Page 13 - GALIET THESMOPHORIAS and Euphorias IV

Galiet & Galiet
Although Mac Dowell realizes that there is no evidence as to how effeminate Agathon and his poetry were in real life, he does assume that Aristophanes must have had a reason for the satire. Mac Dowell is certain that Aristophanes wrote the play just “to make the audience laugh” (257) simply because it must have been far more hilarious for the audience to see “male actors playing men dressed as women” rather than “male actors appearing just as women” (258). For Mac Dowell, the play’s quintessential purpose is to ridicule Agathon, women, Euripides and the Skythian archer despite its prevalent cross-dressing and sexual ambivalence themes.
Even though Agathon turned down Euripides, Mac Dowell spends much time on his character. According to Mac Dowell, Agathon has three incompatible justifications that ridicule his need to wear feminine attire: first, to “write a female role”, second, to imitate his Ionian poetic ancestors, third, to mirror his own effeminate nature (256). He suggests that, in the first case, Aristophanes might be mocking a contemporary mimetic theory that asserts a dramatist’s need to physically and verbally imitate a female in order to feel and absorb her essence fully despite the lack of evidence in this regard. Secondly, he suggests that, given some archeological evidence, Anakreon, an Ionian bard, does wear effeminate clothing and that perhaps Agathon seeks to imitate him. Thirdly, if Agathon’s nature is effeminate, then so must be his poetic style. Such incompatibilities rest mainly on the fact that if Agathon is trying to imitate being a woman, womanhood then, is not, by nature, his nature.
Further, Mac Dowell affirms that Aristophanes not only ridicules women with a series of “wine and sex” jokes (263), but that he also mocks their delusions about female power and superiority. In addition, Aristophanes also ridicules Euripides, not in implying that he is effeminate, but in the hilarious ideas Aristophanes employs from other Euripidean tragedies (Telephos, Palamedes and Helen) in order for Mnesilochus to escape from the assembly of women. Lastly, he mocks the horrible and unintelligible Greek that Skythians speak by exaggerating their poor garb and by making the Skythian archer play a hyper stupid role 3⁄4 rather than the “barbarian”, “cruel” or “resentment” role that Hall suggests 3⁄4 for everything the archer is set out to do, says Mac Dowell, he is
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