Wasps and transition

In Knights, one of the codes that structured the rise of the Sausage-Seller was that of the ephebeia. Wasps too employs the pattern of the ephebeia, but does so in reverse. That such a cultural pattern can, for comic purposes, be presented in reverse may be some small confirmation of the method of this book: that patterns could be so played with suggests they were familiar enough in their usual form for a playwright to rely on his audience recognising the reversal. Here therefore we have, instead of a young man undergoing trials to become a citizen with political power, an old man who is (at least by his own account) possessed of such power and whose trials literally make him young again. The ephebe stands on the boundary between two stages of life, and it is in just such a position that we find Philocleon at the start of the play: he is an old juror on the verge of retirement, whose son wishes him to make the transition; but a rather different transition takes place.

Wasps begins with two drowsy slaves, who recount troubling dreams. Xanthias begins: ‘I thought I saw a huge eagle fly down to the agora, seize a bronze shieldtail and bear it heavenwards. But then it was Cleonymus, dropping a bronze shield’ (15–19).