Aristophanes in a ‘City of Images’

Making Fun of Athena

Abstract

When Aristophanes, in his plays, mentions divinities he does not explicitly refer to any visual media. However, his ‘imagination’ of the gods was (as the English word implies) shaped by images that he – and his audience – saw in Classical Athens. The poet shrewdly plays with the common belief that a statue of a god actually was this god, and he confuses his audience by speaking about the acting goddess Athena but alluding to one particular statue. The Knights, performed in 424 BCE, show that the Athenians of the later fifth century imagined their city goddess to look like the colossal chryselephantine statue made by Phidias and erected in the Parthenon in 438 BCE (Athena Parthenos). This statue is probably also alluded to in the Birds, when the Polias of the new city is said to be fully armed.
However, Aristophanes did not only play with prestigious images. When in the 420s BCE the Athenian Assembly began to top stone inscriptions of their decrees with reliefs and, for honorary decrees, a composition was created that showed Athena (as the representative of the Athenian state) crowning the honoured person, the poet ‘jumped’ at this innovative visualisation of the goddess’s concern for mortals and ridiculed the – traditional – metaphor of Athena holding her hand over somebody (as a guardian) by taking this gesture literally. Aristophanes makes Athena hold a pot of broth over Demos’s head and, in another passage, pour plout-hygieia and ambrosia onto him (and garlic sauce on Paphlagon; Knights).