Disrespect Your Elders

Greco-Persian War Veterans in Old Comedy

抄録

The Greco-Persian Wars and their veterans are mentioned repeatedly in the genre of Old Comedy. Scholars have noted that while often these figures are presented as objects of profound admiration, sometimes the rhetoric surrounding their triumph is satirised. This article argues that: 1) the extent to which Old Comedy mocked the rhetoric surrounding the Greco-Persian Wars is greater than has been previously allowed; 2) the mockery in Old Comedy not only targets the overblown rhetoric to do with the war, but even encourages the audience to laugh at the veterans themselves; 3) but, simultaneously, Aristophanes uses tactics which minimise the potential of offending his audience. Specifically, the poet uses a technique which I call ‘identity layering’: the addition of several types of identity to one character, or, in the case of Acharnians and Wasps, to the chorus. The poet makes his chorus in Acharnians not merely veterans of the Greco-Persian Wars, but fervent patriots and enfeebled old men struggling to defend themselves in litigious contemporary Athens, and similarly he makes the Wasps chorus not only war veterans, but also zealous jurors and human-wasp hybrids. By doing this, Aristophanes is able to mock these figures while never encouraging the audience to laugh at them solely in their identity as veterans.