Reproducing Athens

by Lape, Susan Erik

• ISBN13: 9780691115832
• ISBN10: 0691115834
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-11-24
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

Reproducing Athensexamines the role of romantic comedy, particularly the plays of Menander, in defending democratic culture and transnational polis culture against various threats during the initial and most fraught period of the Hellenistic Era.Menander's romantic comedies--which focus on ordinary citizens who marry for love--are most often thought of as entertainments devoid of political content. Against the view, Susan Lape argues that Menander's comedies are explicitly political. His nationalistic comedies regularly conclude by performing the laws of democratic citizen marriage, thereby promising the generation of new citizens. His transnational comedies, on the other hand, defend polis life against the impinging Hellenistic kingdoms, either by transforming their representatives into proper citizen-husbands or by rendering them ridiculous, romantic losers who pose no real threat to citizen or city.In elaborating the political work of romantic comedy, this book also demonstrates the importance of gender, kinship, and sexuality to the making of democratic civic ideology. Paradoxically, by championing democratic culture against various Hellenistic outsiders, comedy often resists the internal status and gender boundaries on which democratic culture was based. Comedy's ability to reproduce democratic culture in scandalous fashion exposes the logic of civic inclusion produced by the contradictions in Athens's desperately politicized gender system.Combining careful textual analysis with an understanding of the context in which Menander wrote,Reproducing Athensprofoundly changes the way we read his plays and deepens our understanding of Athenian democratic culture.

Table of Contents

Abbreviations	ix
Narratives of Resistance and Romance: Democracy and Comedy in the Early Hellenistic Period	1	(39)
Resilient Democracy and the Rise of Romantic Comedy	1	(12)
The Politics of Marriage and the Comic Marriage Plot	13	(4)
Comedy's Constitutive Political Silence	17	(2)
Constituting Citizens: The Laws of Genre and State	19	(2)
Comedy's Poetics of Political Membership	21	(3)
Opposites Attract: Rape, Romance, and Democratic Selection	24	(6)
The Power of Love: Female Selection and Male Education	30	(3)
Reproduction and Resistance	33	(7)
Reproducing Democracy in Oligarchic and Autocratic Athens	40	(28)
The Reproducibility of Athenian Democracy	40	(3)
The Policies and Politics of Demetrius of Phaleron: Law, Power, and Prior Restraint	43	(9)
Athens and the Antigonids: The Failed Foundation of Hellenistic Democracy	52	(7)
``Romantic'' Resistance: Comedy and the Sterility of Empire	59	(9)
Making Citizens in Comedy and Court	68	(42)
Gender and Democratic Identity	68	(4)
The Importance of Acting Athenian	72	(2)
Engendering Egalitarianism	74	(9)
The Politics of Seduction	83	(8)
Passionate Protagonists and Practical Citizens	91	(5)
The Comic Romance Narrative: Marrying Interest and Necessity	96	(3)
Staging a Biopolitics of Democratic Citizenship	99	(7)
Democratic Reproduction in the Aspis	106	(4)
The Ethics of Democracy in Menander's Dyskolos	110	(27)
The Politics of Love at First Sight	110	(3)
The Democratic Logic of the Comic Plot	113	(2)
The Class Politics of Sexual Conduct	115	(6)
Performing Egalitarianism	121	(2)
Ethical Identity and the Democratization of Social Relations	123	(6)
Marriage Exchange and the Critique of Ideology	129	(5)
Egalitarianism and Inclusion	134	(3)
The Politics of Sexuality in Drama and Democratic Athens: The Case of Menander's Samia	137	(34)
The Father-Son Romance	137	(4)
Forensic Theater: Staging Comedy as Court	141	(6)
The Consequences of Nonconjugal Cohabitation	147	(3)
Demeas's Defense: Revising the Tragic Family Plot	150	(6)
Shame, Poverty, and Anger: The Politics of Affect	156	(3)
The Work of Prostitutes: The Importance of a Gender Stereotype	159	(8)
The Fragility of Manhood	167	(4)
The Mercenary Romance: Gender and Civic Education in the Perikeiromene and Misoumenos	171	(31)
Socializing the Mercenary Lover	171	(2)
Power and Punishment: Problems in the Perikeiromene	173	(7)
Learning the Language of Law: The Embedded Drama of Civic Education	180	(3)
Gender and International Relations	183	(3)
The Return of the Repressed: Gender and the Constraints of Genre	186	(2)
Negotiations of Martial and Marital Values in the Misoumenos	188	(4)
The Conquering Captive: Genre and Gender Inversion	192	(2)
Civic Reciprocity and the Revision of Epic Manhood	194	(4)
Ethics and Comedy's Construction of Transnational or Hellenic Citizenship	198	(4)
Trials of Masculinity in Democratic Discourse and Menander's Sikyonioi	202	(41)
The Loss of the Citizen-Soldier Ideal	202	(4)
The Macedonian Question and Athenian Civic Identity	206	(6)
The Moral Manliness of the Democratic Man	212	(3)
Menander's Sikyonioi: The Male Recognition Plot	215	(5)
Ideology and Intertextuality	220	(2)
Moschion's Revealing Complexion	222	(5)
The Lastauros: An Anti-Macedonian Tradition?	227	(4)
Stratophanes' Embodied Biography	231	(3)
Metadrama and the Illusion of Identity	234	(3)
Remasculinizing and Reproducing the Democratic State	237	(6)
Conclusion: Inevitable Reproduction?	243	(12)
Bibliography	255	(24)
Acknowledgments	279	(2)
Index Locorum	281	(6)
General Index	287