Aristophanes, Where Are You?
Good day to you, and welcome to Fascinating! I am your host Rik, from Planet Vulcan. My ongoing mission on Planet Earth: to plant seeds of a way of thinking, a way that is based on an understanding of evolutionary processes, with the ultimate aim of helping to sustain and increase the momentum of Earth’s long arc towards prosperous and happy societies, founded on ideals of liberty and justice.
King Solomon is traditionally credited with the phrase “There is nothing new under the sun”, found in the book of Ecclesiastes, Chapter 1, Verse 9. It probably wasn’t actually Solomon who wrote it, because the book of Ecclesiastes appears to have been written hundreds of years after the time of David and Solomon; but somebody did, most likely an obscure Jewish sage named Qoheleth writing in the third century B.C.E.
Qoheleth, an especially fascinating Earthling, also gave us the phrase, “all is vanity”, where the Hebrew word translated as vanity, means something different from how Earthlings think of vanity. Qoheleth was actually referring to the transience of life, not to its meaninglessness, and in his writing advocated living in a manner much like the way advocated by the Epicureans.
Scholars who study the classics of ancient Greece and Rome generally arrive at the same conclusion about novelty that Qoheleth and Epicurus did, i.e., that all of the stories have been told already, and all the philosophy has been written already.
Scientific skepticism reminds us that we should leave open the possibility that these conclusions are not beyond refutation, of course, and it’s important to always continue looking to disprove any and all hypotheses – there is always a possibility of something new arising. At the same time, there is nothing wrong with, and everything right with, looking for parallels in the stories from the past, and learning the lessons that are there to learn.
Contributing editor Otto Didact has submitted an essay about the ancient Greek dramatist Aristophanes, who left Earthlings a particularly fine example of the wisdom contained in the classics.
Otto writes:
Aristophanes, an Athenian playwright, came of age and began writing plays during the time of the Peloponnesian Wars, which took place between his City State and the City State of Sparta beginning in 431 B.C.E. and ending with Athens’ surrender to Sparta in 404 B.C.E.
The tale of the war, the events leading up to the war, and the fallout after the war are quite interesting topics in their own right; but for the purposes of this essay, this tale just serves as background and as a foundation for at least a partial understanding of what Aristophanes was writing about.
He did not write much directly about the war that was being fought; he instead directed his attention to the madness and the chaos that was unfolding around him in Athenian society.
He was considered prominent enough amongst the leading lights at the time to be included in some of Plato’s dialogs.
And he savagely ridiculed Socrates in his play “The Clouds”, calling him the master of a “thinkery” where the students learned the rhetorical skills needed to make weak arguments appear to be stronger than good arguments. In one of Plato’s dialogs, Socrates complains that his portrayal in this play contributed to the growing opposition to him among Athenians. And it probably did at the very least contribute to the atmosphere that led to Socrates’ execution 24 years after the play was performed.
Aristophanes was the author of Lysistrata, where the women of the city conspired to keep the “lid on the cookie jar”, i.e., refused to have sex with their husbands until the husbands ceased their endless and pointless warring.
He wrote more than forty plays, of which eleven have survived. The earliest surviving play is The Acharnians, in which the main character, the Athenian Dikaiopolis (dye-kye-OP-oh-liss), is so fed up with the ongoing war that he makes his own peace treaty with Sparta and then establishes a market where Athenians and Spartans can trade.
The play with the widest and most lasting influence was “The Birds”. It is from this play that we get the phrase “Cloud Cuckoo Land”, a phrase that has been used widely ever since, and especially in English-speaking countries, with a self-evident meaning.
Again with the Peloponnesian War as the background, two Athenians, Peisetairus (pay-SAY-tie-rus) and Euelpides (yoo-EL-pih-dees) have become disgusted with the goings on in their city, and are looking for somewhere else to live.
Their names are themselves jokes of a sort.
Peisetairus is usually translated something like “Persuader of Companions”. He is the dominant personality: clever, calculating, rhetorically gifted, and extraordinarily ambitious.
Euelpides means roughly “Full of Hope.” He is the more naive and good-natured of the two.
Our protagonists are not fleeing poverty or persecution. Their complaint is that life in Athens has become intolerable because of its bureaucracy, its endless litigations, its politics and all the fellow citizens with an endless appetite for meddling.
They have had enough of a society in which everyone is constantly suing, arguing, imposing more and more rules, and butting into other people’s business. They want to find a place where they can just live in peace and quiet.
They therefore ask the Hoopoe bird (Hoo-poo) for advice.
Why did they decide to approach the Hoopoe?
The Hoopoe is actually Tereus, in mythology a former King of the Thracians who has been transformed into a bird after a particularly gruesome episode where his wife and her sister kill his son, then cook the lad and feed him to his father to get even with Tereus for raping the sister and then cutting out her tongue so she cannot accuse him. The tongueless sister weaves the story into a tapestry which the wife then sees and they plot their revenge. Tereus finds out what they have done and goes after them with murderous intent; but the gods perform a deus ex machina, transforming all three of them into birds as he pursues them.
So the Hoopoe is for Peisetairus and Euelpides a suitable guide to the realm of birds because he used to be a human. The Hoopoe tells them that living like the birds is better than living in Athens. He then introduces our heroes to the realm where the birds live, between Heaven and Earth.
At first the birds object to the presence of the humans. They are reluctant to trust them because of the way humans have preyed upon them in the past. But Peisetairus delivers a persuasive oration in which he tells the birds that they existed before the gods and therefore ought to be supreme.
The birds feel flattered by this non-sequitur, accept the argument and welcome the humans to live amongst them.
But Peisetairus cannot leave well enough alone, and in his ambition decides to build an entirely new civilization with a new city in the sky, called Cloud Cuckoo Land, and to gain power by exploiting the strategic position of the realm of birds between humans and the gods, like the Iranians in the Strait of Hormuz or the Americans with their tariffs. The power rests on the fact that the gods need the smoke of sacrifices from humans, but the birds are capable of blocking it; and the humans of course need the gods for all the usual reasons.
Aristophanes has hereby shown the audience that political power can be conjured by an appeal to mythology dressed up in fine rhetoric.
To make a long story shorter: our heroes, who have begun with a quest to escape the old political order, ironically end up creating the same old shit that existed in Athens in their new city, as other humans hear of it, sense an opportunity and begin arriving to ask for things for scurrilous and unworthy reasons.
The people who have been attracted to Cloud Cuckoo Land are the same kinds of people who made Athenian society unbearable.
Peisetairus, who wanted to escape politics, turns out to be an exceptionally skillful politician, and becomes even more ambitious than the Athenians for whom he previously felt such loathing. Although his intentions were good, he had failed miserably in his attempt to abolish politics.
But he had succeeded in amassing such power that he could force the gods themselves into negotiations and exact a price. The gods even give him as a wife one Basileia, who personifies sovereignty, and Peisetairus thereby becomes the supreme ruler of the universe, a position he finds supremely satisfying.
He had become a successful revolutionary leader by employing a method we can still recognize today: he gained his position by recognizing a potential source of power, by persuading others that they have been cheated out of their rightful inheritance, by constructing a compelling ideology around that claim, by organizing the newly empowered group and then by exploiting the strategic position. He goes on to defeat all his opponents, like Stalin having Trotsky and many others murdered, and turns the revolutionary movement into his own tyrannical regime.
In America today, we see the same tactics still being successfully employed by people throughout what we refer to as the political spectrum. It’s all the same story, whether you have persuaded your power base that they have been robbed and victimized by immigration and foreign trade, or exploited and victimized by imaginary oligarchs who possess superhuman abilities that have enabled them to design and control an entire economic system and oppress the masses. And all sides claim to have the ability to create an actual Cloud Cuckoo Land after they have gained sufficient power.
The lesson to be learned here is that maybe we should not be thinking of an intelligently designed Cloud Cuckoo Land as an ideal.
Thanks to Otto for this essay.
From the Vulcan’s-eye view, we have to wonder sometimes whether Earthlings are truly progressing towards the evolution of a society where the thriving is truly better for the just plain folk.
Ideally, such progress ought to depend on dealing with one problem after another; but what we observe all too often is that Earthlings have to deal with the same problem over and over again, because they cannot shake the habit of intelligent design. And it’s really all so simple: if Earthlings simply cultivate the sociome instead of trying to replace it with something that is “intelligently” designed, adaptation will operate so as to deal with the problems efficiently and fairly.
We still have hope for your fascinating planet, and are not quite ready to give up on you just yet.
I invite you to have a listen to the next Fascinating! podcast and a look at the next video on our YouTube channel. You can find access to all podcasts and videos on our web page, fascinatingpodcast.com.
Please recommend Fascinating! to your friends if you find the lessons from nature in these essays personally valuable.
Theme music: Helium, with thanks to TrackTribe.
Live long and prosper.
Practice the art of winning without defeating anyone.
Savor your experiences.
Treasure your memories.
Anticipate a happy and rewarding future.
And respect nature’s wisdom.
