COMIC AUTHORITY IN ARISTOPHANES’ KNIGHTS

John Lombardini1

Abstract: This article investigates the relationship between comic speech and politi-
cal authority in democratic Athens through a reading of Aristophanes’ Knights. The
article surveys three different interpretations of how Aristophanes constructs the
authority of his comic persona in the play: (1) he contrasts comic speech with rhetori-
cal speech to illustrate the superiority of the former (comic superiority); (2) he reflex-
ively reveals to the audience the potential deceptiveness of comic speech (comic
reflexiveness); and (3) he mocks his own claims to authority through the construction
of a comically boastful persona (comic anti-authority). It is argued that the final two
readings best capture the spirit of Aristophanic comedy, pointing to an affinity
between the comic authority constructed by Aristophanes and the democratic concep-
tion of authority in operation in classical Athens.

I
Introduction
In Plato’s Protagoras, Socrates reflects on the nature and place of authority
within Athens’ democratic assembly:
For I, along with all of the Greeks, assert that the Athenians are wise. So I
see, when they gather together in the Assembly, that when the city needs to
accomplish a deed concerning buildings, architects are sent for as advisors
in matters concerning building, and when the concern is shipbuilding, ship-
wrights are sent for; and so forth in all other matters, as many as are
believed to be learnable and teachable. But if another person attempts to
advise them whom they do not think is a skilled workman, even if he is
exceedingly handsome and wealthy and one of the nobles, in no way do
they ever receive him, but they laugh and raise a clamour until the one try-
ing to speak, having been shouted down, goes away himself, or the archers
drag or carry him away on orders of the prytanes. This, therefore, is the way
in which they proceed in matters they consider technical. But when there is
a need for the city to be advised in some matter concerning the administra-
tion of the city, just as a carpenter, standing up, advises them concerning
these matters, so can a blacksmith, cobbler, merchant, ship-captain, wealthy
man, poor man, noble man, or man of low-birth, and when he attempts to
offer his advice, no one rebukes him in these things because he never
learned these things or never had a teacher, just as the ones mentioned
before. For it is clear that they do not believe that this is teachable.2
In technical matters, Socrates explains, the Athenians request advice from
those possessing the corresponding technÂ; it is they who the demos believes
1 The College of William & Mary, PO Box 8795, Williamsburg, VA 23187, USA.
Email: jlombardini@wm.edu
2 Plato, Protagoras 319b3–d7. Translation my own.

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 COMIC AUTHORITY IN ARISTOPHANES’ KNIGHTS 131

hold the authority to advise them on such matters, and not those who make
competing claims to authority based on their physical attractiveness, wealth
or noble birth. In political matters, in contrast, there is no comparable authori-
tative techn that distinguishes those who are fit to advise from those who are
not; hence, it is possible for any democratic citizen to offer advice without
rebuke. This points to both the unique nature of democratic authority —
everyone and no one has authority — and the unique problem that democratic
authority raises — while each individual is authorized to speak, no individual’s
advice is uniquely authoritative. This in turn leads to the question: why should
the demos heed the advice of one citizen over another?
In Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens, Josiah Ober illustrates the prac-
tices through which elite orators established their authority to advise, and even
to criticize, the Athenian demos without stripping the demos of its collective
political agency. Central to Ober’s argument is what he terms the ‘ideological
hegemony of the masses’, key components of which were beliefs in (1) the
superiority of collective decision-making, and (2) the threat posed by,
yet need for, elite citizens in the collective decision-making process.3 The
dominance of these ideological beliefs required elite orators to strike a careful
balance between the profession (and possession) of elite and egalitarian vir-
tues.4 Demosthenes’ argument in Against Meidias exemplifies this dynamic:
on the one hand, Demosthenes characterizes himself as an ordinary citizen of
moderate means, in contrast to the wealthy, elite and arrogant Meidias; on the
other hand, Demosthenes stresses that he is ‘able and willing to use his elite
attributes — wealth, speaking ability, high standing in the community — to
help defend the rest of the citizens against the likes of Meidias’.5 While
Demosthenes, then, claims authority for himself based on these elite attrib-
utes, he simultaneously acknowledges that this authority derives from the
people and emphasizes the benefits he provides to the democracy through
exercising such authority.
In this article, I want to explore the place of Aristophanic comedy within
this operation of authority in democratic Athens, and, in particular, the man-
ner in which the comic poet himself advances such claims to authority. I argue
that Aristophanes establishes his authority to advise the demos through a
self-revealing boastfulness: while he claims authority by playing the alazÜn
(boaster), he simultaneously undercuts this authority by revealing the boastful
nature of the claim and, in doing so, revealing such a claim to be laughable.
This self-revealing boastfulness carries with it two key implications: first, it
distinguishes Aristophanes from the boastful charlatans he depicts in Knights

3 J. Ober, Political Dissent in Democratic Athens (Princeton, 1998), p. 33.

4 J. Ober, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens (Princeton, 1989), p. 311.
5 J. Ober, ‘Power and Oratory in Athens: Demosthenes 21, Against Meidias’, in
J. Ober, The Athenian Revolution (Princeton, 1996), pp. 86–106, pp. 96–7.

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132 J. LOMBARDINI

(e.g. Cleon) and in his other plays (e.g. Socrates);6 second, it establishes
Aristophanes’ authority in the very act of undercutting it. By revealing his
claim to authority to be laughable, Aristophanes does not dissolve the distinc-
tion between himself and the alazones he depicts; rather, he re-establishes the
distinction by demonstrating that he, and not they, knows that he is speaking
boastfully. In other words, while he plays at being an alazÜn, they actually are
alazones. This self-revealing boastfulness constitutes, I argue, a type of comic
authority; it is an authority established both by Aristophanes’ claim that he
possesses a self-knowledge that his rivals lack and by the comic nature of his
claim to authority.
To situate Aristophanes’ treatment of authority in Knights, the article
begins with an analysis of the operation of authority in democratic Athens.
Against twentieth-century interpreters like Hannah Arendt, who maintained
that both the conception and operation of authority were absent from Greek
political culture,7 I argue that we can see in classical Athens a specifically
democratic type of authority in operation. Sections III–IV turn to Aristo-
phanes’ Knights and evaluate some alternative answers to the question of how
Aristophanes constructs his own comic version of authority. Section III con-
siders what I take to be the most straightforward understanding of the claim to
authority Aristophanes establishes in Knights: that the comic poet, in contrast
to the politician, has the true interests of the people at heart, and that comic
speech, which is expository, unifying and critical, rather than rhetoric, which
is depicted in the play as deceptive, divisive and pandering, is a more advanta-
geous form of civic discourse. In Section IV, I illustrate how this argument
runs into a host of problems: comic speech can be just as pandering as rhetori-
cal speech (Plato’s Gorgias and Republic); comic speech can be just as decep-
tive as rhetorical speech (Thucydides’ depiction of Cleon); and rhetorical
speech can be just as expository as comic speech (Cleon’s speech in the
Mytilenean debate). I then evaluate a possible response to these criticisms —
that Aristophanes is aware of them, presents them in Knights and, in particu-
lar, reveals the potentially deceptive nature of comic speech to the audience
via the ending of the play as a way of acknowledging such criticisms. Though
this claim to self-knowledge is part of Aristophanes’ claim to authority, it is
not the whole story. In Section V, I argue, through a reading of the parabasis
of Knights and an investigation of the rivalry between Aristophanes and
Cratinus, that Aristophanes’ claim to authority is ultimately grounded in the
self-revealing boastfulness of the claim itself.

6 For this translation of alazÜn in Aristophanes in particular see D. MacDowell, ‘The

Meaning of ajlazwvn’, in Owls to Athens, ed. E.M. Craik (Oxford, 1990), pp. 287–93,
p. 289.
7 H. Arendt, ‘What is Authority?’, in Between Past and Future, ed. J. Kohn (New
York, 2006), pp. 91–141, p. 104.

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 COMIC AUTHORITY IN ARISTOPHANES’ KNIGHTS 133

II
Democratic Authority in Classical Athens
The principle of isÂgoria stood at the centre of Athenian democratic ideology,
so much so that Herodotus, writing in the second half of the fifth century,
could use it as a stand-in for dÂmokratia.8 Commonly translated as the ‘equal
right to speak’, isÂgoria symbolized each adult male citizen’s ability to
address the assembly. While under the sixth-century Solonian constitution all
Athenian citizens were permitted to attend the assembly (and hence, the vote
of the demos was held to be sovereign), only elites were entitled to speak
(most likely, those of the top two socioeconomic classes introduced by
Solon’s reforms). In fifth-century democracy, in contrast, every adult male
citizen of good standing was entitled to address his fellow citizens, a ‘right’
enshrined in the question that initiated meetings of the assembly: ‘Who
wishes to speak?’ (tis agoreuein bouletai).9
Nonetheless, there were real distinctions in the authority wielded by Athenian
citizens in democratic Athens. While every male citizen could speak in the
assembly, it is unlikely they all did. When thinking about democratic citizen-
ship in ancient Athens, it is useful to distinguish between active and passive
participation.10 Only a small number of citizens regularly addressed meetings
of the assembly, while a slightly larger group might have done so on a less fre-
quent basis; most citizens, however, participated in politics through listening
and voting. This ability to speak, hence, was most often exercised by a small
number of wealthy elites — professional politicians known as rhÂtores —
which in turn gave rise to certain norms governing who was held to possess
the authority to speak.
Until the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, the path to being an orator
passed through the office of the generalship. The ten generals (one from each
Cleisthenic tribe) were elected, rather than selected by lot — the only officials
(until the mid-fourth century) so chosen under the democracy. During this
period, Athenian generals all hailed from aristocratic families: Pericles, the
best-known example, was a member of the prominent and powerful
Alcmaeonid family from which Cleisthenes, whose late sixth-century reforms
started Athens down the path to democracy, was also descended. Cleon, his
most (in)famous successor, did not share such a pedigree. Emblematic of the
‘new politicians’ of the late fifth century, to borrow W.R. Connor’s phrase,
Cleon was a non-aristocrat, a tanner by trade, albeit a wealthy one.11 In
Aristophanes’ Knights, his questionable ancestry serves as both a stand-in for
questioning his authority, and an explanation for his base activities. Thus,
8 Herodotus, Histories 5.78.
9 M.H. Hansen, The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes, trans. J.A.
Crook (Norman, OK, 1991), p. 142.
10 Ibid., pp. 306–7.
11 W.R. Connor, The New Politicians in Fifth-Century Athens (Princeton, 1971).

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134 J. LOMBARDINI

while every Athenian citizen was entitled to speak, social status was an impor-
tant factor in assessing the authority that such speech held.12
The fact that most of the citizens who addressed and offered advice to the
demos were elites of some stripe stood in tension with the egalitarian ethos
that underpinned Athenian democratic practice. This anxiety was heightened
by the fact that elite orators had been trained in the arts of persuasion that they
could potentially deploy to deceive assemblymen and jurors and disrupt the
ability of the demos to exercise sound political judgment.13 Yet, as Josiah
Ober has demonstrated, the ability of elite orators to offer advice to, and espe-
cially to criticize, the demos was effectively controlled via a mass ideology
that channelled elite competition over the favour of the people into public
benefits.14 The various ‘dramatic fictions’ that elite orators and ordinary citi-
zens ‘conspired to maintain’ — such as the rhetorically-trained orator’s por-
trayal of himself as an ordinary citizen — functioned as a check on the
ambitions of elites while simultaneously authorizing their ability to oppose
and critique the will of the people.15 In this way, the Athenians managed to
harness elite learning and harmonize it with a strong belief in the wisdom of
the masses to best decide matters of public policy.
We can observe a similar dynamic at work in the judicial sphere. There was
no public prosecutor in the Athenian judicial system; public cases could be
prosecuted by any citizen who was willing — the ho boulomenos.16 While
legally any male Athenian citizen of good standing could try such cases, there
were fairly clear social criteria for determining who counted as a legitimate
prosecutor. In particular, as Danielle Allen has argued, the legitimate citizen
prosecutor was one who was personally connected to, and hence justly
angered by, the crime that had been committed.17 These cultural norms served
to distinguish between a legitimate prosecutor, on the one hand, and a syco-
phant, on the other. Though both had some personal interest in the case they
were prosecuting, the latter’s interest was perverted by the quest for pecuniary
gain, a misuse of anger, or some combination of the two.18 Thus, though each
citizen had an equal ability to prosecute such cases, not all willing prosecutors
were viewed as equally legitimate.19

12 P. Cartledge, Spartan Reflections (Berkeley, 2001), pp. 69–73.

13 Ober, Mass and Elite, p. 189.
14 Ibid., p. 333.
15 Ibid., pp. 191, 318–24; Ober, ‘Power and Oratory’, p. 105.
16 Private cases, in contrast, could only be prosecuted by the victim, or in the case of
murder or a crime against a woman, by a male relative. See D.M. MacDowell, The Law in
Classical Athens (Ithaca, 1978), pp. 57–8.
17 D. Allen, The World of Prometheus (Princeton, 2000), pp. 50–9.
18 Ibid., p. 166.
19 The arguments of both Ober and Allen are constructed primarily from the corpus
of fourth-century forensic oratory, which raises the question of whether the analysis of

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 COMIC AUTHORITY IN ARISTOPHANES’ KNIGHTS 135

The type of authority exercised in democratic Athens, then, was certainly

distinct from the type of traditional authority that has a prominent place in
Clouds; it is also distinct from the authority possessed by the philosopher-
kings of Plato’s hypothetical Kallipolis. While all three are types of authority,
they can be distinguished along two dimensions: (1) the norms that determine
who is entitled to authority and (2) the amount of deference such authority
commands. The traditional authority of the gods, for example, is grounded in
the obedience owed to time-honoured rules and practices, and the deference it
commands is unlimited.20 The authority of the philosopher-kings, in contrast,
was epistemic — it was grounded in the knowledge of the Forms that only
philosophers could possess — and, as with traditional authority, the deference
it commanded was total — no one else in the Kallipolis would have the knowl-
edge necessary to challenge the authority of the philosopher-kings. Finally,
the authority of the orator was governed by norms dictating that he must dem-
onstrate his friendliness to the demos in order for his speech to carry weight.
In contrast to both traditional forms of authority and the authority of the
philosopher-kings, however, the deference such authority commanded was
far more defeasible.21
Within a democratic context, like that of fifth-century Athens, each citizen
is authorized to track the commitments and entitlements of his fellow citizens;
it is precisely through this process of ‘keeping score’ that authority is con-
structed. If Cleon, for example, convincingly demonstrates his affection for
the demos, and has given good advice in the Assembly in the past, I may be
willing to defer to his authority in deciding what course of action the city
should take. Yet, if his policies start to produce deleterious consequences for
the city, or I happen to witness Cleon treating an ordinary citizen hubristically,
I may no longer be willing to act in such a way that his advice counts as
authoritative for me. That I have the authority to track Cleon’s commitments
in this way neither indicates, nor is predicated upon, the truth of my assess-
ments (perhaps Cleon’s policies will turn out to be beneficial in the long term,

democratic authority in ancient Athens that I have articulated using their works is appli-
cable to the fifth-century context in which Knights was performed. The extent to which
the same techniques were employed in the fifth century is one for which a complete
answer is not readily available, given the paucity of evidence comparable to that which
we have for the fourth century. Nonetheless, I would argue that the analysis of Knights in
this article gives us good reason to suspect that fifth-century politicians were playing a
similar game in terms of negotiating their elite status within the democratic community,
whether or not the specific norms governing their behaviour were identical.
20 M. Weber, Economy and Society (Berkeley, 1978), vol. I, pp. 226–7.
21 As Jeffrey Stout argues, all discursive practices, even democratic ones, entail vari-
ous degrees of authority and consent — what distinguishes democratic discursive prac-
tices, in this regard, from other types of discursive practices is that the former are rela-
tively non-deferential (though not entirely non-deferential). See J. Stout, Democracy
and Tradition (Princeton, 2004), pp. 209–13, 278–83.

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136 J. LOMBARDINI

or what I witnessed was actually Cleon retaliating against a prior assault made
against him); I possess such authority simply as a member of a democratic
political community.22 For the operation of authority to remain democratic,
however, it requires that citizens exercise this authority to track each other’s
commitments and entitlements; this, in turn, demands that we recognize our
fellow citizens as fit to hold each other accountable in these ways.
It is this last point in particular that can illuminate Aristophanes’ construc-
tion and deconstruction of his authority in Knights. While the comic poet and
the orator are engaged in a similar game of constructing their authority to
advise the demos within a democratic context, Aristophanes simultaneously
deconstructs his authority, throwing the authority to track the commitments
and entitlements of those seeking to advise the demos back to the demos itself.
From this perspective, Aristophanes’ treatment of his own authority can be
understood as an attempt to confront the key danger facing the democratic
operation of authority: namely, that ordinary citizens will abdicate the respon-
sibility they have to hold their leaders to account to those very leaders. To see
how this dynamic operates, let us now turn to the play itself.

III
Comic Superiority
Let us begin with what I take to be a rather uncontroversial reading of
Aristophanes’ Knights. While the play is a satire of the politician Cleon, it is
also a statement about the comic poet’s art, and the place of his poetry in the
democratic city. In the parabasis of the play, Aristophanes places himself at
the end of a succession of rival comic poets: Magnes, Cratinus and Crates. He
observes that presenting a comedy to the demos is no easy business (516). The
demos can be fickle (519), as the fate of his subsequent comedy, Clouds,
would later attest. His rivals, likewise, can speak to the varying fortunes they
have enjoyed in the dramatic spotlight (520–40). Aware of this, the chorus
offers a justification as to why Aristophanes’ comic voice should carry
authority — though he is young, he has honed his art, and gained experienced
from previous productions, before endeavouring to produce a comedy on his
own (541–50). He has, moreover, won the support of those influential in the
city before asking the entire demos to heed his advice (510).

22 Stout (ibid., p. 279) offers the following example: ‘As in street soccer or sandlot
baseball, all of the participants have the authority to “keep score,” and each of them
necessarily does so in light of his or her already-adopted commitments. That I have the
authority to track commitments and entitlements, and thus to draw the fundamental nor-
mative distinction from my own point of view, does not make my commitments correct;
nor does it make me entitled to them, in the sense that entails being epistemically justified
in holding them. It simply puts me in the democratic game of giving and asking for
reasons.’

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 COMIC AUTHORITY IN ARISTOPHANES’ KNIGHTS 137

The construction of this persona is both a commentary on his own authority

as a comic poet and on the authority of the orators who have endeavoured to
advise the demos in political matters. Unlike earlier political leaders, such as
Themistocles and Pericles, Cleon was elected general only after years spent as
a persuasive and influential orator. He was not, to deploy the metaphor used of
comic poetry in the parabasis, an oarsman before handling the tiller; in other
words, he did not work his way up through the ranks, learning the lesser tasks
before attempting to steer the ship of state. Cleon, rather, ‘leap[t] mindlessly
in and spout[ed] rubbish’ (545), an apt description of what the character
Paphlagon does for the entirety of the play.23
Aristophanes, then, is competing both with other comic poets, such as
Cratinus, and with politicians, such as Cleon. Just as Aristophanes is last in
the list of four comic poets in the parabasis (520–50), so the Sausage Seller is
the last in a list of four politicians (128–43); just as the Sausage Seller is
destined to overthrow Paphlagon (143, 1231–47), so Aristophanes is destined
to overthrow his comic rivals; and just as the Sausage Seller does oust Paphlagon
from power by the end of the play (1259–60), so does Aristophanes, in a sense.
It is, in the end, Aristophanes’ comic art that exposes Cleon’s deceptions, that
reveals his flattery, greed and desire to dominate. Indeed, it is the comic art that
rejuvenates the demos in the theatre, just as the Sausage Seller rejuvenates
Demos on stage (1321–34). It is the low comic poet, like the low Sausage
Seller, who does what is best for the city. To paraphrase the words of
Dikaiopolis in Acharnians, comedy too speaks what is just (501).24
We can further read these parallels as drawing a more general distinction
between comic and rhetorical speech and their respective political functions.
Cleon’s rhetoric, as it is depicted in the play, is deceptive, divisive and pander-
ing. He tricks Demos into believing that he is the people’s only true benefactor
(e.g. his stealing the credit for the successful Pylos campaign (54–7)); he
accuses those who oppose him of conspiring against the city (255–7, 314,
475–9); and he woos Demos with tasty treats and with claims to being his true
lover.25 All of these moves have the effect of silencing opposition in particular,

23 All translations of Aristophanes are from Jeffrey Henderson’s Loeb edition.

24 The comic poet’s competitors, as Aristophanes constructs them in his plays, are
not just rival comic poets and politicians, but tragic poets as well. The word Dikaiopolis
uses in Acharnians is trugÜidia, rather than the expected kÜmÜidia. As Oliver Taplin
has argued, the use of trugÜidia, itself a play on tragÜidia, highlights the rivalry between
comedy and tragedy that will continue to be a theme in Aristophanes’ comedies. See
O. Taplin, ‘Tragedy and Trugedy’, Classical Quarterly, 33 (1983), pp. 331–3. Cf. J. Given,
‘The Agathon Scene in Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae’, Symbolae Osloenses, 82
(2007), pp. 35–51, who offers a helpful analysis of Aristophanes’ critique of the tragic
poet Agathon’s anti-democratic elitism.
25 For a recent treatment of the erotic metaphor in Knights, see A. Scholtz, ‘Friends,
Lovers, Flatterers: Demophilic Courtship in Aristophanes’ Knights’, Transactions of
the American Philological Association, 134 (2004), pp. 263–93, p. 286.

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138 J. LOMBARDINI

and of silencing civic discourse more generally. In a passage memorable for

its vividness, the Sausage Seller accuses Paphlagon of having fixed ‘it so the
city’s now gagged speechless by the thrust of your tongue, and yours alone’
(352). The word used, kataglÜttizÜ, means to kiss with the tongue, and meta-
phorically signifies to talk someone down. In other words, the city has been
silenced, just as if Cleon had shoved his tongue down its throat.26
Comic speech, however, is constructed as the antithesis of Cleon’s rhetori-
cal practice in Knights. While Cleon’s rhetoric is deceptive, divisive and pan-
dering, Aristophanes’ comic speech is expository, unifying and critical. It
exposes, first and foremost, the deceptive rhetorical practices of Cleon; it is
unifying, in that it brings opposed elements of the city together (the elite
Knights with the demotic Sausage Seller (225–7), Poseidon with Athena
(551–64, 581–94), what is spoudaios with what is geloios); it is critical by
attempting to hold the demos accountable for its share of the responsibility in
Cleon’s actions (1111–20). Moreover, while Cleon’s rhetoric silences the city,
Aristophanes’ comic speech opens up space for civic discourse to take place.
It casts the demos sitting in the theatre as a reflective, communal body, one
that is capable (thanks in part to Aristophanes’ comedy) of critically examin-
ing its own beliefs and practices. Comic speech can make the demos better,
and make democracy better, by improving the people’s capacity for effective
political judgment.27

IV
Comic Reflexiveness
This is, indeed, a rosy picture of the civic purpose and function of Aristo-
phanic comedy, one that is only as good as the solidity of the distinctions I
have just outlined. How solid are they? In Plato, of course, the idea that pub-
licly performed poetry seeks to improve the demos is flatly denied. In the
Gorgias, Socrates famously maintains that the oratory practiced in the demo-
cratic Athens of his day is nothing other than a type of flattery (462c ff.).
Tragic poetry, he continues, is no different; for what is tragedy once every-
thing else is stripped away, he argues, other than a set of rhetorical speeches
(501e–502d)? While Socrates does not mention comedy in the Gorgias, there
is no reason to suspect that his argument is not intended to apply equally to
that genre. Indeed, in the Republic, both tragedy and comedy are accused of
gratifying and strengthening the appetitive desires of their audiences (605a–c).
26 As Jeffrey Henderson nicely renders it, ‘tongue-kiss into silence’. See J. Hender-
son, The Maculate Muse (New Haven, 1975), p. 182.
27 J. McGlew, Citizens on Stage: Comedy and Political Culture in the Athenian
Democracy (Ann Arbor, 2002), p. 109; N. Slater, Spectator Politics: Metatheatre and
Performance in Aristophanes (Philadelphia, 2002), p. 83; J. Zumbrunnen, ‘Elite Domi-
nation and the Clever Citizen: Aristophanes’ Acharnians and Knights’, Political Theory,
32.5 (2004), pp. 656–77, p. 674.

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 COMIC AUTHORITY IN ARISTOPHANES’ KNIGHTS 139

Far from making democratic citizens more capable rulers, tragedy and comedy
exacerbate the problem of democratic misrule; the demos cannot lead itself,
let alone the city, because it itself is being led by its desires. Comedy, like
rhetoric, is both guilty of feeding this vicious circle and trapped within it — at
times complicit, at times responsible, for the city being filled with harbours,
dockyards, tribute, and such other trash (Grg. 519a–b). It is responsible, in
other words, for the misdirection of politics away from a cultivation of the
goods of the soul and towards the securement of the goods of the body.28
While Plato collapses these distinctions between rhetorical and comic
speech, Cleon’s speech during the Mytilenean debate (as it is portrayed by
Thucydides in Book III of his history) claims that rhetorical speech is equally
capable of performing the expository function Aristophanes champions as a
characteristic of his own comic speech. Through a highly rhetorical denuncia-
tion of rhetoric, Cleon inverts the relationship between rhetoric and comedy
that Aristophanes will advance three years later, maintaining that theatrical
spectatorship provides a poor model for democratic citizenship (III.38.4–7).
The theatre promotes an unhealthy fixation on the new, which in turn has
made the demos a bad judge of its own affairs. When citizens listen to
speeches in the Assembly, they crave the same type of newfangled arguments,
paradoxical turns of phrase and clever ideas at the expense of examining
which orator’s policy is more just. And it is oratory, and the orators them-
selves, who are ultimately to blame for this predicament; it is they who give
in to these desires, dazzling and deceiving the people with their rhetoric
(III.37.4). We can read Cleon’s speech, then, as an attempt to expose the
deceptive use of rhetoric; it is, on this reading, both expository and critical.29
Finally, Thucydides’ representation of Cleon illustrates how comic speech
can also be deployed for deceptive purposes. Thucydides’ portrait of Cleon is
deeply comic, and deeply coloured by its Homeric undertones. Cleon is
depicted as a Thersites-figure, a comic buffoon deserving of ridicule and not
28 We may even read Knights as flattering the demos in this way. Knights might be
read as belying the Old Oligarch’s claim that the Athenians ‘do not tolerate any satire or
censure of the people as a whole’ (II.18); but we might also read Knights as ultimately
exonerating the demos from blame. First, Demos rebuts the charge that he is stupid,
claiming that he cleverly manipulates the politicians who think they are deceiving him
(1111–50); second, and somewhat incompatible with the first passage, the Sausage
Seller assures Demos that it is the politicians, and not he, who are to be blamed (1356–7).
29 Both McGlew and Saxonhouse emphasize the anti-democratic threads in Cleon’s
speech. See McGlew, Citizens on Stage, p. 93 and A. Saxonhouse, Free Speech and
Democracy in Ancient Athens (New York, 2006), pp. 153–6. Victoria Wohl reads
Cleon’s speech along the lines outlined in this paragraph, arguing that rather than advo-
cating passivity, Cleon is attempting to articulate ‘a model of democratic citizenship
through rhetorical manliness’. See V. Wohl, Love Among the Ruins: The Erotics of
Democracy in Classical Athens (Princeton, 2001), pp. 95–101. I take Wohl’s interpreta-
tion to be a plausible, sympathetic rescuing of Cleon from Thucydides’ send-up (see
below).

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140 J. LOMBARDINI

fit to enter the deliberative circle and advise the city. His claim during the
Pylos debate that he will bring back the Spartans trapped on Sphacteria dead
or alive in twenty days is met with outright laughter in the assembly (IV.28.5),
one of only two moments of such laughter in the entirety of Thucydides’
History.30 Earlier in the debate, Thucydides’ vivid description of Cleon’s
psychological reaction to Nicias’ resignation (IV.28.2) exemplifies the histo-
rian’s judgment; the comic reversal between Cleon’s accusation of Nicias for
cowardice and his own fear at the prospect of leading an expedition to Pylos
reveals that Cleon’s words are hollow (IV.28.4) and that he is deserving of
ridicule.
A crucial component of Thucydides’ characterization of Cleon as a comic
boaster is the latter’s relationship to Pericles in the History. Reading Cleon’s
speech during the Mytilenean debate in Book III alongside Pericles’ speeches
in Book II, we can recognize both the general contrast that Thucydides
advances between Periclean and Cleontic leadership as well as Cleon’s role in
the History as a parodic Pericles. Cleon’s speech echoes many of Pericles’
most poignant phrases and policies — the idea that Athens’ empire is a tyr-
anny, a claim to consistency in opinion, and a strong desire to continue pursu-
ing the war with Sparta.31 Yet, from Cleon’s mouth these words ring hollow,
just as Thersites’ echoing of Achilles in the second book of the Iliad.32 Indeed,
Thersites bears a number of resemblances to Cleon: the ugliness of his appear-
ance (Iliad, II.216–219) mirrors Cleon’s stylistic unattractiveness; his lack of
patronymic (II.212) marks him as a common soldier, reminiscent of Cleon’s
common background (in contrast to the Alcmaeonid Pericles); he is described
as both speaking in a disorderly fashion and as a fluent orator (II.241; 246);
and he is laughed at by the Achaean soldiers (270) just as Cleon was in the
Assembly. Moreover, Thersites’ speech echoes that of Achilles: Thersites,
like Achilles, accuses Agamemnon of keeping the lion’s share of the spoils for
himself, while neglecting to properly reward the soldiers who do the bulk of
the fighting, and scolds the Achaeans for their lack of manliness in the face of
such injustice (I.225–231; II.225–235). In the case of Thersites, laughter
marks a deflation of the common soldier’s pretension in daring not only to
30 For the other, see Thuc. VI.35.1.
31 On tyranny: hÜs turannida gar Âd echete autÂn, hÂn labein men adikon dokei
einai, apheinai de epikindunon (Thuc. II.63.2); Cf. ou skopountes hoti turannida echete
tÂn archÂn kai pros epibouleuontas autous kai akontas archomenous (III.37.2). On con-
sistency: kai egÜ men ho autos eimi kai ouk existamai (II.61.2); Cf. egÜ men oun ho autos
eimi tÂi gnomÂi (III.38.1). Their aggressive war policies exhibit similar verbal echoes.
Pericles’ speech after the plague (II.60 ff.) and Cleon’s instrumental role in rejecting
peace with the Spartans during the Pylos campaign (IV.21.3) offer perhaps the best
parallels for this comparison.
32 F. Cairns, ‘Cleon and Pericles: A Suggestion’, Journal of Hellenic Studies, 102
(1982), pp. 203–4; H. Flower, ‘Thucydides and the Pylos Debate (4.27–29)’, Historia,
41 (1992), pp. 39–57.

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 COMIC AUTHORITY IN ARISTOPHANES’ KNIGHTS 141

address, but also to harangue and criticize his leaders. As Odysseus explains
before striking Thersites, as the worst man who came to the shores of Troy,
‘you should not lift up your mouth to argue with princes’, and he adds that if
he catches him playing the fool again he will whip him ‘out of the assembly
place with the strokes of indignity’ (II.250; 264).33
Much as in Homer’s epic, Thucydides’ characterization of Cleon as a
Thersites-figure marks him as unfit to address the assembly; and, just as in
Homer, these comic tropes are deployed in order to keep the ‘low’ element in
its proper place. Yet, for all the comic brushstrokes Cleon receives at the
hands of Thucydides, Cleon’s boasts were clearly not empty: he masterfully
executed one of the most important Athenian military successes of the war,
and he was greatly — and, viewed from a set of more sympathetic eyes,
rightly — honoured for that triumph by the city of Athens.34 How, then,
should we interpret Thucydides’ deployment of these comic tropes in his char-
acterization of Cleon? Is he exposing Cleon’s deceptions? Or is he using
humour to deceive, as a mask for his elite biases? Is Aristophanes perhaps
doing the same? If so, how can he maintain the superiority of comic speech
over rhetorical speech that he seems to establish in Knights?
One approach to these potential criticisms is to argue that Aristophanes recog-
nizes and acknowledges the similarities between rhetorical and comic speech in
Knights. Crucial to this argument are the parallels between Aristophanes and
the Sausage Seller, and between the Sausage Seller and Paphlagon. While the
Sausage Seller heroically defeats Paphlagon, they are both playing the same
rhetorical game. Indeed, this is the central comic premise of Knights: Cleon
can only be defeated by a politician who is even more vulgar and base than
he is himself. The play itself contains an extended agÜn (lines 273–1252,
interrupted only by the parabasis (498–610) and two brief choral passages
(973–96; 1111–50)) between Paphlagon and the Sausage Seller where they
compete over who can shout more loudly (273–87), who loves Demos more
(890–911), who can offer Demos the most flattering oracles (997–1097), and
who can serve Demos the largest number of, and tastiest, treats (1151–228).
Though the Sausage Seller successfully exposes Paphlagon’s embezzlement
to Demos (1215–25), his rhetorical techniques are indistinguishable from
those of his opponent.
The ending of the play further emphasizes these connections, while sug-
gesting to the audience how comic speech might also be used to deceive. After
his defeat of Paphlagon, the Sausage Seller rejuvenates Demos, changing him
from ugly to beautiful by boiling him down (1321). He returns — indeed, the
city is restored — to the violet-crowned (1323, 1329) Athens of old, the city
of Aristides, Miltiades, and the men who fought at Marathon. The Sausage
33 Lattimore translation.
34 On Cleon’s plan, see J. Wilson, Pylos 425 BC: A Historical and Topographical
Study of Thucydides’ Account of the Campaign (Warminster, 1979).

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142 J. LOMBARDINI

Seller informs Demos of how he used to be deceived by the flattery of orators

like Paphlagon (1339–44); now restored, Demos knows better than to fall for
such deceptions in the future.
There are reasons to doubt, however, the utopian fantasy presented at the
end of Knights.35 First, the mythical subtext of Demos’ rejuvenation —
Medea’s rejuvenation of Jason’s father and her role in the murder of Pelias —
points to a possible ambiguity underlying the Sausage Seller’s actions. In
Euripides’ Medea, performed seven years earlier than Knights in 431, there
are allusions in the play to Medea’s role in the murder of Pelias, though the
details are omitted (9–11; 486–7; 504–5).36 From our other extant sources,37
however, it is clear that Medea performed two separate rejuvenations either
by boiling and administering a potion or physically boiling a corpse. First,
Medea restored Jason’s father,38 a ram,39 or both;40 next, she tricked the daugh-
ters of Pelias into butchering their father by holding out the promise of a simi-
lar magical rejuvenation. When the daughters slaughter their father, however,
he remains dead.

35 For other attempts to complicate the ending of Knights, see J. Hesk, Deception and
Democracy in Classical Athens (Cambridge, 2000); Wohl, Love Among the Ruins; and
Scholtz, ‘Friends, Lovers, Flatterers’. For Hesk, what we see in the Sausage Seller at the
end of the play might be just another deception of Demos. What the play offers is perhaps
‘the dystopian nightmare (as Thucydides would see it) of a post-Periclean demagogue
who actually does manage to achieve total supremacy and control of the demos through
flattering rhetoric, gratification of his audience and the slandering of an opponent’
(Hesk, Deception and Democracy, p. 257, emphasis in original). Wohl bases her ironic
reading of the ending of Knights in her democratic reading of Cleon’s Mytilenean
speech: ‘But Thucydides’ Cleon warned us to be wary of such miracles. He urged the
Athenians not to accept representations of experience in the place of experience itself,
or to judge the conditions by what self-interested speakers say rather than what they
themselves see and know to be true. And if we do not remember Cleon’s warning, we
have Aristophanes’ own. The Sausage Seller’s “miraculous” transformation of Demos is
his bid for power over him and victory over Paphlagon’ (Wohl, Love Among the Ruins,
pp. 111–12). Finally, Scholtz, pointing to Demos’ defence of his actions at 1121–30,
maintains that ‘whether a reformed Demos has finally shed his much vaunted cunning, or
whether cunning Demos, in taking up with a new favorite, simply begins the cycle
anew — none of that is clear’ (Scholtz, ‘Friends, Lovers, Flatterers’, p. 289). Here, I want
to focus on the mythical subtext of Demos’ rejuvenation — a point overlooked by these
scholars — in explicating the ironic undertones of the ending of Knights.
36 Cf. Pindar, Pythian 4.250.
37 For an overview of these sources, see F. Graf, ‘Medea, the Enchantress from
Afar: Remarks on a Well-Known Myth’, in Medea: Essays on Medea in Myth, Litera-
ture, Philosophy, and Art, ed. J.J. Clauss and S.I. Johnston (Princeton, 1997), esp.
pp. 33–4.
38 Nostoi fr. 6.
39 Pausanias VIII.11.2–3.
40 Ovid, Metamorphoses VII.262–321.

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 COMIC AUTHORITY IN ARISTOPHANES’ KNIGHTS 143

Now Demos, of course, is not killed by the Sausage Seller at the end of
Knights. Yet the motif of deception running through the Medea myth supports
the suspicion that Demos’ rejuvenation at the hands of the Sausage Seller is
yet another act of political deception.41 The ambiguity that lies at the core of
Medea’s magical powers — her ability to heal and destroy, to benefit or
deceive — mirrors the ambiguity of political speech, which can either func-
tion to improve, communicate and educate, or to deceive, manipulate and pan-
der. It further mirrors, via the connection between Aristophanes and the
Sausage Seller, the potential for comic speech either to expose deceptive
speech or to be used as deceptive speech. By illustrating its deceptive poten-
tial, Aristophanes collapses the distinction between comic and rhetorical
speech that runs throughout the play while educating citizens to resist the
potential deceptions of both.
The repeated references to Athens as ‘violet-crowned’ (iostephanois) rein-
force this interpretation. In the parabasis of Acharnians, performed one year
earlier than Knights, the chorus boasts of the benefits Aristophanes has pro-
vided to his city:
Our poet says that he deserves rich rewards from you, since he has stopped
you from being deceived overmuch by foreigners’ speeches, from being
cajoled by flattery, from being citizens of Simpletonia. Before he did that,
the ambassadors from the allied states who meant to deceive you would
start by calling you ‘violet-crowned’ (iostephanous); and when anyone said
that, those ‘crowns’ would promptly have you sitting on the tips of your lit-
tle buttocks. And if anyone fawned on you by calling Athens ‘gleaming’
(liparas), that ‘gleaming’ would get him everything, just for tagging you
with an honour fit only for sardines (633–40).
It is precisely this same terminology that Aristophanes singles out in Acharnians
as exemplifying deceptive and flattering speech that is also used by the chorus
at the end of Knights to describe Athens (Ü tai liparai kai iostephanoi kai
arizÂlÜtoi AthÂnai, 1329). Thus, while Aristophanes offers the audience a type
of encomium of Athens in the ending of Knights, he also problematizes this
image by casting it in a vocabulary of deceptive flattery.42 Just as the audience
41 Both Alan Sommerstein and Lowell Edmunds mention the Medea myth in connec-
tion with Demos’ rejuvenation. Sommerstein, however, only notes Medea’s successful
rejuvenation of Aeson in the fragmentary Nostoi and Ovid. Edmunds, in contrast,
focuses on the boiling down of Pelias; yet he never mentions the deception underlying
this act, nor connects that deception to his interpretation of the play. See A. Sommerstein,
Aristophanes: Knights (Warminster, 1981); and L. Edmunds, Cleon, Knights, and
Aristophanes’ Politics (Lanham, 1987).
42 J. Henderson, ‘The Demos and the Comic Competition’, in Nothing to Do with
Dionysos?, ed. J. Winkler and F. Zeitlin (Princeton, 1990), pp. 271–313, offers an analogy
between the comic city, as it is envisioned in the comedies of Aristophanes, and the city
as it is presented in the institution of the funeral oration. For Henderson, the comic city
resembles the city of the funeral oration most precisely in their dual portrayals of ideal

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144 J. LOMBARDINI

should be wary of trusting that its political leaders will serve its best interests,
so they should be wary of trusting the advice of a comic poet too readily. In
short, the demos must be wary of giving any individual citizen too much
authority, lest it find itself relegated to the dangerously passive role it occu-
pies in the play.43
This reflexive nature of Aristophanes’ comic speech is central to the man-
ner in which the comic poet claims authority. By showing the audience how he
might deceive them, he is assuring the audience that he would not, and in any
case, could not, deceive them. He would not, since it is he himself that seeks to
expose such deception; and he cannot, since he has now revealed the tech-
niques by which he might attempt to do so. The ironic ending of the play, in
other words, can be read as a method for establishing trust between audience
and comic poet. Yet the claim to authority for comic poetry that we find in
Knights is not wholly contained in Aristophanes’ ‘self-implication in the rhet-
oric of deception and anti-rhetoric’;44 equally important is the way that
Aristophanes undercuts the very claims to authority that he makes for his own
comic poetry. It is to this particular dynamic that I turn in the following
section.

V
Comic Anti-Authority
To get at this question, let us take a closer look at how Aristophanes’ comic
authority is constructed in the parabasis of Knights. As noted in Section II, the
parabasis exploits the parallels between the tasks of the comic poet and politi-
cian in advising the city. Aristophanes’ career as a comic poet — in particular,
his prudent decision to allow others to produce his comedies before attempt-
ing to produce his own (512–14) — is shown to be exemplary in comparison

cities; both the orator delivering the funeral oration and the playwright producing a com-
edy portray not the actual demos, but ‘what the dÂmos would be like if it behaved itself, if
it lived up to the ideals and potentials of the democracy’ (p. 311). Both genres simulta-
neously chastise and encourage their audience. The comic hero(ine) represents the ideal
city, and offers the audience a vision of how it might defeat the forces that block us from
attaining this vision — most often, ‘acceptable scapegoats who are not fictitious’ such as
Cleon (ibid., p. 312). While real persons would never be able to solve real problems in the
fantastical ways that the heroes/heroines on the comic stage do, the comic poets nonethe-
less encouraged their fellow Athenians ‘to think about their lives and civic duties in ways
not encouraged on other occasions’ (ibid., p. 312). As I argue, Knights provides both a
utopian vision and the possibility that this vision is in fact dystopian. Here it is useful to
recall the different frames for reading Pericles’ Oration — the speech itself and the dra-
matic framework for the speech that Thucydides provides. The ending of Knights, as I
have attempted to show, contains both encomium and plague.
43 On the danger of Demos’ passivity in the play, see in particular Wohl, Love Among
the Ruins.
44 Hesk, Deception and Democracy, p. 273.

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 COMIC AUTHORITY IN ARISTOPHANES’ KNIGHTS 145

with Cleon’s rashness. Yet just as central to the parabasis is its mockery of
Aristophanes’ rivals. It is in Aristophanes’ mockery of his rivals that we can
most clearly discern that the comic poet’s claim to authority is a type of comic
boast, one that would have been recognized by the audience and have evoked
their laughter.
The discussion of Cratinus in the parabasis has garnered the most scholarly
attention, given the preservation of some fragments and an ancient summary
of Cratinus’ Pytine (Wine-Flask), which offers a comic rebuttal of Aristo-
phanes’ mockery.45 What, however, are the ‘charges’ Aristophanes levels
against Cratinus in the parabasis of Knights? The relevant passage runs as
follows:
Then he recalled Cratinus, who once rode the high wave of your applause
and coursed through the open plains, sweeping oaks, plane trees, and ene-
mies from their moorings and bearing them off uprooted. At a party there
was no singing anything but ‘Goddess of Bribery with Shoes of Impeach
Wood’ and ‘Builders of Handy Hymns’, so lush was his flowering! But now
you see him driveling around town, his frets falling out, his tuning gone and
his shapeliness all disjointed, but you feel no pity; no, he’s just an old man
doddering about, like Conn-ass wearing a withered crown and perishing of
thirst, who for his earlier victories should be getting free drinks in the
Prytaneum, and instead of driveling should be sitting pretty in the front row
next to Dionysus (526–537).
We should not be deceived by the veneer of sympathy.46 First, though Cratinus
is sandwiched between Magnes and Crates, both of whom were retired by the
time Knights was performed in 424, Cratinus was also competing at the
Lenaea that year, and would best Aristophanes’ Clouds in the following year
with Pytine. Far from lamenting Cratinus’ treatment, he is mocking his rival
by depicting him (falsely) as a washed-up has-been. Second, the metaphor of
the rushing stream is likely a parody of a boast Cratinus had made in an earlier
45 The question of poetic rivalry between Aristophanes and his contemporaries has
also attracted a great deal of recent attention. See M. Heath, ‘Aristophanes and His
Rivals’, Greece & Rome, 37.2 (1990), pp. 143–58; K. Sidwell, ‘Poetic Rivalry and the
Caricature of Comic Poets: Cratinus’ Pytine and Aristophanes’ Wasps’, in Stage Direc-
tions: Essays in Ancient Drama in honour of E.W. Handley (London, 1995), pp. 56–80;
K. Sidwell, Aristophanes the Democrat: The Politics of Satirical Comedy During the
Peloponnesian War (New York, 2009); Z.P. Biles, ‘Intertextual Biography in the
Rivalry of Cratinus and Aristophanes’, American Journal of Philology, 123.2 (2002),
pp. 169–204; and Z.P. Biles, Aristophanes and the Poetics of Competition (New York,
2011).
46 Heath, ‘Rivals’, pp. 149–50; T. Hubbard, The Mask of Comedy: Aristophanes and
the Intertextual Parabasis (Ithaca, 1991), p. 75; Z.P. Biles, ‘Aristophanes’ Victory
Dance: Old Poets in the Parabasis of Knights’, Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und
Epigraphik,136 (2001), pp. 195–200; and I. Ruffell, ‘A Total Write-off: Aristophanes,
Cratinus, and the Rhetoric of Comic Competition’, The Classical Quarterly, 52.1 (2002),
pp. 142–8.

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146 J. LOMBARDINI

play about his poetic style (and one that he will make again in Pytine).47
Finally, Aristophanes mocks Cratinus as a drunkard, subtly altering the
well-known civic reward of free meals in the Prytaneum to free drinks in the
Prytaneum.48
It is this caricature of Cratinus’ drunkenness that forms the core of his
self-defence in Pytine. According to the scholiast on Knights, Cratinus him-
self appeared as a character in the play. His wife, Comedy, was suing for
divorce on grounds of mistreatment, since he had taken up with a new mis-
tress, Drunkenness (tÂi methÂi, frr. 193–5).49 While earlier treatments of the
Pytine speculated that Cratinus emerged at the end of the play cured of this
vice (fr. 200), it is perhaps more plausible that Cratinus was ‘indulging in
self-mockery by extending the caricature’, revelling in his reputation as the
drunken poet and articulating his comic genius as deriving from Drunkenness
(fr. 203).50 In contrast to the ‘euriparistophanists’, who rely on technical skill
in composing their poetry, Cratinus plays up his ‘relationship’ with alcohol as
indicative of the superiority of his own approach: divine inspiration.51 This
comic reversal is further exemplified in the boastful premise of the play: that
Cratinus himself, and Cratinus alone, has a special connection with the comic
art.52
This brings us to the parabasis of Aristophanes’ Clouds. With the original
version of Clouds being defeated by Pytine in 423, the parabasis of the revised
version that has come down to us laments the earlier version’s defeat and
chastises the audience for failing to recognize its author’s comic genius. As in
the parabasis of Knights, he glorifies his own abilities (this was ‘the most
sophisticated of my comedies’) while denigrating his opponents (I was ‘de-
feated by vulgar men’) (520–5). He goes on to illustrate just how sophisti-
cated and un-vulgar his comedy is:
she hasn’t come with any dangling leather stitched to her, red at the tip and
thick, to make the children laugh; nor does she mock bald men, nor dance a
kordax, nor does an old man, while speaking his lines, cover up bad jokes by
beating the interlocutor with his stick; nor does she dash onstage brandish-
ing torches, nor yell ‘ow ow.’ On the contrary, she has come relying only on
herself and her script. And I myself, being a poet of the same kind, do not
47 R. Rosen, ‘Cratinus’ Pytine and the Construction of the Comic Self’, in The Rivals
of Aristophanes, ed. D. Harvey and J. Wilkins (London, 2000), pp. 23–39, p. 32;
E. Bakola, Cratinus and the Art of Comedy (Oxford, 2010), p. 21.
48 Biles, ‘Intertextual Biography’, p. 179.
49 Fragment numbers for Cratinus refer to Kassel and Austin’s standard Poetae
Comici Graeci (PCG).
50 Biles , ‘Intertextual Biography’, p. 171.
51 Bakola, Cratinus, pp. 24–5; Biles, ‘Intertextual Biography’, p. 181. For the neolo-
gism euripidaristophanizein, see Cratinus fr. 342. Attribution of this fragment to Pytine,
however, is unclear.
52 Bakola, Cratinus, pp. 61–2.

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 COMIC AUTHORITY IN ARISTOPHANES’ KNIGHTS 147

act like a bigwig, nor try to fool you by presenting the same material two or
three times (537–46).
These claims to superiority, however, are heavily undercut by the fact that
Aristophanes does almost all of these things in the revised version of Clouds.
The most glaring claim, of course, is that, in a revised version of an earlier
play, he claims never to have re-presented the same material! Thus, while
Aristophanes boasts of his own poetic prowess in the parabasis of Clouds,
these boasts are undercut in the very act of being made, both drawing attention
to the fact that they are boasts and, in doing so, inviting the laughter of the
audience.53
It is this self-revealing boastfulness that is the comic thread running
through Knights, Pytine and Clouds, and in fact, perhaps through the comic
parabasis itself.54 The poet claims authority for himself vis-à-vis other rival
poets while simultaneously undercutting such authority. In Clouds, it is the
interplay between Aristophanes’ claims to sophistication and novelty and the
vulgarity and repetitiveness of the play; in Pytine, it is the claim to a special
relationship with comedy that is undermined by Cratinus’ own unfaithfulness
to his art; and, in Knights, it is Aristophanes’ boastful claim to superiority
masked as humility. These are all carefully constructed jokes, intended to raise
the laughter of the audience.55 This dynamic suggests, then, that Aristophanes is
not so much claiming authority for himself as mocking those who attempt to
claim such authority. By mocking the very act of claiming authority, however,
Aristophanes is still asserting a claim to authority. This authority is not
grounded in any claim that he is experienced in his craft or knowledgeable
about what the city needs; rather, it is grounded in the act of mocking such
claims. In other words, it is by not claiming authority, or by refusing to do so
seriously, that the comic poet stakes a claim to his voice having authority.56
In this respect, we might compare Aristophanes’ strategy for constructing
his own authority with that of Demosthenes in Against Meidias. While
53 For an excellent analysis of the function of alazoneia in the parabasis of Clouds,
see W. Major, ‘Aristophanes and “Alazoneia”: Laughing at the Parabasis of the Clouds’,
The Classical World, 99.2 (2006), pp. 131–44, pp. 139–41.
54 Hubbard, Mask of Comedy, pp. 2–8.
55 Major, ‘Aristophanes and Alazoneia’, p. 139.
56 To lump together the strategies of Cratinus and Aristophanes in this way admit-
tedly overlooks any broader disagreements around which their rivalry might have
revolved. At the very least, we might take the charge of euripidaristophanizein as a criti-
cism of Aristophanes’ elitism; while Aristophanes boasts of the cleverness of his comic
poetry in Clouds (522), Cratinus, it seems, is accusing him of being a bit too clever. Or, as
Keith Sidwell has argued, most recently in Aristophanes the Democrat, we might even
interpret such rivalry as evidence of the comic poets’ political positions. The exact nature
of this rivalry is beyond the scope of this article; here, I merely want to illustrate how
Aristophanes applies this technique to the political rivalry he constructs between himself
and Cleon in Knights.

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148 J. LOMBARDINI

Demosthenes does distinguish himself from Meidias’ elite attributes, he also

emphasizes the demos’ need for elite citizens such as himself. Ordinary citi-
zens, Demosthenes stresses, do not have the power and the resources to com-
bat arrogant elites like Meidias; those who do so, like the poor Strato who he
puts on display to the jurors (Dem. 21.95–6), risk the same disenfranchisement
(atimia). The demos needs elites like Demosthenes, then, to protect them from
elites like Meidias. In this sense, Demosthenes’ elite attributes are used as a
justification for his authority to advise and defend the demos.57 Aristophanes’
strategy is quite different; though he does cast himself as a superior advisor of
the demos, he does so in an openly ridiculous way, calling attention to the
potentially ridiculous nature of all such claims to authority. His strategy, at the
end of the day, is to refuse to acknowledge seriously that he is playing the
same game.58

VI
Conclusion
In this article I have outlined three strategies whereby the comic poet claims
authority. First, there is the claim to comic superiority: that comic speech,
more so than other forms of civic discourse, provides a valuable service to the
demos by exposing the ways in which politicians might try to deceive it.
Second, there is the illustration of comic reflexiveness: that the comic poet
recognizes, and is willing to demonstrate to his audience, the ways in which
comic speech can be deceptive. Third, there is comic anti-authority: the mock-
ing of one’s own claim to authority through the enactment of a self-revealing
57 Ober, ‘Power and Oratory’, pp. 104–5.
58 On this point, I think a contemporary example can be illustrative. When Jon Stew-
art, host of the popular American satirical news show The Daily Show, appeared on
CNN’s Crossfire in 2004, he accused the show’s hosts, and the American news media
more generally, of failing in their responsibility to the American people. Stewart argues
that what Crossfire offers is mere theatre, rather than substantive debate; the show sim-
ply provides a forum for Democrats and Republicans to recycle their talking points with-
out ever forcing any real discussion. What most interests me here, however, is how Stew-
art responds when Tucker Carlson turns this criticism against Stewart himself. When
Carlson faults Stewart for his ‘softball’ interview of John Kerry, Stewart counters
‘You’re on CNN. The show that leads into me is puppets making crank phone calls’. The
comic, in other words, is not where we should be looking to perform this role, and Stew-
art is not claiming such authority for himself. In fact, he is preemptively mocking any
such claim. Yet, there is a sense in which we can read Stewart’s response as itself a strat-
egy for constructing his own authority. Stewart knows that while he might deny his own
authority, many of his viewers hold his satirical presentation of current events to be more
authoritative than that of traditional news outlets. From this perspective, to deny such
authority is partly disingenuous. At the same time, however, it reconstructs the distinc-
tion between Stewart and his rivals by exposing their own claims to authority as boastful
and self-deluded. For a full transcript of the interview, see http://transcripts.cnn.com/
TRANSCRIPTS/0410/15/cf.01.html. Accessed on 29 March 2012.

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 COMIC AUTHORITY IN ARISTOPHANES’ KNIGHTS 149

boastfulness. While all of these claims figure in what I have identified as

comic authority — indeed, the claim to authority is what sets up the self-
mockery — it is the final two that best capture the spirit of Aristophanic com-
edy, and both illuminate Aristophanes’ strategy for negotiating the practices
of democratic authority in ancient Athens and suggest an affinity between
such comic authority and democratic authority.
A key theme of Aristophanes’ Knights is the danger of being misled by
those who claim authority in the city. Yet it is not just being misled that is the
problem; it is the fact that the demos has become too reliant on its leaders.
This excessive reliance on elite leadership has created the conditions under
which the demos has become too passive, where it is relying too much on its
leaders to secure and protect its interests. Knights, by mocking the authority
of politicians like Cleon, seeks to reduce this reliance; but it does not seek to
replace the authority of the politician with the authority of the comic poet. In
this sense, it does not seek a traditional solution to the problem posed by
Socrates’ analysis of democratic authority in the Protagoras, one that would
entail finding a person with the corresponding techn that would entitle him to
such authority. Rather, it leaves intact the authority of the ordinary democratic
citizen who, as a participant in the democratic process, acts to secure the dig-
nity of ordinary citizens like himself.59

John Lombardini THE COLLEGE OF WILLIAM & MARY

59 The author would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers at Polis who offered
their feedback on this article. A previous version of this paper was also presented at the
Western Political Science Association.

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