Aristophanes' current moments: an introduction

Book section : Chapter

The surest way to ruin a joke is to get the timing wrong. Even Plato knew that: the Aristophanes who is a character in his Symposium is kept from giving his speech in praise of Erōs in the assigned order because he gets the hiccups just at the right, or rather the wrong, moment. What the comic poet has to say, he gets to say later and out of sequence: the tale of how the once-spherical, multi-limbed powerful humans rebelled against the gods, how they were as a result grotesquely cut in half by Zeus (‘like eggs cut with a hair’, 190e), and how ever after they tried to find a suitable response to the desire for their lost halves that the punishment provoked. This itself is an ironic comeback, given how frequently in his comedies the real Aristophanes comments quite explicitly on other people’s bad timing. Spokespeople for the poet, normally the chorus in the parabasis, lash out against the audience for making the wrong judgement calls at the wrong time, or they insult their poetic competitors for being past their prime....

Authors: Gartland, S; Güthenke, C

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Host title: Aristophanes and the Current Moment: The Politics of Comedy
• Pages: 1-18
• Chapter number: 1
• Series: Bloomsbury Ancient Politics
• Place of publication: London
• Publication date: 2025-09-24
• Edition: 1
• DOI: 10.5040/9781350475113.ch-001
• EISBN: 9781350475090
• ISBN: 9781350475083
• Language: English
• Subtype: Chapter