In the last two decades or so, there has been an increasing awareness of the competitive environment in which Old Comedy was performed. Various attempts have been made to describe the dynamics of that competition, with models of differing degrees and kinds of complexity. Such studies have necessarily involved analysis of the comic poets’ self-presentation and their use of other genres, not least tragedy. This latest work explicitly builds on such studies, but does not seek to offer (except perhaps by implication) a general model of comic intertextuality. Rather, T.’s interest is in the aftermath of one famous incident, the defeat of Aristophanes’ Clouds at the hands of Cratinus and his Pytinê, a defeat that resonated for some time in subsequent Aristophanic works, explicitly in Wasps (422 bce) and the revised version of Clouds itself. The thesis of the book is that, in addition to explicit commentary in the respective parabases, both plays re-present and re-play the defeat throughout.
The book consists of five chapters, one of them an extended introduction, and an epilogue. Of the substantive chapters, three are devoted to Wasps (Part 1) and one to Clouds (Part 2). It has been observed by a number of critics that the plot of Wasps, which revolves around attempts to cure an addicted old man, looks suspiciously similar to that of Pytinê, albeit that the addiction is not to alcohol but to the law-courts, and some kind of intertextual game is clearly going on. T.’s interpretation of that game is based on the view (in which he is far from alone) that Bdelycleon in some sense represents Aristophanes. Philocleon then becomes a representation of (or code for), not the addicted old Cratinus, but the audience itself, addicted to Cratinean comedy, from which the young man seeks to wean them, ultimately unsuccessfully.
Chapter 2 sets up these connections. Bdelycleon's semnotês (‘haughtiness’) is linked to metapoetics, in relation both to Aristophanes’ self-construction elsewhere (notably in the parabasis of Peace) and to Aristophanes’ construction of Aeschylus (although T. resists a strong association between Aristophanes and Aeschylus because he wants to reserve Aeschylean associations for Cratinus, following E. Bakola). His famous metatheatrical aporia, claiming that curing Philocleon is beyond comic poets (trygoidoi) is emphasised. As for the nature of the relationship being envisaged, the master signifier is given by the scene following the parabasis, where Bdelycleon dresses up Philocleon in preparation for the symposium. He persuades Philocleon to take off his poor, low-status tribôn and put on the thick and classy khlaina. T. connects the former with Cratinean comedy, the latter with Aristophanic. He builds on the metapoetics of this scene and the connotations of these textiles by drawing links with the language of the parabasis in particular.
The following two chapters add further imagistic grist to the mill. Chapter 3 focuses on engagement with tragedy, again starting from existing scholarship. Critics, beginning with D. Harvey, have long noted that Philocleon's sickness (nosos) and madness (mania) have affinities with those of Euripidean female characters such as Phaedra in Hippolytus. For T., these tragic connotations (both Euripidean and also some Aeschylean elements) are a way to characterise Cratinean comedy. Chapter 4 looks at other generic interactions, principally fable, which is one of the types of sympotic entertainment in which Philocleon is trained, only for him to deploy it abusively at the symposium itself and in the aftermath with complaints about his behaviour. Philocleon's failure to master the sôphrosynê of the fabular tradition is one of the key ways that Cratinean comedy is differentiated from Aristophanic. The conclusion of the play, which has often puzzled critics, is read by T. not as a triumph of comedy over tragedy but an aporetic (or despairing) assimilation of Cratinean comedy (taken as an exemplar of phortikos comedy, deprecated in the prologue) and tragedy. Without conceding to Cratinus, Aristophanes is dramatising and presenting again the failure of Clouds as a kind of sickness against which his nice warm cloak was intended to insulate the audience, only for it to be spurned.
Aristophanes returns to the theme in the Clouds as we have it (which T. dates to 419–417). In common with some recent scholars (such as M. Revermann), he is inclined to view the revision as intended for performance. The parabasis deals explicitly with the travails of the first version, from which T. picks out the image of Electra and draws out the relationship between father and daughter through intertextuality with the Oresteia. The parabasis also deals explicitly with Eupolis (among others), and so this play is read as a similar metacomic game, albeit that Eupolis is added to the mix as someone continuing the Cratinean mode. The character alignments do not work so well here, and so T. makes connections more on the verbal than on the character level. Indeed, the Socratised Pheidippides is associated with Cratinean-Eupolidean comedy and, if anything, the old man now seems to be closer to the Aristophanic model than the Cratinus-influenced audience. The burning down of the Thinkery is a rejection of such comedy.
This is an extremely subtle book that requires very close attention. It proceeds by pursuing verbal echoes across plays and between plays, and it evokes some recent theoretical trends, not least affect (mainly as a source of imagery), and interesting comparanda are brought in, especially in the epilogue. Some may be sceptical about the whole project of comic intertextuality, but this reviewer is not one of them. We certainly need close readings and theoretically-informed works of this kind. There are, however, some problems in the particular readings offered.
The first is that the subtlety of the individual readings is not always matched by some of the other interpretative moves that are rather more crude, particularly the tendency to associate characters as one-dimensional code for literary players (as K. Sidwell has done). The association of Bdelycleon with Aristophanes is one that I, for one, would resist, partly because of how he is described in the play (his semnotês is not a straightforward good), partly because of what he does in the play (he cheats) and partly because of his other intertextual associations. Although we do not have the original Clouds, there is nothing in the testimonia to suggest that Pheidippides was substantially different in the original version, and that particular horsey and disrespectful son must be as much an intertext for Bdelycleon as Bdelycleon is for the revised Clouds (if not more so). Not to read Wasps in the light of Clouds itself, as well as Pytinê, seems somewhat perverse. There is also a certain amount of sliding around along with these big associations. The poor cloak of Cratinean comedy, for example, is at various points both unable to cover its wearer adequately and smothering or choking. The reading of Clouds, as well as being less extensive than that of Wasps, was also much harder to follow, particularly with the half-change of emphasis towards Eupolis. As an example of the difficulties here, the burning down of the Thinkery (with a torch) is an example of the crude comedy that Aristophanes claims to deprecate. For T., torches are, indeed, a mark of tragic-Cratinean comedy, but by some special pleading Strepsiades’ apparent embrace of it against the Cratinean-Eupolidean Socrates becomes a distancing from it, which I did not understand.
T. is refreshingly non-absolutist about his interpretations, and indeed, if one goes all or even some of the way with him, this sort of implicit or ironic passive-aggressive whinge at the audience (as I take it) might be compatible with any number of readings. Whether the audience took this on board (consciously or unconsciously) is of course impossible to say, but T. argues that those who were influenced by it were ancient scholars who duly privileged Aristophanes as the leading writer of Old Comedy, even within the canon of three: Cratinus, Eupolis and Aristophanes. It is not impossible – there is clearly much of ancient scholarship that takes Aristophanes’ commentary at face value, and much of ancient biography follows the method of taking characters from plays as representing the author. But this is my final anxiety: surviving ancient scholarship rarely displays the kind of subtlety employed in this book, or needed it to privilege Aristophanes (even if aspects of that are, for me, overstated). It was not, I think, any cloak that ensured Aristophanes’ canonicity or led Aelian to suppose that Clouds was victorious. Whether this particular mix of subtlety and allegory best represents the processes of the fifth-century audience may well be the more interesting question.
