The title of this volume promises to address what appears to be a reasonably straightforward and easily circumscribed topic, but in the end its thirteen essays on comic invective in Greco-Roman oratory show just how complex the task is. As these essays make clear, there is nothing at all straightforward about the isolated terms “comic” and “invective”, and the conjoined phrase “comic invective” presents even more practical and conceptual dilemmas. For starters, is “comic” invective a special kind of invective, or is all invective at some level comic? Is it possible for there to be invective that is not intended to elicit laughter in any sense, a humorless kind of insult and vituperation? Does “comic invective” as it is used in this study mean that when it is deployed in oratory, it self-consciously draws on examples from comic literary and/or performative genres (Greek comedy in the fifth and fourth centuries, for example, or Greek and Roman comedy in Roman oratory)? There is a vast divide between the frenetic invective exchanges of the Paphlagonian and Sausage-seller in Aristophanes’ Knights and Demosthenes or Cicero insulting their opponents in forensic contexts. These examples are performative in one sense or another, but, as Stephen Halliwell discussed in a foundational article about the “uses of laughter” in Greek culture (“The Uses of Laughter in Greek Comedy,” CQ 1991, appropriately cited throughout this volume), the laughter intended to be generated by both Greek and Roman authors can be plotted along a spectrum from unalloyed play on one end to pretensions of seriousness at the other. This means, then, that if an ancient audience wanted to calibrate just how comic an instance of rhetorical invective was, they had to be well-attuned to both the subtleties of contemporary politics (which tend to operate in modes of seriousness) and dynamics of comic literature (which operates largely within a world of play). As these essays admirably demonstrate—and to borrow an apt metaphor from Kostas Apostolakis’ chapter on “Comic Invective and Public Speech in Fourth-Century Athens”—rhetorical and comic invective “share weapons from the same arsenal” (61).
The twelve essays (after the Introduction) in this collection are distributed across three sections, although many themes recur across all the chapters and the divisions themselves can appear somewhat artificial. The first part (“Intertextual and Multi-genre Invective”) contains more than half of the essays (seven); Parts two (“The Cultural Workings of Invective”) and three (“Invective in Ancient Socio-political Contexts) comprise just three and two chapters, respectively. The volume clearly skews Greek, with only four of the twelve chapters addressing invective in Roman oratory, but the Roman chapters are thematically well integrated into the whole and show that Roman orators had similar motivations to their Greek counterparts in incorporating invective into their speeches and interacted with comic literary traditions in similar ways.
The editors open the volume with an admirably lucid and systematic overview of the history of scholarship on their topic and make a convincing case that, even though there has been much excellent work done on comic invective as such, there has been less focus on invective in oratory and less sustained interest in what they call the “comicness” of the invective found in this otherwise serious performative discourse (although they duly note, p. 13, some important recent exceptions). The editors are looking to “draw overarching conclusions about the (semantic, intertextual, multidisciplinary and other) features of comic invective…[and] about the the limits and restrictions in its use that are imposed or affected by the codes of honour and decency in ancient Greece and Rome” (14). The chapters are diverse in scope and topic, however, and there is no epilogue from the editors articulating how they might construct the “overarching” through-lines, but by the end of the volume a few points become clear. First, orators used comic invective in much the same way as bona fide comic writers—as a means to belittle targets with insult and mockery—but with different endgames. As the volume shows, invective oratory will be designed as entertainment to varying degrees, but it always ultimately has a non-comic job to do, and a serious one at that—to persuade a jury, win a conviction, or to mark an adversary indelibly through humiliation and belittlement. If an orator’s invective is entertaining but ineffective, it matters little how entertaining it was in the moment. At the same time, an orator has to make sure that his comic touches do not become pure Comedy (with a big “C”, i.e., a genre or mode with different aims from oratory), or he risks not, in fact, getting the job done.
The first chapter of Part I, “Comedy and Insults in the Athenian Law-courts” by Jasper Donelan, makes this point effectively by showing how Greek oratorical writers could borrow some specific comic vocabulary from the comic poets to insult their own targets (this much is well discussed in earlier scholarship, as Donelan notes), but that they had to face at the same time significant restrictions, explicit or assumed as a matter of social or legal protocol, on what level of invective they could use. The more common intersections between comic (i.e, from Old Comedy) and oratorical invective, in fact, are rather tame (lots of anaidēs, miaros and bdeluros) with more graphic, naughty language avoided (no katapugōn, euruprōktos and laikastēs, e.g.). Still, as Donelan shows, there is enough evidence from the orators to show that audiences and judges alike enjoyed these comic touches quite apart from the substance of the cases themselves.
While Donelan’s chapter is more concerned with comic language in oratory, Kostas Apostolakis in Ch. 2 (“Comic Invective and Public Speech in Fourth-Century Athens”) addresses the kinds of topics that come in for comic treatment in (4th-C) oratory. The topics Apostolakis has in mind here are “comic characterisation, terms of abuse, vocabulary, metaphors and imagery” (45) in both forensic and deliberative speeches. These topics are familiar enough in their general contours from earlier scholarship, but the virtue of this chapter lies in its detailed juxtaposition of Aeschines and Demosthenes each inveighing against each other with essentially the same cluster of accusations—posturing, dissembling, lying, cowardice. These are all tropes easily paralleled in (if not always traceable directly to) Old Comedy and deployed with relish by the orators in order to entertain while pretending to instruct Athenian audiences. Apostolakis’ further claim that there was a “two-way relationship” between comic and rhetorical invective strikes me as more difficult to maintain partially because we have so little evidence to indicate that the comic poets were learning invective tricks from the orators. The only instance Apostolakis offers, for example, of a contemporary comic poet transferring invective from oratory to comedy is a fragment from Timocles’ Heroes (c. 341 BCE), which seems to mock Demosthenes’ anti-Macedonian politics; but there’s no need to see this as anything other than the routine political satire we expect of a comic poet (even allowing for less invective satire in fourth-century comedy than in the Old Comedy of the fifth), and no need to assume this particular instance of mockery in its verbal detail was somehow inspired by the mockery he might have witnessed between Demosthenes and Aeschines.
Andreas Serafim’s “Comic Invective in Attic Forensic Oratory: Private Speeches” focuses on private speeches and asks a simple question: was there any significant difference between the “comicness” of public and private oratory in classical Athens? His basic answer (“not really”) is perhaps not a great surprise, given the fact that most of the familiar tropes and strategies available from contemporary comic drama (paratragedy, stock comic character types, sex jokes, insults targeting social class, etc.), can work their humorous charms in any number of contexts, but even if there are no fireworks in Serafim’s conclusions (basically, one can generalize, but must consider the use of invective orator by orator), his careful, methodical analysis of many speeches illuminates well the wide variety of comic seasonings orators had at their disposal.
Emiliano J. Buis’ contribution, “Rhetorical Defence, Inter-poetic Agōn and the Reframing of Comic Invective in Plato’s Apology of Socrates,” explores what he perceives to be an interaction between Plato’s Apology and the agon of Aristophanes’ Acharnians. Specifically, Buis argues that in the Apology, Plato has Socrates respond to his detractors in ways modeled on how Aristophanes has his theatrical stand-in, Dikaiopolis, respond to the slander directed against him by Cleon. The chapter has perceptive things to say about the comic features of the Apology and the likelihood that Plato was influenced by Aristophanic drama in the way he deploys these features. Buis is himself well aware, however, that tracing a direct line to the agon of Acharnians can only be suggestive, since one has to concede that “there is no evidence to conclude unequivocally that there is in the Apology a deliberate intention to parody specific verses of Aristophanes’ comedy” (89).
George Kazantzidis drills down in the next chapter (“‘You are Mad!’ Allegations of Insanity in Greek Comedy and Rhetoric”) to a single insult—the accusation of madness against targets—common to both comedy and oratory. The author argues here that at least some of accusations of madness in comedy “owe a lot to, and are designed as sustained allusions, to the practices of contemporary oratory” (107). Conversely, accusations by speakers against their opponents in Attic oratory sometimes seem to be engaged in a kind of “dialogue with the comic tradition.” Kazantzidis offers an insightful analysis of Aristophanes Eccl. 241-53, where Praxagora specifically notes that she learned to call her opponents mad or insane from listening to orators speaking during the war while she was “living with her husband on the Pnyx.” Kazantzidis’ discussion of the differences between the contemporary terms for “being mad” is useful (μελαγχολᾱν, e.g., does seem to be le mot juste for a kind of clinical insanity, as opposed to the less marked word μαίνεσθαι), but it is not clear what we can really generalize from a single passage in Eccles. in which a character has already in effect told us that she is using language from oratory. This point of hers only pokes fun at a well-worn trope the audience would recognize from the lawcourts, without implying that oratory was somehow the source of the many other accusations of madness in comedy. The main question to ask seems to be whether comedians needed oratory to exist in order for them to accuse their targets of madness and vice versa, whether orators needed comedy to exist for them to make the same accusations. These overblown accusations (“you’re insane!”) always have a “comic charge” as Kazantzidis notes (122), but this “comic charge” would seem to be accessible to both comic poets and orators without an antecedent need of each other’s literary traditions.
Two chapters on Roman literature round out Part I, Dennis Pausch’s “Comic Invective in Cicero’s Speech Pro M. Caelio,” and Hanna Maria Degener’s “How to Start a Show: Comic Invectives in the Prologues of Terence and Decimus Laberius.” Pausch takes as his starting point Cicero’s casting of his client Caelius in the role of a young lover from the comic stage and Clodia as the comic meretrix figure. The explicitly comic backdrop of the Pro Caelio has often been discussed, but Pausch has interesting things to say about how Cicero calibrates his invective against Clodia for optimum rhetorical effect, i.e., how he manages make his ramped-up aggression against her socially acceptable by continually stressing its ties to comic theater. Degener’s chapter shares some concerns with Pausch’s in that she too is interested in authorial strategies (in this case the comic poet Terence and the mimographer Decimus Laberius) for minimizing the inherent risks of invective, but here focuses specifically on the invective found in the prologues of these two dramatists. As prologues, placed at the opening of a play, they function as captationes benevolentiae, which require some rhetorical skill on the part of the author to enlist the sympathies of the audience against their targets—in the case of Terence, against his rival Luscius Lanuvius; in the case of Laberius, against none other than Caesar, who had forced Laberius to act against his will in his own play. Certainly, invective put into the mouth of a character on stage purporting to be the author himself is more highly charged than invective coming from a fictional character and directed at another fictional character, but as Aristophanes before them understood, the aura of heightened risk that authorial invective can whip up in the minds of the audience only enhances the author’s claims to self-righteousness.
Thomas K. Hubbard opens part II with an excellent chapter on how Aeschines—once an actor before taking up oratory—in accusing Timarchus of prostitution and general debauchery as a youth drew knowingly on strategies from the comic stage that mocked a target’s physical body. The “hypersexed wastrel” was a comic type in Aristophanes, as Hubbard notes, and remained popular into the fourth century. In Aeschines’ hands, Timarchus become comically “somatised” to the point where the actual details of his defense cease to matter. Aeschines was able to turn the courtroom into a kind of comic theater where laughter wins the case, not facts.
Nathan Kish returns, in the next chapter to Cicero, to the famous discussion of humor in De Oratore (2.216-90). Kish focuses on the tension highlighted in that discussion between role of natura (the position that humor in oratory comes naturally to a speaker and as such is artless) and ars (the need to shape, limit, restrain one’s mockery) in the deployment of humor in oratory. Kish teases out nicely from that passage the importance for Roman orators of getting the balance right between an impulse towards aggressive mockery and the need for some measure of decorum. Jan Lukas Horneff’s chapter, “No Decorum in the Forum? Comic Invective in the Theatre of Justice,” explores many of the themes discussed in earlier chapters, especially the tensions that arise when orators deploy comic invective, but he trains his eye on a later period, the 2nd C. CE. Horneff offers an interesting analysis of the letter Fronto had written to Marcus Aurelius, replying to the latter’s injunction to observe decorum when attacking Herodes Atticus in an imminent court case with him. Fronto’s response is revealing: he would agree to restrain himself to a point, but insisted nevertheless that he be allowed to be comically theatrical in his (counter-)attacks on Herodes.
The volume closes with two essays (Part III) returning us to classical Athens.
In “Political Rhetoric and Comic Invective in Fifth-Century Athens: The Trial of the Dogs in Aristophanes’ Wasps,” Ioannis Konstantakos analyzes the famous mock-trial of the two dogs in Aristophanes Wasps (826-1008), a transparent allegory of an ideological clash between the politicians Cleon and Laches. His suggestion that this scene reflects the “policies and ideological tenets of the satirized politicians…their manner of speech and characteristic rhetorical gimmicks” (236) seems likely enough in light of the indirect testimonia we do have about these politicians, even if ultimately impossible to affirm. Similarly, his suggestion that Aristophanes had Aesopic fable in mind in casting Cleon and Laches as dogs is intriguing and even likely, though whether the audience would have seen the trial as a “large-scale Aesopic fable animated on stage” must remain an open question.
The volume closes with a short but fascinating and original chapter by Wilfred E. Major, “Democracy, Poverty, Comic Heroism and Oratorical Strategy in Lysias 24.” In this speech an Athenian citizen portrayed as poor and physically disabled argues before the boule that he should continue receiving a state pension because of his disability. The defendant is responding to another citizen who had evidently charged that the defendant was neither poor nor disabled and had a questionable character. We hear from the defendant that he has been charged with being a “rogue”, i.e., a figure right out of a Greek comedy, a poneros, and his description and countering of the charge amounts to an unusual bit of comedy itself—turning his accuser’s mockery against him, with the defendant first directing it against himself in an almost counterproductive moment of self-mockery, and then back at the accuser. It’s quite a brilliant and effective strategy! The sympathies with the democratic poor that Major detects in the speech (in striking contrast to the prevailing scholarship) aligns well in the end with comedy’s predilection for calling out the rich and powerful for the usual excesses and abuses.
There was never any doubt that Greek oratory contained plenty of comic invective, and comic invective plenty of self-consciously rhetorical flourishes. The tricky part, however, comes when trying to determine how much each literary/discursive form explicitly owed to the other—not every comically aggressive touch in a courtroom speech, after all, must derive in some direct way from the comic stage. The essays in this volume have done much to lay out the methodological and evidentiary challenges that arise when trying to sort out all these vectors of influence, and offer us a stimulating combination of answers, suggestions, conundrums, and hints for future research on this inherently elusive topic.
Authors and Titles
Part I: Intertextual and Multi-genre Invective
—Jasper Donelan: “Comedy and Insults in the Athenian Law-courts”
—Kostas Apostolakis: “Comic Invective and Public Speech in Fourth-Century Athens”
—Andreas Serafim: “Comic Invective in Attic Forensic Oratory: Private Speeches”
—Emiliano J. Buis: “Rhetorical Defence, Inter-poetic Agōn and the Reframing of Comic Invective in Plato’s Apology of Socrates”
—George Kazantzidis: “‘You are Mad!’ Allegations of Insanity in Greek Comedy and Rhetoric”
—Dennis Pausch: “Comic Invective in Cicero’s Speech Pro M. Caelio”
—Hanna Maria Degener: “How to Start a Show: Comic Invectives in the Prologues of Terence and Decimus Laberius”
Part II: The Cultural Workings of Invective
—Thomas K. Hubbard: “Comic Somatisation and the Body of Evidence in Aeschines’ Against Timarchus”
—Nathan Kish: “Comic Invective, Decorum and Ars in Cicero’s De Oratore”
—Jan Lukas Horneff: “No Decorum in the Forum? Comic Invective in the Theatre of Justice”
Part III: Invective in Ancient Socio-political Contexts
—Ioannis Konstantakos: “Political Rhetoric and Comic Invective in Fifth-Century Athens: The Trial of the Dogs in Aristophanes’ Wasps”
—Wilfred E. Major: “Democracy, Poverty, Comic Heroism and Oratorical Strategy in Lysias 24”