The New Lifetime Reading Plan

We mentioned above, in the introduction to Aeschylus [5] and other Greek playwrights, that at the festivais of Dionysus a tragic trilogy was customarily followed by the performance of a comedy. This was not for any reason so trivial as to lighten the mood of the playgoers before they headed home. Rather, because tragedy and comedy alike were viewed as inseparable aspects of the human condition, it was considered necessary and appropriate to enact both at what was after ali a solemn religious occasion. But it is also true that the rites of Dionysus allowed normal bounds of decorum and propriety to be set aside temporarily; the comedies performed during the festival played into that disruption of the normal social rules. Comedy was (and is) "transgressive," to use a criticai term now much in vogue. In his plays Aristophanes hurled barbs of humor that still strike our funnybones today; even if we no longer recognize many of his topical references, we can at least imagine the discomfort of the targets skewered by his wit.

Eleven of the comedies of Aristophanes survive, the only substantial remaining body of early Greek comic plays. He was acknowledged a master of the form in his lifetime, and his rep- utation has remained high ever since, in part for reasons that unfortunately will not be accessible to most of us. He is, I am told, a brilliant stylist in Greek verse; he was also an accom- plished parodist, capable of imitating and burlesquing the styles of Euripides [7] and Aeschylus [5]. These are matters that largely get lost in translation. But those of us who do not read Greek can still appreciate much of Aristophanes^ humor. His basic comedic technique was to set up an absurd situation and then make his characters carry the situation through to its furthest extremes; this is a device that is employed constantly in movie and television comedies today. The Clouds is a satire on Sуcrates and other contemporary philosophers, who are made to seem as airheaded as the clouds among which they dwell. The Birds sets up a fantastic avian utopia when the world's birds decide to free themselves from the snares and arrows of humans; they beat their wings to prevent the smoke of sacrificial fires from rising to Olympus until they are granted their own realm—where they quickly show themselves to be as pompous, vain and fatuous as the humans they are trying to escape. Lysistrata, perhaps now the most famous of Aristophanes^ comedies, has the women of Athens go on strike against their husbands, refusing ali sexual favors until the men call off a war that they are planning. Here we see Aristophanes as a man of principie; a contemporary of Thucydides [9], he risked unpopularity or worse by opposing the Peloponnesian War, and indeed any military ventures that might compromise the republican simplicity of his beloved Athens.

Comedy fails if it is not funny, but as anyone who has ever had anything to do with the theater will affirm, it is also a very serious matter. As Freud [98] has pointed out, humor allows us to confront, and then deflect, taboos that can disturb us deeply at an unconscious levei. Comedy has long had a role in bring- ing unpleasant realities into the light of day, as witness the privileged position granted to court jesters by rulers from Chinese emperors to Ottoman sultans to Burgundian dukes. Aristophanes used his plays to puncture pomposity, ridicule impropriety, and protest against jingoism and warmongering. He was certainly not the first writer to understand the social power of comedy, but he is one of the earliest that we know about, and still one of the greatest.

J.S.M.

12

PLATO

428-348 B.C.E. Selected Works

Plato is less an author than a world of thought. He is probably one of the half-dozen most influential minds in Western civi- lization. Alfred North Whitehead has said that ali Western phi- losophy consists of a series of footnotes to Plato, an exaggera- tion (or minimization), but not entirely untrue. The beginning reader cannot hope to explore the entire Platonic world, nor should he attempt it. The readings suggested below enable us to make his acquaintance and that of his master Sуcrates. And that is ali.

A wealthy Athenian who lived through his city-state's great and also declining days, Plato experienced one supremely cru­cial event in his long life: his meeting with Sуcrates. (Compare Boswell and Johnson [59].) He had many talents, and was drawn, for example, toward both poetry and politics; but Sуcrates determined him to a life of thought, undertaken on many fronts.