Patrick Comerford
After a few weeks break, the Stony Stratford playreaders resume our readings and rehearsals this evening, and we have gathered in the Library in Stony Stratford, where the play we are reading is Peace (Εἰρήνη Eirḗnē), an Athenian ‘Old Comedy’ written and produced by the Greek playwright Aristophanes.
The play won second prize at the City Dionysia when it was staged just a few days before the validation of the Peace of Nicias, which promised to end the 10-year-old Peloponnesian War in the year 421 BCE.
With the current wars the US is waging in the Gulf against Iran, including Trump’s latest threats this week against Oman, the current war Russia is waging against Ukraine, the continuing and relentless Israeli military actions in Gaza, on the West Bank and in southern Lebanon, Peace seems deeply appropriate as a choice for our reading this evening.
The play is written in joyous anticipation of peace and it is a celebration of a return to an idyllic life in the countryside. However, it also sounds a note of caution, there is a bitter acknowledgment of lost opportunities, and the ending is not happy for everyone.
As in all plays by Aristophanes, the jokes are many, the action is wild and absurd and the satire is savage. Cleon, the pro-war populist leader of Athens, is once again a target of the author's wit, even though he had died in the Battle of Amphipolis just a few months earlier.
The playwright Aristophanes (Ἀριστοφάνης) was known as ‘the Father of Comedy’ and ‘the Prince of Ancient Comedy’ and lived between ca 446 and ca 386 BCE. He wrote 40 plays, although only 11 survive virtually complete. His plays were performed at the religious festivals of Athens, mostly the City Dionysia and the Lenaia, and several of his plays won the first prize in their respective competitions. The majority of his surviving plays belong to the genre known as ‘Old Comedy’ and are among its most valuable examples.
In his plays, Aristophanes wrote about real-life figures, including Pericles, Euripides and Alcibiades, and contemporary events, such as the Peloponnesian War. He is said to have recreated life in ancient Athens more convincingly than any other author.
His plays are characterised by preposterous premises, explicit language, wordplays, and political satire. His powers of ridicule were feared and acknowledged by influential contemporaries. Plato singled out the play The Clouds as slander that contributed to the trial and subsequent condemning to death of Socrates.
His now lost second, now lost play, The Babylonians, was denounced by Cleon as a slander against the Athenian polis. Aristophanes caricatured Cleon mercilessly in his subsequent plays, especially The Knights.
In Peace, Trygaeus, whose part I have been asked to read, is a middle-aged Athenian who miraculously brings about a peaceful end to the Peloponnesian War. He earns the gratitude of farmers while bankrupting various tradesmen who had profited from the hostilities.
Trygaeus boldly summons Greeks everywhere to come and help him set Peace free while there is still time. A Chorus of excited Greeks from various city-states arrives as prompted but they are so excited they cannot stop dancing at first. Eventually they get to work, pulling boulders from the cave’s mouth under the supervision of Trygaeus.
Real progress is only made by the farmers and at last Peace and her companions, Festival and Harvest, are brought to light, appearing as visions of ineffable beauty. Hermes then tells the gathering why Peace had left them many years earlier – she had been driven away by politicians who were profiting from the war.
She had tried to come back several times, but each time the Athenians had voted against her in their Assembly. Trygaeus apologises to Peace on behalf of his fellow Athenians, then he leaves her to enjoy her freedom while he sets off again for Athens, taking Harvest and Festival back with him.
Trygaeus celebrates his triumph by marrying Harvest, a companion of Festival and Peace, all of whom he has liberated from a celestial prison.
All the early plays by Aristophanes were written and acted against a background of war. The war between Athens and Sparta began in 431 BCE. Under Archidamus II in Sparta and Pericles in Athens, it developed into a war of slow attrition in which Athens was unchallenged at sea and Sparta was undisputed master of the Greek mainland.
Every year, the Spartans and their allies invaded Attica and wreaked havoc on Athenian farms. As soon as they retreated, the Athenians marched out from their city walls to avenge themselves on the farms of their neighbours, the Megarians and Boeotians, allies of Sparta. Till then, most Athenians had lived in rural settlements but now they congregated within the safety of the city walls.
A plague in 430 BCE, decimated the over-crowded population of Athens and also claimed the life of Pericles, leaving Athens in the control of a more radical leadership, epitomised by Cleon.
Cleon was determined to gain absolute victory in the war with Sparta and his aggressive policies seemed to be vindicated in 425 at the Battle of Sphacteria, with the capture of Spartan hostages and the establishment of a permanent garrison at Pylos, from where the Athenians and their allies could harass Spartan territory.
The Spartans then made repeated appeals for peace but these were dismissed by the Athenian Assembly under guidance by Cleon, who wished instead to broaden the war with ambitious campaigns against Megara and Boeotia. The Athenians suffered a major defeat in Boeotia at the Battle of Delion and this was followed by an armistice in 423 BCE.
When the armistice ended, Cleon led a force of Athenians to Chalcidice to repress the revolts. But he and his men were surprised and defeated by a Spartan force. Both Cleon and Brasidas died in the battle and their removal opened the way for new peace talks in the winter of 422-421. The Peace of Nicias was ratified soon after in the City Dionysia, where Peace was performed, early in the spring of 421 BCE.
Cleon, the populist leader of the pro-war faction in Athens, is mentioned by name only once in this play, and he receives several indirect mentions. At one point, the Chorus describe Cleon as a disgusting gorgon-like phenomenon in language that matches sound and sense:
ἑκατὸν δὲ κύκλῳ κεφαλαὶ κολάκων οἰμωξομένων ἑλιχμῶντο :περὶ τὴν κεφαλήν
a hundred heads of doomed stooges circled and licked around his head
The sound of something revolting is captured in the original Greek by the repetition of the harsh k sound, including a repetition of the word for ‘head’.
Euripides is a tragic poet renowned for his innovative plays and pathetic heroes. He is ridiculed for his reliance on legalistic quibbling for dialogue and his plays are parodied and deliberately misquoted.
The tragic poet Sophocles is mentioned too because his verses are evocative of the good times that will come with peace.
Homer, the bard of all bards and the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, is mentioned by name twice in this play, there are frequent references to his poetry, and he is fancifully misquoted by Trygaeus.
Places that are named in the play include Mount Etna, the island of Naxos, the Erechtheion, the iconic building on the Acropolis, where work began in 420 BCE during the Peace of Nicias, not long after the performance of Peace at the City Dionysia, and the Pnyx, the hill where the citizens of Athens convened as a democratic assembly.
In his plays, Aristophanes shows a tender love of rural life and a nostalgia for simpler times, and he develops a vision of peace involving a return to the countryside and its routines.
The association of peace with rural revival is expressed in this play in terms of religious imagery: Peace, imprisoned in a cave guarded by a Cerberus figure, resembles a chthonic fertility goddess in captivity in the underworld, a motif especially familiar to Athenians in the cult of Demeter and her daughter Kore in the Eleusinian Mysteries.
In spite of the play’s mythical and religious contexts, political action emerges as the decisive factor in human affairs. The gods are seen as distant figures, and so mortals must rely on their own initiative, as seen when the Chorus of Greeks work together to release Peace from captivity.
The god Hermes delivers a speech blaming the Peloponnesian War on Pericles and Cleon, an argument that Aristophanes had put forward in earlier plays.
The Chorus has a joyful celebration of peace but also shares bitter reflections on the mistakes of past leaders and Trygaeus expresses anxious fears for the future of the peace since events are remain subject to bad leadership. The bankrupted tradesmen at the end of the play are a reminder that there is still support for war.
The militaristic verses borrowed from Homer are a dramatic reminder that war is deeply rooted in culture and that it still commands the imagination of a new generation. Peace in such circumstances requires not only a miracle but also a combination of good luck and good will on the part of a significant group within the community.
Does any this find parallels with today’s cycle of war and how many world leaders have forgotten Peace, leaving Peace trapped in a dark cave?
