See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/277633539

Leo Strauss and Aristophanes

Article  in  Idealistic Studies · January 2015

DOI: 10.5840/idstudies201541025

CITATIONS

0

READS

356

1 author:

Eleni Panagiotarakou

Concordia University Montreal

8 PUBLICATIONS   3 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE

All content following this page was uploaded by Eleni Panagiotarakou on 09 January 2017.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

© 2014. Idealistic Studies, Volume 44, Issues 2 & 3. ISSN 0046-8541. pp. 179–192DOI: 10.5840/idstudies201541025

LEO STRAUSS AND ARISTOPHANES

Eleni Panagiotarakou

Abstract: Leo Strauss is one of a handful of political philosophers to turn his gaze to the political thought of Aristophanes. In his book Socrates and Aristophanes (1966), Strauss provides one of the longest, most methodical, and most comprehensive studies of the Aristophanic corpus. Taking as its starting point Strauss’s interpretation of Aristo-phanes’s Frogs—as it pertains to the political poetics of Aeschylus and Euripides—this essay seeks to demonstrate that Strauss’s reading of Aristophanes was influenced by Nietzsche’s hermeneutical framework of agonistic impulses. Via an interdisciplinary reading of the agonal erotopoetics involving Aristophanes and his older rival Cratinus, I argue that Strauss appreciated the concept of agonal creative contests and its intertextual manifestations. In addition, I raise the possibility that, similar to Nietzsche, Strauss’s perplexing style of writing is a mimetic form of agonal intertextuality.

“A bridge has no allegiance to either side.”—Les Coleman1

IConsidering the divisive character attached to the name Leo Strauss, I wish to indicate at the outset of this essay that my interest lies solely with the strengths and insights of Strauss’s interpretations of the Aristophanic corpus.2 Those insights are found in his book Socrates and Aristophanes and, to a lesser degree, his lectures.3 While Strauss mentions Aristophanes in his other works his references there are minimal;4 it is only in Socrates and Aristophanes that Strauss provides a lengthy, comprehensive review of the Aristophanic corpus. Due to space limitations, this essay will focus exclusively on Socrates and Aristophanes and his lectures even at the risk of arriving at perplexing conclusions.5 Written in 1966 Socrates and Aristophanes is one of Strauss’s “longest” books,6 which in a 1962 letter to Alexander Kojéve refers to it as his “real work.”7 Strauss turned his gaze to Aristophanes in order to gain a better perspective on Socrates—despite or because of Plato’s and Xenophon’s sympathetic accounts. Nonetheless, in so doing, Strauss provided one of the most detailed, comprehensive commentaries on Aristophanes whose

IDEALISTIC STUDIES

180

centrality to Aristophanic scholarship is evident by the increasing number of political theorists citing it. While Strauss was the first modern political philosopher to turn his gaze towards Aristophanes for the sake of Socrates, he was by no means the first philosopher to do so; that distinction belongs to Hegel followed by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.8 Prior to Hegel, the works of Aristophanes were known primarily to a motley mix of historians, poets, theater and literary critics.9

In comparison to Strauss’s other texts, Socrates and Aristophanes remains “one of the least studied of Strauss’s major works,”10 a fact attributed to Aristophanes’s reputation (of all the thinkers that Strauss covers, Aristo-phanes is the least respected). Making things worse, Strauss’s writing style has been described (at best) as riddling,11 multileveled,12 and disjoined.13 Despite Strauss’s labyrinthine style of writing, a number of main points can be discerned in Socrates and Aristophanes. For example: (1) the Aristo-phanic Socrates is a ‘young’ natural philosopher and not the older, political philosopher that one observes in the writings of Xenophon and Plato; (2) Aristophanes’s Clouds is the most important document available to us on the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy as it appears from the side of poetry;14 (3a) Aristophanes was equally concerned with generating laughter and saying the ‘just’ things; (3b) In his capacity as a comic poet Aristophanes could only articulate the just things by treating them comically;15 (3c) Aristophanes was “as much concerned with the approval of the laughers as with that of the wise,” a conflation which enables Strauss to imply (3d) the existence of two types of theatre audience: a wise minority and a non-wise majority,16 which, in turn, allows Strauss to suggest that (3e) Aristophanes was an esoteric writer who (3f) “ridicules Socrates, not for trying to keep his teaching secret from the uninitiated, but for his ineptitude in this respect”; (4) Aristophanes was a friend and admirer of Socrates but that did not stop him from being envious of Socrates’s wisdom; (5) Aristophanes was intellectu-ally vacillating between two polarizing figures, Aeschylus and Euripides in a tension that he was aware of but unable to resolve; (6) Aristophanic comedy is a higher art form than tragedy; (7) Aristophanic comedy used the lowest means (e.g., scatology, obscenity, slander, etc) to achieve the highest ends (e.g., peace, civic unity, etc); (8) Plato engaged in an intertextual dialogue with Aristophanes; (9) “Plato and Xenophon presented their Socrates in conscious contradiction to Aristophanes’ presentation.”17 Rather than attempt to explore each of the above-mentioned points (an impossibility given space constraints) special attention will be given to points two and five (i.e., the quarrel between philosophy and poetry).

IIWith that goal in mind we now turn our attention to Aristophanes’s Frogs which best captures Aristophanes’s ambiguous relationship to Aeschylus

181

LEO STRAUSS AND ARISTOPHANES

and Euripides. In that play, Dionysos (the patron god of drama), whom Aristophanes claims as his nurturer (Clouds 519), descends into Hades to retrieve from the dead the newly deceased Euripides but ascends with Aeschylus. Instead of offering a simplistic, face value interpretation—e.g., that Aristophanes finds the older Aeschylus to be superior to the younger Euripides—Strauss provides a multi-faceted exegesis. He writes:

Neither of the two poets is simply refuted by the other. The position of each has its strong and its weak sides. Aeschylus does not give their due to Aphrodite and to compassion; Euripides does not give their due to the city or warlike patriotism and to the need for concealing the unwholesome truth. Perhaps in Aristophanes’ view there are two kinds of heterogeneous needs that must be satisfied by tragedy but that can not be satisfied except by two different kinds of tragedy. The fact that the kind of need fulfilled by Aeschylus is primary does not by itself prove that the kind of need fulfilled by Euripides is of lower rank. This would mean that Aristophanes is as little a partisan of Aeschylus as is his Dionysos. . . . Aeschylean trag-edy needs as its supplement both Euripidean tragedy and Aristophanean comedy. Jocularly expressed, Aristophanes competes with Euripides but not with Aeschylus, or Aristophanes is an enemy of Euripides. The fact that Euripides and Aristophanes belong together over against Aeschylus is compatible with the possibility that Aristophanes regarded Aeschylus as a greater poet than Euripides. . . . Let us also not forget the bond that links Ares and Aphrodite (254–255).

In the above passage it is obvious that Strauss draws his exegetical inspira-tion from Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, a work which also draws its exegetical inspiration from Aristophanes’s Frogs but, surprisingly, makes little mention of it.18 In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche speaks not only of the birth of tragedy but also of its death which he blames on Euripides. Socrates, the argument goes, had a profound influence on Euripides. He infected him with a spirit of rationalism (and hence optimism) that is to say, an “aesthetic Socratism” which held that “to be beautiful everything must be intelligible” (BT 83–84). Socrates’s pairing of “philosophical activity with an optimistic worldview” eventually brought a corresponding end to “poetry and the po-etic worldview.”19 While Euripides’s last play, the Bacchae, paid homage to Dionysus’s terrible power, it was too late, the argument goes, to restore the delicate balance between Dionysus and Apollo.20

In Leo Strauss and Nietzsche (1996) Lawrence Lampert warns that we “must be cautious before concluding that Nietzsche misunderstood his greatest antagonist, or that Strauss criticizes Nietzsche for misunderstand-ing Plato.”21 The same warning could be applied here, namely, we should be cautious before concluding that Strauss misunderstood Aristophanes, or that Strauss criticizes Aristophanes for misunderstanding Socrates. Strauss understood the distinctiveness of Aristophanic comedy—a polyphonic,

IDEALISTIC STUDIES

182

agonistic, dramatic form that incorporated various aesthetic elements while commenting on contemporary social, religious, and political subjects.

Before rushing to the judgement that Strauss does nothing to simplify but, on the contrary, adds further multiple layers of complexity to Aristophanic comedy (a common complaint), it should be pointed out that Strauss’s her-meneutic framework is actually quite similar to some (classical) scholars who highlight the elusiveness of Aristophanic comedy and refuse to reduce it to a certain poetic, political, ideological, or literary theory.22 Such a methodology has nothing to do with a (suspect) resistance to simplicity, elusiveness, or “hyperinterpretation”23 and everything to do with dramatic works composed during a highly competitive intellectual and rhetorical environment. Dramatic works, one may add, which reflected an equally high rhetorical and competi-tive environment in the Agora and the Assembly. Moreover, this tendency was accentuated in dramatic works involving the figure of Dionysus; an inherently allusive, shape-shifting, androgynous figure.24

The remainder of this essay will add rather than subtract to that complexity. In particular, the following sections will discuss Aristophanes’s intertextual rivalry with Cratinus, another Old Comedy poet, and the significance of that rivalry for better understanding (but also validating) Strauss’s interpreta-tion as it relates to the agonal relationship between poetry and philosophy. Before proceeding with our analysis it should be noted that, to the best of my knowledge, neither Strauss nor Nietzsche (upon whom Strauss draws heavily in his Introduction)25 make any mention of Cratinus. This failure, it seems to me, is not attributable to an oversight or authorial snobbery but to the meagre literature surrounding this topic in the 1960’s. Fortunately the same topic has expanded by leaps and bounds in the last decades to the point where one hears classical scholars proclaiming that there “has never been a better time to read Athenian comedy.”26

IIIWhile some scholars view Aristophanes as the founder of political come-dy27—a perfectly reasonable assumption—textual evidence suggests that this distinction belongs to Cratinus (519–422 BC).28 If Aristophanes is mar-ginalized in the fields of political philosophy and political theory, Cratinus is a complete stranger to them.29 Yet Cratinus was canonized in antiquity in the so-called ‘comic triad’ alongside Aristophanes and Eupolis, two of his younger contemporaries.30 The comic triad, for those unfamiliar with the term, was the equivalent to the tragic triad consisting of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, who were also canonized on account of their perceived excel-lence as tragedians. Despite the high esteem with which Cratinus was held in ancient times all that remains of his works is fragments. The same holds true for the rest of the Old Comedy poets with the sole exception of Aristo-phanes where eleven out of forty-four of his comedies have survived intact.31

183

LEO STRAUSS AND ARISTOPHANES

Needless to say, the field of Old Comedy is inherently Aristophanocentric.32 While some have suggested that the comedies of Aristophanes survived due to their superior quality,33 such interpretations are problematic especially if they draw their qualifying premise from Aristophanic parabases. As Strauss observes, the element of alazoneia (boasting) is prevalent in comedies and Aristophanes himself was not beyond engaging in “vulgar boasting” (as one can see in lines 646–654 of the Acharnians34). Amusingly enough, even Strauss who was well aware of the pitfalls of alazonic boasting accepts at face value Aristophanes’s claim that the Clouds was his wisest comedy. Considering the fact that Cratinus consistently outperformed Aristophanes in terms of prizes—a fact that Aristophanes acknowledges in his Frogs35—we cannot explain the loss of Cratinus’s comedies (or that of the other comedians for that matter) as a quality issue.36 Indeed, no “fragmentary author matches Cratinus’ potential to unsettle complacency in the belief that antiquity selected and transmitted its best and most innovative authors.”37 In all likelihood the answer to this puzzle lies with the process of text transmission and hence survival in later epochs. While this topic lies beyond the scope of this paper it is worth noting that, according to Ian Storey, Plato was in all likelihood instrumental in the survival of Aristophanes’s comedies as a result of his Apology and the Symposium.38

As mentioned earlier, the study of ancient Greek comedy has advanced considerably. For our purposes the most relevant advances, apart from the discovery of lost fragments, are: (a) the publication of The Birth of Comedy (2011),39 and (b) a number of detailed and insightful articles on Cratinus.40 One of the major findings to emerge from this field, is the paradigm of poetic rivalry whereby Old Comedy poets are found engaging in poetic agones. In specific regard to Cratinus we learn that: his poetic style was likened to Aeschylus; his writing styles was abusive, insulting, harsh, and bitter; and he was brutal in his pursuit of public “wrongdoers.”41 We are also told that his intertextual dialogue with Aristophanes generated one of the most “fascinat-ing” poetic rivalries to be recovered in Greek literature, which did not end with Cratinus’s death but continued with Aristophanes’s Frogs.42

The poetic rivalry between Cratinus and Aristophanes is first observed in Aristophanes’s Acharnians where the Chorus claims that they hope to see Cratinus being hit with a “fresh-shat turd” (1170–1173). That wish comes true (figuratively speaking) when Aristophanes’s Acharnians (first prize) defeated Cratinus’s Stormtossed (second prize). A year later, Aristophanes landed another blow to Cratinus when, in his Knights and in the mists of a verbal altercation with Paphlagon, the Chorus proclaims: “If I don’t hate you, may I turn into a blanket in Cratinus’ house” (Knights 400). As Zach-ary Biles points out the implications of turning into a blanket in Cratinus’s house becomes clear once we learn that Cratinus was approximately 93 years old at the time and a wine lover. In other words, Aristophanes was mocking

IDEALISTIC STUDIES

184

Cratinus for being incontinent and a drunk.43 In that round, Aristophanes (Knights, first prize) defeated Cratinus (Satyrs, second prize). The following year, Aristophanes faced Cratinus once more but contrary to expectations he lost; Cratinus’s Pytine (Wineflask) won first place, Ameipsias’s Connus won second place, while Aristophanes’s Clouds finished in third place.44

Some authors have sought to explain the Clouds’s defeat on the basis of Aristophanes’s innovative features which included the abandonment of the traditional elements of gamos (sacred marriage) and Strepsiades’s misguided and unsuccessful efforts.45 However, a more fruitful approach would be to ask what Cratinus did rather than what Aristophanes did not do. And what Cratinus did, was to create “a magnificent comedy whose combination of agonistic response and comic fantasy outclassed Aristophanes’ entry.”46 In that comedy he composed an autobiographical play where he himself played the husband of a personified Comedy who threatens to divorce him on ac-count of his neglect and his addiction to the bottle.47 While some authors have warned against the “sentimental image some have constructed of the burnt-out old poet pulling himself together for one last heroic effort” before his death (Cratinus died shortly afterwards) the same authors admit that the conception of having the comedian “being advised by Comedy on writing a comedy in a comedy” is stunning.48 Indeed, although it was Aristophanes who first invoked the imagery of Comedy as a capricious mistress “many have courted this muse, few have enjoyed her favours” (Knights 517), it is Cratinus who presents her as his wife in the Wineflask thereby making her no “longer a whimsical courtesan but a legitimately married woman.”49 Cratinus’s witty rejoinder to Aristophanes, we are told, amounted to an assertion that, “although the younger poet may be enjoying some ephemeral pleasures with Comedy,” it is he, Cratinus, that has “a long-standing and legitimate claim on her affections and obligations.”50

Cratinus’s comic creativity included lewd puns and possible taunts such as “water-drinking does not produce anything wise” (implying that young Aristophanes was incapable of producing wise comedies because he drank only water).51 Of course Cratinus was not the first comic poet to link intoxi-cation with poetic inspiration—that distinction belongs to the iambic poet Archilochus who claimed a close affiliation with Dionysus52 and whose writing style Cratinus was said to have emulated. Nonetheless, Cratinus ap-pears to have been the first to link the wine god and patron god of comedy, Dionysus, to the (comic) art of ego deflation.53 Ego inflation is said to arise from overestimation and narcissistic tendencies which are themselves linked to lack of self-knowledge. In the Wineflask Cratinus admits that he has failed in the Dionysiac education of wine, insofar as one of the didactic functions of Dionysus was to teach humans “how to use wine properly.”54 But by so admitting Cratinus demonstrates awareness and self-knowledge. By the same token, a person who possesses self-knowledge is not in need of comedy’s

185

LEO STRAUSS AND ARISTOPHANES

corrective ego-deflation mechanism. Biles’s argument, that Aristophanes was seeking to deflate Cratinus’s claim of poetic superiority by “subverting the lofty image of comic inspiration and treating Cratinus’ self-proclaimed reliance on wine as actual dependence,”55 is different yet equally valid.

IVFollowing the above exegeses, alongside Ralph Rosen’s “Aristophanes’s Frogs and the Contest of Homer and Hesiod,”56 an insightful analysis that sees Aristophanes’s Frogs as an intertextually playful, older, and equally “high-profile” poetic contest, I would like to turn our attention to Nietzsche’s Homer’s Contest. Here one reads:

Even the most general way of teaching, through drama, was only brought to the people in the form of an immense struggle of great musicians and dramatists. How wonderful! ‘Even the artist has a grudge against the artist!’ And modern man fears nothing so much in an artist as personal belligerence, whilst the Greek knowns the artist only in personal struggle. Where modern man senses the weakness of a work of art, there the Hel-lene looks for the source of its greatest strength! What, for example, is of particular artistic importance in Plato’s dialogues is mostly the result of a competition with the art of the orators, the sophists, the dramatists of his time, invented for the purpose of his finally being able to say: ‘Look: I, too, can do what my great rivals can do; yes, I can do it better than them. No Protagoras has written myths as beautiful as mine, no dramatist has written such a lively and fascinating whole as the Symposium, no orator has composed such speeches as I present in the Gorgias—and now I reject all of that and condemn all imitative art! Only the contest made me a poet, sophist and orator!’ What a problem reveals itself to us when we enquire about the relationship of the contest to the conception of the work of art! 57

A perceptive reader might be tempted to ask at this point why classical scholars make no reference to Nietzsche’s Homer’s Contest despite the fact that he was the first to articulate the concept of agonal poetics which (as we have seen) has become increasingly popular in classical studies. After all, before turning to philosophy Nietzsche was, by training, a philologist.58 An elaborate answer is beyond the scope of this paper (indeed, this is a topic for another essay), but apart from old prejudices (e.g., Wilamowitz), it seems to me that, as gatekeepers, classical scholars are weary of unsubstantiated claims. In all fairness to them, Nietzsche and Strauss are emblematic of an abstract reading of ancients texts which, to a suspicious eye might be mistaken for an imaginative type of reading (e.g., eikasia).

Turning to Strauss, I would argue along similar lines, namely, that the validation of his arguments cannot come from the field of political phi-losophy or political theory (or, perhaps more correctly, it would be best if they do not); their justification must come from the field of classical

IDEALISTIC STUDIES

186

studies—from the gatekeepers. Hence, within the framework of the agon between poetry and philosophy and, in particular, Strauss’s analysis of Aris-tophanes’s Frogs, one would need to delve, among others, into Cratinus’s term εὐριπιδαριστοφανίζων (euripidaristophanizōn), a witty neologism which combines the names of Euripides and Aristophanes leading to a portman-teau word. This term is found in the following sentence “‘Who are you?’ Some sophisticate in the audience may want to know, / Subtle of speech, a phrasemaker relentless, a Euripidaristophanist,” with an alternative transla-tion being “And who are you?’ some clever-dick spectator might ask; / a micro-intellectualist, a hunter of subtle ideas, a euripidaristophanist.”59 This sentence, we are told, occurs in a fragment and given by an ancient scholiast within the context of Plato’s Apology (19c).60 A common claim is that the term was coined by Cratinus in reference to a perceived similarity in verbal ingenuity between Aristophanes and Euripides, and represented a fascina-tion with Euripides (despite or because of Aristophanes’s satiric treatment of Euripides).61 Ultimately, we are told, it was a rejoinder to Aristophanes’s agonistic posturing.62 A recent interpretation by Bakola, however, paints a far more subtle exegesis. According to this author, Cratinus, “as a poet of the older generation, expressed his own comic poetics with specific reference to the master of older tragedy, Aeschylus.” In this portrayal,

Aristophanes is a technician who uses mere intellect and makes poetry by quibbling about the meanings of words, so he is a far cry from the inspired poet. What leaves Cratinus the space to deny Aristophanes any genuine inspiration is the younger poet’s own self-presentation, namely the advertisement of his poetry as sophisticated, clever and novel, poetry capable of transforming both society and politics, and, to a degree, poetry affiliated with sophistic teaching. . . . On close consideration, the rhetoric which Cratinus uses in relation to Aristophanes is clearly reminiscent of the criteria by which Euripides’ and Aeschylus’ poetic styles are distinguished in Aristophanes’ Frogs. Frogs is the play where the binary approach which Cratinus evokes in fr. 342 is most extensively used, especially for the contrasting portrayals of the two tragic poets. On one hand, Euripides is tellingly portrayed as a cold intellectual whose poetry lies in fancy dealings with words and crude reasoning. . . . In opposition to the intellectualism of the cartoonish ‘Euripides,’ Aeschylus’ comic counterpart is presented as the embodiment of manic inspiration.63

It should be noted that the ellipses in the above passage replace a great deal of citations to fragmentary ancient texts which I have removed in the interests of economy, aesthetics and readability (readers are advised to turn to Bakola’s work for those citations). Those citations, I would argue, give the needed legitimacy to Nietzsche’s argument in Homer’s Contest (agonal poetics) and The Birth of Tragedy (Aeschylus/Dionysus versus Euripides/Socrates) and, ultimately, Strauss’s own interpretation (6–7). At the risk of misinterpretation,

187

LEO STRAUSS AND ARISTOPHANES

I am not arguing that Nietzsche was ignorant of these ancient texts and hence their absence from Homer’s Contest and The Birth of Tragedy.

But why (an inquisitive reader might ask) would Nietzsche deprive his argument of the necessary textual evidence needed to legitimise them? One answer is that Nietzsche was himself engaging in agonal poetics with Plato and Socrates within a “friend-enemy” paradigm.64 In this case, and similar to his intellectual predecessors, Nietzsche would not want to compromise the aesthetic and intellectual form of his agon by providing his readers step-by-step explanations (for a lack of a better term). For example, if we look carefully at (1) Plato’s agon-izing of Aristophanes in his Symposium, (2) Aris-tophanes’s agon-izing of Euripides (and Socrates) in his Frogs, (3) Cratinus’s agon-izing of Aristophanes in his Wineflask, and (4) Hesiod’s agon-izing of Homer in his Works and Days (all of which rely on the former for their contest with the latter), we notice that none of these figures provides step-by-step clarifications to the audience. The audience/reader must figure out the riddle by themselves and (hopefully) become engaged in the process. On a related note, one cannot help but wonder if this is not what Strauss intends with his so-called riddling style of writing. That, however, would be another essay.

Concordia University

Notes

1. I am grateful to a number of people who provided me with various comments and feedback in varying degrees. In no particular order, my thanks to Devin Stauffer, Jeffrey Bernstein, Philipp von Wussow, Gary Shapiro, Patrick Lee Miller, Leofranc Holford-Strevens, Christopher Pelling, Franco V. Trivigno, Michael Nafi, Eric Brown, Clifford Angell Bates, Bob Kaster, Patchen Markell, David Gordon, William Connolly, Mark T. Conard, Nafsika Athanassoulis, Richard Rawles, and Niki Lambros. Special thanks to Rebecca Futo Kennedy. All mistakes remain my own.

2. It is beyond the scope of this essay to delve into this debate; however, suffice it to say that the name of Leo Strauss, which was already controversial pre- 9/11, became more contentious following the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Within the context of this debate, I find Robert Howse’s Leo Strauss: Man of Peace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014) to be a hopeful work. Contrary to claims by Richard Wolin that Howse is unable to maintain a critical distance from Strauss (“Leo Strauss, Peacenik,” review of Leo Strauss: Man of Peace, by Robert Howse The Chronicle of the Higher Edu-cation, December 16, 2014, http://chronicle.com/article/Leo-Strauss-Peacenik-/150133/), it would seem to me that Howse does maintain a critical distance. This is evident from his criticism of major Straussian scholars such as Allan Bloom, Thomas Pangle, William Kristol, and Harvey Mansfield, to mention but a few (p. 4). At the risk of fawning exag-geration, Howse attempts to rehabilitate Strauss’s reputation vis-à-vis hundreds of Strauss’s lectures (recently released by the Leo Strauss Center at the University of Chicago) in a manner reminiscent of Walter Kaufmann’s rehabilitation of Nietzsche’s reputation.

IDEALISTIC STUDIES

188

3. Leo Strauss, The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism: An Introduction to the Thought of Leo Strauss: Essays and Lectures, ed. Thomas L. Pangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).

4. E.g., The City and Man (1963), 30 n., 61, 62, 151 n., 213 n.; 30n39, 61, 62, 151n10, 213n74; Liberalism, Ancient and Modern (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 51; Aristophanes is absent in Persecution and the Art of Writing (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1952).

5. E.g., consider Shadia Drury’s caustic remark in regard to Michael J. O’Brien’s 1967 book review of Leo Strauss’s Socrates and Aristophanes for the Phoenix journal: “A typical review of one who tries to make sense of one of Strauss’s books independently of the others—is therefore perplexed” (The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, (1988) 2005], 248).

6. Heinrich Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 27.

7. On Tyranny: Revised and Expanded Edition, Including the Strauss-Kojéve Cor-respondence, ed. Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 309.

8. For Hegel on Aristophanes, see William Desmond, “Can Philosophy Laugh at Itself?,” The Owl of Minerva 20 (1989):131–149.

9. These include the likes of Johann Georg Schlosser (historian), Christoph Martin Wieland (poet/writer), Friedrich Schlegel (literary critic), Heinrich Theodor Roetscher (theatre critic), Heinrich Heine (literary critic), and Robert von Pöhlmann (historian), among others. Some of these scholars utilized Aristophanes to support their ideological agendas. On the coverage of Aristophanes by (German) authors, see Martin Holtermann’s Der deutsche Aristophanes. Die Rezeption eines politischen Dichters im 19. Jahrhundert. Hypomnemata, 155 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004).

10. Devin Stauffer, “Leo Strauss’s UnSocratic Aristophanes?,” in The Political Theory of Aristophanes: Explorations in Poetic Wisdom, ed. Jeremy J. Mhire and Bryan-Paul Frost (Albany: State University of New York, 2014), 331.

11. Ibid.

12. Eugene Sheppard, Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile: The Making of a Political Philosopher (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2006), 79.

13. Kenneth Hart Green, Leo Strauss on Maimonides: The Complete Writings (Chi-cago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 65.

14. It should be noted that whereas Aristophanes’s comedies had consistently won first- or second-place prizes, the Clouds managed a disappointing third place or lower at the Dionysia festival, a failure that was not subsequently repeated (Aristophanes, Achar-nians, Knights, ed. and trans. Jeffrey Henderson, Loeb Classical Library 178 [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998], 4–7). It should also be noted that the original Clouds was lost; what we have is a revision. On this point, see Jeffrey Henderson’s in-troductory note to the Clouds: “Although ancient editors had both the original festival version and the incomplete revision at their disposal, only the revision has survived. Lack of evidence about the first version of Clouds makes it impossible to determine how much Aristophanes altered in the process of revision. Definitely new is the parabasis speech

189

LEO STRAUSS AND ARISTOPHANES

(518–62) discussing the defeat of the original play and hoping for success with the new version. In other respects we must rely mainly on the testimony of an anonymous ancient scholar who wrote, ‘this play is the same as the first, but has been revised in details, as though the poet wanted to produce it again but for whatever reason did not after all do so’” (Aristophanes, Clouds, Wasps, Peace, ed. and trans. Jeffrey Henderson, Loeb Clas-sical Library 488 [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998], 4).

15. Cf. Alan Bloom’s (elitist) claim, “[poets] will never say anything the public will deeply disapprove of or be extremely shocked by. He [Agathon] is somewhere in between, recognizing the wise but appealing to the unwise.” (Plato, Plato’s Symposium, trans. Seth Benardete, with commentaries by Alan Bloom and Seth Benardete [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, (1993), 2001], 115).

16. In differentiating theatre audiences into wise and unwise categories, Strauss is mimicking (the rhetoric of) Aristophanes and Plato. For example, in Aristophanes’s Clouds (520), one hears of a sophōtate (cleverest? wisest?) comedy that was defeated because the sophoi (clever? wise?) theatas (audience) failed to recognize the play’s wisdom. Likewise, in Plato’s Symposium, one observes Socrates and the tragic poet Agathon in a conversation which adopts that distinction a priori. On the last point, it should be noted that Agathon was (i) (similar to Socrates) the object of playful jousting in Aristophanes’s Women at the Thesmophoria; (ii) the tragic poet in whose honour Plato’s (fictional) Symposium was held to celebrate his first victory at the Dionysia; and (iii) alongside Aristophanes, the last man awake and conversing with Socrates.

17. Strauss, Socrates and Aristophanes, 4, 311, 312, 7, 314; Strauss, The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, 120–125.

18. A fact that does not escape Raimond Daniels’s attention in Nietzsche and ‘The Birth of Tragedy’ (Durham: Acumen Publishing, 2013).

19. Matthew Meyer, “The Ancient Quarrel between Philosophy and Poetry in Nietzsche’s Early Writings,” in Nietzsche as a Scholar of Antiquity, ed. Anthony K. Jensen and Helmut Heit (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014), 10.

20. Mary P. Nichols, Socrates on Friendship and Community: Reflections on Plato’s Symposium, Phaedrus, and Lysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 18.

21. Laurence Lampert, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1996), 30.

22. E.g., Stephen Halliwell, Between Ecstasy and Truth: Interpretations of Greek Poetics from Homer to Longinus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), among others.

23. For example, see Bruce Krajewski’s review of Christina Tarnopolsky’s book Prudes, Perverts and Tyrants: Plato’s Gorgias and the Politics of Shame (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010) in which Krajewski suggests that Tarnopolsky as a ‘Straussian’ (in lieu of the fact that her dissertation director, Nathan Tarcov, was the Director of the Leo Strauss Center) was engaging in “hyperinterpretation,” which is typical of so-called Straussians (Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2011.03.52, http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2011/2011-03-52.html).

24. Charles Segal, Dionysiac Poetics and Euripides’ Bacchae (Princeton, N.J.: Prince-ton University Press, 1982), 159.

IDEALISTIC STUDIES

190

25. Apart from Lawrence Lampert, see also Catherine Zuckert and Michael P. Zuckert, The Truth about Leo Strauss: Political Philosophy and American Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 83–84, for Strauss’s fascination with Nietzsche.

26. Christopher W. Marshall and George Kovacs, “Introduction: On Cratinus fr. 342 and Curmudgeons,” in No Laughing Matter: Studies in Athenian Comedy (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2012), vii.

27. James Robson, “The Birth of Comedy,” The Open University, August 15, 2013, http://www.open.edu/openlearn/history-the-arts/history/classical-studies/the-birth-comedy.

28. Jeffrey Rusten, ed. and trans., The Birth of Comedy: Texts, Documents, and Art from Athenian Comic Competitions, 486–280 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011).

29. With the exception of John Lombardini, who provides a pithy discussion within the context of Aristophanes’s Knights (“Comic Authority in Aristophanes’ Knights,” POLIS 29 [2012]:130–149, 145–147).

30. N. J. Lowe, Greece & Rome, New Surveys in the Classics No. 37: Comedy (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 64; Emmanuela Bakola, Cratinus and the Art of Comedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 3.

31. Aristophanes, Acharnians/Knights, 4.

32. Bakola, Cratinus and the Art of Comedy, 5–6.

33. Erich Segal, The Death of Comedy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 45.

34. Ironically enough, this is the same passage cited by Segal on Aristophanes’s purported superiority.

35. Here one reads of “that bull-eating Wine-God, Cratinus” (Frogs 357). Taking into account that the winner of the dithyramb competitions received an ox as a prize, Aristophanes is attesting to Cratinus’s award-wining record, albeit in metaphorical fashion (John M. Edmonds, The Fragments of Attic Comedy [Leiden: E. J. Brill 1957], 21).

36. Rusten, The Birth of Comedy.

37. Eric Csapo, Review of Emmanuela Bakola, Cratinus and the Art of Comedy, Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2010.08.56, http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2010/2010-08-56.html.

38. Ian C. Storey, Eupolis, Poet of Old Comedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 4; Bakola, Cratinus and the Art of Comedy, 6n16. That being stated, all of Agathon’s tragedies were also lost and yet he was also a major figure in Plato’s Symposium.

39. A magisterial tome of 794 pages by the top experts in the field (Jeffrey Henderson, David Konstan, Ralph Rosen, Jeffrey Rusten, and Niall W. Slater), which offers the most comprehensive English translation of comic fragments to date.

40. Space restrictions prohibit a comprehensive list of authors. The works of Ralph Rosen, Zachary P. Biles, and Emmanuela Bakola will be central to our analysis on account of their sustained study of intertextuality, rivalry, and the construction/assertion of poetic personas.

191

LEO STRAUSS AND ARISTOPHANES

41. Edmonds, The Fragments of Attic Comedy, 21; Rusten, The Birth of Comedy, 174.

42. Bakola, Cratinus and the Art of Comedy, 5–6.

43. Pytine test. ii K-A, as quoted in Zachary P. Biles, “Intertextual Biography in the Rivalry of Cratinus and Aristophanes,” The American Journal of Philology 2 (2002): 169–204, 170. This section relies heavily on Biles’s and Bakola’s interpretations.

44. Or perhaps lower, according to Henderson, Acharnians/Knights, 5n13.

45. On these points see Erich Segal, The Death of Comedy, 70, and Henderson, Acharnians/Knights, 27n42.

46. Biles, “Intertextual Biography,” 172.

47. Ibid.

48. Malcolm Health, “Aristophanes and His Rivals,” Greece and Rome 37 (1990): 143–158, 151.

49. Biles, “Intertextual Biography,” 185.

50. Ibid.

51. Heath, “Aristophanes and His Rivals,” 150.

52. E.g., consider the following line by Archilochus: “I know how to initiate a fine song for Lord Dionysus, a dithyramb, after my mind is thunderstruck with wine” (Biles, “Intertextual Biography,” 172).

53. R. D. V. Glasgow, The Comedy of Mind: Philosophers Stoned, or the Pursuit of Wisdom (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1999).

54. Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece (New York: Zone Books, 1990), 203.

55. Biles, “Intertextual Biography,” 170.

56. Ralph M. Rosen, “Aristophanes’ Frogs and the Contest of Homer and Hesiod,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 134 (2004): 295–322.

57. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 179.

58. With the exception, to the best of my knowledge, of Elton Barker, Entering the Agon: Dissent and Authority in Homer, Historiography and Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

59. First translation belongs to Rusten, The Birth of Comedy, 216, while second belongs to Bakola, Cratinus and the Art of Comedy, 25). That Rusten would defer trans-lational authority to Bakola, yet provide a different (‘Victorian’) translation, is amusing, to say the least, especially when considering the fact that one of the contributors is none other than tour de force Jeffrey Henderson, who, in the preface to the Acharnians/Knights, justifies the publication of a new Loeb edition by pointing out the limitations of older editions on account of their “Victorian era” translations (vii).

60. Rusten, The Birth of Comedy, 216.

IDEALISTIC STUDIES

192

61. John Taylor, “Aristophanic Comedy,” in Classical Literature: An Introduction, ed. Neil Croally and Roy Hyde (New York: Routledge, 2011), 129–131.

62. Zachary P. Biles, Aristophanes and the Poetics of Competition (New York: Cam-bridge University Press, 2011), 123.

63. Bakola, Cratinus and the Art of Comedy, 25–30.

64. Horst Hutter, Shaping the Future: Nietzsche’s New Regime of the Soul and Its Ascetic Practices (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2006), xiv.

View publication statsView publication stats