The Maculate Muse: Obscene Language in Attic Comedy by Jeffrey Henderson Review by: Hugh Lloyd-Jones Classical Philology,

Vol. 71, No. 4 (Oct., 1976), pp. 356-359 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/268770 . Accessed: 22/10/2013 14:22
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BOOK REVIEWS
The Maculate Muse: Obscene Languagein Attic Comedy.By JEFFREY HENDERSON. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1975. Pp. xiii + 251. $15.00. Classical scholars have by no means always declined the task of explaining the obscenities of ancient writers; but many of them annoyingly offer no comment on obscene passages, leaving the reader in the dark. K. J. Dover has set an admirable example of honesty in this respect; so has Jean Taillardat in his remarkable book, Les images dans Aristophane (Paris, 1962). Mr. Henderson is right in thinking there is need for a systematic treatment of the whole topic of obscenity in Attic comedy. He could easily have persuaded us of the need without referringto Dover and Taillardat in a way which may not be intended to seem patronizing, but which certainly does seem so. They did not set themselves the same task, so that they cannot be blamed for not having done what H. has attempted. And it is a pity that by depreciating them H. invites us to judge his work by their standards, since his own scholarship, while by current standards respectable, falls a long way short of theirs. But he has produced a most valuable instrument of study, for which we must be heartily grateful. Half of the book deals with obscenity in a general way; the second half gets down to details. While cautious about the theory that the obscenity of comedy developed directly from that of the fertility cults, H. believes that the existence of these permitted areas of freedom from the taboo against obscenity prepared the way for the license permitted to the Old Comedy and to Ionian iambography before it. H. deals with the obscenities found in the remains of the early (but not the Hellenistic) iambographers;his treatment of satyric drama and of New Comedy is brief and inadequate; and he says nothing of painted vases. A glance at, say, Otto Brendel's contribution to Studies in Erotic Art (ed. T. R. Bowie and C. V. Christenson [New York, 1970]) will reveal the existence of an area of permitted obscenity all the more noteworthy because obscenities are found on vases which were presumably for domestic use. Yet in most literary genres, epic and tragedy for example, obscenity was most carefully avoided. Dover has conclusively refuted the notion that "the Greeks lived in a rosy haze of uninhibited sexuality, untroubled by the fear, guilt and shame which later cultures were to invent" (see GreekPopular Morality [Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1974],pp. 205 f., with detailed evidence). H. does not lean so far in this direction as, say, the late Charles Seltman, but he draws a sharp distinction between the Athenian reason for maintaining taboos upon sexual and excretory matters and our own. We, he thinks, abhor obscenity because the objects and acts which it exposes are felt somehow to be dirty; the Athenians did so "out of respect and propriety and not out of feelings of disgust, dirtiness or embarrassment" (p. 33). Why then, one may ask, did they feel that respect and propriety enjoined the avoidance of certain topics? Certainly their religion lacked the notion of original sin, and the concept of the human body as a tomb in which the soul was imprisoned came to them late, so that they did not think the body dirty and shameful in itself, as the early Christians did. Yet the belief in ritual pollution was deeply rooted in 356

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their culture. In early times physical dirt and spiritual dirt were not sharply distinguished. No substances were thought more polluting than semen, menstrual blood, and excrement. The taboo upon a thing tended to take in the words which name that thing; as the Latin terminology of the subject helps to show, obscene words were at first also ill-omened words. With the advance of civilization, such taboos became less and less a matter of religion, more and more a matter of taste. Religion permitted at certain places and times a relaxation of taboos which was found to have an intoxicating effect. After the diminution of the old religious terrors, the concept of such moments of release was carried over into social life. The Greeks did not maintain their taboos in the shamefast fashion of Christianity, but in origin they were not dissimilar. H. might have brought out the development more clearly by making more use of anthropology: Mary Douglas' Purity and Danger (London, 1966) is a useful work in this connection. Freud's belief that obscenity gives us pleasure because it recalls the pleasant and uninhibited life of infancy may be true, but it hardly explains everything. If the Greeks had had no taboos, or only weak ones, they would never have relished obscenity as they did; their relish is better understood by Catholics in southern Europe than by Protestants or atheists with a Protestant background. Modern puritans whose liberalism has led them to place a taboo on the taboos adhered to by their ancestors tend to approve of obscenity because it violates the ancestral prohibitions. But in their permissive world obscenity is not keenly relished, and the way in which it is relished in other worlds is not easily understood. H. devotes separate treatment to the part played by obscenity in the various plays of Aristophanes, assigning it where possible a general significance within the action. Thus the homosexual obscenities uttered by Dicaeopolis during the first scene of the Acharnians are designed to expose the unnaturalness and corruption of the city by comparison with the countryside. Cleon in the Knights is represented as both a pathic and a paedicator because he is an agent of corruption. The Clouds is a disappointing play because Strepsiades lacks "the strongly developed sense of morality" (p. 72) of Dicaeopolis and Trygaeus; although "only rustics like Strepsiades any longer believe in the old civic values," Strepsiades "is much too simple and weak to change things" (p. 78). Accordingly, "the absence of anything but degraded sex and buffoonish scatology in the play means an absence of that gaiety and freedom which characterize Aristophanes' best work" (ibid.). H. assigns a special place to sexual symbolism in the Lysistrata, developing a suggestion of C. H. Whitman that "somehow the total symbol of the Acropolis is felicitously expressive of feminine sexual attitudes"; it symbolizes the women's position, which the men are trying to violate by an act of sexual penetration (pp. 95-96). H. takes an unfavorable view of the Ecclesiazusae, where "in the absence of fantasy Praxagora's schemes clash with reality" and in the end lead to "nauseating consequences" (p. 101). H. does not manage to find an architectonic significance for obscenity in all the plays, but he still achieves the remarkable feat of making it seem a good deal more important than it is, as well as a good deal more serious. When he remarks that "moralizing is no substitute for gaiety" (p. 78), one may feel that this is less true of the Clouds, the work he has in mind, than of his own treatment of the poet. The second part of the book is a great deal more valuable than the first. It con-

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BOOK REVIEWS

under alphabetically termsarranged sists of a glossaryof sexualand scatological variousmaintopics;an excellentindexmakesit easy to findone'sway about.H. is Dover needsto be. as a manwhowouldpatronize not quiteso gooda grammarian He thricewrites #L&AeLP (see indexs.v.) and twice b7r7ro5pa/u.a (pp. 165and 169);he
and TKaXaOvpW from Oipa (p. 168); he takes from 6pO6s seems to derive 'OpaoXoxos to be an adjective of three terminations (p. 192); he confuses bLaXiyea0aL sopfsOp6OvAos (p. 198); other errors will be mentioned presently. Although the title with bLaX)yeLP

of the book specifies "Attic Comedy," he has paid no attention to the occasional obscenities of the New Comedy, a genre with which he seems imperfectly acquainted. He quotes a fragment of Menander from Kock instead of Korte-Thierfelder (p. 193) and is unaware that a fragment of "Aristophanes" (57 Demian'czuk) misprinted on page 166 has turned out to be identical with Dyscolus 514-15. He is very prone to assume the existence of a play on words when it would be prudent at least to signal doubt. He has no interest in textual criticism, and seldom if ever explains hitherto unsolved problems, as Taillardat with his critical acumen so often does. In compensation, he has solid virtues. He knows the literature specifically referring to the Old Comedy (though not W. Headlam's Herodas [Cambridge, 1922] or A. S. F. Gow's Machon [Cambridge, 1965]; he might have made better use of GraecoK. Latte's edition of Hesychius [Copenhagen, 1966]; C. Austin's Comicorum rum fragmenta in papyris reperta [Berlin, 1972] reached him too late). He shows common sense in choosing between known interpretations: on Nub. 978, he seems right against Dover (p. 145), on Lys. 151, against Wilamowitz (p. 146); on page 153, note 12, he seems right against Housman. He has worked his way assiduously through the remains of Old Comedy, and has provided scholars with an instrument of study that will be invaluable in their researches. Good classical libraries will need to have it, and students of Old Comedy will require their own copies. whenhe tells us how much Now for somepointsof detail.P. 9: H. believesAristophanes less vulgarhis jokesarethanthoseof his rivals;but the directevidencehardlysubstantiates P. 21: for e'XeLP, are wrongly interpreted. the claim. P. 20: the words a7rvyosand 6yj.sos
and read e%XeamaL,
TpAOels

comes from

TLTpWaKW.

P. 22: what is xaa'p? P. 23, n. 89: how

"unArchilochian affinitieswith elegiac,epic and fable literacan H. speak of Semonides' is less chaste than H. thinks;see the lyrics ture"?P. 26: the languageof the Diktyoulkoi Mass., 1963])and the anapeststhat at 786 f. (vol. 2 of the Loeb Aeschylus[Cambridge, a use confollowthem. At line 787, TO OaXaKp6pis evidentlyused in the senseof o OaXX6s, firmedby Soph. Isthm.359 Pearson= 286 Page (add this to H.'s collectionon p. 112). does not mean "flesh."Pp. 134-35: the myrtle was sacred to Aphrodite. P. 115: be,uas to venerealdiseasein Old Comedy,therewouldbe sevP. 143:if therewereone reference knewno moreof the pox than of astrology,or Christianity (see eralhundred; Aristophanes
read -,uepaP. 147: Housman ap. Fraenkel on Aesch. Ag. 6). P. 145: for KEKapVKev/.aTa,

a'y Pj.VWPLca6)X77 7 5' ap' (these nounsare oxytone:see M. Scheller,Die Epicrates'expression der griechischen Substantiva auf -La [Zurich,1951])is not well renderedby Oxytonierung how "she is all cunt"; a mouse'snest has many differentapertures,and one remembers against the parsimonyof nature."P. 153, sec. Theodora"most ungratefullvmurmured 213: oX'L XcIK&a7e is not a curse,and shouldbe followedby a questionmark.P. 155: for the usage mentionedin sec. 229, compareAeschylusfragment175 Nauck = 275 Mette; in sec. 235. P. 156: it belongsto the languageof high poetry, like the use of ueLyPvaTaL KacTaLAXf3eLV (,yviaLKi) does not mean "to go into her." P. 170: 7rXa-yaLP eLsTOI>Ov /.oXeXLP

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(yvvaZKa) does not mean "to strike downwards on a supine woman." P. 174: bevrepdt4ew carries no metaphor from wine-pressing, as H. infers from the Johannine word bevreplas printed in his text without its iota. P. 180: in sec. 362, Cratinus does not liken girls to tables, but tables to girls, and Anaxilas' delicate allusion to the riddle of the Sphinx is neither fully nor correctly elucidated. In sec. 364, the words Trovp cutov make a difference to the quotation from Eq. 263. P. 186: 1OLVLKitU is a misprint for VOLMKLOTTS. P. 192: in see is not used in its primary sense but as a synonym for &vcadoOiros: sec. 415 OKa-Tac44yos Austin (Menandri Aspis et Samia, vol. 2 [Berlin, 1970]) on Samia 427 for this usage, an interesting exception to the general tendency noted by H. at the top of p. 40. P. 194: at Antiphanes 126, the scatophagous habits commonly attributed to cows in Cyprus are explained by the hypothesis that Aphrodite has transferred to them the habits usually attributed to pigs because in her Cyprian cults the pig is a sacred beast. P. 197: Pax 175 should not be quoted without 4th, and in quoting Antiphanes 177. 3 H. should have made it clear that the subject must be supplied from TO Ka6KP. P. 198: 6cwrvlos appeptOiXvsdoes not mean "the same for men and women." P. 199: for this use of OpL-YK6s, compare now the Cologne fragment of Archilochus. P. 203: on Theodorus, see J. Jackson, Marginalia Scaenica (Oxford, 1955), pp. 92 f. P. 211: to sec. 465 add Menander Sic. 200 (with R. Kassel's note, Menandri Sicyonius [Berlin, 1965], p. 16) and 258. P. 220: to sec. 486, add Menander Sic. 201, and to sec. 487, add Sic. 201 and 264. Hugh Lloyd-Jones Christ Church, Oxford

Titi Livi "Ab urbe condita," tomus I: libri I-V. Recognovit et adnotatione critica instruxit ROBERTUSMAXWELLOGILVIE.Scriptorum Classicorum Bibliotheca Oxoniensis. Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1974. Pp. xxiv + 391. ?2.50 (in U.K.), $8.00. This new Oxford text of Livy 1-5 is splendid. There are two chief reasons. The more important is the editor himself, an accomplished Latinist with a finely developed sense of Livian usage and idiom. The second has to do with the optimal conditions under which the text has been produced: fifteen years of study during which the editor has had the benefit of his own continuing research and that of other scholars. In the late 1950s Ogilvie established on a firm basis the first complete stemma of Books 1-10 (CQn.s. 7 [1957]: 68-81). Fifty years before in the same journal (CQ2 [1908]: 213) Walters had asked "'Stemmata quid faciunt?' except much stereotyped mischief." The result was that the apparatus of his and Conway's Oxford texts was overly large and the information hard to evaluate; the chief reason was that scarcely any differentiation had been made among the manuscripts of the X and -Xfamilies of the Nicomachean group. 0. has fixed the priorities. R, D, L, A, F, and B have been banished: "Secondary manuscripts ... are to be entirely disregarded except for the intrinsic merit of individual emendations.... Picking and choosing among manuscripts without a stemma is simple nonsense" (CQ n.s. 9 [1959]: 269). The result is a tighter, more comprehensible apparatus: for 5. 19-20 it requires but seven lines, for example, whereas Conway needed twenty-three. Next came O.'s fine Commentaryon Livy: Books 1-5 (Oxford, 1965), on almost every page of which he had new and important things to say about the text based on a personal examination of all the major manuscripts: "Omnes hos codices et ipse meis oculis perlegi et ex tabellis photographicis denuo contuli" (p. xiii). Unfortu-

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