Arrowsmith Birds

Trustees of Boston University
Aristophanes' Birds: The Fantasy Politics of Eros

Author(s): William Arrowsmith
Reviewed work(s):
Source: Arion, New Series, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Spring, 1973), pp. 119-167
Published by: Trustees of Boston University
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ARISTOPHANES' BIRDS:
THE FANTASY POLITICS OF EROS
William Arrowsmith
"I prefer a poet who can think?a. poet

like Pindar or Leopardi"
?Nietzsche, Wir Philologen
T A HE SURRENDER OF THE ISLAND
of Melos, the massacre of its male citizens, and the selling

into slavery of the women and children, was promptly
followed by systematic colonization. The Athenian con
querors, says Thucydides (5, fin.) "sent out five hundred
settlers and inhabited the place for themselves." These
colonists, officially known as cleruchs, were the deliberate
instruments of Athenian imperialism, and their employment
in places like Melos exhibits that characteristic ingenuity
and ruthless economy of means that made the empire so
remarkable a feat of political engineering and such a for
midable novelty in world history. The ancient world had
known empires in abundance, but never until now had
there been an empire which, in its precision of organiza
tion, in its ability to recruit and galvanize the psychic en
ergies of its citizens in the rich rewards of imperial acqui
sition, and in its elegantly interlocking mechanisms of
coercion and social welfare, represented such a triumph
of social and political techn?.
Radically and ruthlessly in
novative, it was also functional in its innova
marvellously
tions; and the thrust of these functional innovations struck
at the until now, all ancient
directly principle by which,
life?or at least all ancient Greek and Athenian life?had
been organized.
As early as Themistocles' time, Athenian policy had been
directed toward the sea and the acquisition of maritime
empire; but until the Peloponnesian war, Athenian life had
remained fairly evenly divided between the competing
claims of Athena and Poseidon, between agriculture and
maritime commerce. But Pericles' strategy for the conduct
120 Aristophanes' Brnos
of the war against Sparta and her allies was based upon
the radical decision to use the city of Athens as an island
bastion from which Athenian ships could control the far
flung empire and indefinitely hold off the land-based power
of the Peloponnesians. This meant that Attica herself?the
country-world of which Athens herself was originally only
the town-expression?was to be written off,
systematically
abandoned to the enemy. And the yeomanry and peasantry
of Attica?without whom Athens could not have defeated
the Persians at Marathon?were coolly viewed as the neces
sary casualties of Periclean strategy. Casualties along with
them, we should note, were the and culture and
religion
the values inseparably linking that peasantry to the earth.
The death of tragedy, for instance, is indissolubly linked to
the consequences of Pericles' strategy. In the entire fifth
century there is no more momentous decision for the city
of Athens?nor perhaps for human history in the ancient
West?than this Periclean policy (a policy doubtless influ
enced by the terrible plague of the early years of the war,
which is thought to have destroyed as much as one-third
of the entire Athenian population ). For the first time a city
deliberately broke the bonds which bound it to the earth
and the past and proclaimed its freedom of the wisdom
and meaning accumulated through the millennial toil of the
earth and the venerable patterns of culture and religion
which grounded human life in the great cyclical life of
nature.
It is literally impossible, I believe, to comprehend the

full cost of this decision in human misery and alienation,
though we can perhaps see its concomitant effects?all of
immense future importance?very clearly. Few more drastic
changes have taken place in human history, for instance,
than the change from a system in which land is owned trib
ally or collectively and cannot be alienated, to one in which
individual ownership becomes the norm and land itself
begins to be as mobile as money or goods. Man himself is
changed in his altered relation to his land, and his culture
and religion must change with him. Yet there is good reason
to believe that precisely this change did take place in the
Plate 1
122 Aristophanes' birds
latter half of the fifth century,1 and the most logical date
would of course be one which coincided with the effective
abandonment of Attica envisaged by Pericles' policy. Simply
put: as men became more mobile, so did their land, and
everything else.
Cleruchies or coloniescomposed mainly of these up
rooted peasants yeomen at
and Attica were the obvious
social and military consequence of Periclean strategy. At
one stroke Athens succeeded in getting rid of part of her
own surplus and discontented population and employed it
to imperial advantage by resettling it in the territories of
restive subject-cities or strategic military sites. For despite
the effect of the plague, the enforced concentration of
Attica in the city of Athens seems to have created serious
overcrowding. What evidence there is suggests that these

uprooted peasants had proven an explosive and unstable
element, eager to see the end of the war and to return
1
The evidence is of course exceptionally uncertain, and the prob
lem is vexed by profound disagreement. But the most thorough dis
cussion of the problematic date at which land in Athens actually
did become alienable is to be found in John V. A. Fine's monograph,
Horoi: Studies in Mortgage, Real Security, and Land Tenure in
Ancient Athens, Hesperia (Supplement IX), 1951. I cite Fine's con
clusion: "The suggestion that Athenian land did not become alien
able until the period of the Peloponnesian War is completely un
orthodox, but it is in agreement both with what the sources say and
what do not say. ... If we divest ourselves of conceptions
they
derived from the fourth century, the supposition that land in Attica
was inalienable for at least the first seventy years of the fifth century
will be found to conform, I believe, to what is really known of that
period. Despite the Delian League and the growth of empire, the
Athenians remained primarily a conservative and agrarian people
until the Peloponnesian War forced them to make serious changes
in their way of life. Thucydides himself tells us that until 431 the
majority of the citizens still lived in the
country districts and he
emphasizes the grief which they experienced at abandoning their
farms, the ancestral associations, and all the beloved associations of
their rural life. These peasants were so passionately devoted to their
land and to the customs of their fathers that one can hardly imagine
them selling or mortgaging their farms even if there had been no
restrictions on alienation. Can one picture a Dikaiopolis or a Strep
siades parting with his few acres? From 431 on, however, everything
conspired to lessen the importance of land and to increase the sig
nificance of movable wealth. Thousands of peasants were confined
in the city where they suffered the anguish of the enemy. Many of
these peasants had to seek a new livelihood. ... In this milieu it
William Arrowsmith 123
to their villages from the city they had come to loathe, but
at times belligerent too, especially when the
passionately
Spartans razed their vines or olives. We catch a glimpse
of this displaced peasantry in Aristophanes' Acharnians,
above all in the opening soliloquy of Dikaiopolis, a farmer
ousted from his old life and thrust into wartime turbulence
of a city whose ways and goals he neither liked nor under
stood. "Here I sit, bored to death," he exclaims, as he waits
alone in the Pnyx at dawn. "I fix my eyes upon my fields
and lust for Peace. /1 loathe the stingy, greedy city. I
long/for my own ungrudging my generous
countryside,
village, / my openhearted home sweet home. It never
barked, / 'Buy coal! Buy vinegar!' Gratis it gave me / every
. . ."2 yearns, in short, for those tradi
thing. Dikaiopolis
tional, but increasingly elusive, qualities of the old cultural
life?what Greeks called apragmosyn? and h?sychia: the
would not be surprising if the attitude towards movables began to

exercise a considerable influence on the attitude towards immovables
?especially when many a peasant must have sorrowfully wondered
whether his land would ever be of much use to him. . . ."
again
(pp. 201-02)
Fine's views, of course, have not been greeted with universal ac
ceptance, though his critics have been noticeably long on censure
and notably sketchy on argument and evidence. Cf., for instance,
Antony Andrewes, The Greeks, pp. 89-118 and 276-77; W. G. For
rest, The Emergence of Greek Democracy, pp. 146-57; W. K. Lacey,
The Family in Ancient Greece, pp. 333-35; and A. R. W. Harrison,
The Law of Athens (vide esp. the chapter on "Real Security").
Moses Finley (Studies in Land and Credit in Ancient Athens, 1952)
does not really deign to speak about alienability or inalienability at
all, and certainly does not discuss the date of the change (if there
was one). The reason for this evasion of a crucial question lies, I
suspect, less in the sketchiness of the evidence than in the axiomatic
bias that land in Athens was not?could not have been?inalienable.
The obvious anthropological weakness of classical studies?the late
Western parochialism of so many scholars (all the more surprising
in view of the scholarly fear of contaminating Greek experience with
modern views and mores)?is nowhere more visible than in the
apparent inability even to conceive of tribal and collective ownership
of inalienable land; in the tacit acceptance of non-tribal and indi
vidualistic norms. And this is perhaps why Athenian (or Greek)
autochthony generally is taken as simply metaphorical?to the im
poverishment of the ancient relationship to the land and the religious
myths and cults dependent upon the maternity of the earth and
autochthony
2 generally.
Aristophanes, Acharnians (tr. Douglass Parker), 32 ff.
life of rustic peace and quiet, the anonymous, immemorial

round of the country seasons in a world enclosed by a
harsh landscape of necessity where limestone slopes come
down close at hand, making of the village or deme an al
most closed and self-sufficient social unit in which the
psychical and cultural geography reflects the physical real
ity, the physis, that surrounds it. Here the great earth
bound modalities that inform even the aristocratic litera
tures of early and archaic Greece were moulded and
passed on in myth and legend. Its values are essentially
those of a culture of poverty, teaching men
great that
wealth and great ambition weredangerous and ambivalent
gifts, bringing an intoxication that could literally drive a
man's wits astray and make him, for one brief shuddering
moment of glory, as happy and thoughtless and cruel as
any god. The skill of mortal acceptance?s?phrosyn??and
the simultaneous envy and terror of the dazzling but de
sirable attributes that belonged permanently only to the
or wealth
gods?happiness (cuSaifiov?a oX?os), (ttXovtos),
untrammelled freedom and power, the danger of insatiable
greed ( TrXcove&a ), the perilous hybris of wealth and power?
these are the central themes of this great earth-bound cul
ture, the old archaic poetry of the Hellenic earth.
Those torn from this culture, like the Athenian peasantry,
felt something akin to what we now call alienation, an
estrangement from the very ground of their being. And
this estrangement is a real though neglected part of that
Athenian experience which makes the fifth century so
kindred to our own, beneath all differences of scale and
culture. It was above all else the Athenian empire, the
discovery that by maritime empire, a city could be set
free from the immemorial bondage to the earth and its
values, that created this new sense of estrangement and
immensely widened the gulf between physis (nature) and
that nomos (law, custom) once felt to be firmly grounded
in the old dike and reality. But the gulf is peculiarly Athe
nian; at Athens the gulf is felt most intensely and by nobody
more than those peasant victims of the Periclean imperial
city. The estrangement was as total and terrifying, it would
seem, as industrialization was terrifying to those Polish
peasants described so vividly in the poem of the Marxist

revisionist, Adam Wazyk:
From villages and little towns they come in carts

to build a foundry and dream out a city,
to dig out of the earth a new Eldorado . . .
Distrustful soul, torn out of the village soil,
half-awakened and already half-mad,
in words silent . . .
the huge mob, pushed suddenly

out of medieval darkness . . .3
Torn from Attic earth, the uprooted peasant found in

the new Athens, in place of the old landscape of austere
necessity, harsh and yet familiar, the boundless vistas of
the Athenian empire, with its dangerous luxury and exemp
tion from the old toil, its immense political turbulence and
innovative And the strangely immoral or amoral
activity.
exactions made upon its citizenry were the heavy and
often inhuman price of an ethos of imperial force and con
quest. What the former yeoman or peasant found in this
strange and incomprehensibly restless and dissatisfied city
was terrifying and most destructive, just as the Faustian
spirit of the industrial West has proven so terrifying and
destructive to the bewildered laymen of every culture and
religion?from the American Indian to traditional Islam?it
has hitherto encountered.
The result was intense nostalgia and profound discontent,
and the Athenian cleruchies were the chief device for
coping with the alienated and discontented. They offered
the uprooted yeoman the chance to transplant himself to a
less urban though alien environment where he might re
create his old culture on new ground?a vita nuova, a pos
sible renewal of the old world of rustic physis and h?sychia
?just as they promised Athens a permanent Athenian garri
son among restless subjects. The Birds begins with two of
31 am indebted for knowledge of this poem and reinforcement to

some of the perspective of this paper to an exceptionally fine little
book, The Politics of Hysteria, by Edmund Stillman and William
Pfaff (New York. 1964), p. 42 ff.
these self-chosen cleruchs, two antique imperial dropouts,

marching off into the wilderness to found their new anti
Athens, their rustic Utopia, and taking with them the req
uisite myrtle branches and sacrificial utensils. They are
"off to the Birds," in search of apragmosyn? and release
from litigious, exhausting Athens, from the wear-and
tear of that imperialistic dither which Greeks call poly
pragmosyn?. Here, among the Birds, they hope to find a
new pou st?, a natural, pleasant, comfortable human life
whose content is both idyllic and hedonistic; here perhaps
they can reforge their links with the earth, with the olive
and vine, among the nomoi?the grazing pastures?of the
Birds.
But they take with them what they are unaware of, the
corrosive, ineradicable strain of a national?and, for Aris
tophanes, I believe, a genetically human?character. And
their motive is, as they say, Eros?the er?s of the good life,
la vita dolce, it might seem at first, but an er?s which
realizes itself in monstrously new dimensions, as the
swiftly
daimon of their own nature as Athenians and mortals. In a
famous passage
Thucydides sketches the background of the
Peloponnesian War by deftly revealing the national charac
teristics of the chief adversaries, Athens and Sparta. On
the one side is Spartan apragmosyn?4?a. traditional con
servatism, distrustful of all innovation, governed by an aus
4
The complex and important relationships between apragmosyn?
and polypragmosyn?, between h?sychia and pleonexia, is amply and
ably discussed by Victor Ehrenberg in an article of considerable
importance for Athenian fifth-century history, "Polypragmosyn?: A
Study in Greek Politics,,, JHS lxvii (1947), 46 ff.My summary here is
essentially only a pr?cis of Ehrenberg's close and subtle analysis of
the key terms. Cf. also Gommes Commentary on Thucydides, vol. 1,
160 ff. For apragmosyn? see Wilhelm Nestle "AnPArMOSTNH (Zu
Thukydides II, 63)," Philologus 81 (1925-26), pp. 129-40.
American polypragmosyn??not unrelated to, nor essentially dif
ferent from Thucydides* account of Athenian polypragmosyn??
has constantly struck acute foreign observers of American life. See,
for instance, de Tocqueville (Vol. I, p. 249): "No sooner do you
set foot upon American ground, than you are stunned by a kind of
tumult. is in motion. . . ." Or Henri Herz, Mes vo
Everything
yages en Am?rique: "A feverish activity seems to obsess these inhabit
ants of North America." Or Alistair Cooke in One Mans America:
"America may end in spontaneous combustion, but never in apathy,
inertia, or uninventiveness."
Plate 2
tere military discipline of restraint; a quietism of policy

which verges, it seems, on apathy, but based upon the old
Greek sense of a natural dike of boundaries and behavior
against which it was hybris, or polypragmosyn?, to tres
pass. On the other side is Athenian polypragmosyn?, that
divine, metaphysical restlessness and discontent, that en
terprising meddlesome arrogance of mind and hand that

made the Athenians both the bane and wonder of the
Greek world. Here is how the Corinthians describe the
Athenians:
The Athenians are addicted to innovation, and

their designs are characterized by swiftness alike in
conception and execution; you Spartans have a
genius for keeping what you have, accompanied by

a total want of innovation, and when forced to
act you never go far enough. But the Athenians
are adventurous beyond their power, and daring
beyond their judgment, and in danger they are
confident . . . there is swift
[cvc'?ttiSc?]. Moreover,
ness on their side as against procrastination on
yours; are never at home, are never far
they you
from it; for they hope by their absence to extend
their acquisitions; ... to
you fear endanger what
you have left behind. are swift to follow up
They
a and slow to recoil from a reverse. . . .
success,
A scheme is with them a positive
unexecuted loss, a
successful enterprise a comparative failure. The
failure created by the miscarriage of an enterprise
is soon filled by fresh hopes, for they alone are
able to call a thing hoped for a thing got, by the
speed with which they act on their resolutions.
... To describe their character in a word, one
might truly say that they were born into the world
to take no rest themselves and to give none to
others.
[Thuc. 1, 70 ff.]
The convergence between this description of Athenian

national character and Aristophanes' Pisthetairos and Euel
sure we are dealing with

pides is so close that we can be
cultural commonplaces, a stock but schematically accurate
configuration of traits. Pisthetairos is unmistakably Athenian

man, just as he is also?in his closeness to other Aristo
phanic heroes, but especially Dikaiopolis and Trygaeus
and Lysistrata?Dionysiac man. Energy, lustiness, enter
prise, chicanery, rascality, ingenuity, and restless, inquisi
tive, innovative intelligence?these are his nature. No less a
part of his nature is the other side of the same coin?that
mischievous meddlesomeness, that insatiability ("a scheme
unexecuted is with them a positive loss, a successful enter
prise a comparative failure"), that metaphysical discon
tent that makes Athenian man and the imperial city the
new giants of a contemporary Gigantomachy. These two
Athenians, as Aristophanes shows them, are viewed as be
ing at war with their very condition; they are rebels against
mortal finitude?a rebellion which in Greek terms neces
sarily means a war against the gods who impose finitude
upon us, who are the limits we feel and suffer. In political
terms, polypragmosyn? is the very pith and spirit of Athe
nian enterprise, its dynamic of pleonexia, the expansive hy
bris of energy and power in a spirited people; an er?s or
libido, a libido dominandi.
No sooner does Pisthetairos confront the hostility of the
Birds than he begins to realize his daimon, to "become the
thing he is." The war-weary dropout searching for idyllic
apragmosyn? falls away, and is replaced by that miracle
of ponerla?comic rascality?that Pisthetairos actually is.
But it is a poner?a of intelligence; it is his charismatic yvw/xr/,
his cunning intellect, that dumbfounds the stupid and apa
thetic Birds. He dazzles them with a dream they have never
dared to dream?a dream worked out in a stunning se
quence of quick wit, political inven
fantasy, mythological
tion, and god-defying daring. Such is his nature. Set an
Athenian among rustic and peaceful Birds, and he will
instantly sprout wings, harangue and dazzle the gaping
Birds to follow him, the new giant, in his assault on Olym
pus, borne aloft on the soaring wings of his own ethereal
blarney, his calculating hybris, and his ravenous er?s.
For it is above all Eros that propels him, and Cloud
cuckooland is Eros' capitol-in-the-air, the great objective

bastion of what can only be called an erotic politics of
practical fantasy, the real terminus of a politics which aims
at the impossible.
By fantasy politics I mean what we used
to mean when we spoke of "shooting for the moon," when
we werewithin shooting distance of it; a politics that re
fuses all the old modalities and that, deliberately and pas
sionately, coolly and erotically, risks everything it has in
the hope of winning more. In short, the politics of insatiable
a world where world-conquest, or
greed?of pleonexia?in
something like it, lay within shooting distance. But the
for world conquest conceals a galactic, and ulti
hunger
mately, a universal hunger. It has, as Thucydides' Alcibiades
effectively says, no terminus; it must always expand. If
the horizon always recedes, the hope of overreaching it
never dies. This is what Imean by a politics of Eros.
No other play of Aristophanes, not even Lysistrata, is so
pervaded, so saturated by the language of desire. Er?s,
erast?s, and over the note of
epithumia, pothos?over again
desire is struck, given constant visual dimension and the
stress that only great poetry can confer. Thus, at the very
center of the play, in the great first parabasis, radiating
forwards and backwards over the whole work, is the cos
mogonie presiding presence of primeval Eros?"the golden,
the gleaming, the whirlwind Love on shining wings"?an
cestor of the Birds and oldest of the gods, the very prin
ciple embodied by Cloudcuckooland. And this same Love
is present too at the culmination of the play?the "holy
marriage" or hieros gamos of Pisthetairos and Basileia.
"Sing Hymen, Hymenaios O," cries the chorus, in celebra
tion the nuptials
of of the new lord of heaven, whose
bridal chariot is driven by "shimmering Love on gleaming
wings," just as Love once drove the bridal car of Hera and
Zeus. "What was the motive that brought Pisthetairos and
Euelpides to the birds?" asks the Chorus, and the Hoopoe
answers simply, "Eros. Eros of your life, er?s to live with
you always," a point previously made (135-36) by both
Pisthetairos and Euelpides: they came in need, craving an
er?s for pleasures they cannot find in Athens. So too all, or
all, of the interlopers from earth, who come to
nearly
Cloudcuckooland, come in one or another of the various

moods of unsatisfied desire: greed, want, poverty, lust, the
quest for power. And Aristophanes makes the point abso
lutely explicit. It is want?the want that in Greek thought
always underlies desire, the mortal imperfection, the human
craving that can only be fulfilled briefly and is always
renewed, the craving whose physical model and sanction
is sexual love?that all the interlopers share. Kinesias en
ters for instance in a parodied plagiarism from Anacreon:
"Because of Eros I flutter heavenwards on light wings."
"Don't you know, Pisthetairos," cries the messenger from
earth, "how many men revere your name, how many hu
man lovers (epaor??) of Cloudcuckooland there are?" The
young parricide enters Cloudcuckooland in an amorous
rage to beat his father. "I'm in love with (ep?>) the laws of
the Birds. I'm batty about the birds and I'm all in a flutter
of desire (irerofiai Kai ?ovAo/xcu) to live with you, and I want
(KaTriOvfi?))your nomoil" No matter who they are, or where
they come from, it is want and desire they have in common,
and Cloudcuckooland is the terminus of their desire. There
they will be winged and enabled to achieve what their mor
tal winglessness, their wretched limping humanity, forbids
them.
Now this Eros is not only metaphysical and sexual and

material; it is also profoundly political. This is a play, after
all, which equates imperial Athens with Cloudcuckooland,
which is haunted by a political fatigue and war-weariness,
and whose ultimate Great Design is an empire organized to
wrest world-supremacy from the gods. Just as the Atheni
ans once organized the Delian to prosecute the
league
war against the Great
King of Persia, and then established
an empire over their allies, so Pisthetairos recruits the birds
to a crusade against the gods?a crusade in which he will
ultimately establish himself as universal tyrant. (It is no
accident that this play ends with the roasting of jailbirds
for the wedding-feast of Pisthetairos and Miss Universe.)
Across the stage strut an Athenian inspector and other
officials, Athenian charlatans and freeloaders; and the de
vices of Pisthetairos' crusade are precisely those of the
Athenian empire. And this political stress?this theme of
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Gift of E. P. Warren.
Plate 3
political passion?is expressed as a part of the pervasive
language of Eros. There is nothing peculiarly Aristophanic

in this; Aristophanes is simply making use of a residual
possibility in the word er?s, applying it straightforwardly,

and without the slightest strain, to political life. Politics
itself was, to the mind of the period, so pervasively pas
sionate that it could naturally be brought under the rubric
of Eros. Or rather Eros, specifically and indeed commonly,
was applied, from Aeschylus to Plato and Aristotle, to ac
tivities and traits which we would normally classify as
political: the love of glory, envy, lust for power,

ambition,
partisan greed for money
zeal, or conquest. The greatest
single metaphor or
symbol of this political Eros is of course
Helen herself?the seductive and destructive phantom that
in the Agamemnon (681 ff.) lures luxury-loving and ambi
tious men to destruction by tyranny and war, and who still
floats, like a deadly epiphany of political Aphrodite or
Eros, across the Euripidean corpus, from Hecuba to The
Trojan Women to the Iphigeneia at Aulis?the ultimate
love-object of imperial pleonexia.5
5
The instances are too numerous to be cited in full. But dubious
readers should consult thepassage from the Agamemnon (716 ff. )
mentioned above, in which Helen is compared to a gende lion-cub
whose feral and murderous daimon is not yet revealed. She is also
called, in a related figure "the spirit of unruffled calm [yaX?vas],
Love's flower ["Epwros ?vOos] that stings the heart." Then, says Aes
chylus, she "swerves from her course, blasting with ruin" (736 ff.).
This epiphany of Eros?lovely but also lethal; lethal because desir
able, the object of desire? is later, at Eumenides 861 ff. transformed
in Athena's injunction to the Furies into the older, nobler er?s of
true and honorable philotimia. "Do not," says Athena, "implant in
my people the spirit of civil war in mutual aggression. Let their
warfare be without the city, and without stint for him in whom
there lives the dangerous passion for glory" [deivbs evicXeias 'epos].
Aeschylus is aware of the dangerousness of the passion, but he could
hardly have conceived of the excesses to which Athena's advice here
would be carried by the policies of Pericles and his successors. But
in Euripides, Helen appears as the erotic figure of imperialism incar
nate. Thus in Hecuba Helen is again and again (269, 440 ff., 630 ff. )
invoked as the destructive angel of the Trojan (i.e., Peloponnesian)
War, making Hecuba protest against the innocent Polyxena's death
by crying out, "O gods, / to see there, in her place, Helen of Sparta, /
sister of the sons of Zeus, whose lovely eyes / made ashes of the
happiness of Troy." In The Trojan Women the mere sight of Helen
is enough to make Menelaus, previously eager to kill her, drop his
But it is above all during

the Peloponnesian War, and in
Euripides, Aristophanes, and Thucydides especially, that
the language of Eros becomes pervasively, overwhelmingly
political. The boldest figure of all is Euripidean; in a pas
sage in the Iphigeneia at Aulis, for instance, Agamemnon
asks: "What Aphrodite has made this Greek army so pas
mad to sail against the barbarians?" And he
sionately
means, not the goddess, but the lust?the libido dominandi
?she stands for: "What lust (for conquest or wealth) has
driven this army mad?" In Thucydides it is the
precisely
same, as even a brief glance at Thucydides' account of the
Athenian debate
about the Syracusan expedition makes
transparently clear. Nicias had urged moderation; do not,
he pleaded, fall sick of a fatal passion for what lies out of
your reach [SwepwTa? iw ?ttOvtcov]. But the Athenians were
not delivered, says Thucydides, of their passion for the
voyage [to eTn?vfxovv toO ttXov], instead they desired it
more
[topurjvTo] eagerly. And, Thucydides goes on, a passion
sword, helpless against her beauty?Euripides' ironically bitter way

of saying that the er?s for which the war was fought is still, even
when discovered deceptive and destructive, too strong for human
will or reason to resist. And if Helen in the Euripidean Helen is a
palinodie figure, the whole purpose of that witty and elegant play is
to demonstrate that the Helen for whom the war was vainly fought
was really, like the end for which the Peloponnesian War was
fought, only an alluring phantom: ten years of toil and death for
nothing, a shimmering, erotic will-o'-the-wisp. The real name of that
Helen is of course the same as Aristophanes' Basileia (imperial sov
ereignty) or Thucydides' arche (empire). Men love Helen, hunger
for her with a consuming passion, because she is the image of abso
lute power, of satisfied desire?the desire that all other men hunger
for, once obtained (cp. the debate between Eteocles and Polyneices
in Phoenissae or Eur. frag. 850: r? y?p rvpavvls iravTo?ev To?ei5ercu /
?eivo?s ?ptao?v, f?s <pv\aKr?ov w?pi?"For tyranny is always the target of
the arrows of terrible desires, which must be warded off." )
Finally, we might note parenthetically that Aristophanes?in what
strikes me as almost certainly one of his many deliberate echoes of
Aeschylus?referred to Alcibiades as no less a lion, no less lethal and
alluring, than Helen (Frogs, 1431-32, also cited in Plutarch Alcib.,
16,2:
M?\i<rra p?v X?ovra pi? 'v ir?Xei rp?cpeiv.

Vir7jp T lV.
7?V ?' KTpa<j>j?TIS TO?S TpOTTO?S
A lion should not be raised in the city.

But if you raise him, you must cater to his ways.
seized upon all ["Ep<o?hlireve toU 7ra<7iv]to make the expedi

tion. For the older men were confident, and the young men
were led on by longing [tt?0?>] to see faraway places, and
they were confident [cvc?ttiSc?] of a safe return. Thus, owing
to their excessive desire for more [Si? rrjv ayav iw ttXu?v?uv
imdvfi?av], even those who opposed it kept quiet. And the
general mass of the soldiers hoped to gain money at once
and to acquire an inexhaustible mine of pay for the future.
It is Plutarch who adds the crowning touch, telling how
Alcibiades stood on the poop of the ship, with his golden
shield his device?a
and figure of Eros-armed-with-the
thunderbolt, as the great armada, sped on by high dreams
and high hopes [eucXwiSes], under the sign of an imperial
and coercive Eros, sailed away to its miserable doom.
Now this expedition, its sailing, is the immediate context
of the Birds?a. play written after the sailing but before the
doom was known. And, like Thucydides, Aristophanes
carefully records the terrible, anxious ?lan of military Eros
?with its undertone of doom to come?in the fantasy poli
tics of the city of Desire and pie-in-the-sky, Cloudcuckoo
land.
Underlying and informing all these manifestations of

Eros is, I believe, a visual pattern of
unifying Dionysiac
design. In an interesting passage of the Phaedrus?the great
dialogue of the soul's aspiration to take wing, to sprout the
pinions of metaphysical love?Plato remarks: "Now this
condition, fair boy ... is called Love [Eros] by men, but
when you hear what the gods call it, perhaps because of
your youth you will laugh. But some of the Homeridae, I
believe, repeat two verses on Love from the spurious poems
of Homer, one of which is very indecent [v?pio-TiKov irdw
. . .]. it as follows:
They sing
Mortals call him winged Love . . .

["Epwra ttottjv?v],
but the immortals call him the Winged One [Ur?paT3],
because he
must needs grow Wings [Si? irrepo^vrop3 av?y Krjv].*
6 252b.
Phaedrus,
The word Pter?s or Winged One clearly contains the in

decent allusion, since there is no other conceivable inde
cency in the lines. And I suggest, as delicately but as firmly
as I can, that Pter?s means the phallos.7 Gods,
precisely
who view things sub specie aeternitatis, are
notoriously
realistic, even cynical. And what to mortal eyes is the mys
terious shimmering figure of winged Eros, is to the gods
merely a curious natural phenomenon. In love, in the erect
phallos, human flesh rises on its own, defies gravity; it
reaches for the skies. The erect phallos is a winged phallos,
and the figure of the winged
phallos is of great icono
graphie antiquity, commonly used as an apotropaic amulet
against the Evil Eye or sterility. You can even find it sculp
tured on medieval churches, a legged phallos with bells; in
Christian Art this ancient Pter?s survives most vividly as
the winged serpent which the Christian knight, St. George,
so and righteously slays.8 Now there is nothing
eternally
here to surprise or trouble. Greek comedy is a Dionysiac
art, and we know that the comic phallos?either erect and
monstrous as in the ithyphallic procession of Phales?or
huge, dangling and flaccid as in surviving figures of comic
slaves?is a constant presence in Old Comedy. How else,
for instance, can one explain, except by the comic phallos,
the stings of the chorus in Aristophanes' Wasps? Does any
body still seriously believe that these were stingless wasps,
or that their sting was a lance rather than an erection at
the ready? And how else can one explain the superb mastur
bation scene in the Knights? The point need not be la
bored. My purpose is simply to point out the possibility?or
rather the probability?that this comic masterpiece devoted
7
See Appendix II.
8
For discussion of the St. George legend cf. Joseph Fontenrose,
Python, pp. 515-20. According to Fontenrose, St. George is "an heir
of the ancient Tammuz. And like Tammuz he extended his fertiliz
ing powers from cattle to crops: he became Green George, a vegeta
tion spirit. So his replacement of Tammuz as the fighter of herd
molesting beasts contributed to the foundation of the combat
legend." If Fontenrose is right, we have then in the medieval Chris
tian version of St. George a splendid example of what Robert Graves
has termed "iconotropy"?the cultural conversion of a given myth to
the very different modes and ideas of a different culture.
to Eros made generous and purposeful use of the comic

phallos. Thus I suggest that most of those pests from Earth
arriving, panting with desire, at Cloudcuckooland, want
wings, or bigger wings, for their phalloi. They enter either
erect in search of satisfaction, or perhaps in monstrous
detumescence or puny erection, or in the hope
pathetically
of permanent erection, which is of course tantamount to
divinity. This would both give pictorial point and potency

to the great theme of Eros and make
triumphantly manifest
the rampant Dionysiac desire on which the hero rises hun
grily heavenward, just as it also underlines his poignantly
certain fall from divine bliss. So Dionysus dies, dies to be
reborn, then dies again; and the pattern of his life is the
endlessly alternating rhythm of drunkenness and sobriety,
divinity and death, comic bliss and tragedy, tumescence
and detumescence. Because this is comedy, not
tragedy,
the stress is on tumescence, rejuvenation, upon the hero's
effort to mount the skies; but the stress bears the shadow
of a more comprehensive pattern?the shape of the doom
his brief divinity implies and requires; the feel of the earth
to which all this vivid aspiration must
someday return.
If Cloudcuckooland is the city of imperial Eros, it is also
an organized fantasy: a fantastic Babylon of words, with
walls as solid as brick, an impregnable sus
fantasy-city,
pended by the sheer power of persuasion and greed, by
7rXeove??a,in mid-air, in the "country" of Chaos. Chaos, of
course, is the "matrix," a fr. <?>,
primeval yawning [xô? x<?
XoiVo), "to yawn," "gape"; cf. 20, 51, 61, 165, 263, 308, 501,
etc.] abyss, prior to all differentiation, beneath sex, before
Earth and Heaven, the country of Becoming, which contains
all possibilities. There in the waste of Tartaros, says the
Chorus, winged Eros commingled with this yawning hole
and conceived the Birds. And this means that the Birds
are specifically and chaos-creatures. Hence their
genetically
characteristic avine habit is "gaping"; Euelpides is terrified
of the hideous gaping of the Sandpiper's huge beak [61,
"AnoXXov oL7TOTp?7rai , Tov xa<Tp.r?ikaTosi], and Pisthetairos warns
the birds that his Great Idea is feasible only if they can
break themselves of their habit of flying around with gap
ing beaks [165, p,rj 7repnr?T0-6e Travrayri Kexqvoresi], a habit
which degrades them, which makes them look foolish. But

they also wear Love's wings and are themselves symbols
of Love, the typical present which the lover gives his be
loved?"a coot, a a little Persian cock,"?an
goose, image,
surely of Pter?s. Theculmination of all these equations of

the Birds with chaos-creatures occurs when Pisthetairos and
Euelpides make their first appearance with wings. Pisthe
tairos, in a splendid pun on the word xnv (goose: cp. K?xnva
pf. of xa< ?>, to gape) describes Euelpides as the consum
mate chaotic "sucker"?a silly, cackling goose.9 The Birds
are, in short?like Pisthetairos and Euelpides (and mortals
generally)?hybrids, mixed breeds, beasts [cf. 67, 97 ff.]
who soar; aspiring suckers.10 Because Love and Chaos are
the oldest of powers, the sovereignty of the world belongs
to them by right of primogeniture. As the world progres
sively interbred, proceeding from differentiation to differ
entiation, their ancient sovereignty has lapsed, usurped by
the who are, as Pisthetairos observes, "mere usurpers
gods
and of very recent date." In a world ruled by the arriviste
Olympians, the primeval country of Chaos has shrunk to
its miserable present proportions, a small band of void
separating earth and the bright Aither or
( upper air ) of the
9
For this observation, which I had altogether missed, I am in
debted to the sharp Aristophanic eye and scholarship of G. J. Her
ington.
10
An essay could be written on Aristophanes' use of the concept
of "gaping," and its application, in comic derision, to the Athenian
citizenry in the ecclesia, gaping, slack-jawed, wonder-struck with
amazement and greed by the eloquent demagogue appeals of ac
complished political rhetoricians. See, for instance, Knights 1111-119,
where Demos is addressed: "Fair is your empire, and all men fear
you as a tyrant. Yet it is easy to lead you astray, and you delight in
being coddled and deceived, and you gape at the person who is al
. . .)." See
ways addressing you (rrpbs t6v re X?yopr' ?ei Kexrjvas
also the speech of Agoracritus at Knights 1316 ff. or the fragment
of The Babylonians recorded by Athenaeus (3, 33 ) :
?v?xacicov e?s ckckttos ?fi<f>e

pedrera
birria?levais KOyxaiav ?w? r i/ ?vdpaicojv . . .
Everyone of them gaped wide [while listening to an ora

tor] for all the world like mussels roasting on the coals . . .
William Arroivsmith 139
Olympians. This air?this small residual but strategically

located parcel of what was once the boundless territory of
Chaos?is the country of the Birds.
rightful This is why
Pisthetairos indignantly asks the goddess Iris by what
right she trespasses against a foreign country and Chaos
8ta7reTe? / St? 7roA.e<t)? ttJ? a??orpta? /cat rov cf.
[1218: tt}? \aovs',
also the line at 192]. If they will
identical only exploit
their strategic strip of Chaos, the Birds can starve out the
gods by means of a "Melian famine," (just as the Athenians
once starved the Megarians by blockade and reduced the
Melians to submission). Cut the gods off from the ascend
ing aroma of burnt offerings on which they live, and they
will be forced to sue for Peace. policy, in
Pisthetairos'
short, is deliberate chaotic imperialism, founded on a pol
icy of unimpeded power-politics. When Pisthetairos tri
proposes that Cloudcuckooland will be a city
umphantly
of buoyant brick, as solid as Babylon, Euelpides exclaims,
"Kebriones and what a mighty and terrible
Porphyrion,
city" [o)? afiepSaX?ov to 7roA?7/Aa] ; he is clearly apostrophizing
it in his very language as the new Hellenic Gigantopolis.
Pisthetairos himself deliberately warns Iris later (1243-52)
that a new Gigantomachy is in progress; that if Zeus resists
he will face not one giant, the formidable Porphyrion (cf.
Pindar, Pyth. 8, 10 ff. ) but a rebellious man?himself?who
will lead six hundred Porphyrions (i.e., six hundred rails)
against him. The chaotic legions will in fact be captained
by a new Giant, Pisthetairos mustering against Olympus
far greater power than that deployed in the mythical
Gigantomachy. And the Birds in this respect is the spec
tacle of innocent and peaceful physis?a, physis which once
expressed itself in h?sychia and apragmosyn??corrupted

by superior intelligence whose motive power is man's meta
physical discontent, his lust for divinity?the discontent
and er?s written into his physis and nakedly revealed in
this chaotic epiphany of Athenian man and man generally.11
11
Cp. Hobbes Leviathan (I, 11) for the generic er?s which I be
lieve Aristophanes here has in mind:
. . . For there is no such Finis ultimus, (utmost ayme,)

nor Summum Bonum, (greatest Good,) as is spoken of in
Behind the relationsof Pisthetairos and the Birds we are

meant to glimpse, a set of topical allusions
not to the Si
cilian expedition, but the whole process by which the fan
tastic imperial city of Athens had developed from a tradi
tional Greek polis whose values were grounded in the
Attic earth and a sense of sophrosyn? learned by harsh
experience of a culture of poverty, into the monstrous,
tyrant-city of Hellas: a political epiphany of organized
Titanism, organized chaos at war with heaven and with
man's very destiny. The perspective is glancingly but com
prehensively historical. Behind Pisthetairos lies not merely
the erotic politics of Alcibiades, but the triumphant tech
nical intelligence that had secularized and rationalized
Athenian life and eventually created the superb and sinis
ter mechanism of the Athenian empire, a nearly autono
mous system?so autonomous that it literally reduced its
politicians to the bad faith they characteristically exhibit.
In some real sense they are not free. They are incapable of
freedom, given the mechanism of the polis which they
cannot control. Behind Pisthetairos, that is, we are meant
to see all those Athenian statesmen who, by force of mind
[St?vota] and power of speech [X?yoc], had brought the im
the Books of the old Morall Philosophers. Nor can a man

any more live, whose Desires are at an end, than he, whose
Senses and Imaginations are at a stand. Felicity is a
continuall progresse of the desire, from one object to an
other; the attaining of the former, being still but the way
to the later. The cause whereof is, That the object of mans
desire, is not to enjoy once onely, and for one instant of
time; but to assure for ever, the way of his future de
sire. And therefore the voluntary actions, and inclinations
of all men, tend, not onely to the procuring, but also to
the assuring of a contented life; and differ onely in the
way: which ariseth partly from the diversity of passions,
in divers men; and partly from the difference of the knowl
edge, or opinion each one has of the causes, which pro
duce the effect desired.
So that in the first place, I put for a generall inclina
tion of all mankind, a perpetuall and restlesse desire of
Power after power, ceaseth
that onely in Death. And the
cause of this, is not
alwayes that a man hopes for a more
intensive delight, than he has already attained to; or that
he cannot be content with a moderate power: but because
he cannot assure the power and means to live well, which
he hath present, without the acquisition of more.
perial city to its pitch of perfection. For in this Athenian

empire, there was something wholly new in Greek experi
ence; here men felt, for the first time, that, if intellect
were hybris, it was a hybris which promised to deliver
them from their old bondage to the earth and make them
gods. The final destructive angel of this ultimate city was of
course Alcibiades, whose charisma and power were all
expressed, as I observed earlier, in the chryselephantine
device he wore on his shield as the great Athenian armada
set sail for Sicily. But the relevant passage from Plutarch
(Alcibiades, 17,1 ff.) deserves to be cited in detail:
Even in Pericles', the Athenians

lifetime had de
sired . . . But the man who
[iireOvfiow] Sicily.
fanned into flame [ava^?c&i?] this er?s of theirs, and
persuaded [ndo-as] them ... to subdue it utterly,
was Alcibiades. He persuaded [ir?aas] the people
to have great hopes . . . IXttLCuv] and he
[fieydXa
himself desired still more [air?? re fieifovwv
. . . The men were at once car
?pey?fievos]. young
ried away on the wings of such hopes [raU IXir?cnv
. . . He had a shield made for
?irrjpfievovs]. golden
himself, bearing no ancestral device, but Eros
armed-with-the-thunderbolt [?XX3 "Epura icepav
vo<f>6pov].The reputable men of the city viewed

these proceedings with loathing, and they feared
his contemptuous and lawless spirit [irapavofi?av], as
tyrannical and monstrous [aXX?Kora].
In the historical context of the Birds?the anxious shudder

ing slack between the sailing of the armada and the doom
which overtook it?I wonder how any perceptive Athenian
could have failed to discern the parallels between Pisthe
tairos and those statesmen whose fatal work had culminated
in the erotic politics of Alcibiades?? icaA?c?whose device
is Eros wielding the power of Zeus?and the comic epiph
any which closes this
play. This is not to say that Cleisthenes
or Themistocles12 or Pericles could have foreseen this cul
12
Themistocles is called v-XeopeKreav by Herodotus (8, 112, 1).
mination of their political creation; indeed, the politics of

Alcibiades are quite unPericlean projects13 prosecuted with
Periclean genius?but this is partly Aristophanes' point.
Men, not being gods, cannot see the consequences of their
own intellectual designs; the hybris of their intellect, the
power of abstraction, cuts them away from the experience
that might disclose the hidden daimon. Like Oedipus, they
are blinded by knowledge from anticipating the doom in
their own designs. The cruel abstraction of their logos, cut
off from experience, makes them confident [evc'Airi&?].Their
power deceives and, finally, destroys them.
As for the Birds, behind them we can glimpse, first of
all, the nostalgic vision of a golden age; an Athens un
tempted by Eros, content with the harsh horizons of neces

sity, of innocent and unaggressive physis, still at one with
the world around it; the Ufe of the vine, or the wheat?
Dionysiac life or Demeter's thesmos. These express, these
131 have in mind not merely Alcibiades* part in advocating the

Sicilian Expedition (which Thucydides clearly regarded as a fatal
from the Periclean policy of seeking no further conquests),
departure
but'Alcibiades' reversion to the idea of Athenian land-hegemony in
Greece?an idea abandoned after Tolmides' disastrous defeat at
Coronea in 447/6. At least this would seem to be the natural read
ing of Plutarch (Alcib. 15, 4): "However, he [Alcibiades] advised
the Athenians to assert dominion on land too, and to maintain in
action the oath regularly propounded to the ephebes in the sanc
tuary of Agraulos. They swear that they will regard wheat, barley,
the vine, and the olive as the natural boundaries of Attica, and they
are thus to view the whole habitable and fruitful earth as
taught
their own/' Needless to say, this may have been more rhetorical
than military, but the emphasis is, I am convinced, exceptionally
revealing. Alcibiades* politics were effectively based not only upon
an appeal to the young, but to all those who had suffered from the
Periclean policy of writing off Attica in favor of Athens?that is, the
discontented yeomanry. And while Alcibiades' shrewdness in per
sonally reconducting the march to Eleusis (and thereby honoring

the goddesses he had been charged with dishonoring) is obvious, we
should, I think, see his action as part of a consistent politics?a
politics whose success cannot be doubted in view of Alcibiades'
persistent popularity and the enormous general enthusiasm felt for
the temporary re-establishment of the Eleusinian mysteries. That
such a politics could prove so powerful in the late fifth century is
perhaps the most eloquent testimony we possess to the depth of
attachment felt by Athenians generally to the earth, from whose
culture and values Periclean policy had effectively evicted?but not
really alienated?them.
are, their life. Then, under the blandishments of political

suasion, the Birds become estranged from apragmosyn?
and h?sychia; they are tempted by a dream of Eros. And
at this point we can glimpse, in something like historical
perspective, the way in which the island-allies of post
Persian Athens surrender their collective strength into the
hands of the persuasive tyrant-city and deliver themselves
up to the Great Design of Pisthetairos. Allies, then sub
jects; winged and intoxicated by the persuasion of the new
politics of Eros, they sentence themselves to serve in the
aerial squadrons of the aspiring, celestial Pisthetairos. And,
finally, the Birds stand for the dream-intoxicated flighty
Athenian demos itself, the anonymous avine democracy,
agape with wonder and desire, and prepared to renounce
h?sychia forever for the unknown frontiers of boundless
conquest. "We cannot," said Alcibiades, arguing for the
Sicilian adventure, "fix the exact point at which our empire
shall stop; we have reached a position in which we must
not be content with retaining but must scheme to extend
it, for if we cease to rule others, we are in danger of being
ruled ourselves. Nor can you look at inaction [rb r?crvx?v]
from the same of view as others, unless are pre
point you
pared to change your habits and make them like

theirs."
(Thuc. 6, 18) Nicias, arguing against the expedition, said:
"I summon of the older men ... to remember how
any
rarely is to be had by desire [eTrtOvfita]and how often

success
by forethought [vpovola], and not to vote for war. Do not,
like the young men, indulge in hopeless passions for distant
impossibilities [SwepcoTac elvai t?v ?irovri?v]" (ibid. 6, 13).
Point for point, Aristophanes relentlessly forces home his
equation between the birds and the Athenians; like the
Athenians, the birds are natural "gapers"?gawking suckers,
as we might say?for the soaring blarney of Pisthetairos;
the Pelasgic wall becomes the Pelargic wall, the stockade
a storkade; and a whole host of individual Athenians of
avine peculiarities are rebaptized as birds. The equations
are relentless; whatever else Aristophanes' fantasy of Cloud
cuckooland may be, it is not escapist, but a fantasy-mirror
of Athenians, t&v aw?vTwv, sent into world
Svo-epwTas soaring
conquest by the erotic politics and winged words of Pisthe

tairos and his comic sidekick, the and sanguine

cocky
Euelpides.
The rhetoric of this erotic politics is, of course, abso
lutely to
central
the play. The fantasy-city is created by
the sheer power of speech, fired by a fatal er?s for conquest.
The result is a stunning epiphany of Logos and Peitho, in
carnate in the person of Pisthetairos. It is Pisthetairos' own
observation that it is precisely by words that men become
birds; they are winged by words ( 1436 ff.). To the Informer
who comes in quest of wings, Pisthetairos replies, "I wing
you by Words" 7rT?pw ae].
[Acywv
informer: And how do you wing men

by words?
PiSTHETAmos: All men are winged . . .

by words
Through words the mind soars [6 vovs re
/A Tca)pt?eTcu]
and the man is airborne [iwa?peTai t3 av0p<o7ro?].
In fifth-century Athens words are notoriously the instru

ment of political power;14 and if birds have wings to fly,
men, no less chaotic than the birds, soar by the power of
mind and techn?, by the inspiration and intoxication of
speech. It is precisely because the controlling intelligence is
abstract, no longer rooted in the ground of experience or
14
That words were, in the latter half of the fifth century, the most
effective single instrument of political power, the means whereby
the Athenian assembly could be swayed and manipulated, is a tru
ism confirmed by both explicit testimony as well as the rise of
sophistic (i.e., rhetorical) education. An example of the Athenian
attitude toward political eloquence can be found in Hecuba's des
pairing praise of eloquence, whose power exceeds the claims of
justice, compassion, or friendship:
Why, why
do we make so much of knowledge, struggle so hard
to get some little skill not worth the effort?
But persuasion, the only art whose power
is absolute, worth any price we pay
we totally neglect? And so we fail;
we lose our hopes . . .
[Euripides, Hec. 814 ff.]

in Attic earth, that words such power to create not

have
only political fantasy, this play, but fantasy politics,
like
like that of Alcibiades. In words anything is possible, even
the dream of divinity. A politics rooted in reality, in things
as-they-are, in true physis, is the only alternative to fantasy
politics; just as reality, the experience of failed fantasy, of
crashing to earth, is the only ultimate consequence and
conclusion to fantasy politics. Cloudcuckooland is the su
preme creation of intellect and eloquence, and Cloudcuck
ooland and Athens are one. The final choral ode sums it
all up:
Beneath the clock in a courtroom

down in the Land of Gab,
We saw a weird race of people
earning their bread by blab.
Their name is the Claptraptummies.

Their only tool is talk.
They sow and reap and shake the figs
by dexterous yakkity-yak.
Their tongues and twaddle mark them off,

barbarians every one,
but the worst of all are in the firm
of GORGIAS & SON.
But from this bellyblabbing tribe,

one custom's come to stay:
in Athens, when men sacrifice,
they cut the tongue away.
[1694-1705]
And promptly, pat to his cue, enters the final messenger,

drunk on fulsome heraldese, to hail in baroque obsequious
ness the ascension to the throne of Zeus of the Athenian
Pisthetairos, lord of the Logos, the winged winger of words,
fantasist of the impossible. In place of the war-weary old
dropout in search of apragmosyn? among the Birds, who
saw in the life of the Birds a existence, ap
bridegroom's
pears, in stunning epiphany, utterly rejuvenated, the young

and handsome bridegroom himself, and beside him the
gorgeous golden figure of Miss Universe, Zeus' mistress
Basileia, universal conquest.
It is the politics of fantasy, I must insist, that is Aris
tophanes' point here, not, as Professor Whitman would have
it, "the anatomy of ... a world where there
nothingness
can be no tragic reversal or recognition, the world of po
ner?a and the self, where the persuasive and manipulable
word is king. . . . The theme of the Birds is itself
absurdity
... it is about No of can
meaninglessness."15 one, course,
quarrel with the enormous fact of eloquence and language

in the play, a sustained tissue of ambiguities and soaring
rhetorical paronomasia. But Professor Whitman is too quick
to discard the relation of language to fantasy politics, and
the prevalence of fantasy politics in contemporary political
life. When Professor Whitman remarks that "The Birds is
strangely free of political concerns" and that here "comedy
seems to detach itself, to a degree, in search of a broader
and more symbolic scheme,"16 he is drawn irresistibly to
what seems to me his quite wrong-headed conclusion, that
words here are everything. They are, of course, in the sense
that words can do anything, that they can make the impos
sible possible. But they are above all else the omnipotent
instruments of a politics which, both in its topicality and its
existential timelessness, is the real subject of the play. That
politics is, as fantasy, a disease of the human spirit, a spirit
represented, incarnated, in the Athenian imperial city with
a nakedness and clarity that gives the play its enduring
power.
For us
especially?we who belong to the coercive and
Faustian culture of the West?the play is peculiarly power
ful. For it is not only that our Faustian culture was born in
the Athenian imperialism of the late fifth century, but that
Aristophanes' portrayal of fantasy politics?its brilliance
and destructiveness, its fatal ambivalence?is the enduring,
we
the permanent problem of our own lives and culture. If
15
Cedric H. Whitman, Aristophanes and the Comic Hero (Cam
bridge,
16
1964), p. 173; 179.
Ibid., p. 169.
lack the tradition of sophistic eloquence, the forensic fire

of Periclean and post-Periclean Athens, the er?s on which
that eloquence fed has become, if anything, even more
acute in our own time because we are so seldom
precisely
aware of
it, because takewe for granted we
it so much
cannot grasp its erotic and Titanic origins. The Greeks?
Thucydides, Euripides, Aristophanes, Nicias, Alcibiades?
could all articulate it; they knew what they were dealing
with and they were, it would seem, aware of the risks. If
we lack the Athenian apotheosis of the tongue, we have
more than compensated for it by the boundless new tech
nical skills, by the hybris and confidence of technology and
mind, which can discover no impediment, no limit except
the very vastness of space to our unimpeded er?s, our own
libido dominandi. As Hannah Arendt has reminded us, it
is because we have nearly discovered an Archimedean
point by which we can act on the earth as though we dis
posed of terrestrial nature from outside, that we are in dan
ger of destroying, or losing, our own humanity: "All our
pride in what we can do will disappear into some kind of
mutation of the human race. . . . The conquest of space
and the science that made it possible have come perilously
close to this point. If they should ever reach it in earnest,
the of man would
stature not simply be lowered by all
standards we know of, but have been destroyed."17 The
danger is that we may not only forget our origins, but
actually surpass them, transcend them in a new biological
mutation. Our fantasy politics may become factual; we
may actually, if not literally, leave the earth behind, be
coming, as one futurist put it, Cyborgs or, ultimately, lat
tices of light.
To this terror Aristophanes' play cannot really speak, ex
cept as prophecy. To Athenians too, confident of their power
and technical skill, it must have seemed that space offered
no impediment to their hopes. The condition is at least
analogous. But the insistent use of the word er?s?the sense
of an erotic politics?suggests to me at least that, however
17Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York, 1968),

pp. 279-80).
fantasy-like imperial projects, Athenians

their had no real
sense that they had really escaped their chaotic origins.
Men too, like birds, are chaos-creatures, hybrids of earth
and heaven; and if the heavenly xyaxt?techn? guided by
intellect?is tempted to think itself divine, the swamp of its
origins always reclaims it. The Athenian confidence is
bolder, more aggressive, infinitely more proud than any
ancient Asiatic hybris, because it was a new and thor
conscious
hybris based upon intellect as the ma
oughly
nipulator of coercion. And this confidence is visible in the
Birds. But no less visible is the hard, stubborn reality of
terrestrial human nature and imperfection, the aching gap
between confident aspiration of mind and the man's im
placable clay feet.
Professor Whitman would not, of course, concur. Here,
he says:
. . .
lyrical fancy and vaporous superstructures of
wit and sophistry alternate with a trudging realism
which, for all it may bring us back to earth in a
never
sense, really wins the day; the fantasy goes
on with tireless rhythm, unperturbed by the drag
ging weights of what is usually called reality. If
the process were reversed, if soaring fancy foun
dered on ineluctable fact, one might take a com
mon-sense view, and the Birds might be taken as
to Brueghel's
similar "Fall of Icarus," where a
winged man has just fallen out of the sky into the
sea, his legs still visible, but nobody takes notice;
the ship sails on, and the peasant goes on driving
his furrow. Here is just the opposite: the balloon
never quite bursts; it just loses a little air and then
shoots higher. References to everyday familiarities
only feed the fantasy, through Peithetaerus' genius
for turning everything to advantage.18
I wonder. Not for an instant does Aristophanes let us

forget the essential metaphysical absurdity of his heaven
18
Whitman, op. cit., p. 171.
aspiring Ikaruses, from Pisthetairos himself to Kinesias to

Meton. They are all, without exception, kin to Trygaeus,
the Aristophanic archetype of Dionysiac man, the earth
bound comic hero soaring to heaven on his dung-beetle as
Euripides' Bellerophon once scaled Olympus on his winged
Pegasos. Wings are what everybody wants; but the want
begins in the brute fact of having feet. As Empson put it
in his poem "Aubade": "The heart of standing is you can
not fly." This is surely why Euelpides early in the play
explains how he and Pisthetairos (35) "have flown from
our native land . . ." [?veTrrofieaO3 Ik tyjs . . and
7rar/otSo? .],
comes thumping down on an absurdly lame comic dual,
". . . on our two little feet" . . When
[. ?/xô?v ttoSo?v].
Meton enters Cloudcuckooland, he pompously produces his
instruments and announces his intention (995)
surveying
"to . . . the and to out aerial
geometrize air, parcel your
acres . . . t6v / SieXeiv re Kara
[y (t??jiTprj<Tat ??pa v?mv yva?].
The entrance of Kinesias, willowy and splay-footed [ttoSo,
. . . acuAAov] is in striking contrast to his aerial
(1379),
hunger and pretensions. "On light wings I flutter Olympus
wards [?va7T TOfxaL 8r/ 7rpb<; "OXvfnrov 7rTepvyeo~<JL Kov<f>at?,
Trero/xat . . .] (1373), he sings in a loose adaptation from
Anakreon. "I yearn, I burn, thou knows't it well / to be a
lilting Philomel," to which Pisthetairos drily replies?"It'll
take a boatload of wings to get this poet off the ground."
Prophets, poets, statute-sellers?all come motivated by want,
by poverty, the hope of a handout, by hunger, or greed.
And it is want, deficiency that desires to be winged?the
earth-bound, trudging which, because it is earth
reality
bound and trudging, desperately wants wings. When they
first receive their wings themselves, Pisthetairos and Euel
pides mutually recognize their own absurdity?not merely
their ludicrous get-up as men-birds, but the theatrical shab
biness of their transformation. The fantasy here may soar,
but it is steadily pulled back and down by a clumsiness,
and an inexorable neediness that is a mockery of all the
winged words and Nephelococcygian ambitions. And the
reason is that Aristophanes wants to keep steadily before us
their existential status, the tension between their aspira
tions and their realities, their hybrid nature, half-Titan and
half-god, or giant and god in unstable equilibrium. It is the

same here as in tragedy: the comedian insists on the polar
tensions of man's hybrid nature no less than the tragedian.
One thinks, for instance, of Sophocles' Oedipus, with his di
vine hybris and pride of intellect and his mutilated feet; of
Philoctetes' divine bow and his putrid, festering foot. And
this is why, I suppose, the great parabasis, in superb poetry
which echoes with the resonance of every Greek poet from
Homer to Sophocles, begins by addressing the audience in
terms of their transience and mortality, a mortality delib
erately counterpoised to Pisthetairos' great project to be
god:
O suffering mankind,
lives of twilight,
race feeble and fleeting,
like the leaves scattered!
Pale generations,
creatures of clay,
the wingless, the fading!
Unhappy mortals,
shadows in time,
dreams . . .
flickering
[685-87]
This, surely, is the

tragic, earth-bound perspective, the
trudging reality that undercuts, by mocking in advance, the
comic apotheosis of the finale, just as surely as the terrible
words of the Corcyrean excursus and the Mitylenean De
bate in Thucydides darken, with the shadow of past atroc
ity and thus of impending doom, the spectacle of the arro
gant armada putting out from the Piraeus for the dreadful
reckoning waiting in Sicily. It is very hard for me at least
to see for what other reason the chorus should conceivably
speak it does, though Professor Whitman,
the words with
something like fastidious contempt, says that "this is pull
ing a rabbit, and not a very pleasing rabbit, out of a very
old hat."19 "One tries to imagine," he proceeds, "after the
19
Ibid, p. 168.
triumphant riotings of the last scene, the thoughtful Athe

nians turning homeward, spiritually admonished, and mur
muring, 'Ah, that Peithetaerus is headed for a bad fall!
"
Good old Aristophanes has straightened us out again.' It
is difficult to decide which is worse: the donnish effeteness
of Professor Whitman's reading or the coarseness with
which he manages to patronize and vulgarize one of the
greatest of poetic themes. I prefer to think instead of a
thoughtful Athenian possibly turning homeward and mus
ing over that extraordinary m?lange of whirling ideas, ex
uberant words, and comic spectacle, and thinking again of
all that it recalls, of the themes of er?s and h?sychia, of
political reality and soaring fantasy, of all those winged,
and winging, words on their way to the lyrically lunatic
finale. And I imagine his thoughts turning naturally and
inevitably to the major themes of Athenian political debate
and then perhaps, moved by the language and the meta
phors of the play, to Pindar's great eighth Pythian ode.
And I can imagine him perhaps repeating those solemn and
lovely lines with a fresh sense of their meaning to him?and
the tragedy threatening his city and human life generally,
along with the loss of a culture that once contained so much
of himself that losing it is like losing himself and the very
ground of his being:
H?sychia, kind goddess of peace, daughter

of Justice and lady of the greatness of cities:
you who hold the high keys
of wars and of councils,
accept for Aristomenes this train of Pythian victory.
For you understand, in strict measure of season,
deeds of gentleness and their experience likewise.
And you, when one fixes

anger without pity fast in his heart,
are stern to encounter
the strength of the hateful ones, and sink

pride in the bilge. Porphyrion understood you not
when wantonly he vexed you. Gain is sweet
if one carry it from the house of him who gives in good will.
But violence and high vaunting fail at the last.

Typhon the Kilikian, the hundred-headed, avoided not this,
nor yet the King of the Giants. were smitten down by
They
the thunderbolt
and the bow of Apollo. . . .
? # ?
But he that has won some new

splendor, in high pride
of hope [??Tu?o?] rides the air
on the wings of his man's strength, and keeps
desire beyond his wealth. In brief space mortals'
delight is exalted, and thus again it drops to the ground,
shaken by a backward doom.
We are things of a day [eirdpLepot].

What are we? What are
we not? The shadow of a dream20
is man, no more. But when the comes, and God
brightness
gives it,
there is a shining of light on men, and their life is sweet.21
"What are we? What are we not? The shadow of a dream

is man, no more." It is the venerable conclusion, the only,
ancient, fugitive, but inexhaustible wisdom: the concen
trated meditative conclusion of every great poet from Ho
mer to Shakespeare on the unmanageable fact of death, on
human transience and nothingness. It is this conclusion in
the presence of the ultimate fact?the fact which nothing
can annul or stale except cynicism or the rhetoric of evasion
and sentiment?which for the Greeks made man both mor
tal and finally fully human; which pierces him with the
clarity of necessity and a radiant which seems to
mystery
contain the meaning of his condition. There is nothing
men can do with death. It is too total and final to be banal
or trite; as a natural fulfillment of life can it be en
only
dured: "As is the generation of leaves, so is that of human
20
Cf. the phrase of the chorus?aicioei??a <?>vX'?/iev^v??at Aves 686.
21
The Odes of Pindar, tr. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago, 1947),
pp. 77-80.
Plate 4
ity. / The wind scatters the leaves on the ground, but the
live timber / burgeons with leaves again in the season of
spring returning. / So one generation of men will grow
while another / dies."22 This maturing cycle is as much as
any poet or man or people has ever made of death: a nat
ural consortium whose consequence must be compassion
and humility, or that saving skill of mortal recognition
which the Greeks called s?phrosyne in individuals and in
cities h?sychia.23
Here, in both Pindar and Aristophanes, that ancient po
etic conclusion is applied, relentlessly and critically, to a
polis which, in deliberate hybris and determined pleonexia,
had spurned all human mode and turned its back on his
tory. But whereas Pindar's stress clearly lies on the tragic
folly of unlimited pleonexia which threatens all traditional

h?sychia, Aristophanes?like his Athenian contemporary,
Thucydides?is more ambivalent. Thus he sees, with
something like or sympathetic sorrow and sad
admiring
comic pathos, both the terrible doom of Athenian pride
and the exuberant, heaven-storming, heroic brio which
makes Athenian polypragmosyn?, for all its willful unwis
dom, infinitely more appealing and tragic than Spartan
apragmosyn?. Aristophanes' Pisthetairos is dangerous, but
he is also vividly and compellingly Dionysiac: meddlesome,
but of that same high-spirited mettle the comedian so
fondly and repeatedly depicts. If he is undeniably a
poly
pragm?n, he is portrayed with too much affection for us
to miss the characteristic ambivalence of the poet, who
wants us to see Pisthetairos in all his fatally flawed comic
is not so much
hybris. For Aristophanes' point the idiosyn
cratic physis of Athenian imperial man, but the metaphysi
cal physis of the human animal?the animal who wants to
be god. Thus Pindar's splendid traditional vision of
22
The Iliad, tr. Richmond Lattimore, 6, 145 ff.
23
Cf. V. Ehrenberg, "Polypragmosyn?," p. 52: "Even the word
which in general expressed the Greek ideal of moderation, modesty,
and wisdom, sophrosyne, gained political meaning and sided with
ijcrvxia against the restlessness of the imperialists. To Thucydides
<T(a<f>pov?vwas almost identical with being a conservative and an
enemy of the radical democrats. In other passages cwtppoavvn is prac
synonymous with . . ."
tically airpayfioavvr).
doomed, heaven-storming, political confidence (elpis) be

comes Aristophanes' tragicomic Gigantomachy, in which the
Athenian polypragm?n represents the human rebel against
his condition, revolting against death and time and space
?Aristophanes' image of what all human physis would be
if it truly dared to assert itself against the nomoi of society
and religion. In this Athens Aristophanes not only shows
his contemporaries a tragicomedy of their own time and
place and politics?a tale which would be comic if it were

not so terribly tragic, and tragic if it were not so exuber
antly comic?but an image of human physis itself carrying
its erotic politics to their reductio ad absurdum, and there
fore no less a paideia in its own way than Pericles' idealized
human as it appears in Thucydides' version of the
city,
Funeral Oration.
Thus Aristophanic comedy is designed to cope with Athe
nian hybris by self-recognition in the audience; comedy
reveals the inherent contradiction and the doomed ab
surdity of it all. Wit, said Aristotle is educated or
wittily,
civilized [TrerraiSevfievw]hybris, and the hybris is more ef
fective and more lethal in a (changing) shame-culture,
like that of Athens, than in a (changing) guilt-culture like
our own. A fantasy politics, utterly destructive in its effects
and implications?destructive both for those who impose it
and those on whom it is imposed?is more easily exposed
by carrying the fantasy to its logical, or illogical, conclu
sion, to its reductio ad absurdum. This dramatic strategy
of the reductio ad absurdum is, of course, Aristophanes'
commonest way of coping with his subject and themes.
Thus the Athens of Cleon can only be rejuvenated and
cured by discovering a worse than Cleon.
demagogue
These ironic reductions, we should note, are not so much
fictions as fantasies; the comedian fantasizes in order to
make his point, to pillory his victim and those who are the
conscious or unconscious accomplices of the victim's po
ner?a. It is the distortion that does the work, that engages
the cleansing wit by closing the gap between the comic
rascal-hero and his (and our) potential rascality. But what
the victim feels as a cruelty is a kindness to the audience,
since it frees them of a demonology of hate by a demon
ology of laughter.24 And this is especially true if the audi

ence can be persuaded, as it should be, to see itself in the
comic victim-hero, and see its responsibility for, and partici
pation in, the victim's poner?a. Pisthetairos is possible
because the Birds are gullible suckers; but the audience is
the Birds. And the same
is true because the demos is cor
rupt; but the audience is the demos. This cleansing em
pathy with, and complicity in, the poner?a of the hero-vic
tim?an extension, carried to the point of absurdity, of the
audience's own poner?a?is, I believe, the essential cathartic
action of comedy. Those who license fools or madmen or
criminals to rule the world deserve what happens to them.
And this fact is demonstrated by carrying it to its absurd
conclusion, as the only means of bringing
back, of compel
ling back, the memory and presence of what has been lost:
community, the sense of common purpose, humanity,
h?sychia, or simply the lost savor of the col
sophrosyn?,
ored world and the goodness of life.
Black Elk's remarkable account of the Sioux heyoka (or
clown) ceremony, so remarkably close to Greek comedy
in ritual intent and therapeutic purpose, is pertinent to my
point. In the heyoka ceremony, writes John G. Neihardt
on Black Elk's behalf:
. . . those who have had visions of the thun

only
der beings of the West can act as heyokas.
They
have sacred power and they share some of this
with all the people, but they, do it through funny
actions. When a vision comes from the thunder
beings of the West, it comes with terror like the
thunderstorm; but when the storm of vision has
passed, the world is greener and happier; for wher
24
It
is precisely this point, I believe, that Plato is making when
he observes at Latos 935d: "Now mark my point. When a man is
involved in a scolding match, he can say nothing without seeking to
raise a laugh, and it is the resort to this trick at the prompting of
angry passion which I denounce. But what follows? Are we lending
our approval to the comedians' efforts to raise a laugh against man
kind, provided the object of their comedies is to attain their result,
to turn the laugh against their fellow citizens, without such passion?"
[Italics mine.]
ever the truth of vision comes upon the world, it is

like a rain. The world, you see, is happier after
the terror of the storm. But in the heyoka ceremony
everything is backwards, and it is planned that the
people shall be made to feel jolly and happy first,
so that it may be easier for the power to come to
them. You have noticed that the truth comes into
this world with two faces. One is sad with suffering,
and the other laughs; but it is the same face, laugh
ing or weeping. When people are already in des
pair, maybe the laughing face is better for them;
and when they feel too good and are too sure of
being safe, maybe the weeping face is better for
them to see. And I think this is what the heyoka
ceremony is for. . . .
When the ceremony was
over, everybody felt a great deal for it
happier,
had been a day of fun. They were better able to
see the greenness of the world, the wideness of the
sacred day, the colors of the earth, and to set
these in their minds.25
APPENDIX I
A NOTE ON NOMOS AND PHYSIS IN THE BIRDS
Nomos and physis provide the polarities which, as in

the Bacchae or Oedipus at Colonos, frame the actual and
metaphysical geography of the action. Theatrically they
are visible as the gulf which separates city and country, the
metaphorical distance between the unjust and meddlesome
laws (nomoi) of the litigious Athenians and the natural
grazing-grounds (nomoi) of honeysuckle and mint cropped
by the cityless birds in their nomadic and pre-imperial days.
25
John G. Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1961),
pp. 192-97.
And the thematic counterpart of these polarities is of

course the conflict of values between apragmosyn? and
polypragmosyn?; between theaggressive pleonexia and
unimpeded er?s of imperial Athens and the content
idyllic
ment of archaic Attica, that sweet autochthony of "the
golden grasshoppers and the bees"; between the furious
Luftwaffe recruited by the war-mongering Pisthetairos from
the ranks of gaping rubes in the pastoral kingdom of the
Birds. But again and again Aristophanes reveals these
polarities to narrow the gulf between them and finally
only
annul it altogether. If we cannot help observing the gulf,
we should also be aware that the gulf is constantly being
closed; that Aristophanes insists that we should see these
polarities not as absolute, but simply as historical or psycho
logical phases along a common spectrum of development.
The polarities,that is, conceal a common source, a common
potentiality, a single dynamis or daimon. Thus perspectives
of city and country whose differences are initially stressed
later merge as Birds and Athenians become visibly one,
and the landscape of earth-bound, archaic physis folds into
the great fortress of Cloudcuckooland, just as the palmetto
barrens of the Florida coast give way to Cape Kennedy.
What separates these apparent polar extremes is not a
fact of nature but simply a difference in phase or develop
ment. Thus the h?sychia-questing Pisthetairos becomes the
axch-polypragm?n, inciting his simple Tahitian allies to
world-conquest. But no sooner is the city of pleonexia
inaugurated than its tyrant-founder sings the praises of the
blessed h?sychia of his imperial bastion in the skies:
What greater bliss can men require?

Here the lovely Graces go,
and Wisdom strolls with sweet Desire,
and Peace ['Hoi^'as] comes tripping slow.
[1318-22]
So too avine
imperialism is revealed as merely the late
historical phase of the natural belligerence with which even
the gentle Birds first welcome Pisthetairos and Euelpides.
And the man who sought release from jury-intoxicated

Athens becomes in turn the quibbling shyster, twisting So
bornan law in a stunning sophistic effort to defeat the just
claims of the gods.
Again and again Aristophanes shows us the claims and
pretences of nomos transformed into nakedly aggressive
and selfish physis. But he also shows us selfish physis
being transformed into nomos, as though insisting that we
should observe how inextricably nomos and physis are re
lated. Thus if the normal and natural (i.e., physis-b&sed)
practice of the Birds sanctions father-beating, the exception
is the Scrolls of the Storks which Pisthetairos cites in
order to oblige the young to honor their fathers. And if
Pisthetairos' rise to tyrannical power rests initially upon
an appeal to selfish physis, once established, his need for
civic order compels him to reintroduce nomos. And the
reason is the notorious fact that rebels who have won by
overthrowing old nomoi and institutions are later required
?if they propose to remain in power?to reestablish new
versions of the nomoi they have overthrown. Tyranny too
has a stake in order and the restraints of law. Thus Pisthe
tairos, the prince of physis, improbably urges the informer
to take up some lawful work [v?tiipov epyov], and directs
the unfilial feelings of the parricide to find useful ag
gressive release in war. And though Pisthetairos himself is
the supreme polypragm?n, his role as tyrant of Cloud
cuckooland requires him to expel the horde of polyprag
mones?impostors, poetasters, bureaucrats, city-planners,
legislatorsand other pests?who infest and threaten the city
originally founded on the very er?s which makes them seek
it out. Like Pericles earlier, Pisthetairos introduces alien
exclusion acts by whose criteria he would have been denied
entrance to the
city he himself founded?but which he
must now organize to accommodate the sup
principles
pressed or eclipsed in his rise to power. And finally we
should perhaps observe that the contradictions evinced
by Pisthetairos and his fellow birds'' are sanctioned by
the conduct of the gods themselves. Aristophanes, that is,
gives us a glancing comic theodicy in which the Olympian
gods are forced?very much like Athenians cursed with

barbarous and intractable Thracian allies1?to come to
terms with the appetitive er?s of heroized mortals like
Herakles or barbarous and cloddish like Triballos.
gods
The contradictions so visible in human nature and politics
possess as their sanction and explanation the reality repre
sented by the gods and imposed by the gods in turn upon
men.
These comic contradictions which crowd through the

play, I suggest, are not contradictions at all. Or
really
rather, they are merely apparent, the consequence of the
comedian's ironic play with the polarities of nomos and
physis. Human physis, in the Aristophanic view, is constant
only in its metaphysical core (its phases differ with age,
ravenous er?s deriving
youth, fortune, etc.), the from that
conviction of incompleteness, of need, and the craving for
a perfection which, to the Greek mind, was synonymous
with god.2 Traditionally that physis was tempered and gen
tled by nomos; and nomos itself reflected the old realities
of .Greek life and culture, the harsh subjection to work, the
*I have in mind the barbarous atrocity which occurred in 413

when lack of funds forced the Athenians to dismiss a body of Thra
cian mercenaries. On their way home, under the command of the
Athenian Dieitrephes, they reached the Boeotian town of Mykalessos
at dawn, destroyed the entire town, and burst into a school and
massacred all the children. Cf. Thuc. 7, 29.
2
The conviction that man was by definition imperfect and god
was perfection is so common in the poets and the philosophers that
it needs no documentation. Yet it is the very heart of the metaphysi
cal need?the fatal er?s?which is so central to this play and which
has been so oddly overlooked. A contemporary statement of god's
perfection (and the human imperfection which it implies) can be
found in Euripides' Heracles, 1345-46: ?e?rai y?p b Seas, e?irep &rr'
opeas Oe?s, I ovoev?s (For god, if he is truly god, lacks nothing ).
With these words Heracles repudiates Theseus' suggestion that the
gods have acted out of passion and weakness because they too are,
like men, flawed in their very natures.
For comparable philosophical statements, cf. Plato, Rep. 2, 379c;
Timaeus and above all Theaetetus 176a-b: "Evils . . . can
30a;
never be done away with . . . nor have they any place in the divine
world, but they must inevitably inhabit this region of our mortal
nature. That is why we should make all speed to take flight from
this world to the other; and that means become like the divine so
far as we can. . . ." Cf. also Aristode, Nie. Eth. 1177b: "Such a
life as this [the contemplative life] will be higher than the human
seasons, and
circumstances, as well as a deep religious
acceptance of the human place in the natural cycle of
growing and dying things. Paideia, whether religious or
civil, was the effort to make men's lives as natural as then
vines and wheat; to teach them the constraints of human
limits and condition, and to help them think mortal
thoughts (ta thn?ta phronein or s?phrosyn?). And because
men were pitifully limited, because life was for
hard and
tune unpredictable; theybecause lived the Dionysiac or
Eleusinian life simply and humbly so long as they tended
their vines and sowed Demeter's grain, their paideia was
effective. Men might want to be gods, but that was a proj
ect best left to heroes or kings, and even they always failed,
as tragedy and poetry taught. In short, the traditional
nomoi schooled and disciplined the stubborn, discontented,
god-aspiring er?s dormant in human physis; if that er?s
remained perpetually unappeased (and it had no choice,
being by nature unappeasable), it at least learned, like a
domesticated animal, not to revolt. Patiently or impa
tiently, it bore its yoke.
This classical soul, it will be clear, was in fact an inward
level; not by virtue of something within him that is divine; and by

as much as this something is superior to his composite nature, by so
much is its activity superior to the exercise of the other forms of
arete. . . . Nor should we heed those who advise us that a man
should have mortal . . . but we ought as far as possible
thoughts
to achieve immortality [?davar?Ceiv] and do everything a man can do
to live in accordance with the highest in him. . . ."
thing
For a similar modern metaphysical attitude, see above all the
writings of Hegel: "By virtue of the negativity that belongs to its
nature, each thing is linked with its opposite. To be what it really
is, it must become what it is not. ... Its proper nature, which is,
in the last analysis, its essence, impels it to 'transgress' the state of
existence in which it finds itself and pass over to another. Not only
that, but it must even transgress the bounds of its own particularity
and put itself in universal relation with other things. The human
. . . finds its proper in those relations that are in
being identity only
effect a negation of his isolated . . ." (The Science
particularity. of
Logic, as paraphrased by H. Marcuse in Reason and Revolution, p.
124.) Cf. also ibid., pp. 65-6: "Finite things are 'negative'?and
this is a defining characteristic of them: they never are what they
can and ought to be. . . . The finite has as its essence this
thing
'absolute unrest', this 'striving not to be what it is.' . . . It is a state
of privation that forces the subject to seek remedy. As such, it has
a positive character."
Gigantomachy, a constant
battle of the rebellious and ap
petitive giant against the controlling god, just as the medi
eval Christian soul was a battlefield between the angel and
the brute. So long as nomos, externalized or internalized,
restrained the giant, all was well; sophrosyn? prevailed.
But with the Athenian discovery in the late fifth century
that man could be freed from his dependence on the earth
(and therefore even the gods) and liberated from the
natural cycle; that his er?s was free to roam and reach
without impediment, and that his control of the sea gave
him the power to move in unfettered freedom over the
world, like a god through the air, on the wings of his oars;
that the psychic energy of all Athenians could be recruited
in an organized and democratic way that made earlier em
pires?all organized to make one man supreme and other
men his slaves?comparatively impotent and even obso
lete; that the entire habitable world was the Athenian's oys
ter and that he could live like a god, if not perhaps forever
?with these discoveries human er?s at Athens could throw
off all restraint and pleonexia could find no horizon what
soever. What is new in Athenian man, what makes him so
monstrous and and interesting and self-destruc
dangerous
tive, is precisely this rejection of all traditional restraint,
all circumscribing nomos, all earlier definitions of man's
condition, and his conscious commitment to empire as a
system of collective er?s. In Athenian man the dormant

pleonexia in human nature awakes, and the giant over
whelms the god and harnesses the god's clarity of intellect
to the service of er?s. But in human physis generally noth
ing whatever had changed; it remained what it had always
been. However, the nomos that had once domesticated it
had vanished, and could only reappear (as we see it
reappearing in the later scenes of the Birds ) when the need

to establish a settled (and indeed tyrannical) order com
pelled er?s to accept constraints. Aristophanes of course
insists on the irony that all this winged
comic Athenian
aspiration is doomed the giant may overcome
by gravity;
the god, but he still remains rooted in his earthly origins.
But in the dazzling hypnotic pride of his flight, the godlike
hero has no eyes to see his own absurdity or the fate which
^â?^^m^^mmm?mm?$?M
Plate 5
awaits him, like Ikaros, in the sea ( or earth, as the case may
be) below. Only the audience?if the poet has done his
work?is aware of the waiting earth and sees the ominous
resemblance between itself and the soaring Pisthetairos.
APPENDIX II
A NOTE ON EROS AND PTEROS
The identity between Pter?s and the phallos cannot of

course be conclusively proven, but the evidence (particu
larly from the graphic and plastic arts ) is remarkably strong
and cannot be dismissed as merely tenuous. Combined
with the (admittedly less strong) verbal evidence, the evi
dence is reasonably impressive.
As a substantive, Pter?s occurs only once?in the passage
from the Phaedrus under discussion. And the reason is that
it is not a word of common parlance, but a literary coinage,
an "accordion" or compound pun of the sort so common in
Joyce?or, indeed, in Plato himself, who was inordinately
fond of making points by means of paronomasia ( cf. Craty
lus, passim). Here the word ptera ("wings," the chief attri
bute of Er?s) is compounded with the god's name to pro
duce the punning substantive, Pter-er?s or, by elision,
Pter?s; Er?s becomes, as we might say, "Winglove." So much
is obvious enough; the problem is why Plato should term
this coinage as v?pio-TiKov iraw. It may be that my translation
of this phrase as "very indecent" is tendentious; yet it is
difficult to see what other sense of v?pio-TiKOvwould yield
better contextual sense. True, Plato may be saying that the
poets, by punning on the god's name, are being "irreverent"
?that is, that the pun is "outrageous" or even sacreligious.
But this seems inherently unlikely, given Plato's own pas
sion for punning. And it is in any case difficult to see why
Phaedrus should, "because of his youth," laugh, unless Plato
is suggesting that youth is naturally somewhat irreverent
(which seems an improbable Platonic observation, at least

in The other common senses of
context). v?pio-TiKov ("wan
ton," "lewd," "insolent") seem even less appropriate than
"indecent." The secret, I believe, may be in the concluding
words of the passage?Si? irrepo^vrop3 ?vdykyjv?which clearly
offer a gloss on the preceding pun. If Plato had wanted
simply to say that the gods give the name Pter?s to Er?s
because Er?s wears wings, then his construction is cumber
some and inelegant. In my judgment, the crucial word of
Plato's gloss is ?vayKTjv. If we translate the passage in its
most literal sense, we get something like this: "The im
mortals call him Pter?s because Er?s must, of necessity,
grow wings (in order to realize his nature or physis)." That
is, a
drooping or earth-bound Er?s, an Er?s who cannot
rise on his own and reach for the skies, who cannot soar
into divine bliss, is not Er?s at all. If Er?s is potent (and
power belongs to gods by definition), he cannot very well
be portrayed as impotent. The god, in short, forfeits his
divinity if he lacks the wings which allow him to realize
his nature. As so often in Greek religion the god's attribute
is the god; his necessity, nature, and character are repre
sented in the wings he wears (and perhaps also, at least in
Orphic accounts of Er?s-Phanes, in the primal egg from
which he is born ). Like Iris and Hermes, Er?s wears wings
because he is a god who links heaven with earth; through
the agency of winged Er?s, men possess the power to be
come like gods, to achieve, however briefly, the godlike
eudaimonia which Er?s confers on his lovers. Plato is ef
fectively saying that the Homeridae punningly (and in
decently?the sort of indecency that may make a shy boy
like Phaedrus laugh or smile in embarrassment) call the
god by the name of Pter?s because, lacking his wings, his
ptera, he cannot realize his nature?as a mediator between
earth and heaven?or confer his characteristic
godlike bliss.
The best evidence for this interpretation is, I believe, the
passage from the Phaedrus itself?a passage whose difficul
ties have not, so far as I can discover, ever been satisfac
torily explained or resolved. But there is other supporting
evidence. In the Com. Adesp. (592K), for instance, we find:
aAA rj TpLOpxos rj irTepuiv rj arpovuias.
rpiopxos means "hawk" (or perhaps "buzzard"), but it also

has excellent phallic credentials ( cf. Aristoph. V. 1534, and
Av. 1206; also Plato, Tim. 145); o-TpovOlashere would seem
to mean "phallos" ( cf. hetaira-name "Strouthion", schol. Luc.
Catapl. 12); and -n-r?puy,according to Hesychius, means
??8o? opviov. According to both Kock pteron and Meineke
and strouthias here refer to "hominum libidinosorum nom
ma", i.e. they are names based upon slang terms for the
phallos (or perhaps for the cunnus?like a^Swv, a^Sow?,
xeAtSwv, Tins, etc. ). At Lysistrata 774-6 there may well be a
pun on 7TTpvye^?phalloi. Later literature richly supports, of
course, the overwhelmingly sexual nature of bird-imagery.
Birds were indeed (as in Aristophanes' Birds ) the common
est gift of a lover to his beloved, and courtesans were con
in ancient
stantly associated with birds. Nowhere perhaps
literature is the play of sexuality conveyed by avine meta
phors more vivid than in Catullus' lovely Passer, deliciae
meae puellae. In almost all these images are contained, in
constant conjunction, both the god's identity (or Aphrodite's),
and the winged attributes or bird-associations which depict
the necessity of his nature, the palpitation and warmth of
his passion, the thrust and rapture of his course, and the
soaring bliss he confers. Even in Ovid's account of the twin
sons of Boreas and Orithyia (Met. 6.703ff.) we find the
growth of wings ( as in Plato ) associated with the onset of
(ephebic) sexuality:
et genetrix facta est, partus enixa gemellos,

cetera qui matris, pennas genitoris haberent.
non tarnen has una memorant cum corpore natas,
barbaque dum rutilis aberat subnixa capillis,

inplumes Calaisque puer Zetesque fuerunt;
mox pennae ritu coepere volucrum
pariter
utrumque latus, pariter flavescere malae.

cingere
Finally, it may be in order to observe that even the medical

writers preserve in their technical terminology the link be
tween wings and sexuality; thus we find that irrepryîiara
means the labia minora (Sor.l.l6.aZ.; Gal.19.114; Poll.2.174).

Compared to the fairly scanty literary evidence, the
visual evidence is almost overwhelming. Aphrodite, of
course, is constantly associated with a goose (or at times a
duck), either in delicately stylized form (as on the white
ground kylix by the Pistoxenes painter from the British
Museum, Plate 1) or more grossly, mounted on a great
phallic headed goose (as on the kyathos from the Museum
of Berlin, Plate 2). Winged phalloi are of course abun
dantly represented in ancient art (cf. Jean Marcada, Eros
Kalos, passim), as in the cup from the Boston Museum of
Fine Arts (Plate 3 ) or the Attic amphora showing a figure
holding a phallos-headed bird uncovering a nest of phalloi
(Plate 4). On the pedestal of the huge ithyphallic column
flanking the entrance to Dionysus' shrine at Delos (Plate
5) is portrayed a phallos-headed cock (or goose). Figures
of Er?s himself in association with birds (usually a duck or
a goose ) are also fairly common. See, for instance, the repre
sentation of the so-called "Pothos" of Scopas, or the little
gem portraying Er?s spinning from the Berlin Antiquarium,
both reproduced in Plate I in "Two Post
Rhys Carpenter,
scripts to the Hermes Controversy," AJA 58, 1 (Jan. 1954).
This appendix would not be complete without acknowl
edging my sincere gratitude to Professor Thomas Gould
and his graduate students at Yale, who spent considerable
time tracking down every reference to wings (in a sexual
or phallic context) in ancient literature. But I am especially
indebted to Mr.
Jeffrey Henderson, a member of the Yale
Classics Department and the author of a dissertation on
"Obscenities in Aristophanes," without whose knowledge
and generosity this appendix would have been largely
impossible.

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Trustees of Boston University

Aristophanes' Birds: The Fantasy Politics of Eros

"I prefer a poet who can think?a. poet

T A HE SURRENDER OF THE ISLAND

of Melos, the massacre of its male citizens, and the selling

It is literally impossible, I believe, to comprehend the

overcrowding. What evidence there is suggests that these

would not be surprising if the attitude towards movables began to

life of rustic peace and quiet, the anonymous, immemorial

peasants described so vividly in the poem of the Marxist

From villages and little towns they come in carts

the huge mob, pushed suddenly

Torn from Attic earth, the uprooted peasant found in

31 am indebted for knowledge of this poem and reinforcement to

these self-chosen cleruchs, two antique imperial dropouts,

tere military discipline of restraint; a quietism of policy

terprising meddlesome arrogance of mind and hand that

The Athenians are addicted to innovation, and

genius for keeping what you have, accompanied by

The convergence between this description of Athenian

sure we are dealing with

configuration of traits. Pisthetairos is unmistakably Athenian

cuckooland is Eros' capitol-in-the-air, the great objective

Cloudcuckooland, come in one or another of the various

Now this Eros is not only metaphysical and sexual and

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Gift of E. P. Warren.

political passion?is expressed as a part of the pervasive

language of Eros. There is nothing peculiarly Aristophanic

possibility in the word er?s, applying it straightforwardly,

political: the love of glory, envy, lust for power,

But it is above all during

sword, helpless against her beauty?Euripides' ironically bitter way

M?\i<rra p?v X?ovra pi? 'v ir?Xei rp?cpeiv.

A lion should not be raised in the city.

seized upon all ["Ep<o?hlireve toU 7ra<7iv]to make the expedi

Underlying and informing all these manifestations of

Mortals call him winged Love . . .

The word Pter?s or Winged One clearly contains the in

to Eros made generous and purposeful use of the comic

divinity. This would both give pictorial point and potency

which degrades them, which makes them look foolish. But

surely of Pter?s. Theculmination of all these equations of

?v?xacicov e?s ckckttos ?fi<f>e

Everyone of them gaped wide [while listening to an ora

Olympians. This air?this small residual but strategically

expressed itself in h?sychia and apragmosyn??corrupted

. . . For there is no such Finis ultimus, (utmost ayme,)

Behind the relationsof Pisthetairos and the Birds we are

the Books of the old Morall Philosophers. Nor can a man

perial city to its pitch of perfection. For in this Athenian

Even in Pericles', the Athenians

vo<f>6pov].The reputable men of the city viewed

In the historical context of the Birds?the anxious shudder

mination of their political creation; indeed, the politics of

tempted by Eros, content with the harsh horizons of neces

131 have in mind not merely Alcibiades* part in advocating the

sonally reconducting the march to Eleusis (and thereby honoring