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Four Deadly Sins?(Arist. Wasps 74–84)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 February 2009
Extract
The two slaves, Xanthias and Sosias, posted by their master's son to guard his ‘sick’ father Philocleon, challenge the audience to guess the nature of the mysterious and strange disease &nuó&sgr&ogr&nu ⋯&lambda&lambdaó&kappa&ogr&tau&ogr&nu, 71) on account of which the father must be kept inside the house. When the correct answer to the riddle is finally disclosed, Philocleon is revealed to beis revealed to be φιληλιαστ⋯σ (88), namely a man ‘who loves to be a juror’ and to spend his days in the law-courts passionately pursuing the infatuation of which his son tries to cure him by locking him up away from the law-courts and from his fellow jurors. The joke owes its comic effect to incongruity, termed the ‘humour of inappropriateness’ by MacDowell, who writes: ‘It is funny when addiction to being a juror is called a disease (87–88), because “disease” is a word which is not generally applied to such conditions’. It should, however, be stressed that in order to create this sense of incongruity the previously mentioned diseases must form a class with certain common characteristics fundamentally different from those of Philocleon's, thus gradually moulding the audience's expectations and channelling them in a completely different direction.
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- Copyright © The Classical Association 1983
References
1 MacDowell, D. M., Aristophanes: Wasps (Oxford, 1971), 12Google Scholar.
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3 F. W. Hall–W. M. Geldart, Aristophanis Comoediae 2 (Oxford, 1906, repr. 1949); so also B. B. Rogers in his translation in the Loeb series (1924).
4 von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, U., ‘Über die Wespen des Aristophanes’, SB Preuss. Akad., Ph-hist. Kl. 23 (1911), 514–15Google Scholar = Kleine Schriften I (Berlin, 1935), 333–4Google Scholar; Wilamowitz argues that a dialogue would have contained clear references of the speakers to one another, but the text contains references only to the audience; see also his discussion of the other instances of οὔκ, ⋯λλ' in theWasps (lines 9, 635, 1143, 1372).
5 For what it may be worth, still another possibility of line-distribution and of staging may be advanced: Xa. 54–73; So. 74–76 reports to Xa. what Amynias says (that he is a dice-lover, 74–75a), and comments on it (‘What he says is foolish, by Zeus, for he conjectures it from his own disease’ 75b–76). Whereupon Xa. in line 77 addresses Amynias directly: ‘No, but etc’
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