Hi there I’m Mike Rugnetta.
Welcome to Crash Course Theater.
Today we’ll be covering Greek satyr plays
and classical Greek comedy.
We’ll also take a look at Aristophanes’
“Lysistrata,” a play in which the women
of Athens and Sparta decide to ban sexual
intercourse until their husbands stop fighting
a war.
It might get a little lewd, but this play
is actually a lot less lewd than most Greek
comedies that came before it.
The next time you’re at a museum, staring
up at some noble piece of ancient marble statuary,
just remember: those folks LOVED a good fart
joke.
INTRO
Satyr plays are the raunchy plays that appear
at the conclusion of each tragic trilogy.
They’re meant to cheer an audience up after
all of that pity, fear and purgation.
And what did audiences find most cheerful?
You guessed it: phalli.
Like tragedies, satyr plays were usually derived
from mythological stories.
Unlike tragedies, satyr plays featured a chorus
dressed as satyrs—ears, tails, shaggy legs
and … tie-on phalluses.
Satyr plays presented goofy versions of important
legends: here’s your typical myth, going
along as planned, and then who shows up: Satyrs!
These plays normally focus on how fun-loving,
drunk, and cowardly the satyrs are... but
there are often a few human characters who
engage in serious moral debate at some point.
Only one complete satyr play survives and
that’s Euripides “Cyclops,” based on
an episode in the “Odyssey.”
It’s almost a retelling of Odyssey’s version,
except there are a lot of satyrs on the Cyclops’s
island and they’re the ones who get Odysseus
into trouble with Mean Ole Mr Unipupil.
While trying to avoid being eaten, Odysseus
takes a moment to engage the Cyclops in an
earnest debate on whether duty or pleasure-seeking
is the key to a happy life.
After that the Cyclops and the head satyr
Silenus get very drunk and Silenus gets dragged
off to maybe do Cyclops sex stuff, but then
Odysseus blinds the Cyclops and it ends happily
for all.
Except the Cyclops who is blinded and was
probably like UGH THAT WAS MY ONE.
GOOD.
EYE.
You may remember from a couple episodes ago,
the Drama Contests of Dionsyia.
In 486 BCE, a separate contest for comedy
was established, with five competitors each
year.
In classical Greece, comedy was pretty raucous
and pretty ribald.
The word “comedy” came to us from the
Greek word komoidia, which literally means
party song.
After forty years or so, comedy got popular
enough that it had its own festival, the Lenaea,
held in winter for Athenians only.
No foreign dignitaries, which makes sense
because these comedies were probably not how
Athens wanted to represent itself to the world.
Like tragedies, comedies were inspired by
the philosophies and problems of present-day
Athens.
But while tragedies tended to cloak their
relevance in the mythic past or foreign lands,
comedies were typically set in contemporary
Athens, poking merciless fun at contemporaneous
life.
They kept themselves safe by being so wild
and crazy you couldn’t take their political
attacks seriously, though there are records
of a couple lawsuits.
SPOILSPORTS.
Comedies differed from tragedies in that they
often depended on spectacular effects and
featured funny costumes like padded stomachs
and butts, and yes, of course, say it with
me now–though I would totally understand
if it makes you uncomfortable and you super
don’t want to– phalluses.
Most of the formal elements—dialogic scenes
interspersed with choral odes—were similar
to tragedy, but comedy included something
new.
It was the parabasis, a speech in which the
chorus addresses the audience directly.
And while tragedies focus on some noble figure
falling, comedies are often about the little
guy struggling to rise.
Though as we’ll see with “The Lysistrata,”
comedies can deal with great figures and serious
subjects, as well.
Unfortunately, few examples survive from the
golden age of classical comedy and all the
ones that do are by Aristophanes.
But we have fragments by many others, including
sections from the plays of Eupolis, a comedy
writer so beloved that legend has it that
when he died fighting a war, the government
passed a law exempting all poets from military
service.
Let’s take a moment to look at what separates
comedies from satyr plays.
Satyr plays are situated in a mythic past,
comedies in the present.
Satyr plays are typically rural.
Comedies are usually urban.
Satyr plays are about messing things up.
Comedies are about putting things back together.
They tend to return social order and conclude
with a compromise of some kind: a peace treaty,
a constitution, a marriage.
There’s not necessarily any reconciliation
at the end of a satyr play, while comedies
are about offering absurd suggestions to real
problems.
Aristophanes is the most famous figure of
classical comedy for the very good reason
that his plays are the ones that … uhhh…
still exist.
Invading hordes: You.
Are.
The Worst.
He wrote at least forty plays.
We have eleven.
Aristophanes was born into a wealthy Athenian
family sometime in the 450s.
He started writing early and he was almost
immediately known for his splendid poetry,
and for relentlessly mocking specific political figures.
In fact he was sued at least once for “unpatriotic
behavior”.
But, undeterred, Aristophanes kept the poetry
and dirty jokes and mockery coming for quite
some time.
Late in the fifth century BCE, though, Athens
started losing the Peloponnesian War to Sparta
and a lot of things changed, including comedy.
Suddenly it wasn’t a great idea to satirize
political figures.
And Athens didn’t have as much money to
spend on spectacular effects and fancy choruses.
So Aristophanes made a mid-career switch.
He started writing plays for smaller choruses
and with composite comic figures rather than
specific, real-life politicians.
Aristophanes has a lot of famous plays—The
Birds, The Clouds, The Frogs.
But, today we’re going to look at “The
Lysistrata,” which we chose for a couple
of reasons.
For one, it’s still relevant today.
In the early days of the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, thousands of theater companies
staged readings and productions of the play.
The Lysistrata’s frustration at the senselessness
of wars and the tolls they exact won’t seem
very ancient to us.
Also it’s one of the rare ancient comedies
in which the women get to be really funny.
So that’s nice.
(But remember, all the actors in ancient Greek
theater were men!
And all the playwrights, too.)
Let’s go to the Thoughtbubble.
The Lysistrata won first prize in 411 BCE,
at which point the Peloponnesian War had waged
for about twenty years.
Athens and Sparta together defeated an enemy
once thought unstoppable: the Persians.
But after their victory, they squabbled over
colonies.
Sparta had the superior land army, Athens
had the superior navy.
Athens was a democracy, Sparta was an oligarchy.
Athens had a lot of money, Sparta had a lot
of staying power.
Things got ugly and stayed ugly.
Also Athens had a plague that killed a lot
of its citizens and its great leader Pericles.
That didn’t help.
This … is the background story for The Lysistrata,
at the start of which, the women of Athens
are fed up.
They’re tired of war, they’re tired of
being poor and they’re really, really tired
of their husbands leaving to fight.
Because when their husbands are away, they
can’t have sex.
And in The Lysistrata, these women really
want to have sex.
So led by a woman named Lysistrata, they devise
a so-far-fetched-it-just-might-work plan.
They seize control of the Acropolis, which
is where Athens keeps all its money, and they
say they’re not going to give up the siege
and they will not have any sex until the men
stop fighting.
To show that they’re really serious, they
get a bunch of women from warring areas, like
Sparta and Corinth, to join them.
The women swear an oath and achieve a truce,
showing the men that it can be done.
Thanks, Thoughtbubble.
I’d love to quote the chaste ladies oath
for you.
But it’s a family show and this oath is
filthy, which is sort of the point.
To begin, the women prepare a sacrificial
victim, but instead of killing an animal,
the sacrifice they make is to open a jug of
wine, which they’re obviously going to chug.
And then they swear to not let any man near
them, but the joke is that the oath they take
is really, really specific.
It’s not just that they’re swearing off
sex, they’re swearing in great detail about
exactly the kind of sex they’re not going
to have—like…EXACTLY.
EXACTINGLY EXACT
This is one of the things Greek comedy does.
It makes fun of beliefs and rituals that are
often held sacred, but doesn’t satirize.
The point isn’t to show that oaths are ridiculous
or that the goals of the women are absurd.
The point is to make fun of social conventions
with the end goal of creating a better and
happier society.
So cheers to that.
In a patriarchal society like ancient Greece,
by the way, the idea of women seizing power
was also pretty funny in itself--for the men--because
it was so impossible.
The women might have had different ideas.
Most of the jokes are about how difficult
it is to go without sex.
Women keep pretending to be hurt or pregnant
in order to sneak out of the Acropolis.
Men come to try to entice their wives back
into bed.
And in one of the funniest scenes, a wife
agrees, but then she keeps making more demands
of her husband—she needs a mattress, she
needs a pillow—and then runs back into the
Acropolis at the last minute, leaving her
husband with an epic case of… frustration.
Good times.
At the end, Lysistrata comes out of the Acropolis
and meets with Athenian and Spartan delegates.
She reminds them of what they owe to each
other and how ridiculous this conflict is.
Yet they agree to peace not because Lysistrata
is so wise, but because the goddess of Reconciliation
is there, personified as a naked woman, and
they all want to have sex with her.
Which is creepy.
And misogynist.
And violent.
Then, there’s a banquet and all the newly
reconciled men and women sing and dance together.
From this you can get a sense of how delightful
and radical Greek comedy is, while also being
kinda troubling.
Suggesting the absurdity of a vicious and
expensive war is a pretty racy thing for an
Athenian play to do when Athens is still in
the middle of that war.
But this isn’t a bleak satire.
It has a happy ending, with its enthusiastic
embrace of food, wine, singing and dancing,
and it tries to show that peace is possible
and preferable… if maybe kind of ruined
by creepin’ dudes.
Typical.
Thanks for watching.
Next time we’ll look at the transition from
Greek theater to Roman theater and the rise
of popular entertainments that’ll make The
Lysistrata seem tame.
Until then… curtain!
