δείτε την πρωτότυπη σελίδα τεκμηρίου στον ιστότοπο του αποθετηρίου του φορέα για περισσότερες πληροφορίες και για να δείτε όλα τα ψηφιακά αρχεία του τεκμηρίου*
Peisthetairos, Adventurer in Thrace: A New Reading of Aristophanes’ Birds: [Φθινοπωρινές Διαλέξεις στις Κλασσικές Σπουδές]
Hall, Edith
British School at Athens
Institute of Classical Studies, London
If we read Birds without assuming any knowledge of
Thucydides’ account of the disastrous Sicily expedition
(an account which cannot have been available to the
Dionysia audience of 414), then the conventional
scholarly association between the journey of
Peisthetairos / Euelpides and the Athenian campaign in
Sicily seems unconvincing. The play would have been
understood by its contemporary audience, rather, as a
satire on avaricious Athenian politicians’ colonial
activities around the Thraco-Athenian borders on the
northern coast of the Aegean between and beyond
Olympus and Chalcidice. Aristophanes himself
elsewhere labelled the aristocrats who ‘lurked’ in that
area Thrakophoitai. Almost every toponymic reference
in Birds, for example to Triballia and to Olophyxia
near Athos, points in a Balkan direction.
The failure of the Nephelokokkygian citizen enrolment
procedure, and Peisthetairos’ rejection of all the other
appurtenances of Athenian democracy (voting urns etc.), underline that he is a selfaggrandising
turannos, who is opportunistically subjecting a nation of barbarian tribesmen.
The birds are great fighters, but have previously been living in a pre-polis natural world
(rather as the Athenians conceived the Thracian native lifestyle). Their previous
ruler was the hoopoe Teres, whose name sounds like Tereus, infamous King of
Thrace. Like the Athenian parricide, he represents the type of disreputable
criminal, who is attracted to these barbarian hinterlands. As the presence of Procne
and the thumping references to Sophocles’ tragedy Tereus remind us, the Hoopoe,
Teres/Tereus, is a rapist and a mutilator. He has also committed a crime of kincannibalism
(which is what the other Birds start doing under Peisthetairos’
regime).
Birds is thus the only surviving Greek play set in Thrace except for Euripides’
Hecuba, which features another unpleasant Thracian ruler, Polymestor. Birds is
also a rare as a fifth-century text which tells us a great deal about setting up a new
colony in barbarian territory. The Birds are treated like slaves, andrapoda, as Peisthetairos
himself says, and Thrace was of course the place from which the Athenians acquired a large
proportion of their slaves. There may even be a more specific reference, in the name of
Peisthetairos, to another well-known Thrakophoites, and the lecture concludes by considering
several possible identities for his real-life counterpart.
*Η εύρυθμη και αδιάλειπτη λειτουργία των διαδικτυακών διευθύνσεων των συλλογών (ψηφιακό αρχείο, καρτέλα τεκμηρίου στο αποθετήριο) είναι αποκλειστική ευθύνη των αντίστοιχων Φορέων περιεχομένου.
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