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Spotlight: Aristophanes, Women of the Assembly
Aspasia on the Pnyx by Henry Holiday, oil on canvas, c. 1888
Aristophanes’ Women of the Assembly is a classic Greek comedy written around 391 B.C. The play is built on a deliberately absurd premise: what if the women of Athens seized control of the government? The play opens with Praxagora, a politically minded Athenian woman, organizing a secret plot to seize control of the Assembly. She and a group of other women disguise themselves in their husbands’ clothes, sneak into the Assembly, and vote themselves into power. Their chief complaint is that the male politicians have made a spectacular mess of Athens, so perhaps it’s time the women have a go at governing. This logic succeeds in convincing the men of the Assembly to support the vote, and the women get their way.
Praxagora’s new government introduces an aggressively egalitarian system. Private property is abolished, wealth is pooled, and everyone is supposed to live communally. Food, money, and even romantic relationships become matters of public policy. The logic is essentially: if private ownership causes inequality, eliminate private ownership; if private relationships create jealousy and competition, regulate those too. Aristophanes takes the idea to its comic extreme, producing a society in which citizens are required to share virtually everything—including their spouses.
The comedy becomes increasingly farcical as the supposedly rational new order encounters the stubborn realities of human nature. The play's sexual politics are particularly ridiculous: young men are required to sleep with older and less attractive women before they are permitted to enjoy younger partners, creating a queue of frustrated lovers that makes the Athenian revolution look less like utopia and more like municipal administration with an unusually awkward dating policy.
Despite its apparent advocacy of female rule and communal equality, Women of the Assembly is better understood as a satire of political schemes than as a straightforward feminist manifesto. Aristophanes is less interested in proving that women would govern better than men than in showing how easily grand political theories can become absurd when they collide with ordinary appetites, property ownership, and family loyalties.
Women of the Assembly’s enduring significance lies in its scepticism of utopian politics. The play suggests that society cannot simply be redesigned on paper because human beings remain…well, human. Institutions built around family, property, custom, and personal responsibility may be imperfect, but attempts to abolish them can create worse problems than those they were meant to solve. Ultimately, the play serves as an ancient reminder that the trouble with utopia is that somebody still has to live there.
Verse: Twelfth Night by Shakespeare
IF music be the food of love, play on,
Give me excess of it; that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken and so die.—
That strain again;—it had a dying fall;
O, it came o’er my ear like the sweet south,
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing, and giving odour.—Enough; no more;
‘Tis not so sweet now as it was before.
O spirit of love, how quick and fresh art thou!
That, not withstanding thy capacity
Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there,
Of what validity and pitch soever,
But falls into abatement and low price
Even in a minute! so full of shapes is fancy,
That it alone is high-fantastical.
Twelfth Night opens with its protagonist, Orsino, Duke of Illyria, lamenting his lovesickness over the Lady Olivia. His first words are some of Shakespeare’s most famous and enduring.
Pensées
Fate is the same for the man who holds back, the same if he fights hard…A man dies still if he has done nothing, as one who has done much.
Achilles in this line from Homer’s Iliad epitomises the Ancient Greek admiration for arete; i.e. excellence, or manliness. In Homer’s world, bravery and valour are honoured, while cowardice is disparaged. King Agemmemnon, another major figure in the Iliad says something similar in the poem: ‘They that shun dishonour more often live than get killed, but they that fly save neither life nor name.’
Q ~ Achilles’ point is one we might also apply to life outside a military context — if we’re all going to return to dust one day anyway, what’s the point in holding back?
Diversions
Listen to Interstellar played on one of England’s finest mechanical organs.
Meet Jeremy Tate’s Classic Learning Test: a proposed alternative to modern college entrance exams.
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