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The 'Love Duet' In Aristophanes' Ecclesiazusae

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

S. Douglas Olson
S. Douglas Olson
Affiliation:
Howard University, Washington, D.C.
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Extract

Over sixty years ago, Walter Headlam identified Ecclesiazusae 960–76 as a paraclausithyron, or song sung by an excluded lover from the street to his beloved within. In 1958, however, C. M. Bowra suggested that the whole of Eccl. 952–75 was actually the sole surviving example of a previously unrecognized genre of Greek lyric poetry, the informal love duet. The thesis has been widely accepted, and is adopted by Rossi, Henderson and Silk, as well as by the Oxford editor, Ussher, who rejects Headlam's identification explicitly. Only Zimmermann has failed to embrace Bowra's interpretation wholeheartedly, although he offers no detailed discussion of the passage. In fact, Eccl. 952–75 is not evidence for a lost lyric genre, but a sophisticated literary parody, carefully designed as an elaborate poetic comment on the larger action of the play in which it appears. Bowra's ‘love duet’ is a critical fantasy, whose fictional existence only serves to obscure the real purposes and humour of this Aristophanic love-song.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 38 , Issue 2 , December 1988 , pp. 328 - 330
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1988

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References

1 Headlam, W. (Knox, A. D., ed.), Herodas: The Mimes and Fragments (Cambridge, 1922) ad II.34–7Google Scholar.

2 Bowra, C. M., ‘A Love Duet’, AJP 79 (1958), 376–91Google Scholar, reprinted in C. M. Bowra, On Greek Margins (Oxford, 1970), pp. 149–63. Bowra's assertion (p. 378 n. 8) that his differences withCopley, F. O., Exclusus Amalor: a Study in Latin Love Poetry (APA Philological Monograph n. 17; Madison, 1956)Google Scholar, who declared this the earliest example of the dramatic paraclausithyron, are ‘more a matter of terminology than of substance’, is clearly mistaken.

3 Rossi, L. E., ‘“Qui te primus ‘deuro de’ fecit” (Petron. 58.7)’, SIFC 45 (1973), 36Google Scholar; Henderson, J., ‘Sparring Partners: a Note on Aristophanes' Ecclesiazusae 964–965’, AJP 95 (1974), 344–7Google Scholar; Silk, M., ‘Aristophanes as a Lyric Poet’, YCIS 26 (1980), 149Google Scholar; Ussher, R. G. (ed.), Aristophanes: Ecclesiazusae (Oxford, 1973) ad 960–3Google Scholar. I refer throughout to Ussher's text.

4 Zimmermann, B., Untersuchungen zur Form und dramatischen Technik der Aristophanischen Komoedien Band 2: Die andere lyrischen Partien (Beitraege zur klassischen Philologie, Heft 166; Koenigstein im Taunis, 1985), pp. 68fGoogle Scholar. Zimmerman both cites Bowra's assessment of the passage ‘als nachahmung volkstuemlichen Poesie’, and identifies it as a paraclausithyron.

5 If one is going to insist on inventing a genre to explain 952–75, one might just as well create one to explain 900–23 as well.

6 Cf. Ussher (1973) ad loc., and the references provided there, on Sappho, fr. 137 and on the Marisa poem and the putative Greek model for Horace, Carm. 3.9. The strong narrative content in both of the latter suggests that they are related to mime rather than to our passage. The love duet thus does not fill a ‘gap’ in our understanding of Greek lyric poetry, as Bowra (1958), 376–9, esp. 379, implies.

7 Cf. esp. Henderson (1975).

8 Cf. Silk (1980). Much of Bowra's thesis depends on his vision of Aristophanes as a sincere and brilliant exponent of high lyric poetry, speaking out to defend his art from vulgar pretenders. As Silk (esp. 124–51) has shown, however, the comic playwright was no practitioner of the pure, elevated lyric style. Instead, ‘the ultimate affiliations of Aristophanic lyric…are, for better or worse, with popular culture’ (125).

9 It is a reasonable criticism of Bowra's thesis that, for all its ingenuity, it is not funny. Ecclesiazusae is generally a piece of scathing satirical slapstick, and we might reasonably expect the same to be true here.

10 Cf. Headlam, (1922) ad II.34–7Google Scholar.

11 Ussher (1973) ad loc. On the image, cf. Rossi, L. E., ‘Un' Immagine Aristofanea: “L'Amante Escluso” in Nub. 125 sg.’, Archeologia Classica 25 26 (1973–1974), 667–75.Google Scholar Ussher's comment that ‘the youth here is not a type of “exclusus amator”…, for the girl has no disinclination to admit him’ misses the point. However illogical or inappropriate it may seem, the Young Man is playing the part of an excluded lover (cf. 960–3; 974). That ‘one may isolate [the paraclausithyron] only by ignoring the obvious form of the duet’ (Ussher ad 970) is of course true, but ignores the essential question of what is pre-Aristophanic here, and what is deliberate poetic distortion.

12 Bowra (1958), 380f.

13 Bowra (1958), 380, suggests that δεῦρο δὴ δεῦρο δή is a standard erotic invitation. Rossi (1973), 34–40, is unable to offer any parallels to support this assertion. (The ‘insopportabile tautologia’ which Rossi [38] claims a non-erotic δεῦρο in combination with καί κτλ creates at 953–4, may actually be further Aristophanic literary parody, along the lines of the criticism of a similar Aeschylean device at Frogs 1152ff.)

14 Rossi (1973), 37.

15 Cf. esp. Said, S., ‘L'Assemblée des Femmes: Les Femmes, l'Économie et la Politique’, in Aristophane, les Femmes et la Cité (Cahiers de Fontenay 17; Fontenay-aux-Roses, 1979), pp. 33–69Google Scholar, and Foley, H., ‘The Female Intruder Reconsidered: Women in Aristophanes' Lysistrata and Ecclesiazusae', CP 77 (1982), 14–21Google Scholar.