Reproducing Athens examines the role of romantic comedy, particularly the plays of Menander, in defending democratic culture and transnational polis culture against various threats during the initial and most fraught period of the Hellenistic Era.
Menander's romantic comedies—which focus on ordinary citizens who marry for love—are most often thought of as entertainments devoid of political content. Against the view, Susan Lape argues that Menander's comedies are explicitly political. His nationalistic comedies regularly conclude by performing the laws of democratic citizen marriage, thereby promising the generation of new citizens. His transnational comedies, on the other hand, defend polis life against the impinging Hellenistic kingdoms, either by transforming their representatives into proper citizen-husbands or by rendering them ridiculous, romantic losers who pose no real threat to citizen or city.
In elaborating the political work of romantic comedy, this book also demonstrates the importance of gender, kinship, and sexuality to the making of democratic civic ideology. Paradoxically, by championing democratic culture against various Hellenistic outsiders, comedy often resists the internal status and gender boundaries on which democratic culture was based. Comedy's ability to reproduce democratic culture in scandalous fashion exposes the logic of civic inclusion produced by the contradictions in Athens's desperately politicized gender system.
Combining careful textual analysis with an understanding of the context in which Menander wrote, Reproducing Athens profoundly changes the way we read his plays and deepens our understanding of Athenian democratic culture.

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9780691115832.pdf

Susan Lape

Princeton University, Department of Art & Archaeology

Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., 2004

United States, United States of America

Princeton, NJ, United States, 2004

Princeton, N.J, New Jersey, 2004

Princeton, N.J, cop. 2004

November 24, 2003

PS, 2003

producers:
Acrobat Distiller 7.0 (Windows)

Includes bibliographical references (p. [255]-278) and indexes.

Contents 6
Abbreviations 10
1. Narratives of Resistance and Romance: Democracy and Comedy in the Early Hellenistic Period 18
Resilient Democracy and the Rise of Romantic Comedy 18
The Politics of Marriage and the Comic Marriage Plot 30
Comedy's Constitutive Political Silence 34
Constituting Citizens: The Laws of Genre and State 36
Comedy's Poetics of Political Membership 38
Opposites Attract: Rape, Romance, and Democratic Selection 41
The Power of Love: Female Selection and Male Education 47
Reproduction and Resistance 50
2. Reproducing Democracy in Oligarchic and Autocratic Athens 57
The Reproducibility of Athenian Democracy 57
The Policies and Politics of Demetrius of Phaleron: Law, Power, and Prior Restraint 60
Athens and the Antigonids: The Failed Foundation of Hellenistic Democracy 69
“Romantic” Resistance: Comedy and the Sterility of Empire 76
3. Making Citizens in Comedy and Court 85
Gender and Democratic Identity 85
The Importance of Acting Athenian 89
Engendering Egalitarianism 91
The Politics of Seduction 100
Passionate Protagonists and Practical Citizens 108
The Comic Romance Narrative: Marrying Interest and Necessity 113
Staging a Biopolitics of Democratic Citizenship 116
Democratic Reproduction in the Aspis 123
4. The Ethics of Democracy in Menander's Dyskolos 127
The Politics of Love at First Sight 127
The Democratic Logic of the Comic Plot 130
The Class Politics of Sexual Conduct 132
Performing Egalitarianism 138
Ethical Identity and the Democratization of Social Relations 140
Marriage Exchange and the Critique of Ideology 146
Egalitarianism and Inclusion 151
5. The Politics of Sexuality in Drama and Democratic Athens: The Case of Menander's Samia 154
The Father-Son Romance 154
Forensic Theater: Staging Comedy as Court 158
The Consequences of Nonconjugal Cohabitation 164
Demeas's Defense: Revising the Tragic Family Plot 167
Shame, Poverty, and Anger: The Politics of Affect 173
The Work of Prostitutes: The Importance of a Gender Stereotype 176
The Fragility of Manhood 184
6. The Mercenary Romance: Gender and Civic Education in the Perikeiromenē and Misoumenos 188
Socializing the Mercenary Lover 188
Power and Punishment: Problems in the Perikeiromenē 190
Learning the Language of Law: The Embedded Drama of Civic Education 197
Gender and International Relations 200
The Return of the Repressed: Gender and the Constraints of Genre 203
Negotiations of Martial and Marital Values in the Misoumenos 205
The Conquering Captive: Genre and Gender Inversion 209
Civic Reciprocity and the Revision of Epic Manhood 211
Ethics and Comedy's Construction of Transnational or Hellenic Citizenship 215
7. Trials of Masculinity in Democratic Discourse and Menander's Sikyōnioi 219
The Loss of the Citizen-Soldier Ideal 219
The Macedonian Question and Athenian Civic Identity 223
The Moral Manliness of the Democratic Man 229
Menander's Sikyōnioi: The Male Recognition Plot 232
Ideology and Intertextuality 237
Moschion's Revealing Complexion 239
The Lastauros: An Anti-Macedonian Tradition? 244
Stratophanes' Embodied Biography 248
Metadrama and the Illusion of Identity 251
Remasculinizing and Reproducing the Democratic State 254
8. Conclusion: Inevitable Reproduction? 260
Bibliography 272
Acknowledgments 296
Index Locorum 298
General Index 304
A 304
B 304
C 304
D 305
E 306
F 306
G 306
H 306
I 307
J 307
K 307
L 307
M 308
N 308
O 309
P 309
R 309
S 310
T 310
V 310
W 310
X 311
Z 311

"Reproducing Athens examines the role of romantic comedy, particularly the plays of Menander, in defending democratic culture and transnational polis culture against various threats during the initial and most fraught period of the Hellenistic Era."--Jacket.

Athenian history between the battle of Chaeronea in 338 B.C. and the end of the Chremonidean War in 260 is punctuated by one military disaster after another.

2022-03-08