Page 16 - GALIET THESMOPHORIAS and Euphorias IV

Galiet & Galiet
privileges and liberties of men. They were family and house bound and lacked voting rights in the Athenian demos. As suggested earlier, I believe that Aristophanes, in the voice of Euripides, has an underground agenda: his duty, as poet and comedian, is to educate males on the negative consequences that female oppression and repression have on the female character. This would justify Aristophanes infatuation with Euripidean7 drama. Aristophanes knows that Euripides, an acute observer, understands female character in its particular Athenian political context where individuals’ behaviours are profoundly shaped by the public sphere. Extremely socially and politically oppressed females who, by virtue of belonging to a patriarchy, lack formal education, legal protection and freedom of speech can choose to either duck or rebel under these precarious circumstances. If they duck, they become resentful and tend to meet underground; they suffer and sabotage themselves first in order to sabotage their oppressors. If they choose to rebel, they mastermind plans with the serious consequence of suffering persecution and death. Because in classical Greece, women seemed to duck, they were labelled and portrayed to behave as irrational and hysterical unbeings in order to achieve their ends. Euripides’ Medea presents one of the best examples of hysteria and jealousy towards an injustice. Medea murders her two children and her husband’s lover to make Jason pay and suffer for his perfidy, infidelity and disloyalty, despite the fact that we may find her actions justifiable. Aristophanes, therefore, feels compelled to create plays of gender-role inversions in order to make men understand the plight of women and the dire consequences it can have for society to excessively oppress and repress its female denizens. Aristophanes might seem to ridicule women in the Thesmophoriasuzae but with a political message: it is ridiculous to ridicule women. The mocking of women’s vulnerability and second-class status has serious consequences for the polis: if the women take the Platonic role of censoring, banning or punishing the tragic or comic poet from Athens 3⁄4 as they are willing to do with Euripides 3⁄4 then what choice does the polis have in educating its citizens, shall it resort to unattainable Socratic ideals or shall it continue to use the moral-immoral lessons imparted by comedy, tragedy and
7 Let’s remember that in Frogs, Aristophanes has Dionysus choose virtuous Aeschylus over Euripides to come back to Hades as poet-laureate to the Athenian people.
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