers, since its masks are always of leather.Footnote ¹⁹ Could Harlequin's slapstick have come, like his mask, from the cobbler's workshop, and could it continue (or reprise) an ancient Greek theatrical invention? True, the phlyax-vases portray actors armed with realistic (i.e. single-slatted) sticks, which of course the βακτηρίαι represent in the world of the play, but so too do depictions of zanni.Footnote ²⁰ True also, no ancient wooden objects have survived in Greece, nor is a τσάκα among the tools (last [καλάπους], awl, half-moon, knives and soaking basin) in the several surviving shoe-making scenes on black-figure and red-figure vases.Footnote ²¹ Still, a scrap of treated hide from the Netherlands shows that Roman tanners clamped leather to curry it, which implies that this ancillary art at least called for something like the τσάκα.Footnote ²²

A cobbler can be as crass a judge of art as those who spurned Clouds in 423 (cf. Plin. HN 35.36, § 85), yet his humble shop welcomes all who love irony and rail against pretense (cf. Xen. Mem. 4.2.1, Diog. Laert. 2.13 [122]), and gave Aristophanes—both man (Pl. Symp. 191a) and poetFootnote ²³ —vivid metaphors. Where better, then, for the poet's heroes to turn in search of arms?