¹ On the comic body, see (with a focus on obscenity) Henderson, J., The Maculate Muse. Obscene Language in Attic Comedy, second edition (Oxford, 1991), 187–203CrossRefGoogle Scholar; (with a focus on costume) Compton-Engle, G., Costume in the Comedies of Aristophanes (Cambridge, 2015), 16–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and (with a focus on food) Wilkins, J., The Boastful Chef. The Discourse of Food in Ancient Greek Comedy (Oxford, 2000), 28–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

² Translations are my own throughout.

³ N. Slater, Spectator Politics. Metatheatre and Performance in Aristophanes (Philadelphia, 2002), 140: ‘Wings in the play function as markers of self-conscious theatricality. Peisetaerus and Euelpides acquired their wings through a magic herb off-stage. Now it transpires that Peisetaerus can disburse wings to would-be Nephelokokkugians from baskets – that is, as costumes or stage properties.’

⁴ Of Aristophanes’ fragmentary works, one, the ‘second’ Women at the Thesmophoria seems highly likely to have been a ‘women on top’ plot. For a discussion of this play, its fragments, dating, and plot see Austin, C. and Olson, S. D., Aristophanes. Thesmophoriazusae (Oxford, 2004), lxxvii–lxxxixGoogle Scholar. The title and fragments of Women Claiming Tent Sites suggest it may have had elements of this theme. Otherwise, those plays whose titles suggest prominent female characters (Lemnian Women, Phoenician Women, Danaids) appear to have been wholesale parodies of tragic originals, and seem therefore to have been rather different in type to Lysistrata, Assemblywomen, and the two versions of Women at the Thesmophoria. On these kinds of tragic parodies in fifth century comedy, including those of Aristophanes, see Farmer, M., Tragedy on the Comic Stage (Cambridge, 2016), 88–101Google Scholar.

⁵ Taaffe, L., Aristophanes and Women (London, 1993)Google Scholar.

⁶ Henderson, J., ‘Pherekrates and the Women of Old Comedy’, in Harvey, D. and Wilkins, J. (eds.), The Rivals of Aristophanes. Studies in Athenian Old Comedy (London, 2000), 135–50Google Scholar.

⁷ Henderson (n. 6), 144–9, contains a list of all the speaking female characters attested or likely to have featured in Comedy prior to c. 380. The vast majority are categorized by Henderson as ‘mythical/legendary’ figures.

⁸ Taaffe (n. 5), 109: ‘Lysistrata ends on a positive note precisely because the status quo is reinstated.’

⁹ Zeitlin, F., ‘Aristophanes: The Performance of Utopia in the Ecclesiazusae’, in Goldhill, S. and Osborne, R. (eds.), Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy (Cambridge, 1999), 167–97Google Scholar.

¹⁰ On the failure of the women's revolution in Lysistrata, see also Saïd, S., ‘L'Assemblée des femmes: les femmes, l’économie et la politique’, Les cahiers de Fontenay 17 (1979), 33–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹¹ On the politics of the Assemblywomen, see W. Casement, ‘Political Theory in Aristophanes’ Ecclesiazusae’, Journal of Thought 21.4 (1986), 64–79; M. Heath, ‘Political Comedy in Aristophanes’, Hypomnemata 87 (1987), 1–49; K. Rothwell, Politics and Persuasion in Aristophanes’ Ecclesiazusae (Leiden, 1990); Zeitlin (n. 9), 167–97; K. M. De Luca, Aristophanes’ Male and Female Revolutions. A Reading of Aristophanes’ Knights and Assemblywomen (Lexington, 2005); J. Zumbrunnen, ‘Fantasy, Irony, and Economic Justice in Aristophanes’ Assemblywomen and Wealth’, American Political Science Review 100.3 (2006), 319–33.

¹² Taaffe (n. 5).

¹³ We must of course be careful in extrapolating from the few extant plays to the genre as a whole; however, in this respect there is no reason to assume that the surviving evidence is unrepresentative to any great degree, particularly since – as has been persuasively demonstrated by M. Wright, The Lost Plays of Greek Tragedy (Volume 1). Neglected Authors (London, 2016) – many fragmentary plays dramatize the same myths or groups of myths as those that survive in full.

¹⁴ M. Katz, ‘The Character of Tragedy: Women and the Greek Imagination’, Arethusa 27.1 (1994), 81–2.

¹⁵ Hall, E., ‘The Sociology of Athenian Tragedy’, in Easterling, P. E. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy (Cambridge, 1997), 105Google Scholar.

¹⁶ E.g. Ran. 1043–56.

¹⁷ E.g. Phoenician Women, Daughters of Danaus.

¹⁸ Hall (n. 15), 93–126.

¹⁹ For detailed examinations of this topic, see P. Rau, Paratragodia: Untersuchung einer komischen Form des Aristophanes (Munich, 1967); F. Zeitlin, ‘Travesties of Gender and Genre in Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae’, in H. Foley (ed.), Reflections of Women in Antiquity (New York, 1981), 169–218; H. Foley, ‘Tragedy and Politics in Aristophanes’ Acharnians’, JHS 108 (1988), 33–47; M. Silk, ‘Aristophanic Paratragedy’, in A. Sommerstein, S. Halliwell, J. Henderson, and B. Zimmerman (eds.), Tragedy, Comedy, and the Polis (Bari, 1993), 477–504; C. Platter, Aristophanes and the Carnival of Genres (Baltimore, 2007), 143–75; G. Dobrov, Figures of Play. Greek Drama and Metafictional Poetics (Oxford, 2001); S. Nelson, Aristophanes and His Tragic Muse. Comedy, Tragedy, and the Polis in Fifth Century Athens (Leiden, 2016); D. Sells, Parody, Politics, and the Populace in Greek Old Comedy (London, 2018). For paratragedy outside of the Aristophanic corpus, see especially E. Bakola, Cratinus and the Art of Comedy (Oxford, 2010), and Farmer (n. 4).

²⁰ A comic Phoenician Women was also written by Strattis; for a detailed discussion of this play, see Farmer (n. 4), 91–103. Since Euripides’ Phoenician Women was produced after 412, Aristophanes’ parodic retelling cannot realistically have pre-dated the Lysistrata and Women at the Thesmophoria in 411. Aristophanes’ Lemnian Women appears to have been in a similar mould, and again most likely dates to the 410s.

²¹ As N. Loraux, ‘Aristophane et les femmes d'Athènes: réalité, fiction, théâtre’, Mètis: Anthropologie des mondes grecs anciens 6.1 (1991), 127, notes, Aristophanes is of course not always consistent in characterizing comedy as masculine, and e.g. at Clouds (530) he personifies his plays as a young girl. The opposition between masculine comedy and feminine tragedy, however, need not be consistent, but merely sufficiently conventional, for Aristophanes to make a play of this opposition in his ‘women’ plays.

²² On the staging of mute, nude female characters in Aristophanes, see B. Zweig, ‘The Mute Nude Female Characters in Aristophanes’ Plays’, in A. Richlin (ed.), Pornography and Representation in Greece and Rome (Oxford, 1992), 73–89.

²³ Two exceptions exist within Aristophanes’ corpus of fully extant plays: the finale of Clouds, whose violence is highly uncharacteristic of comic endings; and Frogs, which reformulates the triumph of male fertility as a triumph over death, and ends with a dead tragedian being brought back to life from the underworld.

²⁴ On the interactions between gender and genre in the Women at the Thesmophoria, see Zeitlin (n. 19).

²⁵ Blepyrus uses ten scatological terms: at 317: κοπρεαῖος; 320: χέσας; 322: χέζοντα; 345: χεζητιῶν; 347: ̓γχέσαιμ ̓; 360: κόπρος; 368: χεζητιῶν; 371: σκωραμὶς; and 640: κἀπιχεσοῦνται. Only Strepsiades in the Clouds comes close to this frequency, using a total of eight scatological obscenities in the play.

²⁶ Henderson (n. 1), 187.

²⁷ L. McClure, Spoken Like a Woman. Speech and Gender in Athenian Drama (Princeton, 1999), 214.

²⁸ These four scatological utterances are as follows: Lys. 440: ἐπιχεσεῖ (‘you will shit’); Eccl. 78: πέρδεται (‘he farts’); Eccl. 596: πελέθων (‘dung’); Eccl. 1062: χεσεῖ (‘you will shit’). In addition to the paucity of female scatological utterances, there are two additional points of interest. Firstly, all but one of these scatological terms (Eccl. 596, spoken by Praxagora) is spoken by an un-named female character. Secondly, despite being spoken by women, the subject of the scatological action is in each case male. At Lys. 440, an un-named woman threatens the Proboulos (‘I'll tread on you so you shit’); at Eccl. 78, a woman jokes that her co-conspirator's husband farts under the weight of his walking-stick; at Eccl. 596, Praxagora chides her husband for interrupting her (‘you'd eat dung before me’); and at Eccl. 1062 (discussed in detail later in this article), an old woman tells a young man he can use the toilet in her house.

²⁹ The power dynamics of costume in this scene are discussed at length by Compton-Engle (n. 1), 74–82.

³⁰ See e.g. Lys. 42–5, in which Calonice describes the comic woman's typical attire including the κροκωτός, and Thesm. 253, where the κροκωτός forms part of In-Law's female disguise. See L. Stone, Costume in Aristophanic Poetry (Salem, 1981), 174-5; Compton-Engle (n. 1), 60.

³¹ It is interesting to note, given the close relationship between Old Comedy and iambus, that the connection between sexual prowess and scatology is also a theme in Hipponax's diarrhoea poem. M. West, Studies in Greek Elegy and Iambus (Berlin, 1987), 144, suggests (on the basis of a parallel with Petronius Satyrica 138) that in fr. 92 the speaker is undergoing a treatment for impotence, and it is this treatment that seems to result in the severe diarrhoea which follows. On the basis of this reconstruction, the poem's apparent link between the curing of impotence and diarrhoea would therefore form a mirror image to the Assemblywomen's link between constipation and impotence/infertility.

³² Compare Clouds 296, where, in response to Strepsiades’ scatological language (295: κεἰ θέμις ἐστίν, νυνί γ᾽ ἤδη, κεἰ μὴ θέμις ἐστί, χεσείω, ‘I don't know whether it's holy or unholy, but I need to shit’), Socrates instructs him not to ‘joke or use the language of comic poets’ (οὐ μὴ σκώψει μηδὲ ποιήσεις ἅπερ οἱ τρυγοδαίμονες οὗτοι).

³³ Zeitlin (n. 9) argues that this unusual reversal is connected to the relationship between the Assemblywomen's utopian plot and golden age myths such as the myth of Kekrops.

³⁴ On the topic of old men and rejuvenation in Old Comedy, see T. Hubbard, ‘Old Men in the Youthful Plays of Aristophanes’, in T. Falkner and J. de Luce (eds.), Old Age in Greek and Latin Literature (New York, 1989), 90–113.

³⁵ Cf. Isaeus 10.10, in which the speaker claims that women, like minors, are not able to negotiate a contract over the value of a single medimnos of barley.

³⁶ Cf. Eccl. 834–52, in which a herald calls the men to dinner. Since it is already clear that this post-dinner scene is taking place at night, there is no need to reinforce it at this point, and it therefore seems unlikely such temporal scene-setting is the function of the comment.

³⁷ M. Vetta, Le Donne All’ Assemblea (Milan, 1989), ad loc. Vetta's interpretation of this line is further bolstered by the fact that fire imagery is commonly used as a sexual euphemism in Greek (cf. Henderson [n. 1], 47–8, 177–8). A torch metaphor is the subject of an extended joke at Vesp. 1372–7, although the torch here is used to denote female, rather than male, sexual anatomy. It therefore seems highly plausible that the torch here indicates the young man's phallus, since this would fit within this common pattern of euphemism, as well as making sense within the context, as Vetta argues.

³⁸ C. Whitman, Aristophanes and the Comic Hero (Boston, 1964), 9: ‘It is hard to read any play, except possibly the Ecclesiazusae, and feel that it is falling apart.’

³⁹ D. Sutton, ‘Aristophanes and the Transition to Middle Comedy’, LCM 15.6 (1990), 91: ‘The play's deficiencies can probably be attributed to the poet's declining powers. At most, these deficiencies might perhaps be taken as symbolic of the declining vitality of Old Comedy.’ See also A. H. Sommerstein, ‘Aristophanes and the Demon Poverty’, CQ 34:2 (1984), 314: ‘The decline in freshness, in verbal agility, in sparkle of wit, in theatrical inventiveness…may be put down to advancing years and diminishing inspiration.’

⁴⁰ K. J. Dover, Aristophanic Comedy (Berkeley, 1972), 195 n. 7: ‘The possibility that Aristophanes had had a stroke cannot be completely excluded.’