Reproducing Athens : Menander's Comedy, Democratic Culture, and the Hellenistic City

by Lape, Susan

• ISBN13: 9781400825912
• ISBN10: 1400825911
• Copyright: 2008-09-02
• 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	p. ix
Narratives of Resistance and Romance: Democracy and Comedy in the Early Hellenistic Period	p. 1
Resilient Democracy and the Rise of Romantic Comedy	p. 1
The Politics of Marriage and the Comic Marriage Plot	p. 13
Comedy's Constitutive Political Silence	p. 17
Constituting Citizens: The Laws of Genre and State	p. 19
Comedy's Poetics of Political Membership	p. 21
Opposites Attract: Rape,Romance,and Democratic Selection	p. 24
The Power of Love: Female Selection and Male Education	p. 30
Reproduction and Resistance	p. 33
Reproducing Democracy in Oligarchic and Autocratic Athens	p. 40
The Reproducibility of Athenian Democracy	p. 40
The Policies and Politics of Demetrius of Phaleron: Law,Power,and Prior Restraint	p. 43
Athens and the Antigonids: The Failed Foundation of Hellenistic Democracy	p. 52
"Romantic" Resistance: Comedy and the Sterility of Empire	p. 59
Making Citizens in Comedy and Court	p. 68
Gender and Democratic Identity	p. 68
The Importance of Acting Athenian	p. 72
Engendering Egalitarianism	p. 74
The Politics of Seduction	p. 83
Passionate Protagonists and Practical Citizens	p. 91
The Comic Romance Narrative: Marrying Interest and Necessity	p. 96
Staging a Biopolitics of Democratic Citizenship	p. 99
Democratic Reproduction in the Aspis	p. 106
The Ethics of Democracy in Menander's Dyskolos	p. 110
The Politics of Love at First Sight	p. 110
The Democratic Logic of the Comic Plot	p. 113
The Class Politics of Sexual Conduct	p. 115
Performing Egalitarianism	p. 121
Ethical Identity and the Democratization of Social Relations	p. 123
Marriage Exchange and the Critique of Ideology	p. 129
Egalitarianism and Inclusion	p. 134
The Politics of Sexuality in Drama and Democratic Athens: The Case of Menander's Samia	p. 137
The Father-Son Romance	p. 137
Forensic Theater: Staging Comedy as Court	p. 141
The Consequences of Nonconjugal Cohabitation	p. 147
Demeas's Defense: Revising the Tragic Family Plot	p. 150
Shame, Poverty, and Anger: The Politics of Affect	p. 156
The Work of Prostitutes: The Importance of a Gender Stereotype	p. 159
The Fragility of Manhood	p. 167
The Mercenary Romance: Gender and Civic Education in the Perikeiromene and Misoumenos	p. 171
Socializing the Mercenary Lover	p. 171
Power and Punishment: Problems in the Perikeiromene	p. 173
Learning the Language of Law: The Embedded Drama of Civic Education	p. 180
Gender and International Relations	p. 183
The Return of the Repressed: Gender and the Constraints of Genre	p. 186
Negotiations of Martial and Marital Values in the Misoumenos	p. 188
The Conquering Captive: Genre and Gender Inversion	p. 192
Civic Reciprocity and the Revision of Epic Manhood	p. 194
Ethics and Comedy's Construction of Transnational or Hellenic Citizenship	p. 198
Trials of Masculinity in Democratic Discourse and Menander's Sikyonioi	p. 202
The Loss of the Citizen-Soldier Ideal	p. 202
The Macedonian Question and Athenian Civic Identity	p. 206
The Moral Manliness of the Democratic Man	p. 212
Menander's Sikyonioi: The Male Recognition Plot	p. 215
Ideology and Intertextuality	p. 220
Moschion's Revealing Complexion	p. 222
The Lastauros: An Anti-Macedonian Tradition?	p. 227
Stratophanes' Embodied Biography	p. 231
Metadrama and the Illusion of Identity	p. 234
Remasculinizing and Reproducing the Democratic State	p. 237
Conclusion: Inevitable Reproduction?	p. 243
Bibliography	p. 255
Acknowledgments	p. 279
Index Locorum	p. 281
General Index	p. 287
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