On stealing from tragedy: a brief digression

Before examining these two scenes in detail, I would like to suggest that the way that the ‘women on top’ plot seems to strain at the edges of comedy's generic fabric is a product of its tragic affiliations. Of tragedies that survive in full,Footnote ¹³ only one (Sophocles’ Philoctetes) contains no female characters;Footnote ¹⁴ and female choruses outnumber male by twenty-one to ten.Footnote ¹⁵ Euripides is in particular characterized, by Aristophanes at least, as a figure associated with the (often lurid and shameless) female characters who populate his plays,Footnote ¹⁶ but such prominent female roles were by no means a Euripidean innovation. Female characters appear to have been central to the works of even the earliest tragedians; several titles that strongly imply a female chorus are attributed to Phrynichus,Footnote ¹⁷ and the first fully extant tragedy, Aeschylus’ Persians, has the Persian queen Atossa as a leading character. Indeed, women are so central to tragic storytelling in the fifth century that Hall has even gone so far as to suggest that the archetypal tragic plot is one that centres around the transgressions of women in the absence of male authority.Footnote ¹⁸ In these plots, the physical absence of a woman's husband or kurios (‘male legal guardian’) provides an opportunity, or even impetus, for her to act on inappropriate erotic urges, violate ‘natural’ laws, or otherwise flout male authority and transgress from her rightful place within the oikos into the political realm.

Comedy is certainly not shy about borrowing from its dramatic rival. Indeed, it has been well established that tragedy plays a central role in comedy's agonistic self-fashioning.Footnote ¹⁹ Given that the errant wife is a staple of the tragic (and especially Euripidean) plays that Aristophanes so frequently parodies, the absence of such characters from his comedies (and indeed from those of other playwrights) prior to 411 seems remarkable, but is perhaps a testament to just how strongly this trope is associated with the tragic stage.

Aristophanes’ ‘women on top’ plays, in which wives attempt to wrest political control from their menfolk, therefore appear to be something of a land grab, stepping into the ‘transgressive woman’ territory that Hall describes as archetypically tragic. Unlike his lost Phoenician Women, which appears to have been a direct send-up of Euripides’ tragedy of the same name,Footnote ²⁰ these plays do not piggy-back on a tragic plot, but seem rather to take the broader idea of the tragic, transgressive wife and to re-invent her for the comic stage. Each play sees the wives of Athens stage a revolution; and Lysistrata and Assemblywomen in particular show the women stepping into the political domain. In the context of a genre in which the manifestation, and celebration, of aggressive phallic masculinity is a conventional feature, these plots have the potential to be highly disruptive.Footnote ²¹ Not only the visual aesthetics of Old Comedy, in which the comic phallus is a prominent feature, but even its plot dynamics are rooted in a celebration of specifically masculine fertility: Aristophanes’ plays tumble towards their conventional comic ending, in which the hero (or sometimes another male character) is gifted with an often naked woman,Footnote ²² whether in marriage (as in the Peace, Birds, and to an extent also Lysistrata), or otherwise (as in Acharnians, Knights, Wasps, and Women at the Thesmophoria).Footnote ²³ Against this background, even just to open a play (as Aristophanes does in the Lysistrata and Assemblywomen) with an all-female cast of characters, and not a comic phallus to be seen, must have seemed a notable divergence from comedy's usual visual aesthetic. To centre the entire plot around a female power grab is not only to stray into distinctively tragic territory, but to radically challenge some of comedy's most distinctive generic norms.

Repressing the male comic body in the Assemblywomen

Lysistrata and Women at the Thesmophoria each in different ways moderate the impact of their ‘women on top’ plots on the structure and aesthetics of the play. In addition to ending with power being handed back to the men of the city, Lysistrata makes an almost over the top feature of the comic phallus, as the women's sex strike leaves their menfolk in a stage of agonizing, if comical, excitement; and the Women at the Thesmophoria, despite its female revolution, actually focuses primarily on its male protagonists.Footnote ²⁴ While these two plays therefore carefully manage the conflict between their female revolutions and the celebration of phallic masculinity that is ordinarily characteristic of the comic story-world, the Assemblywomen magnifies the disruptive potential of its ‘women on top’ theme. Not only does the women's revolution appear to be both more complete and more permanent, but the play presents the disempowerment of the male comic body, and therefore the inversion of this key comic convention, as the direct result of the women's rise to power.

The entry of Blepyrus, husband of the women's ringleader Praxagora, to the stage is one of the most heavily scatological scenes in all of Aristophanes. The scene's exaggeratedly grotesque aesthetic is emphasized by Blepyrus’ abundant use of scatological vocabulary, which amounts to the most scatological utterances of any character in Aristophanes’ extant plays.Footnote ²⁵ Henderson, in his study of obscenity in Aristophanes, describes scatological language and routines as ‘the purest kind of obscene comedy’,Footnote ²⁶ and in this respect Blepyrus’ constipation routine is almost hyper-comic. It is also hyper-masculine. As McClure has noted, ‘words pertaining to defecation, including allusions to constipation, feces, public befouling, and urination have an exclusively masculine reference in Old Comedy’.Footnote ²⁷ On my count, of the eighty-seven examples of scatological obscenity in Aristophanes’ extant plays, only four are spoken by a female character.Footnote ²⁸

While Blepyrus’ routine is therefore in some ways conventional for both his gender and his genre, the scene also turns these norms on their head. The scene focuses not on his freedom, but rather his inability, to defecate; and this scatological failure is presented in parallel with a humiliating feminization. Blepyrus’ entry to the stage, dressed in his wife's saffron gown and slippers, presents a clear visualization of the male–female role reversal that is the theme of the play, as Praxagora's appropriation of her husband's male clothing has resulted in Blepyrus being forced to adopt her clothing in turn.Footnote ²⁹ Furthermore, Blepyrus’ feminization is presented as a direct result of his scatological frustration. A counterintuitive link between scatology and feminization is first made in the scene when Blepyrus’ neighbour catches sight of him squatting outside his house dressed in his wife's clothing. Blepyrus is wearing the saffron gown (κροκωτός) that is the conventional attire of comic women,Footnote ³⁰ and his neighbour immediately describes it in scatological terms:

As the skit progresses, we find that despite being (metaphorically) shat on, Blepyrus is himself unable to achieve the scatological release characteristic of the male comic body. He is seen squatting and straining throughout his entire lengthy exchange with his neighbour concerning the whereabouts of their wives (327 ff.), and is still going when his friend Chremes enters at line 372 (οὗτος, τί ποιεῖς; οὔτι που χέζεις; ‘What are you up to? Not shitting, are you?’). Blepyrus’ unfulfilled desire is emphasized through his repeated use of the desiderative form χεζητιῶν (345, 368). His scatological incompletion is described in lurid metaphorical terms, first by his neighbour (351: ἀλλὰ σὺ μὲν ἱμονιάν τιν᾿ ἀποπατεῖς, ‘You must be shitting out a rope's length’), and then in a more extended passage where Blepyrus compares his predicament to having his door bolted (361: βεβαλάνωκε τὴν θύραν, ‘it's bolted the door’). We are treated to the specifics of the exact foodstuff blocking Blepyrus up (354–5: νῦν δέ μοι / ἀχράς τις ἐγκλῄσασ᾿ ἔχει τὰ σιτία, ‘There's a wild pear shutting all my food inside’), and it is even anthropomorphized (362: ἅνθρωπος ἁχραδούσιος, ‘this guy from pear-town’).

Towards the end of the scene, Blepyrus’ failure is not only presented in effeminizing terms, but scatological and reproductive (and therefore by implication, sexual) fulfilment are presented as one and the same, so that the obstruction of comedy's normative scatological freedom becomes a kind of sterility.Footnote ³¹ In his desperation, Blepyrus prays to the goddess of childbirth, Hileithya, to deliver him:

In characterizing Blepyrus’ failure to defecate in female terms as the failed delivery of a baby, scatological obstruction is linked thematically to the play's gender role reversal, as well as to the obstruction of sexual and reproductive fulfilment. Finally, in the punchline of his absurd prayer, Blepyrus makes an explicit link between scatological poetics and comedy, and presents his predicament as a marker of his own generic affiliation.Footnote ³² In turn, we are able to read outwards from this scene and see the women's revolution and their inversion of gender roles as a threat to the male bodily freedoms, sexual and scatological, which are characteristic of Old Comedy.

The constipation scene as a whole is both prolifically and insufficiently scatological, simultaneously hyper-comic and anti-comic. Blepyrus’ failure to defecate, and therefore fulfil the scatological freedoms conventionally offered to male characters in comedy, is construed in explicitly female terms and linked to the gender role reversal of the play as a whole. Yet his over the top use of scatological language at the same time reinforces his identity as a comic man; and the scene's inversion of comic scatological tropes also insists upon their centrality to the genre by placing them in such extensive focus.

Old women on top

This strategy, in which the norms and conventions of comedy are replicated only through their subversion, recurs towards the end of the play. The penultimate scene of the Assemblywomen, in which three old women fight for possession over a young man, enacts for the audience the results of Praxagora's plans for sexual revolution (611–18). Under her regime, not only men, but also women, even old women, are to be able to choose the partners they want (615: τῷ βουλομένῳ), and men will have to submit to satisfying less desirable (617: αἱ φαυλότεραι) women before they can take their pick of the young and beautiful.

The scene is in every way a direct inversion of the norms of comic endings. This is true most obviously in the gender-reversal of the comic trope whereby a man wins possession of a young girl; and the emphasis on the fact that, instead of being passive, silent sexual objects (as the women claimed by male characters in the finales of the Acharnians, Knights, Wasps, Peace, Birds, Lysistrata, and Women at the Thesmophoria), the women, both young and old, are actively in pursuit of sex. Perhaps more crucially, as Zeitlin has observed,Footnote ³³ the scene also contravenes the comic convention of rejuvenation and renewal. A significant number of Aristophanes’ extant plays feature elderly protagonists, and in each case the play ends with the old man rejuvenated and enjoying a new lease of life. This is a particularly prominent theme in the Wasps, but features also in the Acharnians, Knights, and Clouds,Footnote ³⁴ and is arguably another manifestation of Old Comedy's phallic aesthetics: even old men will (as it were) rise up again with new vitality.

It is therefore notable that, unlike the old men of Aristophanes’ plays, the old women in the Assemblywomen are not only not rejuvenated in any way, but are repeatedly presented as being close to, or even as good as, dead. The scene with the old women makes an almost exaggerated feature of funereal imagery. The result is an active subversion of audience expectation: comedies are supposed to end in celebration and renewal, and by replacing celebration with death and mourning, this scene threatens to set the play's trajectory off-kilter. The play's inversion of gender roles with its ‘women on top’ theme is therefore presented as turning the comic plot on its head.

The scene opens with a dispute between an old woman and a young girl, who are each trying to take advantage of the new sexual freedoms offered by Praxagora's regime. The scene is therefore set up as a conflict between youth and age, and the eventual triumph of the older women over the girl accordingly emphasizes the way in which Praxagora's regime serves to actively disrupt the norms of procreative sex. This disruption is explicitly linked to the man's loss of political rights. The women repeatedly refer to their sexual rights as established by law (e.g. 1049: παραβᾶσα τὸν νόμον, ‘defying the law’; 1055: ὁ νόμος ἕλκει, ‘the law compels you’; 1077: κατὰ τὸν νόμον, ‘according to the law’), and when he tries to negotiate some kind of exemption to the law, the young man is told that as a man he no longer has the authority (1024: κύριος) to negotiate any contract over the value of a single measure of grain (1025: μέδιμνον), thereby placing him in the legal position previously assigned to women.Footnote ³⁵

The scene's topsy-turvy inversion of comedy's conventional old man/young girl pairing is associated with death and funerals throughout the scene. The young girl repeatedly characterizes her rival as deathly, calling her ‘rotten’ (884, 926: ὦ σαπρά) and ‘Death's sweetheart’ (905: τῷ Θανάτῳ μέλημα). Funereal imagery accumulates throughout the young man's interaction with the old women. He first claims to be worried about incurring the jealousy of the first woman's boyfriend, who he claims is a famous painter of funeral jars:

The use of the verb ζωγραφέω (‘decorate’) here, literally meaning ‘to paint from life’ is a nice touch, creating as it does an immediate juxtaposition between the dead (τοῖς νεκροῖσι) and life (ζω-), which mirrors the conflict between fertile youth and sterile old age in the scene. As the interaction continues, it is not only the old woman, but the young man's sexual encounter with her, that is construed as funereal. Finally submitting to the first old woman, the man instructs her to prepare her bed with herbs, oil jars, and other props associated with the preparation of corpses:

Male disempowerment is therefore explicitly linked to the inversion of the celebratory norms of comic endings. As in the earlier scene with Blepyrus, where male political and sexual disempowerment are linked with scatological constraint, the women's dominance over the young man's body is not only sexual but his scatological functions are also obstructed. In lines 1059 and following, the young man in his desperation to escape attempts to stall for time by saying that he needs to use the toilet (1059: ἴθι νυν, ἔασον εἰς ἄφοδον, ‘let me go to the loo’), since otherwise he will soil himself. However, the old woman refuses to let him go, telling him that he will have to wait, and that he can ‘shit inside the house’ (1062: ἔνδον χεσεῖ).

The young man's disempowerment may be further enacted by a visible loss of erection. When he first appeared in the scene he was described as ‘carrying a torch’ (978: τοῦ δαὶ δεόμενος δᾷδ᾽ ἔχων ἐλήλυθας). It has been suggested by Vetta that, since a torch would itself not be cause for much remark given the night-time setting,Footnote ³⁶ the ‘torch’ here indicates the young man's phallus, and he is therefore an ithyphallic figure.Footnote ³⁷ However, at line 1058, the second old woman addresses the man as ‘softy’ (μαλακίων), which, while a common endearment, additionally suggests that by this point his comic phallus may no longer be erect. If this interpretation is correct, given the importance of the phallus as a symbol of the comic genre, the overturning of comic norms that is a theme throughout this scene would receive some additional visual emphasis. As in the scene with Blepyrus, the disempowerment of men, and the frustration of their pursuit of typically comic corporeal pleasures, is presented as overturning not only gender norms but also the norms of the comic genre. Scatological release is obstructed, male desire thwarted, and celebration replaced with death and mourning.

At the same time, the very inversion of these norms serves to reinforce just how central they are to the genre. The constipation scene, and the penultimate scene with the old women, seem strange precisely because they are strange. Perhaps the Assemblywomen's peculiarities in this regard go some way towards explaining its unpopularity with some modern critics, who have described the play as an out and out failure,Footnote ³⁸ the result of the poet's declining powers,Footnote ³⁹ and perhaps even his declining health.Footnote ⁴⁰