A R I S TO P H A N E S’ T H E S M O P H O R I A Z U S A E

Aristophanes’ comic masterpiece Thesmophoriazusae has long been recognized

amongst the plays of Old Comedy for its deconstruction of tragic theatricality.
This book reveals that this deconstruction is grounded not simply in Aristophanes’
wider engagement with tragic realism. It demonstrates that from the outset
Aristophanes’ play draws upon Parmenides’ philosophical revelations concerning
reality and illusion, employing Eleatic strictures and imagery to philosophize the
theatrical situation, criticize Aristophanes’ poetic rival Euripides as promulgator
of harmful deceptions, expose the dangerous complicity of Athenian theatre
audiences in tragic illusion, and articulate political advice to an audience negoti-
ating a period of political turmoil characterized by deception and uncertainty (the
months before the oligarchic coup of 411 bc). The book thereby restores
Thesmophoriazusae to its proper status as a philosophical comedy and reveals
hitherto unrecognized evidence of Aristophanes’ political use of Eleatic ideas
during the late fifth century bc.

Ashley Clements is Lecturer in Greek Literature and Philosophy at Trinity

College Dublin.
 cambridge classical studies

General editors
r. l. hunter, r. g. osborne, m. millett, d. n. sedley,
g. c. horrocks, s. p. oakley, w. m. beard
 A R I S TO P H A N E S’ T H E S M O P H O R I A Z U S A E
Philosophizing Theatre and the Politics of Perception in Late
Fifth-Century Athens

ASHLEY CLEMENTS
 University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom

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Clements, Ashley.
Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae : Philosophizing theatre and the politics of
perception in late fifth-century athens / Ashley Clements.
pages cm. – (Cambridge Classical Studies)
Includes bibliographical references.
isbn 978-1-107-04082-3 (hardback)
1. Aristophanes. Thesmophoriazusae. 2. Aristophanes – Criticism,
Textual. 3. Greek drama (Comedy) – Criticism, Textual. I. Title.
pa3875.t5c48 2014
8820 .01–dc23
2013037429
isbn 978-1-107-04082-3 Hardback
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 CONTENTS

Acknowledgements page vii

List of abbreviations x
Proagōn: A tragic fable xii

1 Introduction 1
2 Rereading the prologue 12
3 Sophistic models: eristic and ἀντιλογία 28
4 On What-[It]-Is-Not: Gorgias and Empedocles 33
5 On What-[It]-Is: Parmenides, para-Doxa and 43
mortal error
6 Conclusion 159

Appendices 195
Bibliography 200
Index of principal passages discussed 221
General index 224

v
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I first stumbled across the kernel of this book as part of a Cambridge

doctoral thesis begun in 2001. I had then set out to explore an
Aristophanic comedy invested in ‘popular epistemology’ and, as
such, a polemical respondent to philosophy, but what I began
to glimpse in the Thesmophoriazusae was a comedy thoroughly
embroiled with it – and Parmenides no less. The resultant book
has taken so long to write because of the challenges of interpreting –
in one case against the grain of orthodox readings – two of the most
beguiling of ancient authors, whose difficult texts, I must freely
confess, continue to elude me in all sorts of tantalizing ways.
My ongoing experience of trying to grasp them leaves me with
an abundance of debts to many extraordinary scholars and friends.
It has been my rare privilege to have had a series of superlative
teachers and advisors from whom I continue to learn, who, in various
different ways, first taught me what one must learn in order to begin to
see: they include Charles Stewart and Hans van Wees at University
College London; Paul Millett, Paul Cartledge, who first supervised my
doctoral studies of Aristophanes and has remained a source of encour-
agement ever since, and Robin Osborne in Cambridge; Michael
Clarke in Galway; Barbara Graziosi and Christopher Rowe in
Durham. I thank them all dearly here.
I would also like to acknowledge those who kindly read earlier
versions of parts of this book when in the form of the doctoral thesis
and who offered valuable criticism and precious words of encourage-
ment: my thanks to Paul Cartledge, John Dillon, Simon Goldhill,
Barbara Graziosi, Jon Hesk, Liz Irwin, Nick Lowe, Hans van Wees,
Carrie Vout, James Warren, as well as to Mark Bradley, Stephen
Lambert and Keith Sidwell, who all provided support at crucial
moments. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers of
Cambridge University Press, as well as Liz Hanlon and Michael

vii
 a c k n o w l e d g e m e nt s

Sharp, Gaia Poggiogalli, and Jan Chapman, whose exemplary copy-

editing has manifestly improved the final book, and the academic
editors of the Cambridge Classical Studies series, without whose
support this work would not now be appearing.
Various seminar audiences – at Manchester, at St Andrews, at
conferences in Cork and in Maynooth – have in the last few years
also offered their critical responses to the central claims of this
work and are gratefully acknowledged here.
I should also like to express my gratitude to my colleagues in our
Department of Classics at Trinity College Dublin, who have afforded
me two periods of sabbatical leave in which to develop and finish
this work, and whose thoughts about various aspects of it have, often
in unexpected ways, sharpened my own. I owe particular thanks to
Anna Chahoud, Martine Cuypers, Monica Gale and Christine
Morris, and to Brian McGing, who very kindly read a complete
earlier draft of what follows and urged me to send it to a publisher.
That such a draft existed to show to anyone, however, has a
great deal to do with the involvement with this project, initially
as doctoral supervisor, of Robin Osborne. From its tentative
inception through to its appearance in print, Robin has been an
indefatigable voice of encouragement and advice, insight and
criticism, kindness and inspiration, and it is my great pleasure
now to offer my profound thanks to him for everything he has
done for me.
Lastly, there are my personal debts, to which it is impossible to
do justice here. I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to my
Mum, to my Dad, to my sister and brother in-law, and my nephew
and niece, for all their love and encouragement; and to Trish and
Steve, and to Sophie and Adam, for all their manifold kindnesses
and help along the way; and especially to two dear friends who
have bolstered and sustained me now for many years: Tim Hill,
who, with characteristic acuity and good humour, kindly read – as
well as endlessly discussed with me – earlier drafts of this book to
its great betterment, and to whose good-heartedness in this as in all
things I am sorely indebted; and Trevor Lee, who has always found
time to listen and rally, and whose friendship and example ever
inspire; and finally, to Kate, for all her crucial love and support.
This book is for her.
viii
 acknowledgements

Chapter 5 of the book incorporates a revised version of material

that has appeared previously in print as: ‘Thesmophoriazusae’s two
dawns’, Mnemosyne 62 (2009): 535–67. Permission to reprint is
gratefully acknowledged.

Excerpts from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead copyright

© 1967 Tom Stoppard reprinted with the permission of Faber &
Faber Ltd.
Excerpts from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, copyright ©
1967 by Tom Stoppard. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic,
Inc. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication,
is prohibited.

Excerpts from La Bête copyright © 2010 David Hirson reprinted

with the permission of Nick Hern Books: www.nickhernbooks.
co.uk
Excerpts from La Bête, copyright © 1992 by David Hirson. Used
by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Any third party use of this
material, outside of this publication, is prohibited.

ix
 ABBREVIATIONS

AP Anthologia Palatina
DK H. Diels and W. Kranz (1951–2) Die Fragmente der
Vorsokratiker, 3 vols. Berlin.
FGrH F. Jacoby (1923– ) Die Fragmente der griechischen
Historiker. Leiden.
IG (1893– ) Inscriptiones Graecae. Berlin.
KA R. Kassel and C. Austin (1983–91) Poetae Comici
Graeci. Berlin.
Kannicht R. Kannicht (2004) Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta,
vols. v.i, v.ii: Euripides. Göttingen.
LSJ H. Liddell, R. Scott and H. S. Jones (1940) A Greek–
English Lexicon. Oxford.
MW R. Merkelbach and M. L. West (1967) Fragmenta
Hesiodea. Oxford.
POxy (1898– ) The Oxyrhynchus Papyri. London.
Radt S. Radt (2008) Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta,
vol. iii: Aeschylus. Göttingen.
Sandbach F. H. Sandbach (1967) Plutarchi Moralia, vol. vii.
Leipzig.
SH H. Lloyd-Jones and P. Parsons (1983) Supplementum
Hellenisticum. Berlin and New York.
SM B. Snell and H. Maehler (1975) Pindari Carmina cum
Fragmentis, vol. ii. Leipzig.
Smyth H. W. Smyth (1920) Greek Grammar; reprinted 1972.
Cambridge, MA.
TrGF B. Snell, R. Kannicht and S. Radt (1971–85, 1986)
Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta, 4 vols.
Göttingen.

x
 l i s t o f a b b r e vi at i o n s

UR H. Usener and L. Radermacher (1899–1929) Dionysii

Halicarnasei Opuscula. Leipzig.
Wilson N. G. Wilson (2007) Aristophanis Fabulae, 2 vols.
Oxford.

Abbreviations of journal titles correspond to those used in L’Année

philologique.

xi
 P R O A G Ō N : A T R A G I C FA B L E

(From Valere’s ‘Parable of Two Boys from Cadiz’ as staged

in Act II of D. Hirson (2010) La Bête. London.)

valere. de brie juggles, incompetently.

mysterious these brothers were! and his brother, though, was brilliant
how! through and through . . .
fraternal twins, and both named so brilliant that his thoughts were
esteban! far too great
despite that curious phenomenon for ordinary folk to contemplate!
less likely twins there never, ever complex and subtle theorems he’d
were: expound
one juggled, valere slides a spool of paper into
valere hands de brie some juggling balls elomire’s mouth and draws it out across the
and de brie begins to juggle. stage, the troupe bunching to read the
one was a philosopher! ‘theorems’.
He slips a tome into elomire’s hands. of which the most aggressively
one wore a cape, the other wore a profound
frock; was one that proved (and this is just
one boy was big and solid as a rock, the gist)
the other lost his leg in early life catherine (reading).
for proving wrong a bully with a that no such thing as nothing can
knife. exist . . .
The troupe encircles elomire; valere lets marquis-therese (giggling).
out a banshee cry and ‘cuts off’ elomire’s for if it is does, it can’t be nothing,
‘leg’ – a little wooden boot which he shows to can it?
the princess. valere.
(As an aside.) amazing how one thought can shake
Unless your brain is smaller than a thimble, the planet!
The missing leg has struck you as a symbol The whole troupe giggles; with the exception
For just how costly it can be of bejart and elomire, they’re really
To fight for truth with one’s philosophy! beginning to enjoy themselves.
but soft! we tarry! Back to our oration: for this disproof of ‘nothing’,
the juggling twin, though skilled sharply put,
at his vocation, the world . . . at least cadiz . . . was
was, nonetheless, a wee bit ordinaire: at his. . .
beyond his keeping three balls in He holds up the little wooden boot.
the air . . . foot.
there wasn’t very much that he The troupe laughs spontaneously; they’re
could do; having fun, and from this point forward they

xii
 p r o a g ō n : a t r a g i c f a b l e
instinctively assume appropriate roles, their chose the other anyway!
pleasure and enthusiasm building in an now why on earth would she
accelerando. behave that way?
in volta, though, he couldn’t find He draws a tiny mole on bejart’s cheek.
one fan! in volta, where a tiny mole could
The members of the troupe act out the make
following characters. a crucial difference to one’s social
from sage aristocrat to working man, standing
from oldest village coot to tiny He turns bejart in the direction of elomire
shaver, and shakes him.
the brother whom the voltans she shuddered at the merest
seemed to favor thought of banding
was esteban the second-rate with someone so committed to
magician ideals
de brie, incompetently, pulls a magic he’d sacrifice his leg for what he
bouquet of flowers from his trousers. feels!
not esteban the dazzling logician; she therefore told the genius to
the latter’s work they couldn’t move on. . .
understand – was wed to
his proof that nothing’s nothing He pushes bejart and de brie together in
was too grand, the frame, throwing rice over their heads.
too eloquent a theory to advance mediocre esteban . . .
in such a vain and shallow land. . . said fond farewells to sideshows
princess. and all that,
Read france. embarked for spain aboard the tit-
elomire (through clenched teeth). for-tat
i love that. . . de brie steers an imaginary gondola.
princess. which she misread instead as
Shhhh! It’s almost over now. tit-for-tatra
valere. He shrugs as if to say, ‘Who knows why?’
but even more unsettling was how was welcomed to cadiz like . . .
unflinchingly and swiftly cleopatra
esmerolta, He winks at the princess, to celebrate his
herself debased by prejudice in rhyme.
volta, de brie.
gave partial treatment to the ‘ruft laut mein hertz!’
juggling twin! catherine.
a totally unpardonable sin, brava!
for she, marquise-therese.
(Indicating bejart). well, good for
unlike her countrymen, could see her!
(Indicating elomire). valere.
the brilliance of the one’s but . . . what of our esteemed
philosophy philosopher?
but like them It’s clear at this point that there’s a real
And the troupe and bejart turn toward rapport between valere and the troupe;
de brie. and valere now shoves elomire aside,

xiii
 p r o a g ōn : a t r a g i c f ab l e
himself assuming the role of ‘philosopher’ weeks later when his lonely corpse
for the dramatic finale, as if elomire was found
couldn’t possibly handle it. madeline.
except, of course, the patches for
madeline.
his eyes
alas, his was a hideous demise! and also
du parc. valere.
by hunger forced to pluck out both
(Think what this might symbolise!)
his eyes
madeline.
valere ‘plucks out’ two gelatinous ‘eyes’ his wooden leg!
and hurls them against the wall, where they valere.
stick; he then staggers tragically about the
The wooden leg, you hear!?
stage. de brie.
and trade them for a slightly the leg, like . . .
tainted quail catherine.
catherine.
. . . truth!
he wandered, blind and destitute valere.
and frail Good!
de brie. de brie.
from upper volta down to lower
wouldn’t disappear!
volta it stood for his convictions, in a way –
du parc. du parc.
from lower volta back to upper
unyielding,
volta marquise-therese.
madeline. hard,
in search of someone catherine.
catherine.
immune to all
anyone at all decay,
madeline. de brie.
intelligent enough to scale the a mark of what he’d fought for
wall
since his youth:
of his complex and rich philosophy! du parc.
marquise-therese. eternal,
but nothing does exist, for
madeline.
tragically if impenetrable
’twas nothing that was left upon all.
the ground truth!

xiv
 1

INTRODUCTION

ἄκουε, σίγα, πρόσεχε τὸν νοῦν, δεῦρ’ ὅρα.1

The first step in understanding anything at all is not to underestimate it.2

The purpose of this small book is to make one very strong claim:
when theatre turns inward to theorize itself explicitly during the
late fifth century in Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae, it does so
using the lens of one particular philosophical framework and for
expressly political purposes.3 The political dimension of what I
have to say I will leave for my concluding remarks because I want
to devote the majority of this book simply to establishing that our
Thesmophoriazusae is a philosophical comedy. But because
Aristophanes’ comic reflections on mimēsis and theatrical produc-
tion in the famous ‘Agathon scene’, at the end of the play’s
prologue (101–209), have been read in isolation from the dramatic
frame which itself has never been properly understood, the philo-
sophical treatment of theatre that our play offers us has never been
fully appreciated.
This book therefore focuses almost exclusively on the relatively
small section of text that opens the dramatic framework at
the beginning of the play. My aim is to draw the reader into an
exercise in progressively more philosophical reading and thereby
introduce anew a play that has long been known to its aficionados
as the ‘jewel’ in Aristophanes’ literary crown.4 To this end, I offer
not simply a new reading of an old play, but a new way of reading,

1
Cratin. fr. 315 KA: ‘Listen, be still, focus your mind, look here.’
2
Kingsley (2003) 496.
3
See Valakas (2009) for a study of the beginnings of a theoretical discourse about theatre in
extant fifth-century tragic texts that prefigures the direct and explicit theoretical reflexivity
found in Cratin. fr. 342 KA and Aristophanic comedy, which ‘appear to be the earliest
explicit sources for – and, at the same time, travesties of – critical terminology and ideas
about theatre’ (182).
4
Austin and Olson (2004) xxxii.

1
 a ri s t op h an e s ’ thesmophoriazusae

one that situates Aristophanic comedy as closely implicated in the

nexus of sophistic and philosophical trends of the late fifth century.
My intention is to challenge the tyranny of our own genre bound-
aries: to reveal comedy that is every bit as philosophically satirical
as certain of the Presocratics are satirically philosophical. What I
hope will emerge is both a new understanding of the popular
reception of Presocratic philosophy by Aristophanes, and also a
new basis from which to assess the relationship between this play
and its political context.
But it will almost certainly be objected that the way of reading
comedy this book thereby presents often operates at levels of
paradox and implication that simply cannot have been appreciated
by an Aristophanic theatre audience and therefore is itself implau-
sible. I am, some will say, trying to ‘extract from the text subtleties
so tortuous that they could never reach the consciousness of an
audience through a medium so fast moving and unhaltable as
music’.5 Yet the notion that we already know the plausible limits
of comic audiences and must therefore necessarily delimit our
reading of the allusive possibilities of our extant texts is predicated
upon fallacy. No less than the comic poets’ own constructions of
Dionysian audiences as δεξιός, or σοφός, our picture of ancient
audiences, too, is imagined, and if they are not entirely thereby
created in our own image, it inevitably reflects our own precon-
ceptions, prior interpretations, and limitations (e.g. what we think
we know about the Aristophanic corpus, and so on).6 It is not at all
coincidental that Sir Kenneth Dover’s now comical photographic
evocation of a typical member of Aristophanes’ audience as a goat-
carrying, modern Greek shepherd, rustically quizzical but happy,

5
R. David on Shakespeare in PBA 47 (1961) 158, cited by Taplin (1977) 18, reproduced by
Lyne (1994) 197. The thinking of such sceptics, as Lyne has argued, in turn, will run: ‘We
know for whom our writer was writing; we know what sort of effects they could absorb
and understand. Therefore if a scholar posits the sort of effect that the imagined audience
could not have grasped, he must be in error.’
6
A comprehensive and careful discussion of this issue is offered by Revermann (2006a),
who pioneers a ‘bottom-up’ approach to spectatorial competencies amongst late fifth-
century theatre audiences. For objections, see Vander Waerdt (1994) 60 n. 44 (specifically
on Clouds). As for what we think we know about the genre, it remains salutary to note that
such generalizations about Aristophanic comedy as now exist are based upon a sample of
only eleven extant complete plays of a known oeuvre which comprised at least forty and
probably more (Ar. test. 1.59–61 KA).

2
 introduction

the frontispiece to his Aristophanic Comedy, is complemented by a

damning assessment of our Clouds (a play ironically, as we have it,
probably never actually performed) as the product of a poet ‘to
whom all philosophical and scientific speculation, all disinterested
intellectual curiosity, is boring and silly’.7
Even if we accept, as we ought, the stratification of spectatorial
competencies in the late fifth century, the competency of theatre
audiences does not tell against the sophistication of the comic
poets, as, indeed, the failure of the first, staged, but now lost,
version of Clouds attests, nor should it limit our interpretations of
their extant texts.8 Indeed, in the realm of paratragic allusion, it
does not. But then, here we are far more comfortable, because,
despite what Aristotle tells us about the limited audience knowl-
edge of tragic stories, the Scholia who happen to survive have
already noted, and therefore conferred plausibility upon, most of
our accepted tragic allusions.9 But for scholars to endorse this error
in the realm of philosophical allusion and the comedy we are about
to read in particular is deliciously ironic. This is not simply because

7
Dover (1972), frontispiece of a Greek shepherd ‘to help us imagine the people who
constituted the greater part of Aristophanes’ audience’. By so portraying the comic
audience, Revermann (2006a) 99 n. 1 suggests, Dover ‘was implicitly militating against
any attempts at idealization’. Quotation in main text from Dover (1968) lii.
Dover continues: ‘Ar., as a successful writer of comedies for a mass audience, did not
have to make a great effort to look at the world from a popular standpoint; he must in
essentials have adopted that standpoint by nature, for otherwise he would not have been a
comic poet . . . I suggest, then, that although the difference between Socrates and the
sophists was known to Ar., in the sense that the data which constituted that difference were
available to his organs of perception, he simply did not see it’ (liii). Against Dover (1968)
xcviii, Rosen (1997) 410 and others, who posit a reading-audience for our Clouds,
Revermann (2006b) 326–32 addresses the possibility that our play might have been
restaged.
8
For the failure of Clouds I in 423 bc as due to the influence of ‘vulgar men’ (φορτικοί),
i.e. comedians, over its audience, see Clouds 521–5, with Biles (2011) 181–210; cf.
Hubbard (1991) 91–2; Sidwell (2009) 7–15; and Revermann (2006a) 102 on Cratin. fr.
360 KA, which similarly censors dull spectators. Reciprocally, as Biles (2011)
181 notes, the implication of the parabasis is ‘that the exceptional sophia latent in a
play like Clouds (522) requires an audience of the same quality (521, 526–7, 535), in
order that their judgment (533) can bestow this title on the poet (520)’. Cf. now also
M. E. Wright (2012).
9
Arist. Po. 1451b23–6, discussed by Revermann (2006a) 99, 115–17. Tragic allusion, of
course, is also indicated by metre, language and register (as well as, for its original
audience, by additional signifiers in performance), just as is philosophical allusion by
cognate markers (e.g. argument style, language, register). For a sample recent exploration
of tragic allusion in our Th., see Platter (2007) 163–82; philosophical allusion, see, e.g.,
Willi (2003a) 96–156; Broackes (2009); Rashed (2009) (all on Clouds).

3
 a ri s t op h an e s ’ thesmophoriazusae

this is a text in which the ability to read allusion correctly is

manifestly at issue. It is because our play is in fact all about falla-
cious reasoning and yet remains unappreciated as such precisely
because of this fallacy of our own in shepherd’s clothing: the
‘Fallacy of Audience Limitation’.10 That in following this path
scholars also unwittingly endorse the validity of our comedy’s
philosophical criticisms adds a further layer of irony: for, as we
shall see, paradoxically, in this play, as in the parabasis of our
Clouds, it is the very incompetency of late fifth-century theatre
audiences that is essential to the truth of its critique.
Loosely described, the Thesmophoriazusae with which critics are
more familiar takes as its premise the attempt of the tragic poet
Euripides to infiltrate the annual all-female festival of the
Thesmophoria. There, installed on the Pnyx under the ritual regula-
tions of their religious celebration, the citizen women of Athens plan
to use the privacy of their traditional rites finally to rid themselves of
the poet. Euripides is to be brought to trial for telling women’s secrets
and turning the minds of their husbands against them with his
theatrical portrayals of duplicitous tragic heroines. His counter-
scheme is to get a man to disguise himself as a female celebrant, to
infiltrate the women’s festival, and to charm the female quasi-
ekklēsia with a persuasive defence. But he cannot go himself, and
having tried, and failed, to recruit the soft and overly refined tragic
poet Agathon whose mastery of mimēsis accommodates both the
masculine and the feminine, he resorts to disguising a male relative
instead. Shaved, singed and dressed up in female attire, Euripides’
Inlaw is sent off in matronly drag to infiltrate the festival and voice
his kinsman’s defence. There, whilst attempting to pass himself off as
one of the women, he is ultimately discovered, held hostage by the
celebrating women and forced to make a series of attempts at rescue
or escape, thereby acting out a string of tragic parodies of Euripidean
drama, twice bringing the poet back on-stage in supporting roles as
each attempt is thwarted. Finally, it is left to Euripides, this time
swapping his appearance for an old madam and bringing along a
dancing girl, to smooth things over with the women, save his kins-
man from the clutches of a Scythian archer policeman and make

10
The phrase is Lyne’s (1994) 196–8.

4
 introduction

good their escape. Throughout, metatheatrical jokes about gender

inversions, role-playing, mimēsis and deception abound.11
Yet the first scene of the play – ostensibly, at least – presents its
audience with a quite different set of comic concerns. Here we find a
frenetic exchange that places an impatient spectator on-stage and
implicates him in a perceptual puzzle of sensory segregation, first
fragmenting, then negating, his capacity to see or to hear. Scholars
have treated this scene briefly, and largely as a playful and deliber-
ately abstruse precursor to the contradictions and ironic inversions of
the better-known boundary games on offer to its spectators later in our
play.12 It is part of a typical ‘journey-to-the-door’ scene and, as such,
they assume, merely a warm up for the cleverer stuff to follow when
its audience has passed through that door and finally met Agathon,
jokes about transvestism, mimēsis, paratragedy, and so on. But, as we
shall see, this beginning, in fact, secretly holds the key to the real
purpose of every other thing in this comedy that follows.
Thesmophoriazusae opens as two travellers arrive on-stage. One
is leading the other, a man of similar age, who, wearied by hours of
walking, now pauses to ask his companion where he is being taken.
ΚΗΔΕΣΤΗΣ
ὦ Ζεῦ, χελιδὼν ἆρά ποτε φανήσεται;
ἀπολεῖ μ᾿ ἀλοῶν ἅνθρωπος ἐξ ἑωθινοῦ.
οἷόν τε, πρὶν τὸν σπλῆνα κομιδῇ μ᾿ ἐκβαλεῖν,
παρὰ σοῦ πυθέσθαι ποῖ μ᾿ ἄγεις, ωὐριπίδη;

11
Readings of the play exploring these themes include Zeitlin (1981); Bobrick (1997);
Stehle (2002); Tzanetou (2002).
12
For Austin and Olson (2004) ad 5–22, it is simply ‘an interruption in the forward
movement of the dialogue’; fuller, but still cursory, treatments are offered by Whitman
(1964) 219 and Silk (2000) 325–6 discussing characterization; Taaffe (1993) 79 and
N. W. Slater (2002) 151, both influenced by ‘gaze’ film theory, briefly point to the
metatheatrical dimension this opening adds to the play in the course of their discussions
of spectatorship but, in their emphasis on the visual, elide its focus on the interrelationship
of the senses. Nichols (1998) 78–83 offers a metaphorical reading of its language of
seeing and hearing but misses the parody of contemporary sophistic and philosophical
thought this enacts, a feature of the scene hinted at by Whitman (1964) 264 and explored
variously by Hays (1990); Mureddu (1992); Sansone (1996) 339–45; Rashed (2007); cf.
Rau (1967) 156–60; Tsitsiridis (2001). Bowie (1993) 220–5, by contrast, briefly notes the
treatment of perception in Th.’s opening scene, and explains it as part of the programmatic
concern of Aristophanic comedy to assert its superiority over Euripidean tragedy. He
reads our first lines both as parodying ‘opaque’ tragic language (which is received with
‘incomprehension’ by ‘Mnesilochus’, 220) and as prefiguring Th.’s later treatment of the
‘tragic’ theme of illusion and reality in its parodies of Hel. and Andr. (221–3).

5
 a ri s t op h an e s ’ thesmophoriazusae
ΕΥΡΙΠΙΔΗΣ
ἀλλ’ οὐκ ἀκούειν δεῖ σε πάνθ’ ὅσ’ αὐτίκα 5
ὄψει παρεστώς. Κη. πῶς λέγεις; αὖθις φράσον.
οὐ δεῖ μ’ ἀκούειν; Ευ. οὐχ ἅ γ’ ἂν μέλλῃς ὁρᾶν.
Κη. οὐδ’ ἆρ’ ὁρᾶν δεῖ μ’; Ευ. οὐχ ἅ γ’ ἂν ἀκούειν δέῃ.
Κη. πῶς μοι παραινεῖς; δεξιῶς μέντοι λέγεις·
οὐ φῂς σὺ χρῆναί μ’ οὔτ’ ἀκούειν οὔθ’ ὁρᾶν; 10
Ευ. χωρὶς γὰρ αὐτοῖν ἑκατέρου ᾿στὶν ἡ φύσις.
Κη. τοῦ μήτ’ ἀκούειν μήθ’ ὁρᾶν; Ευ. εὖ ἴσθ’ ὅτι.
Κη. πῶς χωρίς;
Ευ. οὕτω ταῦτα διεκρίθη τότε.
Αἰθὴρ γάρ, ὅτε τὰ πρῶτα διεχωρίζετο
καὶ ζῷ’ ἐν αὑτῷ ξυνετέκνου κινούμενα, 15
ᾧ μὲν βλέπειν χρή, πρῶτ’ ἐμηχανήσατο
ὀφθαλμὸν ἀντίμιμον ἡλίου τροχῷ,
ἀκοῆς δὲ χοάνην ὦτα διετετρήνατο.
Κη. διὰ τὴν χοάνην οὖν μήτ’ ἀκούω μήθ’ ὁρῶ;
νή τὸν Δί’ ἥδομαί γε τουτὶ προσμαθών. 20
οἷόν γε πού ᾿στιν αἱ σοφαὶ ξυνουσίαι.
Ευ. πόλλ’ ἂν μάθοις τοιαῦτα παρ’ ἐμοῦ. Κη. πῶς ἂν οὖν
πρὸς τοῖς ἀγαθοῖς τούτοισιν ἐξεύροιμ’ ὅπως
ἔτι προσμάθοιμι χωλὸς εἶναι τὼ σκέλει; 24

K. O Zeus! Will that swallow ever show up?

This guy will be the death of me, plodding around since dawn.
Might it be possible, before I puke out my guts, to find out from
you Euripides, just where you’re taking me?
E. You needn’t hear it all, since you’re going to see it for yourself. 5–6
K. What? Say again? I need not hear?
E. No, not what you’re about to see.
K. And I need not see either?
E. No, not what you need to hear.
K. What are you telling me? It’s pretty subtle.
You’re saying that I should neither hear nor see? 10
E. I’m saying that these two are by nature mutually distinct.
K. What, not hearing and not seeing?
E. To be sure.
K. How do you mean, distinct?
E. This is how they were separated long ago:
For when Aither first was separating itself out
and begetting living, moving beings within itself, 15
that with which one must see, it fashioned first,
the eye, counter image of the solar disc,
and for hearing, drilled the ear as a funnel.
K. So because of this funnel I’m not to hear or see?

6
 introduction
I’m delighted to have this additional lesson. 20
These deep conversations really are something!
E. You could learn many other such lessons from me.
K. As a matter of fact I’d love to figure out how to learn another fine
lesson: how to go lame in both legs!13

These first moments are replete with verbal ambiguities, and their
effect is to puzzle the spectators about what is to come next, situating
them alongside the anonymous figure on stage.14 Indeed, to the extent
that Euripides’ interlocutor is the play’s token spectator, at first blush
there is significant comic congruence between his experience and
theirs. At this point, certainly, it is his eyes and ears, from which the
action is similarly being withheld (5–6); his curiosity, aroused by the
enigma of an opening verbal display (6), a premise within the scene for
the merciless lampooning of Euripides’ pseudo-philosophizing of
perception (δεξιῶς, ‘Sophisticatedly’, 9);15 and it is his hypothesizing
as to what exactly is meant by this, or rather, what is implied in practice
by it, grounded, of course, in his own repertoire of experiences and
expectations (‘And I need not see . . .?’, 8; ‘You’re saying . . .’, 10; 12);
and finally, his incredulous laughter at a puzzle of words that has been
extrapolated in speech and rejoinder to become the perfect sophistic
λόγος, a message paradoxically self-refuting in its performance (20–4),
in which, as fellow spectators, the theatre audience share. At the same
time, that audience comprises a body of spectators made up of diverse
audiences, and thus analogous positions to this unfolding comic λόγος
engender a range of different, developing, responses.16

13
Text Austin and Olson (2004) but following Henderson’s (2000) punctuation of line 10.
Trans. Henderson (2000) modified. Bar noted disagreements, I use the text of Austin and
Olson (2004) throughout. My translations of particular lines will vary throughout the book for
reasons of emphasis.
14
This observation builds upon the work of Taaffe (1993) 79.
15
Pace Silk (2000) 322, for whom the notion that the comic Euripides is belittled in Th. is a
significant misreading of the play.
16
See Lada-Richards (1999) 10–12; Reckford’s (1987) 391 assertion that ‘Aristophanes
wrote for a mass Athenian audience, not for an intelligentsia’ is at best reductive and, at
worst, obstructive: the heterogeneity of comic audiences does not tell against the sophis-
tication of Aristophanic comedy. Nor should the broad range of responses that comedy no
doubt elicited from its diverse spectators predispose modern readers to privilege the
(imagined) sense-making activities of ‘the village spectator’ over those of the ‘town-bred
intellectual’ (I borrow Lada-Richards’ typology) as the default basis of our appreciation
of comic poetry. In light of comedy’s self-promotion as original and sophisticated, δεξιός,
such a view seems perverse. See Wasps 1044, on the failure of the first Clouds; Clouds
547–8; Ach. 628–30; and for the ideal comic audience as δεξιός, see Knights 233, Clouds

7
 a ri s t op h an e s ’ thesmophoriazusae

Yet modern scholarly responses to these early lines tend to

endorse reading strategies that circumscribe their comic possibil-
ities. Many critics, for instance, follow a set of assumptions which
close down discussion of the sorts of sense-making hypotheses an
original audience might have generated in piecing together a por-
trait of the figures on-stage (and so, in developing an idea of what is
going on) – eliding a, if not the, central question on its lips at this
early point: ‘just who is it that questions Euripides?’
The ancient commentators on the text, for example, long sanc-
tioned the practice of naming Euripides’ anonymous interlocutor
‘Mnesilochus’, after the elderly father-in-law of the historical
Euripides.17 Yet the remarkable fact remains that he is never
named in our play; he is given only the generic appellation of
521, 527. That here Ar. is flattering actual audiences does not invalidate the point; as
comedy self-reflexively treats its own reception, δεξιός predicated of an audience is open
to be exploited in all manner of ways: note, for instance, how in the prologue of Peace
(43–8 cited below) Ar. draws the intellectual and political allegorizing of some of his
spectators up onto the stage to be itself an object of laughter (the same allegorizing, in
fact, which he had relied upon only a few years earlier in Knights, there certainly
lampooning Cleon); and, in so doing, he elicits precisely such a response from those
listening to and watching this scene (what does this mean . . .? what am I meant to
see . . .?; see Slater (2002) 116 on the ‘guessing game’ that ensues). Thus the action of
Peace pauses as two slaves speculate about and act out what two intellectuals (a young
smarty pants (δοκησίσοφος) and an Ionian) out in the audience might be concocting from
the enigma of the dung beetle, 43–8 (text Wilson):
Οιβ. οὐκοῦν ἂν ἤδη τῶν θεατῶν τις λέγοι
νεανίας δοκησίσοφος, “τόδε πρᾶγμα τί;
ὁ κάνθαρος δὲ πρὸς τί;”
Οια. κᾆτ’ αὐτῷ γ’ ἀνὴρ 45
Ἰωνικός τίς φησι παρακαθήμενος·
“δοκέω μέν, ἐς Κλέωνα τοῦτ’ αἰνίσσεται,
ὡς κεῖνος ἐν Ἀΐδεω τὴν σπατίλην ἐσθίει.”
See Rosen (1984) 389–96 on this passage, who points to a line of scholarship arguing that
Ar. parodies enigmatizing intellectuals in this scene (i.e. Ionian physikoi who find deep
meanings in anything); cf. Struck (2004) 41, who suggests a spoof of the allegorizing
followers of Anaxagoras. But note that by uncritically accepting the premise of the slaves’
conversation (i.e. that when it comes to political allegory and the αἶνος of a dung beetle,
‘he who smelt it dealt it’), these readings gloss over precisely the comic disclaimer a δεξιός
audience might provide a master of (politically) pregnant jokes (once bitten, Ach. 377–
82). The key point is that whoever the comic vehicle of displacement is – or, is set up to
be – in these lines, this mention of Cleon of course is far from random or innocent (as even
Rosen (1984) 391, cf. n. 9 must acknowledge). See Ach. 377–82, with Halliwell (1980),
(1991) on the problems of this passage.
17
See Austin and Olson (2004) ad 74, who note that the name ‘Mnesilochus’ is attested in
the Scholia, and in marginal notes in R, which identify Th.’s anonymous character with
the father of the historical Euripides’ first wife (see anon. vit. Eur. §5, 13, Suda ε3695 with
Sommerstein (2003/4) 8–9) probably because these ancient commentators drew upon the

8
 introduction

κηδεστής (a term, in fact, which need not denote ‘father-in-law’

any more than ‘son-in-law’ or ‘brother-in-law’), and then not even
until some fifty lines after our opening exchange.18 To be sure, the
most recent editors have succeeded in eradicating the name
‘Mnesilochus’ from our text,19 yet, despite this, it continues impli-
citly to flavour conceptualizations of the sort of character first
depicted (e.g. as elderly and plodding as opposed to a younger,
and sharper, Euripides).20
comic charge made by Telecleides in the early 420s (but possibly earlier) against
Euripides that accredited a Mnesilochus (probably Euripides’ father-in-law) with con-
tributing to the production of his new plays, the intellectual subtleties of which were
supplied by Socrates, see Telecl. fr. 41 KA: Μνησίλοχός ἐστ’ ἐκεῖνος, <ὃς> φρύγει τι δρᾶμα
καινόν∣Εὐριπίδῃ, καὶ Σωκράτης τὰ φρύγαν’ ὑποτίθησιν (‘Mnesilochus is the man <who>
is roasting a novel drama for Euripides, and Socrates is placing underneath the kindling
[for the roasting]’, i.e. according to Sommerstein (2003/4) 11, ‘supplying the ideas and
arguments’ (cf. Telecl. fr. 42; Call. Com. fr. 15; Ar. fr. 392 KA, and p. 66 n. 58 for the
wider comic tradition). As Sommerstein (2003/4) 11 observes, the implication is that
whichever crucial element this ‘Mnesilochus’ may contribute to Euripides’ plays, it is not
their ideas and arguments. Cf. Ruffel (2011) 353 n. 114, who defends his use of the name
by citing this comic tradition, which was available, he argues, also to Th.’s original
audience. But on the lack of evidence for, and improbability of, any specific family
identification intended here, see Rogers (1904) xvii; Sommerstein (1994) ad 1; Slater
(2002) 295 n. 6; Silk (2000) 229–30; cf. Bierl (2009) 244–9.
18
See line 74; κηδεστής (‘male relative by marriage’) is used again at 210, 584, 1165. A
further generic form of address, ὦ γέρον, is used of the κηδεστής (by Agathon’s Servant)
at 63, which alongside Agathon’s later assumption at 164 that he is familiar with the
poetry of Phrynichus, probably indicates that the actor was identified as an old man by his
mask at the outset of the play, as Slater (2002) 151, 295 n. 6 suggests; that this
unambiguously makes him Euripides’ elderly father-in-law is less certain. See, for
example, the lack of any clear division in age between the two characters at 190, where
Euripides identifies himself as πολιός ‘grey(-haired)’). Sommerstein (1994) ad 1 advo-
cates ‘brother-in-law’ as the more probable intended sense of the term. Beyond this,
however, the audience is told nothing specific about the κηδεστής at any point within the
play; even the allusion to the character’s personal history (a wife and children) at 1204–6
is vague and general, see Silk (2000) 229–30.
19
See Sommerstein (1994); Henderson (2000); Austin and Olson (2004); N. G. Wilson
(2007a); contra Hall and Geldart (1901); cf. Bergk (1852).
20
On the ways in which some critics retain the name whilst acknowledging its problems,
see, for instance, Slater (2002) 295 n. 7, who suggests that the κηδεστής ‘is simply an
extension and parody of Euripides’. But the name dominates Slater’s main discussion as
if the fact of this character’s strict anonymity adds little in terms of an interpretative
problem to the spectators’ early experience of the play but instead represents an omission
that does something of a disservice to an otherwise well-developed character: ‘while this
name has no authority and is perhaps even improbable, he is so fully realized and
significant a character in the play that it seems to be better to use this personal name
rather than a functional designation (such as the “Old Relative”)’ (151). For scholars
similarly wedded to the name, see Silk (2000) 208 n. 4, who acknowledges the audience’s
ignorance of the character’s identity (229 n. 41) but sees use of the name as both
‘convenient and harmless’; see also Reckford (1987); Whitman (1964); Zeitlin (1981);
Ruffel (2011). Contra: Taaffe (1993); Hansen (1976); Dover (1972); Voelke (2004).

9
 a ri s t op h an e s ’ thesmophoriazusae

Another way of delimiting the comic possibilities of these open-

ing lines is the assimilation of our protagonists to a comic pairing in
the mould of Strepsiades and Socrates from Clouds.21 A typical
reading of this sort proposes that the humour here derives from a
clash of two well-tested comic caricatures: one, the comic ‘man on
the street’, an ageing Athenian of ‘limited intelligence’22 whose
persistent reduction to the concrete of what is put to him marks him
as one ‘who is having difficulty keeping up (both literally and
figuratively) with his intellectually advanced relative’;23 the
other, the comic philosopher, abstract, modish, given to trivialities,
played, of course, by Euripides, the ‘riddling sophist’.24 As Silk
puts it, as they are introduced in the first scene: ‘The two central
characters of the Thesmophoriazusae are clever Euripides and his
dumb and docile relative Mnesilochus.’25 On this reading, if the
first moments of our prologue present us with a comedy of errors,
they must belong to the stooge who tangles with Euripidean
subtlety – not to that poet, a notorious peddler of sophistry. In

21
On the pairing of Strepsiades and Socrates see O’Regan (1992) 35–48; for the model of
Strepsiades and Socrates used to discuss the relationship between ‘Mnesilochus’/the
κηδεστής and Euripides, see Paduano (1982) 109–10; Hubbard (1991) 185; Sansone
(1996); Silk (2000); Austin and Olson (2004) ad 5–10, 19; Voelke (2004) 131. But see
Whitman (1964) 12, 218–19 on pertinent differences between these characters.
22
‘Limited intelligence’, Sansone (1996) 342; other characterizations include: ‘Mystified’,
Whitman (1964) 219; ‘mystifié par les subtilités d’ Euripide’, C. Austin (1990) 12;
‘clumsy incomprehension’, ‘the baffled victim of Euripides’ mystifications’, or just a
‘buffoon’, Silk (2000) 326, 245, 233, or ‘stooge’ 320; ‘naïve’, Taaffe (1993) 79;
‘befuddled’, Austin and Olson (2004) ad 5–22; full of ‘admiration for Euripides’ clever-
ness [which] is scarcely reduced by his [sc. the Kinsman’s] confusion before Agathon’s
door’, Moulton (1981) 111; cf. ‘Admiratif face aux discours habiles (9) et savants (21)
que tient Euripide’, Voelke (2004) 131; cf. Bowie (1993) 220.
23
Sansone (1996) 341.
24
Taaffe (1993) 79; see also Slater (2002) 151, for whom it is Euripides who plays the ‘word
games’; cf. Austin and Olson (2004) ad 5–22 who, whilst acknowledging that Euripides’
‘professorial’ posturing is ‘mercilessly exposed’ during these opening lines (cf. lv: ‘most
of what he has to say is nonsense (5–21)’), suppose this occurs only through his inter-
locutor’s unintentional ‘ludicrous distortions and misunderstandings’ of ‘Euripidean
verbal subtlety’ (citing ΣR: ‘The one character speaks in a very elevated, tragic style,
while the other hears [his words] more stupidly than is necessary’).
25
Silk (2000) 208, cf. 233, 324, 326, a characterization which holds for our opening lines,
but which, Silk claims, is tempered by Ar.’s subsequent ‘recreative’ play with character
featuring ‘discontinuities between Mnesilochus the docile bumbler [sc. of the first scene]
and Mnesilochus the inventive poseur, between clever Euripides and Euripides so witless
that he accepts Mnesilochus’ unlikely offer’ (223).

10
 introduction

fact, one recent editor is so committed to that model that he resorts

to endorsing emendation of the text in order to preserve it.26
But as the severity of that last editorial intervention suggests,
looking outside these lines for their intrinsic logic simply obfus-
cates what they themselves have to offer, fostering an image of two
protagonists that is significantly at odds with the characters that
emerge strictly from a close reading of the text. Indeed, presuppo-
sing a solution to the problem of identity deliberately posed at the
outset in this way imposes a misleading stability onto a comic
terrain that, for its original audience, presented entirely shifting
ground.
Our interpretation of these opening moments, then, will begin,
first, as does the play, with the comic Euripides and an interlocutor
who is strictly anonymous; and, secondly, with the task its original
audience faced, the task of piecing together an understanding of its
emergent characters through their rapid flow of speech. In practical
terms this will entail close, sequential, line-by-line analysis; and, if
we are to appreciate the experience of listeners making sense of
what they have heard, a style of reading sensitive to an audience’s
movement back and forth within it, induced by the key expository
cues they encounter.27

26
In a move most recently endorsed by N. G. Wilson (2007a) (2007b), but first proposed by
Van Herwerden (1882) 88, Sommerstein (1994) deletes line 12 (Κη. τοῦ μήτ’ ἀκούειν μήθ’
ὁρᾶν; Ευ. εὖ ἴσθ’ ὅτι, 12), which he construes as ‘“neither hearing nor seeing?” to which
Euripides replies “That’s quite right”’, conjecturing the survival in our text of an author’s
variant and offering two grounds for this supposition: the first concerns sequence of
thought and is that our interlocutor’s retort, ‘How do you mean, distinct?’ (13) should
respond directly to the comment of Euripides to which it refers (11). (Sommerstein
compares Frogs 96–8.) But there is no reason for insisting on this here: it is clear that
K.’s two questions follow from Euripides’ comment at 11, each seizing upon the new
terms presented there, and that they are voiced in succession, first at 12, and then at 13
(E. The nature of each of the two of them is distinct (11). K. What, [the nature] of not
hearing and not seeing? E. You can be certain of that (12). K. Distinct in what way? (13)).
Sommerstein’s second reason, however, concerns the apparent illogicality of Euripides’
words at 12: ‘while hearing and seeing are two things, “neither hearing nor seeing” is only
one. Inlaw might well, indeed, make such a mistake, but one would not expect this
sophistic, pedantic Euripides to endorse it’ (my emphasis); but why not? Sansone (1996)
342 n. 20 proposes that the line be saved, but only by rescuing Euripides from having
made such a mistake: ‘the nature of not hearing and not seeing are two things’. See p. 21
n. 21.
27
For Ar.’s fondness for delaying the release of the ‘expository snippets’ that aid his
audience in making sense of his comic scenes, see Felson-Rubin (1993).

11
 2

REREADING THE PROLOGUE

ros. We’re on a boat. (Pause.) Dark, isn’t it?

guil. Not for night.
ros. No, not for night.
guil. Dark for day.
Pause.
ros. Oh yes, it’s dark for day.
[. . .]
ros. We might as well be dead. Do you think death could possibly be a
boat?
guil. No, no, no . . . death is . . . not. Death isn’t. You take my meaning.
Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. You can’t not-be on a boat.
ros. I’ve frequently not been on boats.
guil. No, no, no – what you’ve been is not on boats.1

The first such cue is also the linchpin of the entire scene, the
quibble over the sort of necessity (δεῖ) that is invoked by
Euripides to save himself the trouble of describing for his fellow
traveller what will soon enough be seen (ἀλλ’ οὐκ ἀκούειν δεῖ σε . . .,
‘Ah, but you don’t need to . . .’, 5): it is straightforward, objective,
impersonal, quite unintellectual, as it is meant by Euripides, but
subverted in tone as it is seized upon and echoed by his companion,
for whom it takes emphatic word position – sentence focus – in a
clarifying rejoinder:
ΕΥΡΙΠΙΔΗΣ
ἀλλ’ οὐκ ἀκούειν δεῖ σε πάνθ’ ὅσ’ αὐτίκα 5
ὄψει παρεστώς. Κη. πῶς λέγεις; αὖθις φράσον.
οὐ δεῖ μ’ ἀκούειν; Ευ. οὐχ ἅ γ’ ἂν μέλλῃς ὁρᾶν.

1
Stoppard (1967) Αct III. For a general comparison of Ar. and the work of Stoppard, see
Reckford (1987) 143–52.

12
 r e re a di ng t he pr o lo g u e
Κη. οὐδ’ ἆρ’ ὁρᾶν δεῖ μ’; Ευ. οὐχ ἅ γ’ ἂν ἀκούειν δέῃ.
Κη. πῶς μοι παραινεῖς; δεξιῶς μέντοι λέγεις·
οὐ φῂς σὺ χρῆναί μ’ οὔτ’ ἀκούειν οὔθ’ ὁρᾶν; 10

E. You need not hear all that you’ll see instantly when you’re present. 5–6
K. What’s that? Say again:
I must not hear . . .?
Lit:
E. It’s not necessary for you to hear . . .
K. What do you mean? Say again:
It’s necessary for me not to hear . . .? 7

For listeners swept up in the spontaneity of this leading question,

this switch of word order, inverting δεῖ and ἀκούειν in order
to stress the leading verbal idea, is over in a flash, and it is
only some seconds later (at 10–11) that its ramifications are
fully appreciated. By then, the joke is not fleetingly about a
bumbled attempt at understanding, reminiscent, for instance, of
Strepsiades’ mindless jumbling of snippets of Socratic theory in
Clouds;2 it has become altogether larger. That early reformula-
tion of δεῖ3 – as personal compulsion, moral imperative – already
gestured at in its reshuffling to emphatic word position as it
is echoed at 7 (‘I must not- . . .?’) has gained momentum, picking
up additional nuances of external intention or orchestration
from μέλλω in Euripides’ reply (‘E. . . . Not, at any rate, whatever
you are to see . . .’, 7), until, finally, at the climax of his purported
attempts to clarify what is being meant (10), it has been made
explicit with an unambiguously subjective χρή:4 οὐ φῂς σὺ
χρῆναί μ’ οὔτ’ ἀκούειν οὔθ’ ὁρᾶν; [So . . .] ‘You’re saying I
should not . . .?’
More importantly, with that fleeting switch, in the intervening
lines, 7–8, the negative particle οὐ (5) has also been reshuffled. Not,

2
See O’Regan (1992) 41–2, 163 n. 38 on Clouds 236, where Strepsiades’ regurgitation of
the theory behind Socrates’ elevated entrance on-stage repeats and jumbles up the
philosopher’s original words.
3
Schein (1998) 304 points to a similar subversion of δεῖ at S. Ph. 1049 by the sophistic
operator par excellence of the play, Odysseus.
4
On the relationship between χρή and δεῖ configured in these terms, see B. Williams
(1993) 184 n. 57; W. S. Barrett (1964) ad E. Hipp. 41; Redard (1953); Benardete (1965)
285–98. Traditionally, δεῖ is used of objective requirements, general and independent
compulsions, and χρή of personal obligation, the internalization of such general rules.
Cf. Schein (1998).

13
 a ri s t op h an e s ’ thesmophoriazusae

this time, in word order, but in scope of focus,5 exploiting an

ambiguity generated by the negation of a modal which can be
made explicit in Greek syntactically, through the (re-)ordering
of οὐ δεῖ and then ἀκούειν:6 that is, first, from being coupled in
broad focus with δεῖ and its dependents at 5, E. ‘It’s not
necessary . . .’ or ‘You needn’t . . .’, as it is meant by Euripides,
to being associated narrowly with ἀκούειν, as it is quizzically echoed
at 7, ‘It’s necessary for me not-to-hear . . .?’ or ‘I must not-hear . . .?’;
and then, supposedly back again, to its original emphasis at 5, as this
shift in scope is glossed over by the poet as if his companion just

5
The semantic ‘scope’ of a modifier or an operator such as a negative is a measure of the
extent of material to which it applies. In Classical logic a distinction is drawn between
narrow-scope predicate-term negation generating contrary opposition (A is not-B) and
a (relatively) wide-scope predicate-denial generating contradictory opposition (A is not
B, A is-not B), see L. R. Horn (1989) 122 with 86–8 on the peculiarities of negation in
modal contexts where broad and narrow scope variant readings can transform a
negative injunction (‘What A must-not do is B’) into a positive injunction (‘What A
must do is not-B’).
6
Note that οὐκ ἀκούειν δεῖ at 5 is evidently (and I suggest deliberately) construed as
ambiguous in its negation by our interlocutor (cf. Austin and Olson (2004) ad 5–10),
who by his reshuffling of word order at 7 further exploits its ambiguity by creating a
syntactical unit of οὐ δεῖ (cf. Henderson (1987) ad Lys. 119) by which he intends to pair
οὐ now in narrow focus with the infinitive (‘it is necessary not-’). This kind of ‘neg-
raising’ whereby a negative may be transferred from a dependent infinitive to the
principal verb is attested in many languages, see L. R. Horn (1978); specifically
Greek: Smyth §2692 on ‘adherescent οὐ’: οὐ closely paired with the leading verb
forms a quasi-compound but belongs in sense to its following infinitive (if that infinitive
depends on the leading verb). οὔ φημι exploited here at 10 (‘You’re saying that [I should]
not . . .’, rather than ‘You’re not saying . . .’) is the most usual example, see J. R. Wilson
(1988) 88–92; Slater (2001) 360–7; and L. R. Horn (1978) 205–6 (for the syntactic
and semantic membership of φημί in the ‘Greek verbs of the opinion/belief class’,
which also includes deontics like δεῖ, that neg-raises); cf. Moorhouse (1959) 123, 129,
who also notes the phenomenon is ‘widespread’, ‘not confined to simple verbs of saying
or thinking’, and seen also with verbs of necessity (χρή) and others (although less
common after verbs that take μή like δεῖ); cf. F. D. Miller (2006) on Arist. Eth. Nic.
1138a6–7 (οὐ κελεύω) (citing the forthcoming discussion of Young ad 1138a7).
Specifically on neg-raising in relation to δεῖ, see further Smyth §2693 and §2714b,
where it is noted that οὐ δεῖ ‘may be equivalent in sense’ to δεῖ μή (narrow-scope negation
of the infinitive). Cf. Ar. Lys. 119, Wealth 477 (cf. 478); E. IA 1392, Or. 1143; Pl. Smp.
216b4, Cra. 411b2, Chrm. 156e1, La. 840d3, Phd. 62e1, Phileb. 22c1, Tht. 204a5
(all arguably instances of adherescent οὐ closely paired with δεῖ to form a syntactical unit
that effects narrow scope negation of a dependent infinitive); with such cases, contrast
Moorhouse (1959) 137 on ‘οὐ infinitive φημί’ at Knights 576 and Wasps 593, who notes
ambiguity in the scope of the negation; but also p. 114 for further instances where οὐ
immediately precedes the infinitive but belongs in sense to the leading verb and does not
transfer (e.g. Clouds 1415 (δοκέω), Frogs 950 (χρή), Eccl. 769 (διανοέω)); cf. Page
(1938) ad E. Med. 48 (φιλέω).

14
 r e re a di ng t he pr o lo g u e

mindlessly repeats what has already been said (which, as astute

listeners will have picked up, of course he does not . . .):7
Κη. οὐ δεῖ μ’ ἀκούειν; 7a
K. It’s necessary for me not to hear . . .?
Ευ. οὐχ ἅ γ’ ἂν μέλλῃς ὁρᾶν. 7b
E. . . . Not, at any rate, whatever you are to see.

For the listening audience switching between actors, this reshaping

of the mildest of negative injunctions into a forceful injunction
should occur only for a disappearing second. But, it does not, for
next there has been: οὐδ’ ἆρ’ ὁρᾶν δεῖ μ’; ‘And so, it’s not necessary
for me to see . . .?’ or, ‘And so, I must not see?’ (8) – a cause for
surprise, another negation, but this one an apparent non-sequitur,
taking the audience back to Euripides’ original in word order, yet
substituting one sensory focus for another: a jump from what we
might next expect, (not) hearing (ἀκούειν), to (not) seeing (ὁρᾶν):
Κη. οὐδ’ ἆρ’ ὁρᾶν δεῖ μ’; 8a
K. And so, it’s not necessary for me to see . . . ?
Ευ. οὐχ ἅ γ’ ἂν ἀκούειν δέῃ. 8b
E. . . . Not, at any rate, whatever you must hear.

And then, a summary understanding –

Κη. πῶς μοι παραινεῖς; δεξιῶς μέντοι λέγεις·
οὐ φῂς σὺ χρῆναί μ’ οὔτ’ ἀκούειν οὔθ’ ὁρᾶν;
K. How are you recommending this to me? Of course you’re speaking
Sophisticatedly.
You’re saying I should not either hear or see? 10

– and only then, realization for the audience. By deviously follow-

ing up on what Euripides has been led to propose a second earlier,
at 7, the inference at 8 (indicated by ἆρα)8 springs a trap already set
by the switch of δεῖ and ἀκούειν (also at 7):

7
Euripides means what he thinks he states at the outset: ‘Whatever you will see, you needn’t
hear about’ (5), but the conditional he constructs here in fact proposes something quite
different: ‘Whatever you are going to see, you must not-hear.’
8
On ἆρα as inferential, an unambiguous ‘so’ indicating a logical connection equivalent to
ἄρα, see Dunbar (1995) ad Birds 91; cf. Stevens (1976) 44; Denniston (1954) 44 I (2);
Sommerstein (1994) and Henderson (2000) in trans. Pace Austin and Olson (2004) ad
7–8, who read interrogative ἆρ’ οὐ expecting a positive answer but in exegesis ad 5–10
adopt an inferential construal.

15
 a ri s t op h an e s ’ thesmophoriazusae

Κη. οὐ δεῖ μ’ ἀκούειν; 7a

K. I must not-hear . . .?
Ευ. οὐχ ἅ γ’ ἂν μέλλῃς ὁρᾶν. 7b
E. . . . [You must]Not[-hear], at any rate, whatever you are to see.

For, in his reply there (at 7b), Euripides’ οὐ has meant to negate
the verbal idea δεῖ (as he did in his original words (5): ‘It’s
not necessary for me to hear? E. Not [-necessary . . .]’). Yet by
swallowing up the word switch into a relative clause and reiterating
only its negative particle, he has instead reiterated the negation
of its infinitive, ἀκούειν (‘I must not-hear? E. Not [-hear . . .]’).9
Seeing this, his interlocutor has next seized upon a syntactical
ambiguity generated by the elision of the verb in such a
reply and deliberately exploited it, now pressing the poet even
further –
Κη. οὐδ’ ἆρ’ ὁρᾶν δεῖ μ’; 8a
K. And so, I must not see . . . ?
Ευ. οὐχ ἅ γ’ ἂν ἀκούειν δέῃ. 8b
[. . . You must] Not[-see],
E. at any rate, whatever you must hear.
[. . . You must-]Not [see],

in order to prise apart his original statement (at 5–6) and reshape its
constituents into a bogus antinomy (10):
ΕΥΡΙΠΙΔΗΣ
ἀλλ’ οὐκ ἀκούειν δεῖ σε πάνθ’ ὅσ’ αὐτίκα 5
ὄψει παρεστώς. Κη. πῶς λέγεις; αὖθις φράσον.
οὐ δεῖ μ’ ἀκούειν; Ευ. οὐχ ἅ γ’ ἂν μέλλῃς ὁρᾶν.
Κη. οὐδ’ ἆρ’ ὁρᾶν δεῖ μ’; Κη. οὐχ ἅ γ’ ἂν ἀκούειν δέῃ.
Κη. πῶς μοι παραινεῖς; δεξιῶς μέντοι λέγεις·
οὐ φῂς σὺ χρῆναί μ’ οὔτ’ ἀκούειν οὔθ’ ὁρᾶν; 10

E. You need not hear all that you’ll see instantly when you’re present. 5–6
K. What’s that? Say again?
I must not-hear . . .?
E. . . . [must]Not[-hear], at any rate, whatever you are to see. 7
K. And so, I must not see . . .?

9
For an alternative construal of the grounds for the conclusion drawn at 8 by the interlocutor
(‘So, then, I must not see?’) that draws upon the implication of μέλλω in Euripides’
preceding statement at 7 (‘Not . . . whatever you are going to see’) see pp. 72–5.

16
 r e re a di ng t he pr o lo g u e
E. . . . [must]Not[see], at any rate, whatever you must hear.
K. How are you recommending this to me? Of course you’re speaking
Sophisticatedly.
You’re saying that I should not hear and not see? 10

At the point at which this strategy becomes evident – the coup

de grâce at 10 – the audience have become alive not only to
the ambiguities active in this prosody of negations but also,
through expository cues laced into the flow of speech that follows
(11–14), to a probable intellectual context for them. Yet irrespec-
tive of this context, it should be noted that in no way has the effect
of these first seconds of banter been to reduce Euripides’ inter-
locutor to a Strepsiades, a mindless ‘buffoon’ (even if that is
precisely what he has been taken for by the careless Euripides).
Indeed, quite the opposite: it has been to push, with his subtle
wordplay and comic pedantry, the seriously pedantic Euripides
into advocating (παραίνω, 9) an extreme, and increasingly philo-
sophical, (per)version of his original words (5–6), sifting out (6,
‘What’s that? Say again . . .’), then extrapolating (‘I must not-
hear . . .?’, 7; ‘. . . I must not see . . .?’, 8), then, lavishing solicitous
praise upon (δεξιῶς, 9)10 all his pretensions to superior knowledge.
Framed by the movement within the dialogue from δεῖ to χρή
(5–10), the sly logic-mongering of this strategy has also steadily
manoeuvred the poet into a ‘dilemma, either horn of which leads
to a contradiction’;11 for by foolishly allowing his words to be
reshaped, he has also allowed hearing and seeing to be transformed
from two equivalent and mutually substitutable experiences,
into two mutually exclusive and mutually negating activities.12

10
See Eccl. 243–4 with Rothwell (1990) 85–7 for δεξιός of sophistic speech. For a
sophistic analogue of Euripides’ statements at 7b and 8b, see Antipho Soph. 87b44
DK fr. a col. 3.1–15; Euripides as a ποιητὴς δεξιός see Frogs 66–71, 1009; for the term
associated with tragedy more generally: 762, 1121, 1370. Cf. Silk (2000) 48–53.
11
I borrow this phrase from Chance (1992) 106.
12
Note that the distinction between seeing and hearing at the start of this dialogue is one
drawn between present and future experiences of an implicit equivalency: 5–6, ἀλλ’
οὐκ ἀκούειν δεῖ σε πάνθ’ ὅσ’ αὐτίκα | ὄψει παρεστώς (extrapolated with μέλλω at 7). Any
tacit preference for sight over hearing here does not reflect an epistemic ranking of
these senses; it points to the preferability of direct rather than indirect experience (i.e.
of seeing for oneself, which also includes and subsumes hearing for oneself, rather
than relying on the purely auditory testimony of others, as at Heraclit. 22b101a, b55
DK with Curd (1991) 541, 549 n. 60; Robb (1991); Pritzl (1985) 305–7, esp. 307). It is
our interlocutor’s protracted quibble over the point of necessity (δεῖ) invoked that

17
 a ri s t op h an e s ’ thesmophoriazusae

Indeed, by carelessly sanctioning the shuffled negation of 7

(‘I must not-hear . . .?’ E. [. . . must] ‘Not [-hear] . . . at any
rate, whatever you are to see’),13 and treating similarly the
same ambiguity implicit at 8,14 this poet has been edged toward
the brink of the absurdity that his audience is obliged (δεῖ, χρή)
to not-hear him in order to see him, and to not-see him in order to
hear him; thereby providing his comic interlocutor, and every-
one else in the theatre, with all the means necessary to
refute him.
The subtle reformulation of Euripides’ words through the toss-
ing around of negations which the poet seems unable properly to
distinguish has thus culminated in the trap set at 10: οὐ φῂς σὺ
χρῆναί μ’ οὔτ’ ἀκούειν οὔθ’ ὁρᾶν; – a question which wilfully
introduces even more ambiguity into the dialogue by accommoda-
ting both a disjunctive (‘So, you’re saying that I shouldn’t either
hear or see?’) and a conjunctive (‘So, you’re saying I should neither
hear nor see?’) pairing of the senses.15 Yet the possibility of hearing

forces the issue of the relation of these senses to one another into present time (i.e. into
the frame of immediate first-person experience); and it is Euripides’ inept handling of
modal negation that follows (6–10) which destroys the possibility of their coexistence
here (with the enantiomorphic logic A = Not-B, and B = Not-A). See my discussion
pp. 72–9.
13
See my pp. 14–15 nn. 6–7.
14
With his reply at 8, οὐχ ἅ γ’ ἂν ἀκούειν δέῃ, Euripides echoes in word order his original
remark at 5: ἀλλ’ οὐκ ἀκούειν δεῖ σε . . . He is led to do so by his interlocutor, who
reintroduces this order into the dialogue with a leading question, also at 8: οὐδ’ ἆρ’ ὁρᾶν
δεῖ μ’ (see underlined text below); predicting from the response he has received at 7 that
Euripides will again fashion an answer that reduplicates the same word order employed in
the question (see bold text below). In this way Euripides is tricked into creating a closed,
circular system, restating the same ambiguity of modal negation his interlocutor was
originally able to exploit in reshaping 5, ἀλλ’ οὐκ ἀκούειν δεῖ σε into 7, οὐ δεῖ μ’ ἀκούειν;
ΕΥΡΙΠΙΔΗΣ
ἀλλ’ οὐκ ἀκούειν δεῖ σε πάνθ’ ὅσ’ αὐτίκα 5
ὄψει παρεστώς. Κη. πῶς λέγεις; αὖθις φράσον.
οὐ δεῖ μ’ ἀκούειν; Ευ. οὐχ ἅ γ’ ἂν μέλλῃς ὁρᾶν.
Κη. οὐδ’ ἆρ’ ὁρᾶν δεῖ μ’; Eυ. οὐχ ἅ γ’ ἂν ἀκούειν δέῃ.
Κη. πῶς μοι παραινεῖς; δεξιῶς μέντοι λέγεις·
οὐ φῂς σὺ χρῆναί μ’ οὔτ’ ἀκούειν οὔθ’ ὁρᾶν; 10
15
Strictly speaking, line 10’s οὔτε . . . οὔτε are conjunctive negative coordinators (as are
μήτε . . . μήτε in line 12), but this does not prevent the disjunctive as well as conjunctive
pairing of the senses here (as is also the case for line 12, see my pp. 20–1, esp. n. 21); my
translation ‘either . . . or’ (as well as ‘neither . . . nor’ = ‘not . . . and not’) follows Smyth
§2942 (cf. §2761) and is an attempt to draw out the two extreme paraphrases possible for
οὔτε . . . οὔτε after the leading adherescent negation οὐ, which, I suspect, can be taken

18
 r e re a di ng t he pr o lo g u e

in this line ‘neither . . . nor’ as well as (or instead of) ‘either . . . or’
has not been seen by this Euripides. Confounded in his attempts to
support his trivial point at 5–6 and undercut in what has ensued by
the rapid concretization of δεῖ into χρή (5–10), he has simply
assumed one reading – a disjunctive one – and focused instead
upon the use here of χρή, flying from it into an abstract justification
for his marshalling of necessity, δεῖ (11). Now, his commitment
pressed, the point really in need of clarification – for this is not a
matter of what should be, but a matter of what is – he has aban-
doned ‘needs’ and ‘musts’ (5) to marshal a higher authority, a
philosophical account of the senses:
Κη. πῶς μοι παραινεῖς; δεξιῶς μέντοι λέγεις·
οὐ φῂς σὺ χρῆναί μ’ οὔτ’ ἀκούειν οὔθ’ ὁρᾶν; 10
Ευ. χωρὶς γὰρ αὐτοῖν ἑκατέρου ᾿στὶν ἡ φύσις.
Κη. τοῦ μήτ’ ἀκούειν μήθ’ ὁρᾶν; Ευ. εὖ ἴσθ’ ὅτι. 12
Κη. πῶς χωρίς;

K. How are you recommending this to me? Of course you’re speaking

Sophisticatedly.
You’re saying that I shouldn’t either hear or see? 10
E. That the nature of each of the two of them is distinct.
K. What, of not hearing and not seeing? E. You can be certain of that. 12
K. Distinct in what way?

The linguistic cues that mark this change in register, between 11

and 13, have also prompted the audience to orient themselves
afresh to the comic antics playing out before them. By the quibble
over χωρίς (13) they have been bombarded not only with a battery
of negations but also with a rapid succession of marked phrases and
philosophical jargon, the cumulative weight of which has been to
signal a dramatic frame for the dialogue – and a preliminary setting
for the play – that emerges as unambiguously sophistic. Euripides’
philosophizing of a separation, χωρίς,16 of the senses by nature,
here either as broad-scope and merely reinforced by οὔτε . . . οὔτε (which are therefore
construed as redundant: following Smyth §2942, ‘I shouldn’t either hear or see?’), or
more narrowly, and as reprised twice by οὔτε . . . οὔτε (‘I should not hear and not see?’ =
‘. . . neither hear nor see?’). For the logical equivalence of the two construals, see
Haspelmath (2007) 17, who notes the ‘logical equivalence of disjunction with wide-
scope negation and conjunction with narrow-scope negation (in the notation of symbolic
logic: ¬ (p ∨ q) ≡ ¬ p & ¬ q) [i.e. not (p or q) = not p and not q]’.
16
See H. W. Miller (1946) 172 (cited by Sansone (1996) 341): ‘this is the philosophical
meaning of χωρίς’, comparing Pl. Phlb. 44a10: χωρὶς τοῦ μὴ λυπεῖσθαι καὶ τοῦ χαίρειν ἡ

19
 a ri s t op h an e s ’ thesmophoriazusae

φύσις,17 as a wider corrective to the comic nonsense made of his

words has set him up as a peddler of avant-garde theoretical
concepts (E. [What I’m saying is this] ‘. . . each of the two of
them is essentially separate [that is, each has a separate sense-
organ and a separate sense-object]’, 11).18 Yet pitted against the
argumentative powers of this interlocutor, Euripides’ allusion to
such high ideas has served only to draw attention to a tragic
inability to deploy them persuasively. For no sooner have they
been voiced, than his sophistic interlocutor has seized his oppor-
tunity to test the poet’s sophia continuing his attack –
Κη. . . .
οὐ φῂς σὺ χρῆναί μ’ οὔτ’ ἀκούειν οὔθ’ ὁρᾶν; 10
Ευ. χωρὶς γὰρ αὐτοῖν ἑκατέρου ᾿στὶν ἡ φύσις.
Κη. τοῦ μήτ’ ἀκούειν μήθ’ ὁρᾶν;

K. . . .
You’re saying that I shouldn’t either hear or see? 10
E. That the nature of each of the two of them is distinct.
K. What, of not-hearing and not-seeing?

– again exploiting the ambiguities of Euripides’ speech, again

splintering his theorizing into its constituent parts, φύσις and
χωρίς, so as to reshape and refute it. To this end, the αὐτοῖν
ἑκατέρου ‘of each of the two of them’ (11) – an emphatically plural
reference, the first indication that Euripides has committed himself
to a disjunctive pairing of the verbs at 10 – has presented his first
opportunity. For the interlocutor’s very next question (12) has been
to adopt a conjunctive construal of 10, thereby shifting the context

φύσις ἑκατέρου. Cf. χωρίς at E. Alc. 528 in the midst of a discussion of being and not-being
that has obvious sophistic overtones; in the context of clever speech, cf. S. OC 806–8; Pl.
Prt. 336b.
17
On φύσις as a marked philosophical term, the ‘catchword of the new philosophy’, as Kahn
(1960) 201 puts it (cited by Sansone (1996) 342), see Hajistephanou (1975);
Mannsperger (1969).
18
For the basis for this extrapolation, see Sansone (1996) and Rashed (2007), who see traces
in Euripides’ words of Empedocles’ theory of sensory perception (Emp. 31a86 DK), which
posited mutually exclusive senses able to register only those effluences commensurate to
the πόροι of each sense organ, see Long (1966) 260 and my discussion, pp. 36–42. The
doxographical tradition records that not only Empedocles, but also Parmenides before him,
Anaxagoras and later Democritus also drew upon these principles in their treatment of
perception, see Thphr. Sens. 1, Aët. iv 9.6 (= Stob. Ecl. 1.26.2 / 28a47 DK). But see Laks
(1990) on the likely reasons for this later tradition attributing to Parmenides a fully
articulated theory of perception; cf. Mansfeld (1999) and my p. 47 n. 11.

20
 r e re a di ng t he pr o lo g u e

of the poet’s philosophizing at 11 back from referring abstractly

(and disjunctively) to hearing and to seeing, and thus echoing
current speculation into the distinct φύσεις of these senses, to
referring instead to a conjunctive pairing of the negated verbs –
only using a question that is as wilfully ambiguous as that first
given at 10: τοῦ μήτ’ ἀκούειν μήθ’ ὁρᾶν; (‘[What,] – of not-hearing
and not-seeing?’, 12). With this, the interlocutor’s trap is set, for
the comic implication of his ambiguous question is that
what Euripides has posited at 11 is not the ‘distinct’ φύσις of
hearing and the ‘distinct’ φύσις of seeing, but rather, the ‘distinct’
φύσις of this singular anatreptic state (‘. . . of neither hearing nor
seeing? – of perceptual nothingness – [. . . the nature of this is
distinct?!]’, 12).19 Yet so swept up is Euripides in his assumptions
of disjuncture and segregation (and so deaf to the negations
that have thus far tied him up in (k)nots), that all he has heard in
that query is disjuncture ( ‘What, [the nature] . . . of (not-) hearing
as opposed to (not-) seeing?’, 12). And so he has offered happy
affirmation of this distortion of his thesis –
Κη. τοῦ μήτ’ ἀκούειν μήθ’ ὁρᾶν; Ευ. εὖ ἴσθ’ ὅτι.20 12
Κη. πῶς χωρίς;

K. What, of not hearing and not seeing? E. You can be certain of that. 12
K. Distinct in what way?

– quite unaware that by ignoring the possibility of a conjunctive

pairing of the verbs (and their (non-)experiences), he has just set
himself up for the knock-out blow that follows at 13: πῶς χωρίς;
‘How do you mean ‘separate’?’ ‘How can the nature of neither
hearing nor seeing – a unity of nothingness – be ‘separate’?’21
‘Separate’ from what?
19
Contra Sansone (1996) 342: ‘This philosophical language poses a challenge to the
kinsman’s limited intelligence . . .’
20
εὖ ἴσθ’ ὅτι at 12 is colloquial (see Austin and Olson (2004) ad loc.), cf. Socrates’ εὖ ἴσθ’
ὅτι at Pl. Tht. 149a6; but for εὖ ἴσθι as also characteristic of sophistic posturing, see Xen.
Smp. 8.40, and esp. Dover (1980) ad Pl. Smp. 208c: καὶ ἥ, ὥσπερ οἱ τέλεοι σοφισταί, εὖ
ἴσθ’, ἔφη, ὦ Σώκρατες. ‘Whereat she, like the perfect sophists, said: “Be certain of it,
Socrates.”’ Cf. Euthd. 274a, Hp. Ma. 287c.
21
Line 12 has generated considerable confusion among commentators, see Austin and
Olson (2004) ad loc. Most recently, Wilson (2007b) ad loc, following Sommerstein
(1994), aporetically suggests it is ‘better deleted’; ‘. . . I confess to finding the syntax so
odd that I do not see how to get an amusing line out of it’. One of Sommerstein’s (1994)

21
 a ri s t op h an e s ’ thesmophoriazusae

Run rings around in speech yet again, then, by the beginning

of his longest speech of the dialogue, the poet has been seen
abandoning the dangerous fallibilities of λόγος in order to con-
tinue his philosophical display under the cover of a handy μῦθος.
Lines 13–18:
Κη. πῶς χωρίς;
Ευ. οὕτω ταῦτα διεκρίθη τότε.
Αἰθὴρ γάρ, ὅτε τὰ πρῶτα διεχωρίζετο 14
καὶ ζῷ’ ἐν αὑτῷ ξυνετέκνου κινούμενα,
ᾧ μὲν βλέπειν χρή, πρῶτ’ ἐμηχανήσατο

two reasons ad loc. for endorsing this deletion (the other concerns sequence of thought) is
that ‘while hearing and seeing are two things, “neither hearing nor seeing” is only one’,
and that this ‘pedantic, sophistic’ Euripides would never endorse such an absurd refor-
mulation of his words (see my p. 11 n. 26). Sansone (1996) 342 n. 20, by contrast,
dismisses Sommerstein’s objection on the grounds that ‘Euripides has just (10–11)
endorsed his kinsman’s observation that he is being asked to neither hear nor see’, and
he continues: ‘And anyway – to be, for the moment, pedantic and sophistic – the nature of
not seeing and the nature of not hearing are two things’, citing the gloss τοῦ μὴ ἀκούειν καὶ
τοῦ μὴ ὁρᾶν in Blaydes (1880) ad loc., and the translation ‘Not seeing and not hearing?’ in
Kovacs (1994) 79. Whilst that is undoubtedly true (at least within this closed system of
only either hearing or seeing; outside it things are less certain – smelling, for instance, is
both), the important point here is rather to recognize the line for what it is: one more airing
of a device (first voiced at 10) which uses its ambiguous double meaning to elicit a
commitment to one or other reading, the counter to which can then be taken up. Blaydes’
gloss represents only one possible interpretation of τοῦ μήτ’ ἀκούειν μήθ’ ὁρᾶν; (12), one
that prevails only if the line is read through the lens of an a priori disjunctive pairing of
the verbs (the very same habit which Euripides exhibits as he responds to the similar
construction at line 10 οὐ . . . οὔτ’ ἀκούειν οὔθ’ ὁρᾶν; with 11, αὐτοῖν ἑκατέρου, ‘[sc. the
nature] of each of the two of them . . .’) Thus, as they are voiced at 12, the pair of negated
articular infinitives, τοῦ μήτ’ ἀκούειν μήθ’ ὁρᾶν; pick up on and reiterate the same
ambiguity that enables a conjunctive as well as a disjunctive reading of the verbs at 10
and throughout the rest of the scene (see again at 19): see the identical translations of
Henderson (2000) and Silk (2000) 326, with n. 63 for similar recognition of ‘the
continuing possibility of a disjunctive, rather than a conjunctive, pairing of the two
verbs’ although Silk does not read the disjunctive construal at line 11 as an ‘answer’ to
line 10). My translation of the line at various points as ‘neither hearing nor seeing’ (rather
than the more properly ambiguous ‘not-hearing and not-seeing’) is an attempt to make
explicit the way in which I suggest the argument develops from 10: first, the formulation
of a question that allows for both a conjunctive and a disjunctive reading of the verbs
throughout what follows, 10: οὐ φῂς σὺ χρῆναί μ’ οὔτ’ ἀκούειν οὔθ’ ὁρᾶν; then one
character, Euripides, committing himself (whether intentionally or not) to a disjunctive
interpretation of this, 11: ‘E: That the nature of each of the two of them is distinct’; which,
consequently, is met at 12 by his interlocutor, who, as author of this ambiguity (10),
exploits it once more to take the opposite conjunctive construal and push the poet toward
an absurdity that, precisely because of his strictly disjunctive reading and his deafness to
negations, he just cannot hear (or see): ‘[What?] – of neither hearing nor seeing?’, ‘. . . of
not-hearing and not-seeing?’. Cf. Austin and Olson (2004) ad 12: ‘E. reacts as if Inlaw
has said τοῦ ἀκούειν καὶ ὁρᾶν, and is too absorbed in his own thoughts to notice the
mistake.’

22
 r e re a di ng t he pr o lo g u e
ὀφθαλμὸν ἀντίμιμον ἡλίου τροχῷ,
ἀκοῆς δὲ χοάνην ὦτα διετετρήνατο.

K. [Neither hearing nor seeing is . . .] Distinct! – in what way?

E. This is how they were distinguished long ago:
When Aither first was separating itself out, 14
and begetting living, moving beings within itself,
that with which one must see, it crafted first,
the eye, ‘in imitation of the solar disc’,
and for hearing, bored the ear as a funnel.

The rhetorical purpose of such an epideixis at this point of the

dialogue is signalled by its very first word: οὕτω(ς), [Distinct? How
so? Well, listen . . .] ‘Once upon a time . . .’ (13).22 In the following
lines, 14–18, the shift into fable that it introduces emerges as a
sophistic strategy that has enabled Euripides blithely to sidestep the
rigour of logical argument (λόγος),23 escaping the need to theorize
further the exclusivity of the senses. His tactic of telling a μῦθος
instead has been to invoke mythological authority to explain why
(not) hearing and (not) seeing are essentially separate things
(‘Cosmogony recapitulates ontology!’, 13),24 thereby eliminating
the awkward problem of having to offer any supporting proof – a
criterion alien to mythological discourse – of how (or even that)
this is so. Indeed, by its close at 18, Euripides’ μῦθος has been seen
to presuppose precisely what he has otherwise entirely failed to
demonstrate by λόγος.25 Its new fifth-century spin26on traditional
ideas about the coming into being of a differentiated world from

22
See Sansone (1996) 342, with his n. 22 for parallels for οὕτως (a typical marker
of fable) introducing a story or μῦθος, suggesting also that we read ποτέ here for
τότε (as at Wasps 1182); see also Van Dijk (1997) 76, 113, 172–3, 189, 362–6; cf.
W. H. Thompson (1868) and Yunis (2011) ad Pl. Phdr. 237b2, and the opening
words of Protagoras’ μῦθος at Pl. Prt. 320d1 with Denyer (2008) ad loc.: ἦν γάρ ποτε
χρόνος ὅτε . . .
23
Contra Sommerstein (1994) ad 11–18. 24 Trans. Slavitt (1998).
25
For a later parallel of this use of myth as an evasive rhetorical strategy used by the
sophists, see Pl. Prt. 320c2–7 with Morgan (2000) 138–47, esp. 139, 145 for this
observation. For the more general tactic of launching into a long speech so as to elude
further arguments and drag out the issue until one’s interlocutors have forgotten their
original question (according to Alcibiades, a habit also exemplified by Protagoras), see
Pl. Prt. 336b–d.
26
The intellectualism of Euripides’ spontaneous μῦθος, striking to its original audience
but less evident in its overly literal translation into English, is captured well by William
Arrowsmith’s unpublished translation of the speech discussed by Scharffenberger
(2002) 439–40. Here Arrowsmith plays up the pretensions of the poet, and with a

23
 a ri s t op h an e s ’ thesmophoriazusae

primal chaos – the separating out of Aither (14),27 the begetting

of living creatures within it (15), and the crafting of their sense
organs by a deity (16–18)28 – has not only taken separation (χωρίς)
as its axiomatic principle (14) but also, in so doing, made its
audience privy to a world of Presocratic science – or at least to a
playfully Euripidean (which is to say, typically truncating) image
of Presocratic science, for the μῦθος the poet has offered at this
point has conjured an eclectic and muddled regurgitation of
Empedoclean-esque cosmogony, zoology and biology. Its aetiol-
ogy of division and segregation harking back to the original shap-
ing of distinct sense organs, explicitly the first biological features of
living organisms crafted by Aither (πρῶτ’ ἐμηχανήσατο, 16), has
sought to persuade his interlocutor of the truth of its premise of
essential separation. But this poet’s redeployment of Presocratic
sophia has in fact only unwittingly reiterated his own inability
to maintain such a separation himself; for if his source is (among
possible others), indeed, Empedocles, his spontaneous cosmolo-
gizing has merely conflated the separation of Aither to be found in
Empedocles’ zoogony of Strife, with the crafting of sense organs
by Aphrodite in the zoogony of Love. What is more, if his words

change in register to elevated speech and ‘exceptionally formal diction’, 13–18

becomes:
This is how it happened.
When parturient Ether first began to divide
her womb pullulating with organic life,
she endowed each organism with sight. She devised eyes,
tiny orbicular organs modelled on the sun,
and then, having bored a shaft through the skull,
created small acoustical funnels, or ears.
27
Examples of the motif of separation, already implicit in the earliest extant mythical
cosmogonies: Hes. Th. 154ff. (the separation of Ouranos and Gaia) and 695ff. discussed
by Kirk et al. (1983) 34–9; philosophical examples, see Parm. 28b8.53–60 DK; Anaxag.
59b1 DK; Diog. Apoll. 64b2 DK, and for a philosophical parallel for Euripides’ sub-
stitution of Ouranos with Aither, see esp. Emp. 31a49 DK: Ἐμπεδοκλῆς τὸν μὲν αἰθέρα
πρῶτον διακριθῆναι (sc. ἔφη).
28
Cf., e.g., Emp. 31b84, b86, b87 DK (the fashioning of the eye by Aphrodite). The
cosmologizing of the sense organs as a new characteristic of fifth-century thought:
Austin and Olson (2004) ad 14–18, highlighting the sudden appearance and ubiquity
of this concern; debate about the number and nature of the senses in fifth- and fourth-
century philosophy and science: Jouanna (2003) and Laks (1999) 262–7; an example of
an extant fifth-century ‘inquiry into nature’ that situates an account of senses within the
first principles of cosmology, cf. Hipp. Carn. esp. 15–18 with Jouanna (1999) 227. See
Clements (forthcoming) for an introductory survey.

24
 r e re a di ng t he pr o lo g u e

ἀκοῆς δὲ χοάνην ὦτα διετετρήνατο at line 18 echo the original

version of the now corrupt Empedoclean line describing
Aphrodite’s crafting of the eye in manuscript P (Vaticanus 1339),
a verse speculatively restored by Blass to <αἳ> χοάνῃσι δίαντα
τετρήατο θεσπεσίῃσιν at 31b84.9 DK, it would seem that this
Euripides has thus conflated not only the actions of Empedocles’
cosmic opposites of Strife and Love, but also, tellingly (as we
shall see), the eye and the ear themselves.29

29
For the possible implicit suggestion of a philosophical failure correctly to differentiate the
eye and the ear here and its wider significance, see my discussion, pp. 77–87.
Sommerstein (1994) ad 11–18 and Kovacs (1994) 81 look to cosmogonical passages
from Euripidean drama for antecedents to Ar.’s Euripidean μῦθος, suggesting a parody of
the cosmology at E. fr. 484 (Kannicht) (Melanippe the Wise). Mureddu (1992), Sansone
(1996), and Rashed (2007), by contrast, posit a comically abbreviated caricature of the
stages of creation of the Empedoclean cosmos. Its three components: the separation of
Aither, the begetting with earth of living beings within it, and the fashioning of speci-
alized sense organs find parallels in Empedocles’ cosmogony, zoogony and biology: see,
for instance, 31a49 DK, the separating off of Aither; 31b62 DK, b73 DK, the generation
of life (from earth) within its enveloping canopy; 31b84, b86, b87 DK, the fashioning of
specialized organs of sense. For the muddling of the Empedoclean domains of Strife and
Love that Euripides’ cosmology may represent, see Rashed (2007) 28, who discusses the
possibility that χοάνην and διετετρήνατο (at 18) of the ear may allude to Emp. 31b84.9
DK, which Blass (1883) restored to <αἳ> χοάνῃσι . . . τετρήατο (of Aphrodite’s crafting of
the eye), a conjecture endorsed by DK and also discussed (more cautiously) in relation to
our line 18 by Sansone (1996) 344–5 and dismissed as a comparandum by Austin and
Olson (2004) ad 16–17 (citing M. R. Wright (1981) 241). For τετραίνω generally of pores
in Empedocles, see 31b100.3 DK, and of the ears in earlier tragedy, see Rösler (1970) 90
on A. Ch. 451 (positing Empedoclean influence, contra Garvie (1986) ad loc.); but see
also τετραίνω of ἡ ἀκοή in Thphr.’s accounts of Diogenes of Apollonia’s (τῇ ἀκοῇ
τέτρηται) and Democritus’ theories of hearing, Thphr. Sens. 41, 56; cf. συντετραίνω at
Plut. De Garr. 502e; and διατετραίνω at Hipp. Loc. Hom. 2.1 with Craik (1998) ad loc. on
use of the verb in early accounts of the senses that becomes ‘formulaic’. And note also
that Empedocles’ cosmology itself in some respects probably followed the divinely
orchestrated metaphysical processes of the now no longer extant cosmology of
Parmenides’ Doxa, see Censorinus, DN 4.7.8; Bollack (1969b) 429–30; Palmer (2009)
316–17, although on the issue of perception, cf. also Laks (1990), my p. 20 n. 18 and p. 47
n. 11. See Austin and Olson (2004) ad loc. for an indication of the range of scholarly
attempts to read a parody of ‘a particular philosophical system’ in 14–18 based upon
alleged specific allusions (none of which they find compelling), including the cosmology
of Anaxagoras, the influence of which on the Melanippe fragment (fr. 484 (Kannicht))
has been suggested since antiquity, see Dion. Hal. Rhet. 9.11 and Diod. Sic. 1.7.7, and
doubted by Collard et al. (1995) 270 and others. For examples of the sort of intellectual
butterfly collecting typical of Euripidean drama that informs Ar.’s caricature and his
eclectic reworking of contemporary cosmologizing, see esp. E. fr. 839 (Kannicht)
(Chrysippus) with Collard and Cropp (2008) 466–7 on its philosophical ideas (again
acknowledged since antiquity), and fr. 484 (Kannicht) with Collard et al. (1995) 269–70
(who is sceptical about Euripides’ philosophical debts); cf. frs. 877, 941,

25
 a ri s t op h an e s ’ thesmophoriazusae

Yet, of course, this Euripides’ deafness to the ambiguities brought

by negation has meant that, even as rhetorical sleight-of-hand, his
μῦθος of confused opposites has always been doomed to comic fail-
ure; for it is not, in any case, as he thought, the essential distinctness
of hearing or seeing that he has been pressed to explain but, rather, the
essential distinctness of not-hearing or -seeing.30 Hence, far from
ensuring the blind acceptance of his regurgitated axiom (‘the nature
of each of the two of them is distinct’, 11), our poet’s sudden launch
into his display of scientific erudition has been merely to set himself
up once more, though now more entertainingly than ever, to be tied
up in the same old nots (and the same old joke), all over again, 19ff. –
Ευ. . . .
ᾧ μὲν βλέπειν χρή, πρῶτ’ ἐμηχανήσατο
ὀφθαλμὸν ἀντίμιμον ἡλίου τροχῷ,
ἀκοῆς δὲ χοάνην ὦτα διετετρήνατο.
Κη. διὰ τὴν χοάνην οὖν μήτ’ ἀκούω μήθ’ ὁρῶ;
νὴ τὸν Δί’ ἥδομαί γε τουτὶ προσμαθών. 20
οἷόν γε πού ᾿στιν αἱ σοφαὶ ξυνουσίαι.

E. . . .
that with which one must see, it crafted first,
the eye, ‘in imitation of the solar disc’,31
and for hearing, bored the ear as a funnel.
K. Aha! So, because of this funnel I’m neither to hear nor to see?
I’m beside myself to have learnt that! 20
Intellectual conversations32 are really something!

182a (Kannicht). But see my p. 47 n. 11 and pp. 77–87 for the genuine issue at stake in
Ar.’s parodic cosmology here, and p. 83 n. 107 for further discussion of the particular
significance of E. frs. 839, 484 (Kannicht) as possible Euripidean antecedents.
30
See p. 21 n. 21.
31
Line 17, ἀντίμιμον ἡλίου τροχῷ, may allude to a Euripidean verse: Blaydes (1880) and
Sommerstein (1994) ad loc. both point out that Eratosth. Cat. 13 uses similar language
when retelling the Athenian myth of Erichthonius, a character said to have invented the
chariot ‘in imitation of the sun’, and cites Euripides as his authority for the story (E. fr.
925 (Kannicht)). But for the philosophical currency of such comparisons of the eye to the
sun or comparable light source, see Sansone (1996) 343 and Rashed (2007) on
Empedoclean imagery, and for earlier appearances of the visual ray in Pythagoras and
Parmenides, see also Aët. iv 13.9–10 (= 28a48 DK). See also Pl. R. 508b, where the eye is
said to be: ἡλιοειδέστατον . . . τῶν περὶ τὰς αῖσθήσεις ὀργάνων.
32
See Austin and Olson (2004) ad loc. for ΣR’s comparison of S. fr. 14 (σοφοὶ τύραννοι τῶν
σοφῶν ξυνουσίᾳ), a line he alleges Ar. attributed to Euripides (at fr. 323 KA) (as do fourth-
century writers). But (as Austin and Olson imply) the allusion is probably more general;
for the sophists’ supplanting of the traditional institution of συνουσία during the late fifth
century, see, e.g., Pl. Prt. 316c–d, with Robb (1993).

26
 r e re a di ng t he pr o lo g u e

– until, for his interlocutor, it is simply a matter of mopping up this

Euripides, still seemingly oblivious to half of what has come
before, with one final reduction to absurdity,
Ευ. πόλλ’ ἂν μάθοις τοιαῦτα παρ’ ἐμοῦ. Κη. πῶς ἂν οὖν
πρὸς τοῖς ἀγαθοῖς τούτοισιν ἐξεύροιμ’ ὅπως
ἔτι προσμάθοιμι χωλὸς εἶναι τὼ σκέλει; 24

E. Many such things you could learn from me. K. So how,

in addition to these fine things, might I discover how
I might yet learn to be lame in my legs? 24

and with it, a last comic plea from this exasperated follower of the
poet, for respite . . .

27
 3

S O P H I S T I C M O D E L S : E R I S T I C A N D Α Ν Τ Ι ΛΟ Γ Ι Α

The sophistic strategies paraded and parodied in these first lines

find striking parallels in the eristic tactics ascribed to two late fifth-
century sophists in another philosophical satire, Plato’s
Euthydemus. The dropping of contextual qualifiers to get to the
terms at the heart of a proposition (5–8); the reshaping of those
terms into antinomies using verbal ambiguity (5–8); and the rele-
gation of the original assertion to self-contradiction and absurdity
(10, 12, 19): precisely the style of argument that arguably marks the
interlocutor of our opening lines also characterizes the ἀντιλογικὴ
τέχνη of the sophist brother-pair portrayed by Plato.1 Indeed, it is
perhaps no coincidence that the probable dramatic date of this
dialogue places its image of an Athens enamoured by epideictic
contest and eristic technique at around the same time as the
performance of our Thesmophoriazusae.2 As Plato presents them,
the Euthydemus’ sophist protagonists, the elderly brothers
Euthydemus and Dionysodorus, had originated from Chios and

1
Numerous examples could be cited, but for the particular strategy of dropping qualifiers to
generate a conjunctive formulation of opposites and contradiction, see Pl. Euthd. 293b7–
294a8, with S. Austin (1986) 116–23, esp. 122; cf. Chance (1992) 130–6. For the
tendentious application of Eleatic logic underlying such eristic tactics, see S. Austin
(1986) 116–23; Palmer (1999) 126–39; and my following discussion. For the affinity
between Plato’s Euthd. and Aristophanic comedy, see Chance (1992) 191–2: ‘all those
grotesqueries which he [sc. Plato] used to characterize the [. . .] antithesis to his own
dialectic – the misuse of verbal triggers, the devious employment of ambiguous words and
syntax, incomprehensible talk, non sequiturs and sophisms, even radically abrupt tran-
sitions, insults and slanders of every description, eristical dodges, puns – are precisely the
signs that point to the discourse of actors on the comic stage’; and 277–8 n. 30 with the
utility of the Euthd. for scholars interested in ‘the problems of antilogy’ in Ar. (among
others). See p. 31 n. 11.
2
This is based upon the extrapolation of Nails (2002) 317–18 of a dramatic date of
≥ 407. There is general consensus that Th. was performed at the Dionysia of 411 bc
and Lys. was performed at the Lenaea of that year, see Austin and Olson (2004)
xxxiii–xliv, esp. xli–xliv; Sommerstein (1977); cf. Revermann (2006b) 166; Rogers
(1904) and now Tsakmakis (2012) argue in support of a performance date for the
Th. at the Lenaea of 410 bc.

28
 s o p h i s t i c m o d e ls : er i s t i c an d ΑΝΤΙΛΟΓΙΑ

later joined the mainly Athenian colony at Thurii from which they
then fled to Attica, probably as part of the political expulsion of
Athenians and Athenian sympathizers that occurred in Thurii in
413 following the Athenian disaster in Sicily.3 Plato thus evidently
thought it plausible to suggest that at the time of the staging of our
Thesmophoriazusae (with its two ageing protagonists, and set-
piece epideixis of eristic method by a sophistic ‘kinsman’ character,
κηδεστής – ‘brother-in-law’?),4 probably at the City Dionysia of
411, his eristic exemplars had been in or around Attica for some
two years at least, first plying their trade as teachers of generalship
and then, according to the demand they encountered in Athens, also
as teachers of sophistry.5 Here they rapidly perfected their eristic

3
Nails (2002) 136–7, 317–18. For the failure of the Sicilian expedition and its consequen-
ces for the Athenian war effort (including widespread revolt against Athens of numerous
subject allies) as the implicit political backdrop to the Th., see Austin and Olson (2004)
xxxvi–xxxvii.
4
See Euthd. 272b9 for the brothers as γέροντε; for the comparably advanced age of
Euripides and his interlocutor, and for κηδεστής as ‘brother-in-law’ see my pp. 8–9 nn.
17–18.
5
Nails (2002) 317. Euthydemus and Dionysodorus themselves are obscure, but scholarly
consensus is that certainly Euthydemus and probably Dionysodorus were historical
personages, see Palmer (1999) 126, esp. n. 9; see also further references to Euthydemus
at Pl. Cra. 386d and Arist. SE 177b, Rh. 1401a27, and to Dionysodorus at Xen. Mem. 3.1,
where the sophist’s early ambition to teach generalship upon his arrival in Athens is
mentioned. But irrespective of the historicity of these two sophists, their Platonic dramatis
personae are certainly crafted so as to raise the issue of their ontological independence: see
Crito’s confusion in the dramatic frame at 271a–b about whether there is one or two of
them (which makes Plato’s repeated use of the dual seem surely significant), and Chance
(1992) 270 n. 113, who argues that Plato’s brothers are ‘enantiomorphs’; cf. Hawtrey
(1981) 13–14, who also notes the suggestion that the two constitute ‘a virtually indistin-
guishable pair’ and compares the comic effect of such a characterization to the effect of
Shakespeare’s characterization of Rosencrantz and Gildenstern as a semi-comic pair
shaped from ‘essentially one character’. This aspect of their Platonic characterization
may also owe something to the protagonists of our prologue, see my earlier discussion
pp. 8–9 on the problem of the Aristophanic hapax of Euripides’ anonymous interlocutor
(according to N. W. Slater (2002) 295 n. 7 essentially an extension and parody of, which is
also to say, a philosophical foil to, Euripides himself), and my p. 31 n. 11, p. 103 n. 165,
p. 108 n. 176, p. 141 n. 259, p. 184 n. 81 for the Euthd.’s likely debts to Ar. and our Th.
Certainly, the displays of Plato’s brothers elicit no less a theatrical and comic audience, see
276c–d. According to the Euthd., the elderly brothers added sophistry to their skills during
the course of several years spent in and around Athens (271c). Socrates relates that they
acquired their eristical wisdom (τῆς σοφίας [. . .] τῆς ἐριστικῆς, 272b9) within only a year or
two of the dramatic date of the dialogue, which is why they are not known by name to Crito
(271c–272b). In this respect, they are not remarkable; Socrates witheringly notes both the
speed (272b10–c1) and the ease with which anyone, even the many, can pick up and
mimic their eristic skills (as first Ctesippus and then he himself demonstrates, 300b–d,
301b5–6), see 304a.

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 a ri s t op h an e s ’ thesmophoriazusae

skills and quickly added themselves to the ranks of those practising

the sort of Eleaticizing ἀντιλογία that their parodic portrayal in the
Euthydemus was later to have them exemplify.6 Indeed, further
evidence from Aristotle suggests that at some point during these
years Euthydemus, for one, very likely produced eristic arguments
for public consumption and, if this is so, his work evidently
contributed to an ever-growing number of display speeches (epi-
deixeis) and manuals (technai) on the art of speaking written by
intellectuals, poets and sophists during the late fifth century.7
That Aristophanes composed our prologue in response to the
appetite that existed amongst his contemporaries for the sophistic
displays of such figures seems especially plausible if we consider
that our extant Thesmophoriazusae is one of two versions of the
play produced during the last decades of the fifth century; the other
was probably staged either just before or just after 411.8 The little
that we know about the plot of this lost version suggests that the

6
For many of the sophist brothers’ arguments as pastiches of earlier sophistic topoi, see
Palmer (1999) 126.
7
An example of one such anonymous treatise, the Δισσοὶ Λόγοι, believed to have been
written around 400, survives in an appendix to Sextus Empiricus. Protagoras himself wrote
two books of ἀντιλογίαι: Diog. Laert. 9.55; (= 80a1 DK). Euthydemus: Wilamowitz-
Moellendorff (1919) 155–6; Praechter (1932) 122–7; the circulation of Euthydemus’ argu-
ments in some form is certain: see the tantalizing (and perplexing, since it is incomplete)
reference to a sophism attributed to him by Aristotle at SE 177b12–13 and unattested in
Plato. Chance (1992) 5–6 discusses the Protagorean influence on later eristic, but see
Hitchcock (2000) 60–2, who sees fundamental differences in their styles of argument. For
the large number of texts on the art of speaking written by sophists, see Pl. Phd. 266d; Xen.
Mem. 4.2; R. Thomas (2003) on the issue of audience and performance; and for the
widespread dissemination of Eleatic ideas appropriated by the eristics, my following
discussion, pp. 43–6.
8
A lost Th. is attested among the fragments of Ar. Traditionally, it has been dated to some
time after our extant play of 411, and the departure of Butrica (2001) from this assumption
with a date in the late 420s, and specifically the Lenaea of 423, a sister play to the lost
Clouds, has not proved persuasive to the most recent commentators; Austin and Olson
(2004) lxxxiv–lxxxvii; but cf. Butrica (2004) for a response. However, his case has
prompted the revision of our placing of the lost play to within the range of dates 415/
14–407/6. That the play seems unlikely to have been staged before that earliest date (415)
is suggested by a reference to Agathon attributed to the lost play (fr. 341 KA) which
assumes his poetic tendencies are well known to the comic audience and implies a date of
sometime after the staging of his first set of plays at the Lenaea of 416, and before his
departure to Macedon (sometime earlier than 405); Austin and Olson (2004) lxxxvii.
However, the question of whether our extant play was the ‘original’ version and the lost
version a rewrite or vice versa, remains open. But see Karachalios (2006) for a challenge of
the attribution of fr. 341 KA to the lost play and an attempt to find further support for
Butrica’s dating of the lost play to the early period of Ar.’s career (i.e. pre-421) and
specifically to the Lenaea of 423.

30
 s o p h i s t i c m o d e ls : er i s t i c an d ΑΝΤΙΛΟΓΙΑ

prologue of our extant play was very different if not entirely new.9
If that is so, then it seems we are dealing with a scene either written
or rewritten in, or just before, 411 in order to stage a set-piece
epideixis of the popular art of eristic sophistry,10 that same art
which just a few years later, c. 405, Aristophanes would explicitly
pin to his comic Euripides (cf. Frogs 771–6) and which, some years
after that, Plato would parody in its highest form in his
Euthydemus, drawing upon Aristophanes’ earlier popularizing
treatments performed on-stage during his youth.11 Certainly,

9
According to the scholiast (ΣR298 = fr. 331 KA) of our extant version, the prologue of the
lost Th. opened with the speech of Calligeneia, a minor deity associated with the
Thesmophoria. The play almost certainly began at the festival on its last day, a day
named in honour of this Goddess (cf. the title given to the play by Demetrios of Troizen:
αἱ Θεσμοφοριάσασαι (Th. II test. ii = SH 377), cited by Austin and Olson (2004) lxxxvii).
According to Butrica’s (2001) 62–70 speculative reconstruction, the prologue which
followed probably consisted of ‘a scene of deliberation in which the celebrants agreed
upon the necessity of doing away with Euripides’ before setting out for Salamis to
apprehend the poet in his cave and kill him.
10
An earlier, pre-411, date (say, 415/14) for the lost Th. implies that the prologue of the first
play was rewritten to take the shape of our extant version and so fit with the sophistic
Zeitgeist of 411/10. A later, post-411, date (say, 407/6) for the lost version, on the other
hand, suggests either that the original prologue (now, our extant version) was perfectly
timed for its first airing in 411 but less relevant a few years later and so was reworked
accordingly, or else that, like the first Clouds, our extant beginning simply flopped,
perhaps because of its similarly intellectual subject matter, and it was this failure which
prompted a rewrite. Alternatively, if Karachalios (2006) is right to see our play as the
second version of a play that was performed in 423 but, like the first Clouds, failed (cf.
Wasps 1043–5), then our extant play may well mark a poetic castigation of the first play’s
earlier audience just as does our extant Clouds, see my discussion, pp. 144–58. But see
my conclusion for a full discussion of the reasons motivating our Th.’s parody of
Euripides and his audiences in 411.
11
For the sophistic epideixeis of Euthydemus and Dionysodorus, see Pl. Euthd. 274d–275a.
For the formulaic nature – instantly recognizable to those in the know – of the cross-
questioning displays exemplified by these brothers and by the sophistic interlocutor of the
Th., see Chance (1992) 42–7, esp. 43, on the ‘standardized question-chains’ of eristic
which enact ‘frozen pieces of reasoning, stored away for future recall and requiring only a
set of triggers or cues’ in order to ‘set in motion a crystallized refutation’. Cf. R. Thomas
(2003) 177. On the issue of intertextuality: the depth of the relationship that exists
between Plato and Ar. is only now beginning to be appreciated, see Nightingale (1995)
172–92; Brock (1990); Chance (1992) 191–2; Nails (2006); Tordoff (2007); Rashed
(2009); Charalabopoulos (2001) (2012); Sissa (2012). The Euthd., in particular, deserves
a study of this kind; it is the Platonic dialogue ‘probably richest in allusions to
Aristophanes’: Hawtrey (1981) 34, see esp. n. 21, listing allusions to Clouds (Clouds
439–42 and 453f., Euthd. 285c–d; Clouds 143, Euthd. 277e; Clouds 254, Euthd. 277d);
Tarrant (1991) 162–66 (Clouds); a likely allusion to our Th. and Agathon’s theory of
mimēsis (Th. 149–50, 168–70) at Euthd. 284d5, see Hawtrey (1981) ad loc.; ‘with the
largest number of references to laughter’ and possibly mirroring in its five-part structure
the five acts of a comedy, Charalabopoulos (2012) 69; and exhibiting close affinities to
comedy in its sophistic conversational strategies and wordplay, see Chance (1992) 191–2

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since the ambassadorial visit of Gorgias of Leontini to their city

in 427 the intellectual community of Athens and its wider theatre-
going public had steadily demonstrated their appreciation for
precisely such sophistic epideixeis.12

and my discussion pp. 102–13; cf. Collins (2004) 50–3, and my p. 28 n. 1, p. 103 n. 165,
p. 108 n. 176, p. 141 n. 259, p. 184 n. 81; cf. Brock (1990) 45–6 and D. Tarrant (1946) and
(1958) on Plato’s redeployment of colloquialism and comic wordplay. In light of these
considerations, it is entirely implausible to suppose that Plato composed his comic exposé
of eristic without at least some knowledge of Ar.’s satirical handling of eristic procedure
in our prologue. Indeed, by Plato’s time, Th. had evidently acquired an international
audience: see the depiction of its (Telephian) hostage scene (688–764) on an Apulian bell
crater from southern Italy c. 370, Martin von Wagner Museum, Würzburg, H5697, cited
by Henderson (2000) 446; for a full discussion, see Taplin (1987) 102–5 and (1993) 36–
40. None of this, of course, is to detract from the dialogue’s fourth-century political and
philosophical agendas, for which see Dusanic (1999) and Rappe (2000) respectively.
12
For the suggestion that Gorgias may have been lampooned by Ar. in the very next year
(426) in Babylonians, see O’Sullivan (1992) 126–9, esp. 127 on Ar. fr. 67 KA; and for
likely references to Gorgianic deception in Ach. 634 see my p. 191 n. 102; in 422
Ar. explicitly mocks an Athenian emulator of Gorgias, a certain Philippus (Wasps 421),
and by 414 the characterization of Athens as an unbearably litigious city by two
Athenians seeking to escape is made in terms of Gorgias’ impact on the practice of
rhetoric: Birds 1694–1705; lastly, for castigation of Athenian audiences under the spell of
Gorgianic style rhetoric in 427 in a piece of rhetoric that is itself Gorgianic, see Thuc.
3.38.4–7 with my discussion pp. 160–3. Impact of Gorgias outside Athens: see Pl. Men.
70a–b on the Thessalians’ newly learnt wisdom, and Philostr. test. 35 (Buchheim (1989))
for the scholarly cliché that, in Thessaly, ‘to gorgiasize’ became an idiom for ‘to orate’.

32
 4

O N W H AT- [ I T ] - I S - N O T: G O R G I A S
AND EMPEDOCLES

The extent of the influence Gorgias had on intellectual life in

Athens is reflected not least by the readiness with which
scholars assume that it is the spectre of his work that lies
behind the key features of our prologue. Most significantly, the
ʻtheoryʼ setting out the relation of the senses of sight and
hearing to their respective objects and to one another that is
solicited from Euripides here has been identified as a specific
homage to Gorgias’ famous treatise On What Is Not – a
suggestion seemingly bolstered by the ostentatious plays on
negation of the early lines in which it occurs.1 In a pivotal

1
Bobrick (1997) 179 voices the popular view that Euripides’ words of the prologue bode
for ‘a Gorgian fantasy in which that which is not is’; Hays (1990) 333–4 offers a lengthier
but similarly glossing discussion of our lines as a parody of Gorgianic scepticism; so too
Mureddu (1992) and, most recently, Nichols (1998) 81 n. 76, building upon Whitman’s
(1964) 226 (cf. 219) unsubstantiated characterization of Euripides’ musings about the
objects of sight and hearing as ‘almost a quotation from the book “On Non-Being”’.
Against the force of that characterization should be weighed the fact that Gorgias’ treatise
survives in two Hellenistic versions, one in the work of Sextus Empiricus (M vii 65–87 =
82b3 DK), the other in the pseudo-Aristotelian De Melisso Xenophane Gorgia (MXG, text
and German trans. Buchheim (1989)), neither of which can be said to have preserved
Gorgias’ own words, nor even necessarily to have rendered intact the original sequence of
his thought; see Wardy (1996) 15, and 152 n. 12, for ‘the indubitable evidence for heavy
reworking by Hellenistic philosophers’ in both texts, a fact which prompts Gagarin (1997)
38 wryly to ask ‘does On Not Being even exist? Or is it, like Gorgias’ Being, something
that does not exist, cannot be known, and cannot be communicated to others?’ On the
problems of both texts, and particularly of the version preserved by Sextus Empiricus
(which most scholars now consider more of an extrapolation than MXG), see Wardy
(1996) 14–15; Sedley (1992); Mansfeld (1988). I have followed the practice of Wardy
(1996) 15, 152 nn. 14–15, endorsed by Sedley (1992), in basing what follows upon MXG.
Significantly, Hays’ (1990) 333–4, esp. nn. 13–14, reading of our prologue as a popular
reception of Gorgianic scepticism, noting the epistemological uncertainty that follows at
lines 27–8, can suggest only two points of linguistic commonality with the MXG text: the
use of χωρίς at Th. 13 (cf. MXG 980b10) and the negated articular infinitives τοῦ μήτ’
ἀκούειν μήθ’ ὁρᾶν at Th. 12, which he compares to Gorgias’ τὸ μὴ εἶναι (MXG 979a27), and
both the use of χωρίς and ‘of such negations’, Hays must concede, was ‘evidently common
enough’ amongst the eristic appropriators of Eleaticism to be parodied by Plato (see
Euthd. 284a, 284b–c); i.e. allusion specifically to Gorgias is far from established.

33
 a ri s t op h an e s ’ thesmophoriazusae

passage of that work, dating from the 440s,2 Gorgias is said to

have drawn upon a similar premise, extrapolating from the
notion of the mutual exclusivity of sight and hearing in order
to argue the paradoxical thesis that communication itself is
impossible (MXG 980a20–b3):3
εἰ δὲ καὶ γνωστά, πῶς ἄν τις, φησί, δηλώσειεν ἄλλῳ; ὃ γὰρ εἶδε, πῶς ἄν τις, φησί,
τοῦτο εἴποι λόγῳ; ἢ πῶς ἂν ἐκεῖνο δῆλον ἀκούσαντι γίγνοιτο, μὴ ἰδόντι; ὥσπερ γὰρ
οὐδὲ ἡ ὄψις τοὺς φθόγγους γιγνώσκει, οὕτως οὐδὲ ἡ ἀκοὴ τὰ χρώματα ἀκούει, ἀλλὰ
φθόγγους· καὶ λέγει ὁ λέγων, ἀλλ’ οὐ χρῶμα οὐδὲ πρᾶγμα.
Even if things are knowable by us, how, he asks, could anyone make them known
to another? For how, he says, could anyone express in λόγος what he has seen? Or
how could a thing the listener has not seen become clear to him? For just as sight
does not recognize sounds, so neither does hearing hear colours, but rather sounds;
and the speaker speaks but does not speak colour or the thing.

Gorgias’ argument, staked out at the beginning of the third part of a

spiralling epideixis which attempts to demonstrate that nothing is,
or, if something is, that it cannot be known, or, if it can be known,
that it cannot be made clear to anyone else (979a12–13), takes as its
starting point a scenario parallel to that staged in our prologue: a
speaker has seen and therefore knows (οἶδα) something that
another has not seen and does not know and so is faced with only
hearing about. But whereas our comic dialogue extends from this
premise (K. ‘Might it be possible . . . to find out from you,
Euripides, just where you are taking me?’, 3–4) to play out one
possible consequence of the exercise of theorizing the mutual
exclusivity of the senses, that is, the reductio ad absurdum of
each sense to (a) non-sense (E. ‘You needn’t hear all that you’re
about to see . . . K. . . . I must not-hear?’, 5–7), Gorgias’ epideixis
aims at quite another goal: a reductio ad absurdum that preserves
the integrity of the senses in order to infer from their absolute
segregation the absolute segregation of human beings per se, a

2
Gorgias is said to have written On What Is Not or On Nature in the eighty-fourth Olympiad
(444–441), see 82b2 DK but see Mansfeld (1985) 247 on the chronological difficulties in
this testimony.
3
Nichols (1998) 81 n. 76 notes the superficial similarity in the most general terms, but in the
absence of any detailed analysis of either the possible allusion, or On What Is Not, he is not
able to frame our opening lines correctly. Hays (1990) 333–4 discusses in more detail but
similarly glosses.

34
 o n w ha t - [ it ] - i s-n o t
rhetorical move which extrapolates from the theoretical impossi-
bility of communication between individual senses to an impossi-
bility of communication between individuals themselves.4 For if
the senses of sight and hearing can discern (γιγνώσκω) only their
own sense objects, Gorgias asks, how is it possible for a speaker to
make clear (δῆλος) to his listener using invisible λόγοι those visu-
ally acquired objects of knowledge (χρώματα) which only the eyes
are able to perceive? (980a20–1); and, how, in turn, is it possible for
the listener, for his part, to gain access to the visual knowledge of
the speaker through merely the sounds of articulate speech
(φθόγγοι), sensory objects which only the ears can possibly

4
See Bux (1941) 404 on Gorgias’ expertise in drawing out theories to their logical
conclusions; and Levi (1941) 29 in support of the causal connection posited here between
sorts of mutual exclusivity, there reconstructing Gorgias’ argument as follows: ‘it is
surmised by some philosophers that there exists a reality equipped with sensible qualities
and therefore perceptible, and it is also accepted, with Empedocles, that perception is
explicable as he claims. Even if one starts from these premises, one must necessarily arrive
at the theory of the incommunicability of the knowledge of this reality.’ (For the issue of
Empedoclean premises, see p. 36 n. 6.) By contrast, Mourelatos (1985) 609 argues that a
relationship of analogy and not explanation connects Gorgias’ use of the doctrine of
mutual exclusivity between sensory domains and the inadequacy of λόγος, basing this
upon the use of “ὥσπερ . . . οὕτως . . .” at MXG 980b1. However, a key feature of the
passage implies that the incapacity of λόγος to communicate visual knowledge in the first
instance follows from its status as an aural object: the use at 980b1 of φθόγγοι, a term
which can mean articulate speech as well as inarticulate sounds, for the special object of
hearing, ‘sounds’, suggests the inclusion of λόγος within the domain of the aural, cf.
Wardy (1996) 17–18, and the absence of φθόγγοι in the final clause at 980b3 (. . . καὶ λέγει
ὁ λέγων, ἀλλ’ οὐ χρῶμα οὐδὲ πρᾶγμα). Indeed, for some commentators, the indeterminacy
of φθόγγοι in this respect raises the issue of whether a heard λόγος can in fact effect the
communication of aural realities, and whether Gorgias’ demonstration of the impossibility
of communication is therefore flawed: see Wardy (1996) 17–18; Mourelatos (1985) 609.
But it might just as easily be said that at this point of Gorgias’ epideixis aural realities are
simply not yet at issue: in these lines it is specifically the communication of ‘things seen’
by means of a ‘thing heard’, λόγος, that is at stake (hence the use of φθόγγοι). In fact, if we
recognize the causal connection that is being posited at this early stage of the argument
between the distinctness of the sensory modalities of sight and of hearing and the
inadequacy of λόγος (a medium held to be audible, but not visible) therefore to mediate
between them, the use of φθόγγος to emphasize the aural dimension of λόγοι is entirely
fitting. The tactic is thrown into relief just a few lines later: witness how, when Gorgias
generalizes from this example to assert the incapacity of λόγος to communicate not only
the reality of ‘things seen’ but also the reality of ‘things heard’, he shifts tack, explicitly de-
emphasizing the sonority of the word by replacing the inclusive term φθόγγος to designate
the special object of hearing with ψόφος, ‘noise’ (never, ‘articulate speech’) (980b3–8,
noted by Wardy (1996) 19). λόγοι do not cease to be aural but, as semiotic media, what
they are now shown to offer detaches them from the content of any direct sensory object
they may be asked to convey (ὃ οὖν τις μὴ ἐννοεῖ, πῶς αὐτὸ παρ’ ἄλλου λόγῳ ἢ σημείῳ τινὶ
ἑτέρῳ τοῦ πράγματος ἐννοήσει, . . . 980b3–5; ψόφος, 7–8); pace Wardy (1996) 18–19.

35
 a ri s t op h an e s ’ thesmophoriazusae

recognize? (980a22). The answer, Gorgias flatly asserts, is simple:

it is not (980b4–8).5
As Plato chose to portray him, Gorgias arrived at the extreme
reaches of that position by exploiting premises about the senses
consistent with the principles of a theory of perception proposed
by his fellow Sicilian, Empedocles, a figure with whom he is closely
associated in the Meno.6 At an early stage of that dialogue Socrates is

5
This argument is further developed at 980b4–8, wherein audible λόγοι are shown to exist
as a class of objects separate from the colours and noises they purport to express: ἀρχὴν
γὰρ οὐ <ψόφον> λέγει <ὁ λέ>γων οὐδὲ χρῶμα, ἀλλὰ λόγον· (980b6); and at 980b14–17,
wherein Gorgias’ final proof of the impossibility of communication returns us to its
theoretical beginnings: the dissolution of perceptual experience. Now, however, this
impossibility is no longer hung on the failure of λόγος, but rather, on the fragmented
experience of the sense-making individual (in Gorgias’ terms, a perceptual isolate). Even
if communication could somehow occur, he argues (980b8), even if the same thing could
be made present in the minds of two people (980b11), even then, there is still no reason
why it should appear the same to both, for (980b14–17):
φαίνεται δὲ οὐδ’ αὑτὸς αὑτῷ ὅμοια αἰσθανόμενος ἐν τῷ αὐτῷ χρόνῳ, ἀλλ’ ἕτερα τῇ ἀκοῇ
καὶ τῇ ὄψει καὶ νῦν τε καὶ πάλαι διαφόρως. ὥστε σχολῇ ἄλλῳ γ’ ἂν ταὐτὸ αἴσθοιτό τις.
6
On Plato’s numerous allusions to On What Is Not in the Prm., see Mansfeld (1985)
258–65. For his portrayal of Gorgias as a proponent (satirical or otherwise) of
Empedocles’ theory of sensory mutual exclusivity, see Pl. Men. 76c–e, with my following
discussion; cf. Diog. Laert. 8.58–9; Olymp. in Gorg. 9 proem ( = 8 2 a 3 , a 10 DK) on the
tutelage of Gorgias by Empedocles in the doxographical tradition; and for elaboration of
this association specifically in relation to On What Is Not, see Untersteiner (1954) 158;
Guthrie (1962–9) iii. 198; Calogero (1977) 266–8; Kerferd (1985); J. B. Davis (1997)
34–5. The primary context within which to situate On What Is Not is mid-fifth-century
Eleaticism, see my p. 44 n. 5; the third section of On What Is Not can be read as a direct
challenge to Parmenides’ assertion that he can provide ‘trustworthy discourse and thought
about Truth’ (28b8.50–1 DK), see Schiappa (1997) 23. Yet insofar as it is the mutual
exclusivity of sight and hearing that is used as the vehicle for contesting this, I suggest a
broader concern with Empedoclean-type premises, which, as Kerferd (1985) 604–5
argues, provide the physiological grounds Gorgias needs to force the issues of the inter-
relation of the senses and the status of λόγος, in On What Is Not can legitimately be
posited; however, I do so with the qualification that for Gorgias this theory is not merely
the premise for the third part of his anti-Eleatic epideixis, but also an implicit and
subsidiary target of it. Cf. Blass (1887) 49 and my p. 35 n. 4. Pace Mourelatos (1985)
609–10, who argues that in order for this section of Gorgias’ epideixis to have been
persuasive its instrumental notion of the distinctness of the senses must have been based
upon ‘ordinary intuitions or commonly held beliefs’ (610) rather than their explanation by
contemporary theories of perception: ‘Since Gorgias has highly paradoxical conclusions
to defend he would have been foolish to draw on speculative theses that are in themselves
controversial’ (610). Cf. 622. But for On What Is Not as a piece of ἀντιλογία aimed more
toward attacking a range of philosophical positions known to its intellectual audience than
toward defending paradoxical conclusions to an imagined ‘uneducated’ one, see the
statements of Anonymous to this effect at the outset and conclusion (979a14–18,
980b19–21) and the fact that Gorgias’ arguments throughout take their cue from contest-
able premises (the arguments of Zeno and Melissus) in order to show that their logical

36
 o n w ha t - [ it ] - i s-n o t
pressed to provide a definition of colour (χρῶμα) by a former pupil of
Gorgias, the young Meno – a character, who, thus far in the dialogue,
has shown himself adept at evading the real issue at hand (i.e. what is
ἀρετή?) with his eristic questioning. Now, in order to circumvent
Meno’s contentious streak, Socrates’ treatment of colour must sat-
isfy Gorgias’ young protégé in such a way as to present him with
nothing he might want openly to dispute.7 Socrates’ strategy is
twofold: first, he primes Meno to behave as if he were a φίλος
engaged with him in dialectic, rather than a ‘sophist of the eristic
and contentious sort’ (75c8–d6);8 then he resolves to offer him the
sort of answer Meno will find most persuasive (ᾗ ἂν σὺ μάλιστα
ἀκολουθήσαις), an account of colour κατὰ Γοργίαν (76c4–5).9
What follows under these auspices is a definition of χρῶμα
somewhat wryly cobbled together from agreements elicited from

implications are absurd. Contrast the view, closer to that advocated here, of Levi (1941)
29–32, who argues that Gorgias tries to demonstrate in On What Is Not that the ration-
alizing accounts formulated by philosophers in order to explain customary beliefs are
ultimately ‘not valid’ (32) or at least result in paradoxical conclusions; cf. my p. 35 n. 4;
and Striker (1996) 14 (building upon Sicking (1964)): ‘Gorgias was not making the
philosophical claim that nothing can be known; he was just pointing out that the arguments
presented so far did not impress him’; with Mansfeld (1985) 247, cf. 259, also citing
Sicking (1964) 402–5, on the certainty that Gorgias argued against not only Eleatics but
physikoi also. See Sicking (1964) 395–6 for Sickingʼs own interpretation of Gorgiasʼ
possible relation to Empedocles here. Finally, for the sensory fragmentation posited by
Empedocles’ theory of mutually exclusive senses as exemplifying only one half of the
wider ontological processes of separation and coming-together governed by the cosmic
forces of Strife and Love, see Laks (1999) 266–7, with 31b3 DK on the complementary
processes of synthesis by which the fragmentation of the senses is overcome in noetic
grasp.
7
Socrates’ preliminary objective is to extract a definition of ἀρετή that stipulates the single
element all kinds of ἀρετή have in common (the εἶδος, 72c). The challenge of defining
colour, initially set for Meno, is therefore raised to begin with because, alongside the
definition of shape, it offers useful practise in such definition-making (75a9–10); it
becomes a question put by Meno as part of an eristic tactic designed to defer the need to
answer about ἀρετή, and it is finally answered by Socrates only as part of a bargain that
Meno will then immediately reciprocate by finally providing Gorgias’ definition of ἀρετή
(76a10–b2).
8
For Socrates’ explicit equation of Meno’s views with those propounded by Gorgias, cf.
71d–e; 73c8–10; 76c7–8; and for the direct comparison of the training and tactics of paid
sophists specializing in eristic to those offered by Gorgias’ school, see Arist. SE 34.183b36–
184a4. It is Meno’s obstructive questioning into colour (a concept with which he has
already shown himself to be familiar) that prompts Socrates to distinguish between eristic
and dialectic and establish the future grounds of their discussion: Pl. Men. 75c8–d6.
9
For the phrase κατὰ Γοργίαν as ‘after the doctrine propounded by Gorgias’ rather than ‘in
the manner (i.e. style) of Gorgias’, see the phrase κατὰ Ἐμπεδοκλέα that follows at 76c8,
and Sansone (1996) 340, with the following Platonic parallels: Pl. Phd. 229e5; Cra.
401d4; Smp. 174c6.

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Meno as to the existence of a thing called sight (ὄψις) and a general

model of mutual exclusivity between the senses (76d4–5). But, as it
is related by Socrates in the Meno, that model itself is not simply
assumed; rather, it is gradually extrapolated from a step-by-step
exposition of the first principles of a specifically Empedoclean
physiology (κατὰ Ἐμπεδοκλέα, 76c8), a set of teachings with
which, Socrates is careful to establish, a young student of
Gorgias should be only too familiar:
Σω. Οὐκοῦν λέγετε ἀπορροάς τινας τῶν ὄντων 76c7
κατὰ Ἐμπεδοκλέα;
Μεν. Σφόδρα γε.
Σω. Καὶ πόρους, εἰς οὓς καὶ δι’ ὧν αἱ ἀπορροαὶ πορεύονται;
Μεν. Πάνυ γε.
Σω. Καὶ τῶν ἀπορροῶν τὰς μὲν ἁρμόττειν
ἐνίοις τῶν πόρων, τὰς δὲ ἐλάττους ἢ μεíζους εἶναι; 76d1
Σω. Ἔστι ταῦτα.

S. Do not both you and Gorgias10 say there are certain effluences of
existent things, as Empedocles held?
M. Certainly.
S. And passages into which and through which the effluences pass?
M. To be sure.
S. And some of the effluences fit into various passages, while some are
too small or too large?
M. That is so.

Existent things, it is here agreed, constantly give off a stream of

effluences (ἀπορροαί) into the world, some of which, being suit-
ably sized, fit into certain pathways or openings (πόροι) of objects
that they encounter; others, being either larger or smaller than
these πόροι, do not. For Socrates’ present purposes this general
principle is enough: his theoretical grounds laid, he swiftly moves
to secure the last proposition necessary for extrapolating a definition
of χρῶμα ‘κατὰ Γοργίαν’ –
Σω. Οὐκοῦν καὶ ὄψιν καλεῖς τι; 76d2
Μεν. Ἔγωγε.

10
For λέγετε as including both Meno and Gorgias, or Gorgias’ followers in general, see
Bluck (1961a) ad loc.

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 o n w ha t - [ it ] - i s-n o t

S. And further, there is something you call sight?

M. Yes.

– before unveiling his Gorgianic conclusion, a revelation already

there for the seeing, and so announced with an air of Pindaric
solemnity plucked straight out of Aristophanes:11
Σω. Ἐκ τούτων δὴ “σύνες ὅ τοι λέγω,” ἔφη Πίνδαρος. 76d3
ἔστιν γὰρ χρόα ἀπορροὴ σχημάτων ὄψει σύμμετρος καὶ
αἰσθητός.

S. So now ʻconceive my meaningʼ, as Pindar says:

colour is an effluence consisting of shapes12 commensurate with sight
and perceptible.

Yet so utterly swept up is Meno in the echo of his former profes-

sor’s pedagogy, that he, by contrast, seems deaf to the comic over-
tones that flavour these words (76d9–e1). Against the lavish praise
he now heaps upon Socrates (76d6–7), it falls to Socrates himself to
hint that the Empedoclean account with which he seeks to placate
his young friend is really as hollow as the grand eloquence lent to it
by his ironic use of Pindaric poetry. Having first deflated Meno’s
declaration that an answer of this sort is truly ἄριστα (76d6),
countering, on the contrary, that it is merely one familiar to him
(κατὰ συνήθειαν, 76d8), Socrates next pursues an irony in its
perceived utility (76d8–e1). For if, as Meno evidently prefers,
one is to define χρῶμα (or χρόα) κατὰ Ἐμπεδοκλέα, that is, in
terms of a mechanistic theory of like by like, supposing a world
of effluences (ἀπορροαί) perceptible only in their mutually exclu-
sive pairing with commensurate πόροι, how would this definition
differ in any substantive sense from a definition by which one
would be led to define sound (φωνή)?13 Or, likewise, to define

11
Socrates’ quotation at 76d6 of Pindar’s words “σύνες ὅ τοι λέγω” almost certainly does
not refer to their original use by the poet but to the comical meaning the phrase has
acquired from Ar. Birds 945, see Klein (1965) 67–8 n. 40 with exegesis of both passages.
12
σχημάτων is ambiguous; for its construal as genitive of material rather than genitive of
origin, see Kerferd (1985) 603; but see Scott (2006) 45 for discussion of both possible
translations and their wider implications.
13
Substituting ἀκοῇ for ὄψει accordingly so that sound would be ‘an effluence of shapes
which is commensurate with hearing and so perceptible’.

39
 a ri s t op h an e s ’ thesmophoriazusae

smell (ὀσμή)?14 Or even numerous other things of this kind (καὶ

ἄλλα πολλὰ τῶν τοιούτων, 76e1)? To Gorgias’ young protégé, by
contrast, a character who, from the outset of this work, is more
interested in learning how virtue comes into being than what it
actually is (70a; cf. 72c7), the very appeal of an Empedoclean
answer lies in its capacity to furnish a universal model of the
process by which perceptual objects are generated, applicable to
each of these things (or so Socrates explains, 76d9–e1): hence, that
his answer is formulaic is a positive bonus (as Meno readily agrees,
76e2). Yet so convinced is he of its utility that he fails to detect
Socrates’ implicit criticism: how can a theory that offers merely an
account of how its definiendum comes-to-be, and that is equally
applicable to all such things, yield anything but the emptiest of
definitions of the essential nature (εἶδος) of any single one?15
What Socrates says next must be read in light of this tacit
objection, against the ironic failure of Empedoclean principles of
differentiation to produce adequate definitions. For now, as if
vindicating the comic overtones of his earlier Pindaric quotation,
Socrates encapsulates his formulaic answer about χρῶμα with a
single word, τραγική, saying it is lastly because of its ‘tragic’
nature that Meno finds this account more agreeable than any
other that has come before (τραγικὴ γάρ ἐστιν, ὦ Μένων, ἡ
ἀπόκρισις, ὥστε ἀρέσκει σοι μᾶλλον . . ., 76e3–4). Meno does not
object, yet his ready agreement (at 76e5) should not prompt us to
suppose that this epithet merely gestures to a pretentious, ‘high
poetic’, or ‘high-flown’, style of expression:16 the subtext of
Socrates’ τραγική is more pointed, and its focus is patently sub-
stantive.17 Whatever superficial nuances of élite culture or refined
sensibility, or even popular currency, τραγική might plausibly

14
Again, substituting ὀσφρήσει this time for ἀκοῇ.
15
On the problems of such a definition and its materialist conflation of γένεσις and εἶδος, see
M. Davis (1988) 113–14; problem of generality, cf. Weiss (2001) 30–1, 32 n. 39: (unlike
Socrates’ first definition of shape) ‘the definition of color in terms of effluences does not
pick out color uniquely’; cf. Sharples (1985) ad 76e3; J. E.Thomas (1980) ad 76d6–8;
Bluck (1961a) ad 76e6; Klein (1965) 67–70; Sedley and Long (2010) xiv–xv point to
further possible difficulties.
16
Bluck (1961a) ad loc. and (1961b), there taking into account forty years of scholarship on
this line, concludes that the term alludes to the answer’s ‘high-flown language’ and to its
‘grandiose’ and ‘difficult’ subject matter; cf. Weiss (2001) 28–30.
17
E. S Thompson (1901) ad loc.; Bluck (1961b) 295.

40
 o n w ha t - [ it ] - i s-n o t
evoke for Meno,18 for Socrates, the term sums up his implicit
criticism with a single idea: an answer κατὰ Γοργίαν is an answer
rich in obfuscating hyperbole.19 In the Meno, however, that hyper-
bole is not found in the sort of sophistic exploitation characteristic
of Gorgias’ earlier epideixis; it is unearthed in the exaggerated
claims of the very theory Plato leads us to believe lies behind it, a
theory which purports to explain and define a plurality of percep-
tibles yet on closer scrutiny yields little, save a single formulaic
account of the material conditions of coming-into-being, as to the
essential nature (εἶδος) of any of these things (a fact perhaps wryly
foreshadowed by Plato’s framing association of χρόα with ἀπορία
at 75c5–7, and subsequent punning repetition of πόρος and
ἀπορροή throughout this account; cf. 77b3–5, 78c1–79e7).20

18
All these glosses of the term have been offered by commentators: for τραγική as élite as
opposed to popular, see E. S. Thompson (1901) ad loc.; for the opposite reading, ‘known
to the masses through tragedy’, a reading which does not account for the use of the term
elsewhere, see Sansone (1996).
19
For τραγική connoting the idea of ambiguation through embellishment, dressing-up and
exaggeration see Pl. Cra. 418d, 414c; R. 413b, 545e; Plut. Art. 18.7; and esp. Thphr. HP
9.8.5: Ἔτι δὲ ὅσα οἱ φαρμακοπῶλαι καὶ οἱ ῥιζοτόμοι τὰ μὲν ἴσως οἰκείως τὰ δὲ καὶ
ἐπιτραγωδοῦντες λέγουσι. ‘Further we may add statements made by druggists and herb-
diggers which in some cases may be to the point, but in others contain exaggeration’ (trans.
Hort (1926)); see Pl. Cra. 408c, where ψεῦδος ‘trickery’ belongs to the category of τραγικός.
20
See M. Davis (1988) 113–14; Weiss (2001) 30–2. This is not to say that Socrates implies
in the Men. that the Empedoclean theory is false, as Scott (2006) 44 n. 38 has argued
(following Vlastos (1991) 122 n. 65; who compares Timaeus’ materialist account of
colour at Tim. 67c). For possible plays on ἀπορία here in the repetition of πόρος and
ἀπορροή (forms of which occur respectively three and four times in eight lines at 76c–d),
see Gordon (1999) 100; and note that Meno’s leading question, ‘what if someone were to
say that he didn’t know what colour was but was aporetic (ἀποροῖ) in the same way as he
was about shape’ (75c5–7), asked in response to Socrates’ first definition of shape (sc.
‘that which alone always accompanies colour’, 75b9–11) teasingly associates colour and
ἀπορία (and disingenuously, for Meno has already shown that he is well aware of what
colour is, 74c5ff.), and that what Socrates’ Gorgianic (dis)ambiguation of that concept
leaves all – bar the uncritical Meno – with is exactly this, an implicit ἀπορία borne from
Empedoclean πόροι and ἀπορροαί (what is the unique εἶδος of ‘colour’, as opposed to the
εἶδος of ‘sound’, or ‘smell’, etc.?), just as, indeed, Socrates’ next disparaging remarks
about the deficiency of Meno’s preferred Gorgianic/Empedoclean answer implicate their
audience in a further ἀπορία concerning his previous ‘better’ definition of shape (ἀλλ’ οὐκ
ἔστιν, ὦ παῖ Ἀλεξιδήμου, ὡς ἐγὼ ἐμαυτὸν πείθω, ἀλλ’ ἐκείνη βελτίων, 76e6–7; for it is not
clear to which of his two earlier definitions of σχῆμα Socrates here refers); see Ionescu
(2007) 37 n. 36 for conflicting scholarly views; for the subsequent development of this
wordplay in Meno’s next attempt at defining virtue (at 77b2–5) as ‘to desire good things
and have the capacity to get them (πορίζεσθαι)’ in refutation of which Socrates is
eventually able to get Meno to agree that ἀπορία (‘not-acquiring’) itself should qualify
as virtue if ‘not-acquiring good things’ is chosen for just reasons, see Sharples (1985) ad
78d3–6 and 78e5–6 with Politis (2006) for the positive value of ἀπορία in the Men.

41
 a ri s t op h an e s ’ thesmophoriazusae

Socrates’ grounds for mocking the utility of an Empedoclean

answer to the problem of perception when charged with definition-
making may be quite different from those that inform its satirical
exploitation by Gorgias in On What Is Not. Yet in so far as it is the
logical failure – and attendant ἀπορία – of the same theoretical
παράδειγμα that is Socrates’ implicit message in this episode
(cf. 76e6–7), playing Gorgias on χρῶμα (even playing him straight)
inadvertently throws into relief a critical affinity between his actor
cum-critic and what we have seen of the sophist that he
caricatures for his part. For if τραγική – understood as exaggeration
or overstatement shown later to exact an aporetic price21 – marks a
‘Gorgianic’ response, both here and in the paradoxical conclusions
of the third part of On What Is Not, it is Empedoclean-type theorizing
that provides its inspiration and cause.22

21
Cf. M. Davis’ (1988) 113 interpretation of τραγική here ‘built upon the necessity of an
initial mistake that later extracts an enormous price’; he detects such a mistake both in the
generality of the Empedoclean definition (which ‘could apply to any of the senses’) and
(more importantly for Davis) in its dependency upon the definition of shape thus far
arrived at, which itself has inadequacies.
22
As Scott (2006) 45 points out, the ‘Gorgianic’ Empedoclean account of colour at 76d4 is
ambiguous in even its formulation, see my p. 39 n. 12. Cf. Diog. Laert. 8.70, there
attributing a τραγικὸς τῦφος to Empedocles; see also 8.73, 8.66. For Empedocles’ reputed
flamboyance and the ‘carnival atmosphere’ of philosophical and sophistic epideixis, see
Lloyd (1987) 101–2.

42
 5

O N W H AT- [ I T ] - I S : PA R M E N I D E S , PA R A - D O X A
A N D M O RTA L E R R O R

You’re acting like you’ve never heard of him,

And everybody has. He’s world renowned!
His writings turned philosophy around
By altering the then-prevailing view –
That what is real is really falsely true –
To what is true is really falsely real . . .
(A perplexed squint; then, resuming.)
Well, either way, it’s BRILLIANT! Don’t you feel?1

. . . to own to being a mortal is to invoke negation and distinction fundamentally

in whatever one conceives and whatever one does . . .2

If Gorgias and Aristophanes seem to share a common object in

the passages we have examined, it is an apparent concern with
exploiting the absurdities engendered by pressing fifth-century
theories of the mutual exclusivity of the senses.3 Yet readings
of our Thesmophoriazusae that collapse their parodic responses
into one, supposing an Aristophanic homage to Gorgianic scep-
ticism, clearly obfuscate the nuances of both.4 A more fruitful
approach situates Aristophanes in relation to Gorgias, to be sure,
but repositions our prologue alongside On What Is Not as one of a
number of intellectual responses to the widespread dissemination
of the philosophy from which his epideixis derives; and this
means not simply to Empedoclean-type theorizing in general,
but also, and in fact, far more explicitly, to Gorgias’ principal
targets in composing his speech, Parmenides, and, or rather, the
Parmenideanism of eristics such as Zeno and Melissus, for

1
Hirson (2010) Αct I. 2 Cherubin (2005) 20.
3
For evidence of a thriving rival poetic discourse of sensory relations amongst the comic
poets, see Clements (2013) and Telò (2013).
4
The approach is illustrated by, e.g., Whitman (1964), Hays (1990) and Nichols (1998), see
my p. 33 n. 1.

43
 a ri s t op h an e s ’ thesmophoriazusae

some, at least, the exemplars of Eleaticism during the late fifth

century.5
Here the linguistic similarities between our prologue and the
eristic strategies of the Euthydemus again prove telling. As Plato
caricatures the activities of the sophist-brothers, not only do their
linguistic manoeuvres emerge clearly as ‘sophistic deformations’
of Parmenidean logic,6 but also, in their hands, Parmenides’ phi-
losophy, in turn, to borrow an image from Plato, is shown to supply
a feast for the eristic scavenger: serving as a repository of abusable
logic and argumentatively useful premises that can be appropriated
and redeployed to refute undesired philosophical positions and
support counterintuitive and paradoxical claims.7 Indeed, both in
the Euthydemus and when trying to define the sophist in the
Sophist, Plato explicitly dramatizes the tendentious and selective
appropriation of Parmenidean strictures against what-is-not by
the eristics (who variously argue for the impossibility of falsehood
and contradiction (Euthd. 283e7–286b6; Sph. 236d10–237a9,
quoting Parm. b7.1–2; cf. 258d2–3), or for elevating the realm of

5
In addition to exploiting tenets consistent with Empedocles’ theory of perception,
Gorgias’ On What Is Not appropriates premises from Parmenides, Melissus and Zeno,
as well as ultimately Zenonian argument strategies (antilogia and reductio) which pre-
cipitated Zeno’s later categorization as a sophist (see Palmer (2009) 195–6) in order to
attack the idiosyncratic Parmenideanism of Melissus, who (perhaps as an extreme onto-
logical monist) seems to have been regarded as ‘a more prominent representative of so-
called “Eleaticism” than Parmenides in certain circles of the philosophical world of the
later fifth century’, see Palmer (2009) 220; cf. 189–224, for the dangers of following
Gorgias’ reductive grouping of these thinkers as subscribing in common to the claims that
‘what-is is one’ (ἓν τὸ ὄν) or ‘everything is one’ (ἓν τὸ πᾶν), assimilating Parmenides’
monism to Melissus’, and failing to distinguish Zeno’s quite different ‘Eleatic’ agenda.
For Zeno and Melissus as eristics in the doxographical tradition, Palmer (2009) 196 n. 13;
and for the popular identification of eristics with Eleaticism (and vice versa), see Pl. Sph.
216b8–c2 (Theodorus assuaging Socrates’ worries that the Eleatic visitor of the Sophist (a
philosopher of the circle of Parmenides and Zeno) will be ‘some kind of god of refutation’
(θεὸς ὤν τις ἐλεγτικός) by dissociating him from eristics, thereby implying that the eristics
have become the most publicly recognizable face of Eleaticism), Palmer (1999) 120.
6
On the brothers’ use of Parmenides’ logic to create their pairs of antinomies, see S. Austin
(1986) 116–35; and Lloyd (1966) 134, on the brothers’ Eleatic tactic of ‘putting a choice
between a pair of opposite alternatives’. The phrase ‘sophistic deformations’ is Palmer’s
(2009) 43.
7
See Chance (1992) 192–3: ‘As for eristics themselves, it is not right to call them
“Eleatics”, for they are not committed to “a metaphysics and a logic that is incompatible
with change”. They are not committed to anything but themselves. If they produce Eleatic
arguments, that is the result of historical accident, not philosophical commitment. [. . .] In
terms of Plato’s imagery, eristics are scavengers . . .’ Contra Sprague (1962) xiii, for whom
the brother’s arguments make them ‘Neo-Eleatics’.

44
 o n w h at - [ it ] -is
appearance to all that there is (that is, reality, by means of the
reduction of what-is-and-is-not to what-is-not simpliciter, Sph.
239c9–241d9), or for relegating one who is to become one thing
and no longer to be something else simply to one who is no-longer-
to-be (Euthd. 283d)).8 And what arguably emerges from the
testimony of Plato’s sophist caricatures and the evidence of
Gorgias, and his fellow appropriators of, or respondents to,
Parmenides – Zeno, Melissus, Protagoras, Xeniades, and others –
is the remarkably diverse and widespread intellectual culture of
ʻsophisticʼ receptions of Eleaticism current during the late fifth
century across the Greek world, but especially in Athens.9

8
The selective appropriations and ‘reductive and distorting’ understandings of
Parmenidean ontology underlying these arguments and Plato’s efforts to counter them
as part of his project of defining the philosopher against the sophist have been thoroughly
charted by Palmer (1999) 118–47 (this characterization, of the eristics: p. 133):
Euthydemus and Dionysodorus’ Eleaticizing arguments against the possibility of false-
hood, see 124–34; the Sophist’s elevation of appearance to reality by means of reduction
of what-is-and-is-not to what-is-not-at-all, see 135; the brothers’ own reduction of what is
to become one thing and not something else to what-is-no-longer-to-be, see 139; and (for
the Euthd.) see also Hawtrey (1981) ad loc.
9
The widespread circulation of Parmenides’ poem (or distillations of it) and responses to it
across the Greek world during the fifth century is no better illustrated than by the
geographical origins of Zeno (from Elea) and Melissus (from Samos), see Warren
(2007) 104, 16–19, who, taking his cue from the fact that Plato thought it plausible to
portray Parmenides in philosophical conversation in Athens around 450 bc (Prm.127b–c),
speculates that Athens ‘was just the place for Melissus to find out about Parmenides’ (19).
Indeed, significantly, A.’s Ag. (first produced in Athens at the Dionysia of 458 bc) itself
shows evidence of engagement with Parmenidean ideas among the intelligentsia of the
mid fifth century, see Kouremenos (1993). Parmenides’ thought certainly will also have
circulated in mediated or distilled form in the collections of earlier thinkers’ views made
by sophists such as Gorgias, Hippias and (another) Euthydemus, Xen. Mem. 4.2.1;
significantly, Gorgias prefaced On What Is Not with such earlier views on τὰ ὄντα
(MXG 979a13–18) ‘in which Parmenides would have figured prominently’, see Palmer
(1999) 133. Diversity of interpretation: for Zeno’s paradoxes as independent challenges to
‘common-sense pluralism’ that were received as indirectly supporting Parmenides against
a range of detractors who opted for reductive understandings of his claims, see Palmer
(2009) 189–205 on Pl. Prm. 128a–d; for (evidently plausible) portrayals of Zeno in
Athens: Pl. Prm. 127b–d; Alc. I 119a; and Plut. Per. 4.5., asserting that: ‘Pericles heard
Zeno of Elea discoursing on nature like Parmenides, and practising a kind of skill in cross-
examination and in driving one’s opponent into a corner by means of contradictory
argument.’ For Melissus’ material monism as a crude and ‘a radicalizing development
of Parmenidean ontology’ analogous to the eristic extrapolation of Parmenidean premises
in Plato, see Palmer (2009) 218 (who also lists evidence for its currency amongst the
philosophical élite in Athens); Porphyry follows both Plato and Aristotle in asserting that
Protagoras’ Alētheia presented at some length counter-arguments ‘against those who
propose that what-is is one’ (πρὸς τοὺς ἓν τὸ ὂν εἰσάγοντας, 80b2 DK), i.e. Parmenides
and/or the Eleatics, and for Protagoras’ ‘man is the measure’ aphorism as a polemic

45
 a ri s t op h an e s ’ thesmophoriazusae

Certainly, it is here, I will suggest, in this climate of popular

Parmenideanism, where Eleaticizing arguments of all kinds
circulate widely, deploying Parmenidean premises for pragmatic
purposes, that, on linguistic grounds alone, our opening comic
lines most naturally find their home. Resituating our prologue as
belonging to this intellectual milieu thus means replacing the
assumption of a vague comic allusion to Gorgias’ epideixis, a
comparison that obscures its workings, with a close appreciation
of what the scene arguably yields: a deliciously clever dramatic
reception of Eleaticism. And this is what the rest of this book will
set out to provide. My first claim in what follows, then, will be that
our prologue is neither a popular deformation of Gorgianic scepti-
cism, nor simply random comic nonsense: rather, there is a logic to
this scene, that logic is philosophical, but, more precisely, just like
the Eleatic arguments of the eristics Plato portrays as a feature of
Athenian intellectual culture in the 410s, it is drawn tendentiously
from the poem of Parmenides.10 I shall argue that while Gorgias’
On What Is Not exploits Eleatic and Empedoclean-type premises in
order to refute Eleatic arguments, our prologue reverses this object

defence against Parmenides’ condemnation of mortal δόξαι that echoes his language (ὡς
οὐκ ἔστιν), see Schiappa (2003) 121–5; Striker (1996) 14–21; Lee (2005) 28–9; the little
we know about Xeniades’ Eleaticism, by contrast, suggests he adopted Parmenides’
claims about the nature of δόξαι and change to develop the radical position that ‘all things
are false’ and ‘everything that comes to be comes to be from what-is-not, and everything
that perishes passes away into what-is-not’ (81 DK), see Palmer (1999) 129 (who also
stresses ‘the diversity of the sophistic engagement with the logic of Eleaticism’);
Brunschwig (2002); and for others, see Palmer (1999) 128 (the ‘Eleatic undercurrent’
of Prodicus’ claims about language). The indisputable currency of Eleatic ideas under-
lying these diverse receptions of Parmenides thus leads Schiappa (1997) 21 to surmise:
‘By Gorgias’ time, it is reasonable to assume that most educated people had heard some
form of Parmenides’ position – either read from a copy of Parmenides’ poem or passed on
by word of mouth.’ Cf. Kingsley (2003) 488 for an insightful characterization of the
deformation of Parmenides by subsequent thinkers; and for the ease with which eristic
deformations of Parmenidean logic could be learned and mimicked, see Pl. Euthd. 304a.
Finally, for the adoption of Parmenidean strictures by Anaxagoras, Empedocles and
Diogenes of Apollonia, see Curd (1998) 151–4 (Anaxag.), 155–64 (Emp.); McKirahan
(2005) 181–2 (Emp.); Vander Waerdt (1994) 62–3 (Diog. Apoll.), with Osborne (2006);
Palmer (2009) 225–317 for a different view; and for the profound influence of
Parmenides’ poem on later Greek thought, see Palmer (1999) esp. 1, establishing
Parmenides’ influence on Plato as second only to Socrates.
10
For Ar.’s ‘marked interest in the content of contemporary thinking’, see Carey (2000) esp.
430, a feature of Aristophanic comedy that leads Carey to conclude that comic audiences
‘who were familiar with contemporary ideas could play “spot the sophist”’ (speaking
specifically about Clouds I). Cf. Willi (2003a) 96–117; Vander Waerdt (1994) 52; Rashed
(2009), Broackes (2009), and my concluding remarks, pp. 172–84.

46
 o n w h at - [ it ] -is
and emphasis, exploiting Parmenidean premises in order to refute a
muddled, eclectically philosophical (and, in part, perhaps pseudo-
ʻEmpedoclean’) comic Euripides, the recent dramatizer of
Parmenidean mortal confusion and Gorgianic ideas about the pri-
macy of doxa and the epistemological limits of perception.11
My second claim is that our prologue’s use of popular Parmeni-
deanism is not simply a matter of embroiling the poet character in an
eristic routine ultimately rooted in Eleatic patterns of argument;12 it
involves the practice of a far more sophisticated, indeed hitherto
unappreciated, form of paraphilosophy. In the following pages I
shall argue that by appropriating both Parmenidean strictures and
the intrinsically satirical imagery by which Parmenides enacts the
fallaciousness of mortal doxa, and by employing an Eleaticizing
sophistic interlocutor of the sort Plato pictures in the Euthydemus or
11
For the view that Euripides’ cosmology represents a ‘muddled’ version of Empedoclean
theories of perception, zoogony, the divine construction of the eye, see Mureddu (1992),
Sansone (1996) and Rashed (2007) (cf. my p. 25 n. 29), in readings that fail to appreciate
that the true comic charge of Euripides’ cosmology cannot be understood correctly until it
is situated in Th.’s wider paraphilosophical exposé of the fallacious way in which the
tragedian redeploys philosophical wisdom; if, as Sansone and Rashed argue, Ar. writes
into Euripides’ cosmology Empedoclean elements (as well perhaps other non-Eleatic,
e.g. Anaxagorean, allusions), that is, they signify primarily within a wider Parmenidean
elenctic frame through which the poet’s inability to redeploy them in a metaphysically
sound way is revealed (and against which Rashed’s (2007) suggestion of a muddling of
opposites and confusion of eye and ear (see my p. 25) takes on a deeper significance, as
we shall see). For the way in which Empedocles formulates his cosmology expressly in
response to Parmenidean strictures, see Curd (1998) 155–71 (cf. 152–5 on Anaxagoras);
McKirahan (2005) 181–2; alternative assessments of the extent to which the pluralists are
indebted to Parmenides: Osborne (2006); Palmer (2009) 225–317. For the similarities
between Parmenides’ theory of knowledge and Empedocles’ theory of the senses which
led the doxographers like Theophrastus and Aëtius to attribute to Parmenides a theory of
perception analogous to that fully articulated by Empedocles (Thphr. Sens. 1, Aët. iv 9.6.
(= Stob. Ecl. 1.26.2 / 28a47 DK) with Palmer (2009) 316), see Laks (1990), who argues
that Parmenides did not in fact describe the mechanism of the various senses. Cf.
Mansfeld (1999) and Vlastos (1946) for Empedocles’ development of Parmenides’
treatment of sensation/perception. On the relation between Empedocles and
Parmenides, and the similarities (and differences) between Empedocles’ cosmology
and the divinely orchestrated metaphysical processes of the now no longer extant
cosmology of Parmenides’ Doxa, see Palmer (2009) 316–17, esp. on Censorinus, DN
4.7.8; and Bollack (1969b) 429–30; Finkelberg (1997), who sees Empedocles’ teaching
as a ‘vindication and philosophical defence of the way taken by Parmenidean mortals’
(8); cf. Kingsley (2003) for the complementarity of the two thinkers’ insights about the
nature of the mortal condition. For the dramatic enactment of Parmenidean mortal
confusion and the Gorgianic exploration of mortal doxa and perception presented to
the audiences of Euripides’ Helen in 412, see my concluding remarks, pp. 163–72.
12
For these patterns see p. 28; for further evidence (from Plato) that the late fifth-century
eristics were prominent sophistic appropriators of Eleaticism, see Palmer (1999) 120.

47
 a ri s t op h an e s ’ thesmophoriazusae

Sophist, the prologue of our Thesmophoriazusae stages a comic trans-

position to theatre of Parmenides’ revelations about reality and illu-
sion. In fact, the sophistic exchange of our opening lines transforms
the physical path of its journeying protagonists into an Aristophanic
version of the wandering metaphysical path trodden by all
Parmenidean mortals as they characteristically fail to differentiate
clearly between what-is and what-is-not. And as its ludicrous steps
are revealed, as we shall see, it not only casts Euripides as exemplar
and perpetuator of the typical mortal predicament of intellectual
ἀμηχανίη (‘helplessness’) that belongs to those who flounder about
on that confused Parmenidean way (now known as the Doxa) but also
thereby lays the grounds quite precisely for a revelatory philosophiz-
ing of theatre as the very progenitor of the seductive illusions that hold
tragic mortals fast in their helplessness, later encountered in the
climactic comic epiphany of the ‘Agathon scene’ (101–209).
Indeed, to this epiphanic end, as we shall see, the opening
moments of our Thesmophoriazusae issue a subtle enjoinder to
their comic audience to negotiate the mortal confusion ahead as any
other Parmenidean traveller must: by marking carefully the σήματα
(‘signs’ or ‘proofs’) of mortal speech and action that together
(ironically) expose the path of ‘mortal error’.13 Only then will it
become apparent that the prologue of this comedy presents us with
a paraphilosophical exposé of the faulty thinking characteristic of
all naïve mortals and warned against by Parmenides’ goddess in the
Doxa section of his poem, but first satirically dramatized by her as
the archetypal predicament of mortal confusion described at b6:
χρὴ τὸ λέγειν τε νοεῖν τ’ ἐὸν ἔμμεναι· ἔστι γὰρ εἶναι,
μηδὲν δ’ οὐκ ἔστιν· τά σ’ ἐγὼ φράζεσθαι ἄνωγα.
πρώτης γάρ σ’ ἀφ’ ὁδοῦ ταύτης διζήσιος <εἴργω>,
αὐτὰρ ἔπειτ’ ἀπὸ τῆς, ἣν δὴ βροτοὶ εἰδότες οὐδὲν
πλάττονται, δίκρανοι· ἀμηχανίη γὰρ ἐν αὐτῶν 5
στήθεσιν ἰθύνει πλακτὸν νόον· οἱ δὲ φοροῦνται
κωφοὶ ὁμῶς τυφλοί τε, τεθηπότες, ἄκριτα φῦλα,
οἷς τὸ πέλειν τε καὶ οὐκ εἶναι ταὐτὸν νενόμισται
κοὐ ταὐτόν· πάντων δὲ παλίντροπός ἐστι κέλευθος.

13
The phrase ‘mortal error’, used by Gallop (1984) 11 and Curd (1998) 51ff., denotes the
archetypical mortal habit of conflating what-is and what-is-not epitomized in the god-
dess’s account (28b8.51ff. DK) of the fallacious mortal reasoning at the heart of the Doxa.

48
 o n w h at - [ it ] -is

It must be that what is there for speaking and thinking of is; for [it] is there to be,
Whereas nothing is not; that is what I bid you consider,
For this is the first route of inquiry from which <I restrain> you,
And then also from this one, on which mortals knowing nothing
Wander, two-headed; for helplessness in their
Breasts guides their distracted mind; and they are carried
Deaf and blind alike, dazed, uncritical tribes,
By whom being and not-being have been thought both the same
And not the same; and the path of all is backward-turning.14

Beginnings: the routes of inquiry and an inquiry into route,

the pathways of Parmenides’ poem and our play

Parmenides’ proem plunges its audience straight into the flight of a

traveller en route to meet a goddess, and thereafter travel is the ‘leit-
motif of the whole poem’.15 In a first-person narrative awash with
epic imagery, the mythical details of this first journey are gradually
described, but, notably, the identity of the narrator is withheld.16
An anonymous traveller first tells of being escorted by ‘much-
guiding’ (πολύφραστοι, b1.4) mares on to the ‘very famous’
(πολύφημος, b1.2) path of the divinity, ‘which/who carries the
man who knows over everything dark and unknown’ (ἣ κατὰ
†πάντ’ ἀδαῆ†17 φέρει εἰδότα φῶτα, b1.3). Swiftly driven along
this route ‘as far as longing might reach’ (ὅσον τ’ ἐπὶ θυμὸς
ἱκάνοι, b1.1), his mares straining at a speeding chariot streaming
with blazing light and shrill sound, he describes how he is led on by
14
Text (following DK) and trans. Gallop (1984) modified.
15
Gallop (1984) 6; Mourelatos (2008) 14–25.
16
Epic allusions and imagery: Mourelatos (2008) 12–46; anonymity of the narrator, and the
question of whether this anonymity implies that what is described is the experience of the
poet himself: Morgan (2000) 74. The traveller is implicitly alluded to only as a φὼς εἰδώς
at 28b1.3 a formulaic expression for an initiate, see Kingsley (2002) 377 (but possibly
later ironized, see Cosgrove (2011) and my p. 66 n. 59, p. 144 n. 270); but he is not
directly addressed until 28b1.24 DK, where he is called κοῦρος, a term which does not
indicate age but, again, the status of an initiate, cf. Ar. Birds 977 (of an elderly
Peisetaerus); cf. Cosgrove (1974); and esp. Kingsley (1999) 71–5, (2002) 377 n. 107;
cf. (2003) 61–3 for Parmenides’ poem as itself an initiation.
17
The MSS have suffered corruption; against the usual emendation of N’s πάντ’ ἄτη as
κατὰ πάντ’ ἄστη, which has no textual authority, I follow Karsten’s (1835) reading of
ἀδαῆ as defended by Kingsley (2002) 377 n. 108. Further significance of ἀδαῆ as a
property of Night at Parm. 28b8.59, 9.3 DK, see my p. 82. Palmer (2009) 376–8 discusses
alternative conjectures.

49
 a ri s t op h an e s ’ thesmophoriazusae

the Heliades, the daughters of the sun (b1.5–10). Having earlier left
the House of Night and unveiled their faces, these immortal guides
now spur the traveller on through the Hesiodic gates where the
paths of Night and Day meet to deliver him to his encounter with
the goddess on the road beyond (b1.11–21). There, the goddess –
thought by some to be Persephone – receives him as ‘an initiate into
the mysteries that she will reveal’;18 from this point onward the poem
is her direct address to him (b1.22ff.). It will set out, the goddess says,
to teach the traveller the nature of reality (ἀληθείη), how things really
are, and in the process also to impart the beliefs of mortals and warn
against relying, as mortals typically do, upon the misleading impres-
sions of untutored senses (b1.28–32).19 This lesson will be an expo-
sition of the only paths of inquiry open for those seeking genuine
knowledge of that which is, and it will first distinguish two: one, the
pathway of what-is, leading to being and reality (ἀληθείη); the other,
the ‘pathway’ of what-is-not, leading to non-existence and so
nowhere (and thus as a route, paradoxically, not itself existent), b2:
εἰ δ’ ἄγ’ ἐγὼν ἐρέω, κόμισαι δὲ σὺ μῦθον ἀκούσας,
αἵπερ ὁδοὶ μοῦναι διζήσιός εἰσι νοῆσαι·
ἡ μὲν ὅπως ἔστιν τε καὶ ὡς οὐκ ἔστι μὴ εἶναι,
πειθοῦς ἐστι κέλευθος (ἀληθείῃ γὰρ ὀπηδεῖ),
ἡ δ’ ὡς οὐκ ἔστιν τε καὶ ὡς χρεών ἐστι μὴ εἶναι,
τὴν δή τοι φράζω παναπευθέα ἔμμεν ἀταρπόν·
οὔτε γὰρ ἂν γνοίης τό γε μὴ ἐόν (οὐ γὰρ ἀνυστόν)
οὔτε φράσαις.

Come, I shall tell you, and do you listen and convey the story,
What routes of inquiry alone there are for thinking:
The one – that [it] is, and that [it] cannot not be,
Is the path of persuasion (for it attends upon reality);
The other – that [it] is not and that [it] needs must not be,

18
Gallop (1984) 6; Jaeger (1947) 98; Kingsley (1999) 71–5. The identity of Parmenides’
goddess is debated, but there is growing consensus that she is Persephone or a
Persephone-like figure, see Kingsley (1999) 93–100, (2002) 373–5, (2003) 43, 217–
20; M. Miller (2006) 19 ‘a Demeter- or Persephone-like figure’; Gemelli Marciano
(2008) 35–6; contra, Cornford (1912) 215 ‘Justice’; Mourelatos (2008) 26, 161, ‘poly-
morph deity’; cf. Coxon (2009) 166–7; Jaeger (1947) 94 and Guthrie (1962–9) ii.10, a
philosophical ‘counterpart’ to Hesiod’s Muses; Granger (2008) 8–10, reflective of both
‘the Muse and a cult goddess’ but fully identified with neither; Palmer (2009) 58–9,
‘Night’ (and see his n. 27 for further identifications).
19
On ἀληθείη in Parmenides see Cherubin (2009).

50
 o n w h at - [ it ] -is
That I point out to you to be a path wholly unlearnable,
For you could not know what-is-not (for that is not feasible),
Nor could you point it out.20

The goddess will guide the traveller through each of these routes,
the way of what-is and the specious ‘way’ of what-is-not (in the
so-called Alētheia at b8.1–49). But before their natures are fully
revealed, she will first (at b6 and b7) warn her initiate of the error
committed by those mortals who fail to make a clear distinction
between the two paths, always imagining themselves to be on the
positive route to what-is, when in fact they repeatedly stray
onto the fallacious negative route and so remain caught wander-
ing aimlessly on a backward-turning path (παλίντροπος . . .
κέλευθος, b6.9) of their own at the point of intersection between
the two. Here, mortals circle back and forth ‘two-headedly’
(δίκρανοι, b6.5) on their specious, third ‘way’, unable to distin-
guish the only path that is real (the path of what-is), from that
which is not, or perceive the ludicrousness of the ‘route’ of their
own design (a path first physically evoked at b6, b7, and then
cognitively illustrated in the mortal cosmology recounted in the
Doxa section of the poem, b8.50–61).21 Against this fate, the
goddess exhorts, the traveller must guard by trial and judicious
direction of νόος, judging any talk he hears about what-is by
marshalling a ‘much-contesting’ (πολύδηρις) ἔλεγχος of the sort
exemplified by her own account (b7.5–6). He must cease to
follow his guide passively and instead consider, test and judge
all that is said to him, sifting any claims about what-is for inti-
mations of what-is-not, weighing them against the proofs offered
by the goddess in her description of the nature of reality in the

20
Text DK, but I have followed Palmer (2009) 360–1 in decapitalizing 28b2.4 DK’s Πειθοῦς
and Ἀληθείῃ; trans. Gallop (1984) modified.
21
See Kingsley (2003) 85–92, 99–110, for the comical predicament of two-headed mortals
who, caught in their indecision at which of the two paths to take of the forking routes
ahead of them, constantly vacillate to-and-fro between both (even though one does not
exist), esp. 109, on the humorous implications of goddess’s image of the three paths of
inquiry: ‘There is a path that turns back on itself and goes nowhere. There is a path that
doesn’t exist. And there is a path that finishes where it begins. [. . .] All of the goddess’
paths are just a trick. The second is an illusion, the third a joke. And as soon as you put
one foot on the first, it stops you in your tracks [i.e. it confronts you with simply what-is,
reality]’ (110).

51
 a ri s t op h an e s ’ thesmophoriazusae

Alētheia at b8.1–49.22 Only in this way, by judging all by λόγος,

being ever mindful of the ‘signposts’ (σήματα, b8.1–3) that mark
out the way of what-is, and not relying on habit, appearance or the
untested theories of mortals, can the traveller retain his way on the
genuine path of inquiry and avoid straying back into the usual
state of mortal confusion beyond.23
Set off against Parmenides’ metaphysical use of the motif of the
quest, what is done with the dramatic convention of the journey-to-
the-door in our prologue is already suggestive of the sustained
allusion to follow.24 Just as Parmenides’ poem plunges its audience
midway into a journey through all things ‘dark and unknown’ that
began at the coming of the dawn (but will, nonetheless, reach its
decisive point at a site at which night and day meet, b1.3, 8–11, cf.
my pp. 57–66); is driven by longing (θυμός, b1.1); focalizes its
narrative through the eyes of an anonymous traveller with whom its
audience is expected to identify;25 casts as his guide an instructor
promising to reveal ἀληθείη (b1.28–9; on a journey to divine
revelation, cf. my pp. 49–50, 122–44); and finally primes him
(and by extension, the listener/reader also) to judge by critical

22
See Curd (1998) 103–4; Lesher (1984) 25 notes how the change in the role of the traveller
from passive passenger to active critic is effected through the goddess’s exhortations: ‘the
situation changes, as he is issued a steady stream of commands: come, attend (or carry
away) my word, reflect on these things, keep away your thoughts, judge, keep in mind,
etc.’ We might compare the exhortations of the anonymous interlocutor of our prologue
to scrutinize and interrogate what Euripides is saying (6, 9); and examine Euripides’ own
later exhortations (25–8). Cf. Robbiano (2006) 106–20.
23
See Mourelatos (2008) 94–114 (on 28b8.1–3 DK: μόνος δ’ ἔτι μῦθος ὁδοῖο∣λείπεται ὡς
ἔστιν· ταύτῃ δ’ ἐπὶ σήματ’ ἔασι∣πολλὰ μάλ’ . . .) for Parmenides’ imagery of ‘signposts’
along the way of the Alētheia; cf. 241–6, 250 (on 28b8.55 DK), for the ‘signs’ that bear
witness to mortal confusion that have been added to reality by mortals in the Doxa, with
the observation of J. Barrett (2004) 275–6 (discussing 28b8.1–3 DK), applicable to both
parts of the poem, that: ‘a σῆμα does not refer in a straightforward manner; rather it always
poses itself as an enigma to some degree, compelling the listener/reader to ponder the
linguistic content as such’ – an observation that will prove highly pertinent to what is to
follow in our comic scene. Cf. my pp. 81–2 nn. 100–1, p. 89 n. 117, p. 98 n. 149, p. 99
nn. 154–5, p. 138 n. 252.
24
Parmenides’ use of motif of the journey and Parmenidean δίζησις as a quest: Mourelatos
(2008) 21–5, 67–8; cf. J. Barrett (2004) for Parmenides’ poem as itself both a ‘pathway of
song’ and the road upon which the traveller must travel in its proem. Comic motif of the
journey-to-the-door, see the prologues of Birds and Frogs and cf. the openings of Pl. Prt.,
with Charalabopoulos (2001) 154–8, (2012) 63, and Smp.
25
Mourelatos (2008) 16–17, esp. 17: ‘The expectation of the poet is, presumably, that his
story will help us take our bearings much as the Kouros’ superhuman experience enabled
him to take his.’

52
 o n w h at - [ it ] -is
testing exactly where he is being taken (b7.5–6), so the first lines of
our Thesmophoriazusae present its audience with a parallel situa-
tion, albeit evoked retrospectively:
ΚΗΔΕΣΤΗΣ
ὦ Ζεῦ, χελιδὼν ἆρά ποτε φανήσεται;
ἀπολεῖ μ᾿ ἀλοῶν ἅνθρωπος ἐξ ἑωθινοῦ.
οἷόν τε, πρὶν τὸν σπλῆνα κομιδῇ μ᾿ ἐκβαλεῖν,
παρὰ σοῦ πυθέσθαι ποῖ μ᾿ ἄγεις, ωὐριπίδη;

K. O Zeus! Will the Swallow ever appear?

This man will be the death of me, tramping around in circles since dawn.
Might it be possible, before I throw up my spleen, to learn from
you, Euripides, just where you are leading me?

Thesmophoriazusae’s comedy of (mortal) errors opens with a set of

travel complaints. Through them, and the physical movements of
the figures making their way (or not making their way . . .) from one
of the eisodoi around the orchēstra, its audience infer that here too
a quest is playing out; most obviously there are two comic travel-
lers, one apparently ʻguidingʼ the other. But as the trailing figure
voices these first lines, it rapidly becomes apparent that the path cut
by the man ahead, a guide soon identified as Euripides, leaves
much to be desired . . .

Signposts of the Doxa, 1. ἀλοῶν . . . ἐξ ἑωθινοῦ: this poet’s

ridiculous backward-turning path

νυκτιφαὲς περὶ γαῖαν ἀλώμενον ἀλλότριον φῶς.

αἰεὶ παπταίνουσα πρὸς αὐγὰς ἠελίοιο.26

For this Euripides is getting nowhere fast; in fact, if we listen

closely to 2, he is circling around the orchēstra floor, moving first
in one direction, then in the other: ἀπολεῖ μ’ ἀλοῶν ἅνθρωπος . . .
(2). The image cast out to the audience in this line is difficult.
Following the manuscript’s ἀλοῶν (from ἀλοάω, ‘to thresh [cut
grain]’, by causing livestock to trample it on a threshing floor) and

26
Parm. 28b14–15 DK: ‘Shining by night, wandering around the earth, a foreign light.
Always gazing towards the rays of the sun.’

53
 a ri s t op h an e s ’ thesmophoriazusae

the scholiast on line 2, Austin and Olson read a comic reference to

‘thrashing’ or plodding steps, from which they infer the meaning
‘[This man will be the death of me . . .] tramping endlessly about,
pounding along’.27 But working from the scholiast also (who in
addition says: ἐν κύκλῳ περιάγων ὡς οἱ ἐν ταῖς ἅλωσι), Rogers and
Taillardat (and, implicitly, Austin and Olson as well) recognize that
what is elided by this construal, and probably first evoked by ἀλοῶν
here, is the comical image of a path that endlessly circles around as
does the circular path of livestock driven around the threshing
floor.28 Yet that suggestion itself, I suspect, elides a significant
detail: an audience familiar with traditional methods of threshing
with livestock would be well aware that using a threshing floor
efficiently involves not simply driving draught animals endlessly
in a circle but also periodically reversing their pattern of movement
so as to cause them to circle now in one direction and (after a time)
now in the other; and hence, to tread a path that not only circles
but also leads them back on themselves.29 And it is this notion,

27
C. Austin (1987) 69–70; (1990) 11; Austin and Olson (2004) ad 2; for use of the verb to
denote threshing see Hom. Il. 20.495–7; Xen. Oec. 18.3–4, and extended meaning ‘to
thrash, crush’, as at, e.g., Frogs 149, Ar. fr. 932 KA, leading Austin and Olson (2004) to
the meaning cited. Reiske’s (1753) ἀλύων, after ΣR on line 1 (ἐχειμάσθη περιαγόμενος ὑπὸ
Εὐριπίδου ἀλύοντος), endorsed by, among others, Maas (1913) and Henderson (2000),
which would denote mental distress (as at Wasps 111, Ach. 690) but, in later prose,
acquires the meaning of ‘wandering’ or ‘roaming’ (LSJ s.v. II), has no textual authority.
28
Austin and Olson (2004) ad 2: ‘ἀλοῶν: ‘thrashing around’ (cf. ΣR)’ (my emphasis).
Taillardat (1965) §138 n. 3 (cited by Austin and Olson (2004) ad 2) notes the two senses
of the verb: ‘ἀλοᾶν est devenu un synonyme expressif tantôt de τύπτειν, avec le sens de
broyer de coups (voir §606), tantôt de περιιέναι, tourner en rond (voir §218)’, but at §218
on our ἀλοῶν at Th. 2 says: ‘Cette métaphore agricole est très claire, quoiqu’unique, et il
n’y a pas lieu de corriger le texte; la scholie explique: [. . .] Le verbe est un synonyme
expressif de περιελθεῖν, Ois. 6, où la plainte est la même.’ So also Rogers (1904) ad loc.,
who, following Hesychius’ listing of πλανῶν and τύπτων as meanings of ἀλοῶν, likewise
notes ‘the double signification of driving round and round and pounding’ but, contra
Austin and Olson (2004), also argues that πλανῶν is the primary meaning here (original
emphasis).
29
Our extant ancient literary references to the practice of threshing by driving livestock over
ears of grain on threshing floors (understandably) do not dwell upon the path of the
animals, which are simply said to be driven around (i.e. in circles) (see, e.g., Hom. Il.
20.495–7, cf. 5.499; Xen. Oec. 18.3–4; cf. Varro, Rust. 1.52; Columella, Rust. 2.20 (who
also mention the use of threshing sledges, devices unattested in our Classical literary
sources and whose employment in the fifth century bc is debated, see Isagar and
Skydsgaard (1992) 53, cf. 25). But the ethnography of traditional methods of threshing
in modern Greece enables us plausibly to hypothesize such details: I cite the testimony
of the ethnoarchaeologist Dr Hamish Forbes, who during fieldwork conducted
between August 1972 and August 1974 on Methana in the northeastern Peloponnese

54
 o n w h at - [ it ] -is
coupled with the idea of endlessly circling, that I suspect underlies
the full comic charge of our opening ἀλοῶν. Once this is under-
stood, it can then also be appreciated that the ridiculous image
ἀλοῶν thereby brings to these first moments in fact ingeniously
concretizes satirical imagery from Parmenides at b6, where, as we
have seen, the endless wandering (πλάττονται, b6.5; cf.
πεπλανημένοι εἰσίν, b8.54) of those mortals who are steered by
their helplessness to tread a path that repeatedly turns them back
on themselves in parodic circlings (παλίντροπος . . . κέλευθος, b6.9)
is marked as symptomatic of the confusion suffered by all who
conflate what-is and what-is-not.30 As it appears at 2, then,

(from which a well-known modern threshing floor is analogously used by Isagar and
Skydsgaard (1992) 54 fig. 3.5 in order to understand the ‘structure and form’ of ancient
threshing floors (53)), witnessed traditional methods of threshing by driving livestock in
circles around a threshing floor, and who relates the contents of an interview with an
informant conducted on 1 and 2 July 1973: ‘The farmer carrying out the operation
specifically stated that after a period of time driving his animals round in one direction
he would stop and then drive them round in the other direction. I was not told whether
there was any specific need to start in a clockwise or anti-clockwise direction: my guess is
that it did not matter. However, the main point is that they certainly changed direction so
as to thresh efficiently’ (personal correspondence). I am extremely grateful to Dr Forbes
for his invaluable insights here.
30
See J. Barrett (2004) 280 on 28b6.5–9 DK: ‘the change from the present in lines 5–6 to the
perfect in line 8 suggests that the “wandering” of mortals [sc. at 5–6] follows-and therefore
results from [. . .] the (faulty) judgment described in lines 8–9’. Cf. Mourelatos (2008) 225
on ἀλάομαι ‘to wander’ in Parmenides: ἀλώμενον (at 28b14 DK) ‘wandering’, because it
recalls 28b6.5 DK’s πλάνη, ‘is a signal of falsehood [i.e. mortal confusion] all by itself’.
On endless mortal circlings on a backward-turning path: in view of 28b6 DK’s description
of mortals as δίκρανοι and ἄκριτα φῦλα, the image of the παλίντροπος [. . .] κέλευθος
(28b6.9 DK) should be understood as evoking a path whose forward motion in one
direction is at some point stopped and turned back on itself (as if in vacillation between
two alternatives), not as a path that is ever moving forward as is the path of a complete
circle; indeed, such a path of unbroken forward circular movement in Parmenides is
associated by the goddess with reality itself, which is held in the limits of a circle, like a
complete, homogeneous, and still well-rounded sphere, 28b 8.42–9 DK, with no begin-
nings and no ends, see Kingsley (2003) 36 (the proliferation of circle imagery in the
proem), and esp. 179–80, 186–7 with my p. 155 n. 301. Pace Crystal (2002) 212–13;
Robbiano (2006) 137, the problem with the path of mortal reasoning is thus not that it
comes back to its own starting point (cf. the goddess’s words at 28b5 DK) but rather that it
does so by stopping and turning directly back on itself (as παλίντροπος implies). Cf.
Kingsley (2003) 182–7, on the ‘endless circlings’ of helpless mortals as ‘only a parody and
mockery of a circle, because we have no idea of how to bring the beginning together with
the end’. (184) with my p. 155 n. 301). Vacillation and parodic circling elsewhere in
comedy, cf. Birds 3–6 with Taillardat (1965) §218; and for the later association of
unbroken circle imagery and circular movement with the bastions of comic reality in
Th., the women, see 953–1000 with Bierl (2009) 108–9. Deployed as a comic way of
evoking the theatrical situation and characterizing Euripides as a thinker who turns his
passive audiences back on themselves in parodic circles, the agricultural image of ἀλοῶν at

55
 a ri s t op h an e s ’ thesmophoriazusae

Euripides’ ἀλοῶν, that is, his very path itself, is already positioned
as the first signpost of the mortal thinking of the Doxa that will
soon be excavated in hilarious detail in the λόγος to follow (and one
that could easily have been played up to greater comic effect in a set
piece of physical comedy performed as our prologue began).31
Yet, of course, his ἀλοῶν is also the catalyst for this λόγος; for
this Euripides’ lead has been turning back on itself in endless

Th. 2 is thus wonderfully apposite: not only does it construct the physical congruence of
the space of the threshing floor and the space of the orchēstra and evoke a practice
associated with both Demeter and Dionysus but it also ingeniously concretizes in one
image both the circle imagery through which Parmenides’ goddess evokes reality and,
thus, what actually is (which is held fast ‘in the limits of a circular bond’, see 28b8.42–9
with Kingsley (2003) 179–80, quotation: 179), and the fallacious path of mortals entrap-
ped by deception within it, upon which mortals turn back on themselves in their own
helplessness. For the mortal conflation of what-is and what-is-not at the root of this
predicament as a characteristic feature of Euripidean style: see Breitenbach (1934) 238
on Alc. 521 (corrected at 528: χωρὶς τό τ’ εἶναι καὶ τὸ μὴ νομίζεται); Hec. 566, 948, 1121; Tr.
1223; IT 512; Ion 1444; Hel. 696, 1134; Ph. 272, 357, 1495; Ba. 395; Or. 819; El. 1230:
see the comic capital made of this already in 425 at Ach. 395–6, where the Aristophanic
Euripides is οὐκ ἔνδον ἔνδον.
31
For a further possible exploitation of the motif of endless circling on a backward-turning
path as a marker of those who confuse what-is and what-is-not, see Pl. Prt. 315b5–8,
where the hilarious choreography of the dazed followers of the Orpheus-like Protagoras,
who, like a comic chorus (315b2–3, possibly the chorus of Eupolis’ Flatterers (Kolakes),
see Nightingale (1995) 186) forever part and circle back to fall into line when their master
turns about, is followed by Socrates’ redeployment of Odysseus’ words at Hom. Od.
11.601 (τὸν δὲ μετ’ εἰσενόησα . . ., 315b9). For his quotation retrospectively situates the
Orpheus-like (hence already chthonic) Protagoras in Homer’s Underworld and implicitly
identifies both his backward-turning sophist followers and the sophists that Socrates next
describes (Hippias and Prodicus) with the souls of the dead, and this surely can be only on
the metaphysical level of beings that illegitimately mix being and not-being (already
spotted by Wayte (1880) ad loc: both sophists and psychai maintain ‘the identity of
“being” and “seeming”’). But, more specifically, Plato’s reuse of Od. 11.601 here, just
after evoking the backward-turning path of Protagoras and his sophist chorus, also draws
a tacit comparison on parallel grounds between their endless comical display and the
eternal forward-and-backward rolling of Sisyphus’ rock (described by Odysseus just two
lines earlier at 11.597–8): for Homer describes this rolling in language (κυλίνδω, 598) that
at least from Ar. onwards, and certainly in Plato, becomes closely associated with
phenomena that hover between being and not-being, see my p. 135 n. 248, p. 182
n. 73, and Segvic (2006) esp. 256–7 for the way Plato’s Odyssean allusions in the
Prt.’s dramatic frame cast Socrates’ pre-dawn journey to Callias’ house as an implicit
Odyssean katabasis to the Underworld and thereby lay the grounds for Plato’s conse-
quent ‘revelation’ of all three sophists as ‘beings’ associated only with appearances
(εἴδωλα). On Parmenidean allusion in Plato, see Crystal (1996); Palmer (1999) esp. 79
on Plato’s use of the Parmenidean image of wandering (πλάνη) as a mark both of the
Doxastic state of the lovers of sights and sounds and a characteristic of the phenomenal
objects that can be apprehended by them, see R. 485b1–3, 479d7–9, cf. p. 182. Against
Plato’s redeployment of this imagery, cf. Socrates’ resolutely stationary contemplation of
any problem at Smp. 175b, 220c, with my discussion esp. pp. 63–6 for its comic and
philosophical debts.

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 o n w h at - [ it ] -is
circlings ever since daybreak, when this journey began (ἑωθινός, 2).
Just like the ἀλοῶν they describe, these words, . . . ἐξ ἑωθινοῦ (2)
‘wandering . . . since dawn’, too raise difficulties. From them it is
commonly inferred that the action of our Thesmophoriazusae
begins in the early morning just after dawn and, thus, that the
temporal period alluded to in our play is simply a single day
(later identified as the middle day of the festival, 80; cf. 375–6).
Yet long after these opening words, at 277–8, Euripides will
prompt his fellow traveller to hurry off to the women’s Assembly
so as to arrive there by ‘dawn’ (ἕωθεν, 375).32 He does so at the
Assembly herald’s usual signal (ὡς τὸ τῆς ἐκκλησίας∣σημεῖον ἐν τῷ
Θεσμοφορίῳ φαίνεται, 277–8) and his warning is in good time;
Kinsman sets out, spots the Assembly-bound women by their
torchlight, joins them and is not at all late in arriving (cf. 279–
94). Our Thesmophoriazusae, then, makes reference to not one, but
two dawns (i.e. at 2 and 375), which for orthodox readers creates a
paradox; for if we interpret them according to a single festival day,
our traveller would seem to arrive at the women’s Assembly (375)
before he sets out on the journey that ultimately leads him there.
Austin and Olson on line 2 posit temporal inconsistency.33 But,
as we shall see, such mitigations are unnecessary. If we listen
carefully to the text, it becomes clear that Thesmophoriazusae’s
two dawns belong to two separate days, which has significant
implications for our play’s paraphilosophical frame.
The key to this identification is a temporal marker in the play’s
very first line: ὦ Ζεῦ, χελιδὼν ἆρά ποτε φανήσεται; From ΣR onwards
critics have taken these words to refer to seasonal time: χελιδών, ‘the
swallow’, is read as a metonym for spring, the season with which the

32
Cf. 372–6, ἔδοξε τῇ βουλῇ τάδε∣τῇ τῶν γυναικῶν . . . εἶπε Σωστράτη·∣ἐκκλησίαν ποιεῖν
ἕωθεν τῇ Μέσῃ∣τῶν Θεσμοφορίων, ‘Decision of the Women’s Council . . . Sostrate pro-
posing: to hold an assembly at dawn of the middle day of the Thesmophoria’. For ἕωθεν as
the usual time for meetings of the Assembly, see Ach. 20, Eccl. 85.
33
(2004) ad 2: ’This [sc. ἐξ ἑωθινοῦ] is hardly consistent with ἕωθεν in 375 [= 376 Wilson]
(marking the start of the women’s Assembly), but Greek drama is notoriously flexible in
its handling of time (cf. Taplin (1977) 290–4) and the audience cannot be expected to
worry about matters of this sort.’ They implicitly (and, in my opinion, correctly) reject the
view of Sommerstein (1994) ad 375, on Critylla’s opening address to the women’s
Assembly at 373–7, who assumes that all involved in the event collude in pretending
to have started their meeting (and their day of festivities) at the time specified in Sostrate’s
decree.

57
 a ri s t op h an e s ’ thesmophoriazusae

migratory return of that bird was commonly associated in antiquity

as it is now.34 On the orthodox reading, the play thus begins with a
despairing winter appeal for warmer days to come. Yet, as Austin and
Olson note, the fictional date of our play, the 12th of Pyanepsion
(our October–November), the middle day of the Thesmophoria (80,
375–6), is ‘much too early to be impatiently awaiting the arrival of
spring’.35 In fact, on that understanding of χελιδών (sc. as ‘spring’),
even trying to explain the allusion as relative to the date of perform-
ance is little help either; for if our play was, as is generally accepted,
produced at the City Dionysia of 411, that is, between 10th and 17th
of Elaphebolion, our early to mid-April, mid-spring, that would be to
posit an Athenian yearning for the arrival of a swallow that has
already come.36 The allusion would be less problematic were our
play staged some months earlier, at the Lenaea (Gamelion 12th–21st,
our January–February), presumably alongside its sister comedy of
411, the Lysistrata; but that performance date is itself equally
unlikely given the different assumptions both plays make about
contemporary politics.37 Thesmophoriazusae’s opening words too,
then, are difficult, and scholars have had to range as far afield as to
Shakespeare in order to explain the problem away, claiming that our
play opens with our traveller longing for ‘the end of the metaphorical
winter of his discontent’.38

34
For the swallow as a sign of spring, see, apart from ΣR: Rogers (1904); Sommerstein
(1994); Prato (2001); Austin and Olson (2004) with references all ad loc. D. W.
Thompson (1966) 319, catalogues the evidence (and, misguided by Th. 1, incorrectly
refers to the Thesmophoria as a spring festival).
35
Austin and Olson (2004) ad loc. For the festival dates of the Thesmophoria as 11th–13th
of Pyanepsion (by the late fifth century extended to run from the 10th), see Mikalson
(1975) 71–2.
36
For the dates of the City Dionysia, see Mikalson (1975) 201. The pertinent ancient
evidence indicates a date in late March for the arrival of actual swallows from wintering
in Africa (the same approximate date as given by modern observations of migrating
birds); see Blomberg (1992) 54–5.
37
Austin and Olson (2004) xxxiii–xliv, esp. xliii; there is general consensus that Lys. was
performed at the Lenaea, see xli–xliv; cf. Revermann (2006b) 166 and my p. 28 n. 2.
38
So Sommerstein (1994) ad loc., ‘Inlaw, seeing Euripides stop, hopes that this marks the
end of the metaphorical winter of his discontent – i.e. his long traipse around Athens.’ Cf.
Austin and Olson (2004) ad 1–2, ‘since the second verse immediately converts the image
into a metaphor (“Will this long period of misery ever come to an end?”) in order to begin
the process of introducing the plot, it may be that the idea of the swallow’s arrival was
already proverbial by this period and could be used at any time of year. Similar dramatic
imagery is used at the start of Shakespeare’s Richard iii: “Now is the winter of our
discontent made glorious summer by this sun of York.”’

58
 o n w h at - [ it ] -is
But there is another possibility. Aristophanes’ audience would be
well aware that χελιδών was not only a bird whose arrival was taken
to herald spring; it was also a bird associated with a specific time of
night, the dark, pre-dawn hours of νύξ known as ὄρθρος.39 What is
more, to that audience, the χελιδών was not even simply a bird but
also a celestial body, a star. As Blomberg has shown, it is the heliacal
rising of this star that Hesiod refers to at Works and Days 564–70:40
Εὖτ᾿ ἂν δ᾿ ἑξήκοντα μετὰ τροπὰς ἠελίοιο
χειμέρι᾿ ἐκτελέσει Ζεὺς ἤματα, δή ῥα τότ᾿ ἀστήρ 565
Ἀρκτοῦρος προλιπὼν ἱερὸν ῥόον Ωκεανοῖο
πρῶτον παμφαίνων ἐπιτέλλεται ἀκροκνέφαιος·
τὸν δὲ μέτ᾿ ὀρθογόη41 Πανδιονὶς ὦρτο Χελιδών

39
For the association of the swallow with ὄρθρος, see Antip. Sid. AP 6.160, Phili. AP 6.247;
Anacreont. 10.9 West; see also Page (1955) 145 on Sappho fr. 135; West (1988) on Hes.
Op. 568 (emended; see my n. 41 below); Wallace (1989) 205. For ὄρθρος as a period of
darkness leading up to sunrise, see Wallace (1989). As Wallace (1989) 201f. notes, it is
possible to introduce considerable confusion into Greek categories covering the temporal
period from night to sunrise by using English terms (daybreak, dawn, sunrise) inter-
changeably: to clarify what follows, then, (1a) ὄρθρος is the final stage of νύξ which spans
several hours leading up to ἕως, ἕωθεν, dawn; (1b) ὄρθρος can also designate the beginning
of this period, i.e. a specific time of night; (2) ἕως, dawn, is either the period of light just
before sunrise, or simply sunrise itself; as Wallace (1989) 204 n. 14 notes, dawn and
sunrise can be distinguished in Greek but often are not.
40
Blomberg (1992). Blomberg’s identification of Hesiod’s χελιδών as the elsewhere-
attested star Χελιδών has been disputed by Beall (2001) 162–3; but Beall’s criticisms
are passing and do not detract significantly from Blomberg’s case. Minor points of
disagreement are at 162 on the meaning of μετά at Hes. Op. 568, and when and where
it is appropriate to invoke figurative rather than literal interpretations of Hesiod’s
language: see Beall’s own shifting onus between reading language figuratively and not
literally (‘nornumai es phaos is not appropriate for birds, that is, if taken literally. Yet it is
easily seen as a figure’, 162), to yet again, literally and not figuratively (‘one wonders
why stars as opposed to birds would be thought of as mourning. [. . .] to say that a bird is
what actually calls (goaô usually entails vocalization, and –goê here must refer both to
Pandonis and to chelidôn, contra Blomberg) remains more natural’, 163). Beall’s most
substantial objection against Blomberg’s (1992) 57 reading of Philomela’s iconographic
portrayal alongside other mythical figures (Orion and Perseus) who will be immortalized
as stars and give their names to constellations in the same part of the sky is that Blomberg
has shown ‘no connection of a celestial object to the swallow qua Philomela’ (163); but
Hesiod himself may well be making that connection. In any case, it is difficult to see how,
for a Greek audience, the astronomical and mythological associations of χελιδών did not
conjoin these things. For the general significance given to the risings and settings of fixed
stars and star-clusters as seasonal and temporal markers during the fifth and fourth
centuries, see Pritchett (2002) 152–3.
41
West (1988) ad loc. emends ὀρθογόη to ὀρθρογόη after Livrea (1967). For a thorough
discussion see Blomberg (1992) 50–1, who rejects Livrea’s arguments as biased in favour
of the assumption that Hesiod alludes to the actual bird, rather than to the star, which has
its first heliacal appearance ‘well before the arrival of actual swallows’ (as Blomberg
shows from a range of ancient calendrical attestations, 53).

59
 a ri s t op h an e s ’ thesmophoriazusae
ἐς φάος ἀνθρώποις, ἔαρος νέον ἱσταμένοιο.
τὴν φθάμενος οἴνας περιταμνέμεν· ὣς γὰρ ἄμεινον. 570

When Zeus brings to an end sixty wintry days after

the solstice, just then the star Arcturus leaving the
holy stream of Ocean, shining brightly, rises for the
first time at twilight; after him the truly-grieving
daughter of Pandion, Swallow, rose to the light for
mortals, when spring is newly begun; prune the vines
before she comes; for it is better so.42

According to Hesiod, Χελιδών, the star, just like χελιδών, the bird,
was not simply associated with a seasonal time (ἔαρος νέον
ἱσταμένοιο, 569), but also with a particular time of night. Χελιδών
rises just before the sun (ἐς φάος, ‘into the light’, 569), a day, or a
few days, after Arcturus is first seen rising at dusk (ἀκροκνέφαιος,
‘at the tip, or, beginning, of total darkness’, 567) sixty days after the
winter solstice.43 The behaviour of Hesiod’s Χελιδών is verified by
the late fifth-century calendar of Euctemon, the fourth-century
calendars of Philippus, Callippus and Eudoxus, and the later obser-
vations of Columella; all similarly identify the ‘Swallow’
(Χελιδών), with Eudoxus and the later Roman author placing its
heliacal rising in close sequence with the acronychal rising of
Arcturus, as on, or around, 21 February.44 Now, if we give priority
to what will later be known (first, at 67) by our audience of the
fictional winter setting of our play,45 an opening reference to
Χελιδών, the star, at Thesmophoriazusae 1, would therefore seem

42
Text and trans. Blomberg (1992).
43
See Blomberg (1992). Also Reiche (1989) 49–53 (on Arcturus).
44
The relevant fragments of the calendars of Euctemon, Callippus and Eudoxus are
preserved in Geminus Astronomicus’ Calendarium; see Lasserre (1966) 90, f229a;
Philippus, Callippus and Eudoxus are found in Ptolemy’s Appearances of the Fixed
Stars (cf. f229b). For Eudoxus, the rising of Χελιδών occurs in conjunction with the rising
of Arcturus on 19 February; Euctemon, Philippus and Callippus, place the rising of
Χελιδών at approximately the same date (17–19 February); Columella more explicitly
places the rising of Χελιδών at 21 February, three days after the twlight rising of Arcturus,
see Columella, Rust. 11.2.21 with Blomberg (1992) 53–4. Reiche (1989) 49–53 and West
(1988) 253 place the beginning of the acronychal rising of Arcturus on 14 February; it
continues to rise so until around 20–24th. Scholars disagree only upon whether Hesiod’s
‘πρῶτον παμφαίνων’ (567) refers to the star’s first rising (14 February), see Reiche (1989)
49–53; or its last rising (20–24 February) within that range, see Blomberg (1992).
45
Confirmation of our play’s winter setting, beyond what an audience might infer from its
title (which may or may not have been known in advance) or the festival proagōn (where,

60
 o n w h at - [ it ] -is
every bit as difficult as our allusion to χελιδών, the bird; in either
case, seasonal time, spring, would seem to be its most likely
referent.46 Yet if we consider the possibility of an astral allusion
in light of the Elaphebolion Dionysiac performance date of our
play (sc. early–mid-April, mid-spring), quite a different picture
emerges. Certainly, by Elaphebolion, Χελιδών would not still be
rising visibly just before the sun; yet it would still be visible rising
earlier than this, during ὄρθρος, the pre-dawn hours of darkness
leading up to sunrise.47
Significantly, ὄρθρος is precisely that final stage of night asso-
ciated both with pre-Assembly activity (preparation, rendezvous,
travel, etc.) and also, in the Greek wisdom tradition, with revelation
and adjudication.48 Hence, for an Elaphebolion (i.e. a mid-spring)
nothing of Th.’s plot would have been revealed that would have undermined any aspect of
its comic unpredictability – if, indeed, its plot was discussed at all), is given only at 67, 80;
see Sommerstein (1977) 117; Revermann (2006b) 169–71.
46
Χελιδών would not rise again heliacally until early spring (late February), just before
actual swallows arrive (in March).
47
On heliacal rising, see Reiche (1989) 39: ‘a given star which is today seen rising before
dawn for the first time will, on succeeding nights, be seen to rise at ever earlier hours,
until, after several months, it will have its last visible rising as it approaches the time of
sunset’s afterglow’. Also Dicks (1970) 12–15. Summarizing Hesiod’s calendar, West
(1988) ad 381–617 calculates that Arcturus’ cycle through 12 hours of night from its
acronychal to its heliacal risings takes approximately 7 months, beginning in mid-
February (acronychal rising) and ending in mid-September (heliacal rising). On this
basis, the movement we might expect from Χελιδών over a period of 7–8 weeks (from
late February to mid April) would mean that at the time of the City Dionysia this star was
rising approximately 3 hours before sunrise, i.e. at, or, just before, the beginning of
ὄρθρος.
48
For pre-Assembly activity at ὄρθρος see also Wallace (1989) 201, and 203 for the standard
joke in Ar. ‘that meddlesome Athenians got up at ὄρθρος to make sure of getting a seat in
court or the Assembly’. That is, they get up at the beginning of ὄρθρος (1b in p. 59 n. 39),
rather than during it, as would everyone else going to a dawn meeting of the Assembly;
see Eccl. 462 (Blepyros) and Hesiod’s exhortation to his brother to get up at ὄρθρος and
set off for work at Op. 574–77. For the stars being still visible at this early time, see Eccl.
83. ὄρθρος is also the time specified by Plato for his Nocturnal Council to meet at Laws
951d, ostensibly because everyone was then free, 961b; but for the association of this
temporal period from ‘earliest dawn [sc. ὄρθρος] until sunrise’ with revelation and
adjudication, see Kingsley (1999) 211–15 and esp. 212 on Orpheus’ night-time rising
to be the first to see the sun (whom he addressed as Apollo and elevated above Dionysus),
and thereby re-experience what he had previously experienced in the Underworld, at A.
Bassarai fr. 23a (Radt), the second play of the tetralogy that comprised Aeschylus’
Lycurgeia, a series that will be alluded to by Ar.’s Kinsman at Th. 134–5 (there citing
the first play, Edonians) in the midst of our comic revelation, cf. Seaford (2005); and for
the Underworld as the place of origin of all laws, see Kingsley (1999) 214–15, (2003)
146; and note that this same nexus of associations connecting ὄρθρος with revelation and
adjudication is clearly also exploited in the Crito, whose entire dialogue takes place at
ὄρθρος βαθύς (43a4) and culminates with an imagined visitation of the personified Laws,

61
 a ri s t op h an e s ’ thesmophoriazusae

audience, a first-words’ traveller’s plea for χελιδών finally to

appear, would most naturally evoke two meanings, both of which
are pertinent to its present. Either our traveller’s words are
addressed to the heavens, and, in similar fashion to Euripidean
tragedy’s prologue allusions to those disappearing stars which
herald the approach of daylight,49 he refers to Χελιδών, the star,
which has been getting progressively earlier in its heliacal rising
over the previous weeks and, by this date, is rising during ὄρθρος.50
Or, he refers to χελιδών, the bird whose song is presently heard
during those same nocturnal hours, ὄρθρος, the first period of
everyday waking activity. The choice between star or bird is, itself,
of course, unimportant; for on what is most crucially at stake, both
the birdwatchers and the stargazers will agree: it is not primarily a
seasonal allusion that occurs first at Thesmophoriazusae 1. Rather,
by momentarily situating the play within the world of its audience
and temporarily bridging any divide between the reality-of-the-
present (spring Dionysia) and the fantasy-yet-to-be (winter
Thesmophoria), our opening words, ὦ Ζεῦ, χελιδὼν ἆρά ποτε
φανήσεται, elegantly place their speaker and the beginning of our
play at some unspecified time before dawn.51

who are depicted as arriving like apparitions (ἐλθόντες . . . ἐπιστάντες, 50a7–8) and go on
to reveal not only their own reasoning but also what lies in store for their audience after
death at the hands of their ‘brothers’, the Laws of the Underworld; cf. my following
discussion on Plato’s further exploitation of the period from ὄρθρος to sunrise to associate
Socrates with the Apolline Greek wisdom tradition at Smp. 220c3–d5 and its
Aristophanic Parmenidean foil, with Appendix I for the full signifieance of ὄρθρος for
our prologue.
49
For the tragic convention of beginning a drama in total darkness, the protagonists
awaiting the arrival of dawn and tracing the departure of night by poetic reference either
to the approaching light or to the disappearance of seasonal stars, see the prologues of E.
Andr., Phaeth., El. and IA, with Diggle (1970) 98–100. Phaeth. 63–70 is exemplary; see
Diggle (1970) ad 66 for Euripides’ use of the Pleiades, and other star-clusters in order to
evoke the approach of light; and ad 67–9, for use of the nightingale’s song to signify the
arrival of ὄρθρος. This convention, as used in E. Andr., will later be parodied explicitly in
our comedy, Th. 1065–9.
50
Were our Th. staged not at the City Dionysia of 411, but at the Lenaea of that year
(January–February), such an appeal to the appearance of Χελιδών (then, imminent) would
be even more timely.
51
See Revermann (2006b) 172–3, on the ‘bridging’ effects of Ar.’s opening routines, and
Zeitlin (1981) 171–2 for the suggestion that the fictive and actual festival time frames of
our play may work to elaborate one another. For parallel pre-dawn openings in Ar., cf.,
e.g., Clouds, Wasps, Eccl. (esp. 83–5 for astral allusion); in Plato, see Prt. 310–12a
(further associated with katabasis at 315b9 by allusion to Odysseus’ pre-dawn journey to
the Underworld, see my p. 56 n. 31) with Charalabopoulos (2001) 154–8, (2012) 63.

62
 o n w h at - [ it ] -is
Herein, I suggest, lies the solution to the problem of our play’s
two dawns; at 2, our traveller has indeed been walking ‘since dawn’
(ἐξ ἑωθινοῦ, 2), and he will travel on to the women’s Assembly and
arrive there at (or just before) dawn (ἕωθεν, 375, cf. 277–8) because
his very first words situate these two ἑωθινοί as the dawns of two
consecutive days. For this weary traveller, following the lead of
this Euripides has meant treading a circling path all day yesterday,
and (almost) all night, so that, by the time we encounter him, he is
quite understandably looking for any sign that his backward-
turning ordeal (day-to-night-to . . .) nears its end. This man is not
desperate for a metaphorical ‘spring’. He is desperate for
daybreak.52
A nocturnal opening for our Thesmophoriazusae not only solves
our problems with the play’s temporal sequence (especially the
apparent contradiction of 2, 277–8, 375) but also reveals the
dramatic use of a specific period of time in order to characterize a
style of thought and its thinker; and that provides us with a clear
Aristophanic precedent for a significant aspect of Plato’s character-
ization of Socrates as the legitimate heir to Parmenides in the

52
Later temporal evidence from the play confirms this reading. A pre-dawn setting, for
instance, explains why Agathon has not yet emerged to finish composing his verses ‘to
the sun’ (πρὸς τὸν ἥλιον, 69) by the time this opening journey ends (25) but will soon do
so (τάχα, 66); evidently, it is, by now, only ambiently light. It also explains why
Agathon’s Servant at 46–7 in anticipation of that moment, hieratically sings for the
birds to go to sleep (κατακοιμάσθω) and that the feet of the beasts of the forest ‘not be
released’ (θηρῶν τ’ ἀγρίων πόδες ὑλοδρόμων∣μὴ λυέσθων); for they are evidently still
asleep, see Austin and Olson (2004) ad loc. This, also, is why at 204–5 Agathon objects
that if he were to go to the Thesmophoria right now as Euripides asks he would likely
‘appear to be stealing the nocturnal doings of women and absconding with the female
Cypris’ (δοκῶν γυναικῶν ἔργα νυκτερήσια∣κλέπτειν, ὑφαρπάζειν τε θήλειαν Κύπριν (text
Austin and Olson (2004)); and why, at 280, our traveller first points out the procession of
female Assembly-goers that he will follow to the women’s dawn meeting by reference to
their torchlight (καομένων τῶν λαμπάδων). These events are all staged during a temporal
sequence which, very approximately, places the beginning of the play at some point
during the last phase of night, brings its protagonists through the first modulations of
ambient light between 25 and Agathon’s appearance at 101 (cf. Euripides’ words at 71: ὦ
Ζεῦ, τί δρᾶσαι διανοεῖ με τήμερον;), takes them to sunrise (ἕωθεν) at some point between
277–9, the herald’s signal, and 295, the opening of the women’s Assembly, and thus, to
the daytime action beyond: the middle day of the Thesmophoria. Cf. Austin and Olson
(2004) li on the Thesmophoria: ‘The constant references to torches hint at night-time
ceremonies.’ For the wider significance of sunrise that underlies Ar.’s dramatic conceit of
a pre-dawn longing for signs of ὄρθρος here, see Kingsley (1999) 211–12 and my p. 61
n. 48 and following discussion on the association of the period ὄρθρος to sunrise with
revelation.

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 a ri s t op h an e s ’ thesmophoriazusae

Symposium, a wisdom figure who (quite unlike those rival appro-

priators of Parmenidean stricture, the eristics) deploys his own
much-contesting ἔλεγχος in the service of Apollo, for whom he
exposes the reality of mortal self-contradiction, namely that all
those who think they know something are really εἰδότες οὐδέν
(b6.4; cf. Ap. 21b–23b).53 Plato’s dialogue and our Thesmopho-
riazusae, of course, exhibit several points of shared interest: most
obviously, the didactic use of blending (and for Plato, transcend-
ing) the genres of comedy and tragedy in order to address error and
illuminate how things really are;54 but also, implicitly, Euripides,
the quintessential fifth-century playwright to whom it belongs to
mix both genres (as at 223d3–6), and whom Socrates, Plato’s
own master of the comic and the tragic (i.e. the serious, Laws
7.817a2–3), satirically quotes when it is his turn to speak
(199a5–6; cf. E. Hipp. 612, also parodied at Th. 275–6).55 In the
present instance, however, I refer to the story about Socrates told by
Alcibiades at 220c3–d5:
συννοήσας γὰρ αὐτόθι ἕωθέν τι εἱστήκει σκοπῶν, καὶ ἐπειδὴ οὐ προυχώρει αὐτῷ,
οὐκ ἀνίει ἀλλὰ εἱστήκει ζητῶν. καὶ ἤδη ἦν μεσημβρία, καὶ ἅνθρωποι ᾐσθάνοντο, καὶ
θαυμάζοντες ἄλλος ἄλλῳ ἔλεγεν ὅτι Σωκράτης ἐξ ἑωθινοῦ φροντίζων τι ἕστηκε.
τελευτῶντες δέ τινες τῶν Ἰώνων, ἐπειδὴ ἑσπέρα ἦν, δειπνήσαντες – καὶ γὰρ θέρος
τότε γ᾿ ἦν – χαμεύνια ἐξενεγκάμενοι ἅμα μὲν ἐν τῷ ψύχει καθηῦδον, ἅμα δ᾿
ἐφύλαττον αὐτὸν εἰ καὶ τὴν νύκτα ἑστήξοι. ὁ δὲ εἱστήκει μέχρι ἕως ἐγένετο καὶ
ἥλιος ἀνέσχεν· ἔπειτα ᾤχετ᾿ ἀπιὼν προσευξάμενος τῷ ἡλίῳ.

There he was at daybreak with something on his mind, standing and reflecting on
it; and when he couldn’t make progress with it, he didn’t give up but stood there
looking for a way forward. By now it was midday, and people began to notice him;
amazed they told each other that Socrates had been standing there thinking about
something since dawn. Finally when evening came some of the Ionians, after

53
See Kingsley (2003) 150–6.
54
For Socrates’ typical slides from the comic to the serious, see Rowe (1998) ad 223d2–5
citing Pl. Smp. 216e4–6; cf. Nails (2006) 179; Sedley (2006). Shared concerns with
exposing fallacy and illuminating truth: Nails (2006); Bobrick (1997); cf. my discussion
pp. 179–84.
55
Hipp. 612 was the line allegedly used to underwrite an attempt (by a certain Hygiainon) to
charge Euripides with asebeia in life as in Aristophanic fiction (see Arist. Rh. 1416a28–
33; cf. Ar. Th. 356–67, 450–1) just, indeed, as will happen to many of Plato’s symposiasts
(and ultimately, of course, to Socrates himself) in the years following Agathon’s party, see
Nails (2006). For evidence of Plato’s engagement with Th. see, most recently (on the
Smp.), Sissa (2012) and my discussion pp. 179–84, and p. 31 n. 11, p. 103 n. 165, p. 108
n. 176, p. 141 n. 259; cf. also Schefer (2003) 181–2 on Pl. Phdr. 278b7 and Th. 1227.

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they’d finished their evening meal, took palliasses outside (it was summer at the
time) and slept there in the cool, at the same time looking out to see if he’d
stand there all night too. And so he did – stand there, until dawn came, and the sun
rose; then, with a prayer to the sun, he went off.56

Just like Aristophanes’ Euripides, Socrates is here portrayed as

having been searching (ζητῶν) for the solution to a problem for a
full twenty-four hours, since dawn (ἐξ ἑωθινοῦ, 220c7; cf. Th. 2),
through the whole subsequent day and night, up until the sun rises
again the next day (ἕως, 220d3; cf. ἕωθεν, Th. 375). Unlike the
‘thinker’ with whom our comedy begins, however, he is not a man
to take to the streets like a circling ox (ἀλοῶν); when Socrates is
lost, he is aware of that fact. And he simply stands still (εἱστήκει,
220c4, d3).
Alcibiades’ story is told at a late point in the symposium, and for
Plato’s audience it recalls a similar event that occurred on the same
day of the party just before the socializing began. At this earlier
point Socrates’ companion, Aristodemus, had been forced to arrive
without him; for, as the two of them make their way to the party,
Socrates once again becomes preoccupied with his thoughts and,
being unable to find a way forward, he tells Aristodemus to go on
ahead (174d4–7). As Plato’s dialogue unfolds, Aristodemus’ brief
story and Alcibiades’ epideictic tale of Socratic wisdom, of course,
elaborate each other and, as they do so, they work together to typify
Socrates (cf. ἔθος γάρ τι τοῦτ᾿ ἔχει, 175b1–2).57 Yet as this fuller
picture of the philosopher emerges from the glimpses they provide,
they also throw into relief the comic subtext of the image at which
we arrive; for not only does this Socrates share with Aristophanes’
Euripides a comical propensity for dawn-to-dawn thinking (clearly

56
Trans. Rowe (1998).
57
See R. L. Hunter (2004) 33 on the ‘performance’ of wisdom that Socrates’ periods of
silent reflection evoke, but importantly also Kingsley (2003) 155–6 for the Apolline
associations of ‘extraordinary states of stillness’ (with which Socrates’ ‘final prayer to the
sun’ at 220d5 is surely resonant), by means of which, along with his use of the ἔλεγχος to
expose men as ‘know nothings’ (150–5), Plato situates his Socrates in a Parmenidean
tradition. Cf. with the Smp.’s (i.e. Alcibiades’) portrayal of Socrates as filled with argu-
ments bursting with godlike images of virtue at Smp. 216c4–217a, 221d7–222a6,
Socrates’ self-portrayal in the Ap. as himself a wanderer (22a6) who is ‘wiser’ than all
others (his ἔλεγχος reveals) only by virtue of the fact that he alone does not think he knows
what he does not: Pl. Ap. 21d3–7, with Prior (2009) 33–5. Plato’s Socrates and the Greek
Sages: Kurke (2011) 326–9.

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here a pretext for exhibiting their hugely divergent styles of

thought, one manifest in the confused wanderings of a Doxastical
mortal; the other, in the Apolline stillness of the philosopher), but
also, as Plato reuses that motif, both end up displaying something
of it on the way to Agathon’s door.58
For Aristophanes’ audience, by contrast, no one yet knows of
that destination – least of all, the traveller just four lines into our
play, whose journey, it can now be appreciated, having begun at
dawn, presently very much negotiates all things ‘dark and
unknown’ (ἀδαῆ, b1.3; cf. 8.59, 9.3, explicitly of Night) just like
the opening journey of Parmenides’ poem (and will, in fact, also
culminate at a site at which night and day meet, when night
becomes day, cf. b1.3, 8–11; my pp. 49–50, 124–44, having primed
its audience for revelation).59 He is faced only with the constant
circling and regress of more Euripidean ἀλοῶν, hence his despair-
ing cry at 3–4: οἷόν τε,∣ . . . παρὰ σοῦ πυθέσθαι ποῖ μ’ ἄγεις,
ωὐριπίδη; ‘Is it possible to learn from you just where you are
leading me, Euripides?!’, an appeal framed in terms reminiscent
of the traveller of Parmenides’ proem who should learn all things
(χρεὼ δέ σε πάντα πυθέσθαι, b1.28), including the mistaken beliefs
of mortals (ἠδὲ βροτῶν δόξας, ταῖς οὐκ ἔνι πίστις ἀληθής.∣ἀλλ’ ἔμπης
καὶ ταῦτα μαθήσεαι . . ., b1.30–1; which are precisely what now
follow, 7–24; cf. μανθάνω, 20), so that he will never again be
58
Against the comic tradition which blames Euripides’ association with Socrates for his bad
pseudo-intellectual poetry (see esp. Ar. Frogs 1491–9 with Nightingale (1995) 63–4),
Plato’s reformulation of the Aristophanic motif of 24-hour wandering thus might be read
as polemically asserting just how different from the tragedian his Socrates is, the
backward-turning circlings of Th.’s Euripides constituting a tacit foil for the 24-hour
Apolline stillness of Smp.’s Socrates. On Aristophanic and wider comic association of
Euripides and Socrates, cf. also Ar. fr. 392 KA; Clouds 1364–79; Call. Com. fr. 15;
Telecl. fr. 41, 42 KA (where Socrates again supplies the material for Euripides’ plays);
Satyrus in POxy 1176 fr. 39 i.21–ii.22; Carey (2000) 419–30, esp. 429; Wildberg (2006).
59
For the specifically Parmenidean revelatory significance of the phase of phenomenal
experience from ὄρθρος to sunrise, a phase in which the distinction between Light and
Night (mortal opposites) collapses, and its misunderstanding by mortals, which is high-
lighted by Parmenides’ goddess just before describing the thought-world of the Doxa, see
Mansfeld (2005) 558–9 on 28b8.38–41 DK, and my further discussion, pp. 113–22; and
note also the possibility that Parmenides’ φὼς εἰδώς at 28b1.3 DK., later resounds ironi-
cally to evoke not only an initiate to the goddess’s revelations but also a ‘man who has
seen the light’ (φῶς), i.e. a truster in perceptual knowledge alone and, therefore, a mortal
knowing nothing, whose path, the course of the sun, is changed fundamentally when the
Heliades meet him and take him down to the Underworld, see Cosgrove (2011) and my
pp. 144–6 and n. 270, for the double audience this implies.

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 o n w h at - [ it ] -is
misled.60 It casts Euripides as a guide posturing as a speaker of
ἀληθείη – though one already flagged by his day-to-night(-to- . . .)
ἀλοῶν to be hopelessly astray from it61 – and directs the audience’s
attention to the framing questions of the scene: where is this
ridiculous backward-turning poet leading his anonymous fol-
lower/audience? Just what is it possible to learn (πυθέσθαι) from
this Euripides?
Contrary to the claims of the latest commentators on our text, the
answer to those questions is not simply deferred until after the
opening banter of our prologue;62 rather, it is set out in this, forged
for all to see (-and-hear) in the trial by λόγος of the ἔλεγχος (‘testing’
but also ‘revealing’) that is the rest of our opening scene.

Testing the Doxa: scrutinizing Euripides’ λόγος in the

trials of the ἔλεγχος (5–10)

Ironically, Euripides’ side-stepping reply to our traveller’s scene-

setting inquiry into his comical route makes explicit the shared
motif of the journey to mystic revelation. His half-priestly, half-
teasing use of παρεστώς at 6 invokes the ritual frame of the
Mysteries and, patently in the hope of removing the need to answer
the question, thus implicitly makes an initiate of his anonymous
follower (the joke is, hopefully a passive and silent one) (5–6, ἀλλ’
οὐκ ἀκούειν δεῖ σε πάνθ’ ὅσ’ αὐτίκα∣ὄψει παρεστώς, ‘You need not
hear all that you’ll see instantly when you’re present’).63 With it,
Euripides dangles the promise of revelatory sights like a carrot but,
60
See p. 78 n. 92 for the significance of the movement from πυνθάνομαι at 4 to
μανθάνω at 20.
61
For the best tragedian as the one who deceives most in making things equivalent to
ἀληθείη, see Δισσοὶ λόγοι 3.10, with Detienne (1996) 85, 184, and my p. 41 n. 19 on the
relationship between τραγική, exaggeration, ambiguity and trickery.
62
See Austin and Olson (2004) ad 3–4.
63
παρεστώς marks ‘a deliberation manipulation of the audience’s expectations’, according
to Austin and Olson (2004) ad 5–6, who assert that Euripides ‘speaks like a priest and
misleadingly implies that he is taking Inlaw to some sort of initiation’. See Lada-Richards
(1999) 87–90 on the parallel use of the motif of the guided journey for initiation into the
Mysteries in Frogs. For the obligation to be silent during initiation rituals, see Montiglio
(2000) 23–32 (cf. the play on silence to come at 27–9), and 28–9 on the revelatory
significance of seeing as part of initiation ritual and reflected in the terminology related to
the Eleusinian Mysteries, δείκνυμι and φράζω; but see 29–32 for the parallel presence of
hearing. For parallel exploitation of these motifs in tragedy and Plato, see Schefer (2003)

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with evidently little idea of how to reach them himself, he shirks the
prerequisite of showing his initiate, by means of ‘words that indi-
cate’, exactly what to look for, or how to see (unlike Parmenides’
goddess, b2, b8).64 And so his follower finds himself in the position
described by the goddess in her exhortation at b7 (a passage that
warns against accepting the lot of the mortals of b6); that is, the
position of being expected to trudge passively along Euripides’
wandering path, a route trodden only by those who confuse what-is
and what-is-not (b6), and there circle around with nothing definite
to hear (ἠχήεσσα ἀκουή, b7.4), plying only an undirected, and
therefore, ‘aimless’ (ἄσκοπον, b7.4), eye. There, at b7, the goddess
urges her follower to guard against slipping off the path of what-is
by accepting without test any route of inquiry that purports to give a
genuine account of something and yet invalidates itself by drawing
upon what-[it]-is-not:
οὐ γὰρ μήποτε τοῦτο δαμῇ εἶναι μὴ ἐόντα· 1
ἀλλὰ σὺ τῆσδ’ ἀφ’ ὁδοῦ διζήσιος εἶργε νόημα
μηδέ σ’ ἔθος πολύπειρον ὁδὸν κατὰ τήδε βιάσθω,
νωμᾶν ἄσκοπον ὄμμα καὶ ἠχήεσσαν ἀκουὴν
καὶ γλῶσσαν, κρῖναι δὲ λόγῳ πολύδηριν ἔλεγχον
ἐξ ἐμέθεν ῥηθέντα. 6

For never shall this prevail, that things that are not are;
But do you restrain your thought from this route of inquiry,
Nor let much-experienced habit force you along this route,
To ply an aimless eye and ringing ear
And tongue; but judge by λόγος the much-contesting ἔλεγχος
Spoken by me.65

178–9. Against this connotation of παρεστώς, the frame of the Mysteries is perhaps
already implicit in the endless (Parmenidean) wandering in backward-turning circles in
darkness with which this play begins, cf. Plutarch’s description of the ritual search at
Eleusis at On the Soul, fr. 178 (Sandbach). But as with our backward-turning circling and
temporal setting, note that this general schema does not, however, provide the only
(or even, I suspect, the primary) resonance of παρεστώς here, see my discussion,
pp. 116–22.
64
See Montiglio (2000) 30–1 on the importance of hearing the sacred words of the
hierophant in contexts of initiation ritual.
65
Trans. Gallop (1984) modified. For the view that the goddess’s imperative at 28b7.3–6
DK (κρῖναι δὲ λόγῳ) refers specifically to her already spoken ‘critique’ (. . . ἔλεγχον∣ἐξ
ἐμέθεν ῥηθέντα, 5–6) of the implicit cognitive failure of those confused mortals of b6, b7,
see Mourelatos (2008) 90–1, esp. n. 46; Tarán (1965) ad 5–6; Palmer (2009) 108–9, and
n. 3 (the translation ‘critique’ is his); Robbiano (2006) 106–7 agrees the reference is to
what precedes but argues the subsequent arguments of the Alētheia ‘have again the form

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Her exhortation is to turn instead to ‘discourse’ (λόγος), to shun

judgements of habit (ἔθος) or past experience and instead extract and
put to the test by trial of argument the true nature of any such account
(b7.5; b8.15–18).66 Just as the mortal predicament described here, at
b7.3–4, resonates with the lot of the traveller of our prologue, so, too,
does this strategy: Euripides’ comic turn as the guiding hierophant is
met not by quiet acceptance, as perhaps he had hoped, but by
challenge: πῶς λέγεις; αὖθις φράσον (6). It signals that an ἔλεγχος
has begun.67 On one, colloquial, level, this line may be read simply
as: ‘What’s that? Say again . . .’; but, against the parodic Mysteries
frame, this use of φράζω is also pregnant with ritual connotations of
showing and, as it is used in Parmenides, also of route giving (cf.
b2.6, 2.8; b6.2). (Hence the line also resonates: ‘What are you
saying? Show me again in words that make visible for all to
see . . .’).68 With this question, any idea of this travellerʼs simply
passively following the lead of our poet is dispelled; now enters a
contentious interlocutor, and, with him, the goddess’s imperative of
b7.5–6 (κρῖναι δὲ λόγῳ πολύδηριν ἔλεγχον∣ἐξ ἐμέθεν ῥηθέντα) is
subtly reissued to the Aristophanic audience.69

of an elenchos and [. . .] clarify and support the given elenchos’ (107); Curd (1998) 62 and
n. 107 suggests the goddess’s imperative and her allusion to her own ἔλεγχος pertains both
to her preceding critique of mortal confusion and also to what follows, where Curd
interprets the word ἔλεγχος to resonate not in the sense of the ‘invective’ the goddess has
already voiced, but in the sense of a ‘trying’ or ‘testing’ of her proofs about what-is. But
preferably J. Barrett (2004) 274 n. 24, citing parallels, notes that the ‘temporal value’ of
the aorist passive participle ῥηθέντα may simply be ‘understood relative to κρῖναι, an act
by definition as yet unperformed’. For the goddess’s ἔλεγχος (which I understand to mean
‘a testing using the criteria set out explicitly in the Alētheia’, 28b8.1–49 DK) as a model
for our own evaluation of any account of what-is, and the tacit imperative here to do so,
see Curd (1998) 62; Robbiano (2006) 107–20.
66
For λόγος at 28b7.5 DK as ‘discourse’, see Coxon (2009) ad 7.3–6, though also invoking
‘reason’ in his comments; Curd (1998) 63 n. 109, suggesting also the meaning ‘thought’ or
‘reckoning’ citing the parallels adduced and discussed by Guthrie (1962–9) i. 419–24, esp.
421 (on Parmenides); so, Robbiano (2006) 97. Kingsley (2003) 129–34 notes the para-
doxical implication of the goddess’s imperative to ‘judge her talk by talk’ (132), ‘judge
by discussion’ (134), when ‘Judgement has already been passed’ (133) and so proposes
(139–40) to emend λόγῳ to λόγου (‘[judge] in favour of the highly contentious demon-
stration of the truth∣contained in these words spoken by me’, 140).
67
For Parmenides’ ἔλεγχος as a ‘putting to the test’, ‘challenge’ or ‘cross-examination’, see
Lesher (1984) 1–9; Coxon (2009) ad 7.3–6; see also my n. 65 above: ‘a testing using the
criteria set out explicitly in the Alētheia’, 28b8.1–49 DK.
68
For ritual connotations of φράζω against the Mysteries frame hinted at by παρεστώς at 6,
see p. 67 n. 63 above.
69
For the ‘temporal value’ of ῥηθέντα here see p. 68 n. 65.

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Signposts of the Doxa, 2. Entering the νόος that binds us:

b8.50–61, Euripides’ thought-world and the Doxa as comic
dialogue (7–24)

With the scene now framed around the idea of scrutinizing Euripides’
λόγος (6, 9), the comedy takes a more explicitly intellectual turn:
the frenetic burst of speech and rejoinder at 7–8 (extrapolated at
9–24) prompts its audience no longer simply to laugh at the slapstick
physicality of mortal error (that silly circling path), but also at the
fallacious thought-world of the Doxa. For the purpose of this ἔλεγχος
is to trick Euripides into making explicit all the fallacies of thought
that have sent him and countless others astray from the Alētheia
and back onto his ludicrous third way (thereby, completing the
image conjured by ἀλοῶν (2) with the idea that, just like all those
mistaken others, this poet treads a path that turns back on itself not
only on foot, but also in νόος, b6.5–6). Indeed, as we shall see, the
interlocutor will soon extrapolate from his replies at 7–8 precisely the
same errors that the goddess reveals as characterizing the self-
contradictory reasoning of mortals at b8.19–20, 50–61 (the Doxa).
But the genius of this comic ἔλεγχος lies in the way in which
Aristophanes appropriates that quintessential account of the
Doxa by the goddess (at b8.50–61) and recasts it into dialogue
form (at 7–24), flagging this enactment even at its outset by making
flesh, as it were, as its first argument strategy, the framing idea of the
deceptive ordering of words with which the goddess introduces her
own exposition of the Doxa at b8.51–2 (there, signalling it to be
wholly untrustworthy): for after the goddess has portrayed the phys-
ical symptoms of mortal confusion (at b6–7) and given us her true
account of reality – told us that what-is is ‘ungenerated’ (ἀγένητον,
b8.3) and ‘deathless’ (ἀνώλεθρον, b8.3), ‘whole and of a single kind’
(οὖλον μουνογενές, b8.4), ‘still’ (ἀτρεμές, b8.4), ‘complete’ (τελεστόν,
b8.4),70 ‘one’ (ἕν, b8.6), ‘continuous’ (συνεχές, b8.6), and so on – she
breaks to introduce mortal thought, saying: δόξας δ’ ἀπὸ τοῦδε
βροτείας∣μάνθανε κόσμον ἐμῶν ἐπέων ἀπατηλὸν ἀκούων, ‘. . . from
here onwards mortal beliefs∣Learn [by judging them], listening to the
70
For a discussion of this reading 28b8.4 DK for which there are several variants, see
Palmer (2009) 382–3, and my p. 156 n. 305.

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 o n w h at - [ it ] -is
deceitful ordering of my words’.71 Consider how it is also this idea (in
Parmenides, enacted in the next line, at b8.53) that signals the begin-
ning of our prologue’s dialogical exposition of Euripides’ path of
mortal error, realized here by our interlocutor’s sly reshuffling
of ἀκούειν δεῖ at 5 (‘You needn’t . . .’) to δεῖ and then ἀκούειν at 7a
(‘I must not-hear . . .?’):
ΕΥΡΙΠΙΔΗΣ
ἀλλ’ οὐκ ἀκούειν δεῖ σε πάνθ’ ὅσ’ αὐτίκα 5
ὄψει παρεστώς. Κη.πῶς λέγεις; αὖθις φράσον.
7a οὐ δεῖ μ’ ἀκούειν; Ευ. οὐχ ἅ γ’ ἂν μέλλῃς ὁρᾶν. 7b
8a Κη. οὐδ’ ἆρ’ ὁρᾶν δεῖ μ’; Ευ. οὐχ ἅ γ’ ἂν ἀκούειν δέῃ. 8b

E. You need not hear all that you’ll see instantly when you’re present. 5–6
K. What are you saying? Point it out to me again [this path of yours!]
I must not-hear . . .? 7a
E. Not, at any rate, whatever you’re going to see. 7b
K. And so, I must not see . . .? 8a
E. Not, at any rate, whatever you must hear. 8b

Indeed, this is a double parody, for by creating an adherescent οὐ

(οὐ δεῖ μ’ ἀκούειν, 7a) with which to trip up our poet, our traveller’s
deceptive (re)ordering of words also cleverly enacts the goddess’s
very next next words at b8.53–4, where, immediately following her
own deceptive ordering of words at b8.53,72 an adherescent οὐ
similarly exposes the essential fallacy of mortal error: μορφὰς γὰρ
κατέθεντο δύο γνώμας73 ὀνομάζειν·∣τῶν μίαν οὐ χρεών ἐστιν – ἐν ᾧ
πεπλανημένοι εἰσίν – . . ., ‘for they laid down notions (i.e. they
decided) to name two forms∣Of which it is obligatory not to
name one’ (or, ‘Of which they should not name one’) – wherein
they have wandered . . .’74

71
See Curd (1998) 103 ‘a hearer’s response to the Doxa must be the same as the response to
the claims of Alētheia: there we are exhorted to judge by logos what we are told. [. . .] to
judge, ponder, and consider’. For the meaning of μανθάνω as learning that implies active
judgement, both in Parmenides and our prologue, see p. 78 n. 92.
72
For the deceitful ordering of words enacted in the goddess’s syntactically ambiguous
μορφὰς γὰρ κατέθεντο δύο γνώμας ὀνομάζειν at b8.53 and the double meaning it effects,
see my following discussion, pp. 93–5.
73
For γνώμας at 28b8.53 DK, see p. 94 n. 135.
74
See Curd (1998) 110: because the two forms are enantiomorphic opposites ‘naming both
of them entails negations in the natures of the two, so one of them ought not to be named’
(see also 110 for a further possible translation, endorsing the construal of Furley (1989)
30–3: ‘not one of which is it right to name’). The construal of οὐ χρεών ἐστιν is a site of

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Signposts of the Doxa, 3. A ‘ringing ear’, an ‘echoing

tongue’ and the extrapolation of futurity: Euripides and the
symptoms of mortal error (7–8)

Euripides’ reply to this (not only deceptive, but also parodic) word
switch, at 7b, gives the audience their first taste in λόγος of the
comic confusion of mortal error. It casts the backward-turning poet
as an archetypal traveller of the Doxa, as quite literally possessing a
‘ringing ear and echoing tongue’ (ἠχήεσσα ἀκουή∣καὶ γλῶσσα,
b7.4–5); as ‘carried’ helplessly along the path of mortal confusion
(φοροῦνται, b6.6); as ‘uncritical’, or, ‘without judgement’ (ἄκριτος,
b6.7); and with no idea of where he is, or of the mistakes that have
led him there, or what is really going on (εἰδὼς οὐδέν, b6.4). Thus,
unable correctly to distinguish what-is from what-is-not, his ears
ringing only with the misperception of οὐ δεῖ μ’ ἀκούειν; at 7a
(which resound to him as if they are his own words at 5),75
Euripides comically fails to hear the shift in negation effected
by the deceptive switch of word order that ushers in the Doxa;
and so, quite unwittingly, he literally echoes it: 7a, οὐ δεῖ μ’ ἀκούειν;
7b, Ευ. οὐχ ἅ γ’ . . . (‘. . . not-hear? E. . . . Not[-hear], at any rate,
whatever . . .’).76 Next, blissfully unaware of that mistake, he is

intense scholarly disagreement; but this debate itself nicely illustrates the capacity of an
adherescent οὐ to confound mortals (as is our comic Euripides confounded at 7a), some
scholars endorsing the view that οὐ should be taken with χρεών and not ὀνομάζειν (or even
καταθέσθαι) so as not to imply obligation but merely the absence of an obligation or
logical necessity (‘it is not necessary . . .’ rather than ‘it is necessary not . . .’) (see, e.g.,
Croissant (1937) 102–3; Mansfeld (1964) 123–31; Tarán (1965) 217–20; Meijer (1997)
203–6), and others drawing out the prohibitive connotation of the adherescent construc-
tion, translating ‘it is not right’ rather than ‘it is not necessary’ (e.g. Curd (1998) 109–10;
Palmer (2009) 170; cf. Woodbury (1986) 5 n. 15, who, although reading τῶν μίαν as
referring to γνώμας rather than μορφάς and understanding καταθέσθαι with οὐ χρεών ἐστιν,
translates ‘it is wrong . . .’), with the different interpretations of Cornford (1939) 46;
Verdenius (1942) 62; Vlastos (1946) 74; Curd (1998) 110; and Robbiano (2006) 184, 219
making fully explicit the obligation the goddess’s adherescent οὐ really effects: e.g.
‘. . . should not be named’ (Cornford, Verdenius, Vlastos), ‘. . . ought not to be named’
(Curd), ‘. . . of which they are obliged not to name . . .’ (Robbiano).
75
This misperception is Euripides’ own: missing the shift in word order at 7a, he hears in οὐ
δεῖ μ’ ἀκούειν; only an echo (of half) of his statement at 5, ἀλλ’ οὐκ ἀκούειν δεῖ . . ., and thus
rushes to complete it at his 7b: see my exegesis of the scene at pp. 12–17. See also
J. Barrett (2004) 268, who highlights a key aspect of the poem of Parmenides comically
exploited here by Ar.: ‘. . . central to what the poem has to offer is precisely the challenge
of struggling with its linguistic difficulties [. . .] mortal failure [. . . is] linguistic failure’.
76
As already explained, pp. 12–17.

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 o n w h at - [ it ] -is
shown to wander off even further down this fallacious route by
reintroducing the idea of futurity: E. 7b, . . . ἅ γ’ ἂν μέλλῃς ὁρᾶν
(‘[Not(-hear)] . . . at any rate, whatever you’re going to see’, or,
‘whatever you are to see’), 7b ostensibly merely extrapolating upon
the imminent futurity of αὐτίκα∣ὄψει παρεστώς at 5–6, but thereby
also unwittingly introducing the notion of a beginning yet to be
(just, in fact, as Parmenides’ goddess draws upon μέλλω to this
same effect at b8.19–20 in her own didactic extrapolation of the
[prohibited] simple future of b8.5, οὐδ’ ἔσται). For according to the
proofs of the goddess’s ἔλεγχος at b8.19–20 even to entertain this
idea is to let in by a backdoor what-is-not all over again, for what-
is-going-to-be patently is-not right now:
πῶς δ’ ἂν ἔπειτα πέλοι τὸ ἐόν; πῶς δ’ ἄν κε γένοιτο;
εἰ γὰρ ἔγεντ’, οὐκ ἔστ(ι), οὐδ’ εἴ ποτε μέλλει ἔσεσθαι.

And how could what-is be in the future; and how could [it] come-to-be?
For if [it] came-to-be, [it] is not, nor [is it] if at some time [it] is going to be.77

Here, at b8.19–20, the goddess explicitly rules out any account of the
nature of a thing that is predicated on what-is-going-to-be in the
future (μέλλει ἔσεσθαι), arguing that becoming implies beginning
from what-is-not.78 On a Parmenidean understanding, Euripides’
use of μέλλω at 7b thus involves an illegitimate mix of what-is and
what-is-not that can only send a traveller astray from the genuine
path of inquiry (the Alētheia).79 But if that is so, then it is abundantly
clear that the apparent non sequitur from our bemused interlocutor
that follows at 8a, Κη. οὐδ’ ἆρ’ ὁρᾶν δεῖ μ’; (by which he means
‘And so, I must not see . . . ?’, cf. 5, 7a), is no non sequitur at all;80

77
Text and trans. Gallop (1984).
78
See Mourelatos (2008) 102–14; Palmer (2009) 140–50; Curd (1998) 79–80; Gallop
(1984) 13–14.
79
For μέλλω expressing ‘future realization of present intention or arrangement’ (and, hence,
two semantic notions, present intention/expectation and future realization), and its
possible relations to the future indicative, see Wakker (2006) esp. 247 and (1994) 168–
73; cf. Goodwin (1889) 20, 146–7; see Markopoulos (2009) 20–33, esp. 31–2, for the
capacity of both future and present infinitival complements of the verb to convey
reference to the future; and cf. Willi (2003a) 257–8 (noting Ar.’s preference for the
construction with the present infinitive).
80
For the absence of a non sequitur at 8a: against Parmenides’ strictures against futurity at
28b8.5–21 DK (which, at 28b8.20 DK, significantly, themselves exploit the semantic
properties of μέλλω as a verb denoting not simply future being but future beginning, to

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rather, it is precisely the right inference (indicated by ἆρα)81 to draw

for any traveller judging the Euripidean λόγος at 5 by running its
constituent ideas of modal negation (οὐ δεῖ, ‘tested’ at 7a) and
futurity (ὄψει, judged in light of 7b) through the tests of the
ἔλεγχος. In turn, the fact that 8a is then affirmed by Euripides’
echoing tongue at 8b (Ευ. οὐχ ἅ γ’ ἂν ἀκούειν δέῃ. ‘Not . . . at any
rate, whatever you must hear’) simply provides the cue to recap what
has been learnt so far in this ἔλεγχος (at 10: Κη. οὐ φῂς χρῆναί μ’ οὔτ’
ἀκούειν οὔθ’ ὁρᾶν; ‘So you’re saying I should not hear and not see?’).
Indeed, the best way to bring all this out, without losing its comic
flavour, is in the form of an internal monologue set in the midst of our
unfolding exchange:
ΕΥΡΙΠΙΔΗΣ
ἀλλ’ οὐκ ἀκούειν δεῖ σε πάνθ’ ὅσ’ αὐτίκα 5
ὄψει παρεστώς.
Κη.πῶς λέγεις; αὖθις φράσον.
7a οὐ δεῖ μ’ ἀκούειν; Ευ. οὐχ ἅ γ’ ἂν μέλλῃς ὁρᾶν. 7b

extrapolate upon the prohibition of what ‘will be’ at 28b8.5 DK, see Gallop (1984) 14),
7a–8b read as follows: from 7a, ‘Not [-hear] . . . whatever you are (going) to see’, our
Parmenidean interlocutor infers (ἆρα; cf. p. 15 n. 8): 8a, ‘So I must not see?’, because if
you ‘are going to see’ you must not be seeing right now; ‘going-to’ implies a beginning
that is yet to be, and what is yet to be is not. But note also that the word order between
infinitive, modal and negation, which is reshuffled at 7a from Euripides’ original order (5)
and echoed by the poet character at 7b, moves back at 8a (again, echoed at 8b) to that of
Euripides’ original statement (at 5) creating a Doxa-like circularity to 5–8 (cf. Austin and
Olson (2004) ad 5–10, 7–8; my p. 18 n. 14). 8a therefore reissues the comic ambiguity of
Euripides’ opening use of δεῖ at 5 (see my p. 14 n. 6), whose interpretation by our
interlocutor as ‘must not-’ rather than ‘needn’t’ is made explicit by his subsequent shift of
word order at 7a, but which here is left suitably unmarked by the scope of the negation:
8a: ‘So I need not see . . .?’ Instead of clarifying his meaning, Euripides’ reply at 8b then
simply swallows this inference up in another relative conditional clause which recapit-
ulates the fundamental opposition between hearing and seeing that we have just seen at
7b: (8a, ‘So, I need not see . . .?’ 8b, ‘E. [need] Not [–see?] . . . whatever you must hear.’).
For, just as the poet character’s reply there at 7b unwittingly sanctions the deliberate shift
in negation which ushers in the Doxa at 7a, so, here at 8b, his response thus at once
sanctions our interlocutor’s translation of μέλλω into negation of the possibility of present
seeing and plays into the hands of the interlocutor by failing, just as before, to disambig-
uate the central comic ambiguity of 5: is the sense of 8a ‘needn’t . . . see?’, which
Euripides’ reply to it presupposes, or ‘mustn’t . . . see?’ (or even (judging from 7a),
‘must . . . not-see?’), as the interlocutor means? The culmination of the interlocutor’s
exploitation of this ambiguity, and of the negation brought by futurity before it, is that
Euripides is manoeuvred into committing himself quite unintentionally to an account of
hearing and seeing which, from both sides of their pairing (7b, 8b), transforms each of
these things into mutually exclusive opposites. See my following discussion.
81
On this ἆρα as inferential rather than interrogative, see p. 15 n. 8.

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INTERNAL MONOLOGUE
[K. thinks:
‘So I have to “not-hear” (7a/b) . . . “whatever I’m going to see” (7b),
. . . which activity, for now, must not be, apparently (b8.19–20:
. . . for if “I’m going to see” implies a beginning that is yet to be,
. . . there is no seeing for me right now, obviously (8a)).
So, it seems, I’m being told I must [not hear and] not see . . .!
(8, extrapolated fully, in light of 8b, with χρή at 10).]82
8a Κη. οὐδ’ ἆρ’ ὁρᾶν δεῖ μ’; Ευ. οὐχ ἅ γ’ ἂν ἀκούειν δέῃ. 8b
Κη. πῶς μοι παραινεῖς; δεξιῶς μέντοι λέγεις·
οὐ φῂς σὺ χρῆναί μ’ οὔτ’ ἀκούειν οὔθ’ ὁρᾶν; 10

Signposts of the Doxa, 4. Explaining nothing: Euripides

hopelessly astray on the path of the Doxa (11–13)

His ears now surely also ringing with the laughter of the comic
audience, Euripides’ response to this reductio ad absurdum is at
11: Ευ. χωρὶς γὰρ αὐτοῖν ἑκατέρου ᾿στὶν ἡ φύσις ([The view that I’m
advocating (picking up παραίνω at 9) is this . . .] ‘. . . the nature of
each of the two of them is distinct . . .’). It moves us ever more deeply
into the mortal error of the Doxa at b8.50–61, showing us explicitly
Euripides’ conflation of what-is and what-is-not, for, though believ-
ing himself to be speaking about what-is (hearing and seeing),83
by falling into the trap of treating his interlocutor’s conjunctively
paired senses (at 10) singly, what he unwittingly now begins to give
is its opposite: an account of what-is-not (11, ‘(not-)hearing is just
different from (not-)seeing . . . [Look, I’ll explain . . . cue 13–18]’);
which thereby affirms his place among the ‘two-headed’ (δίκρανοι,
b6.5) mortals of b6, another mistaken traveller who believes himself
to be on the positive route of what-[something]-is, but who, by
(unknowingly) speaking of what-[it]-is-not (b6.8–9), shows himself
to be hopelessly circling on the path of the Doxa.

82
For parallelism of use of χρή between Euripidean tragedy and Parmenides, see
Mourelatos (2008) 206–7, who observes that in the work of both poets, the word is
infused with the same ‘element of censure’; see E. Med. 573, Hipp. 925; Parm.
28b1.30 DK.
83
Picking up on the interlocutor’s use of χρή at 10: see my earlier exegesis, esp. p. 19: ‘for
this is not a matter of what should be, but a matter of what is . . .’

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Yet if Euripides is just like those mortals, ‘by whom it [sc. what-
is] has been supposed to be and not to be the same and not the
same’, i.e. ‘to be subject to both being and not being’ (οἷς τὸ πέλειν
τε καὶ οὐκ εἶναι ταὐτὸν νενόμισται | κοὐ ταὐτόν, b6.8–9),84 then his
appeal to φύσις as the principle upon which this radical separation
rests does not resonate as a claim about ‘nature’ in a general
sophistic late fifth-century sense, that is, as opposed to νόμος.85 In
Parmenides the concept of φύσις is associated not with the quest for
‘genuine nature’86 but with mortal doctrines of becoming, the
δίζησις for origins (as it is here, cf. 13–18) as opposed to ἀληθείη
or the essence of being; hence it occurs explicitly only in the Doxa
(b10.1; 10.5; 16.3).87 Thus, its explicit use here already speaks of
the mortal cosmology that will manifest itself fully in our
backward-turning poet’s (backward) turn to aetiology and Aither
just a few lines later at 13–18 (another stamp of the thought of the
Doxa, εἴσῃ δ’ αἰθερίην τε φύσιν τά τ’ ἐν αἰθέρι πάντα ∣ σήματα . . .,
b10.1–2, b8.55–9).
But for now there is more fun to be had from it in the ἔλεγχος:
Euripides’ inability correctly to distinguish what-is and what-is-not
is milked for laughs as his appeal to origins is checked against the
twin negations (first spoken at 10) to which, quite nonsensically, it
seems to refer: Κη. τοῦ μήτ’ ἀκούειν μήθ’ ὁρᾶν; ‘What, not-hearing
and not-seeing?’ [is/are88 separate by nature, i.e. origin, growth?!]
Ευ. εὖ ἴσθ’ ὅτι. ‘Exactly!’∣Κη. πῶς χωρίς; . . . ‘How so?’ . . . (12–13),
prompting Euripides to muster a cosmological μῦθος by way of an
answer:

84
See Palmer (2009) 115–16 for this construal of 28b6.8–9 DK.
85
This is true even if a broad general sense of φύσις as ‘“essence” or “nature”, the way a
thing is made’ (which includes the idea of growth), is precisely what Euripides means, see
Kirk (1954) 228, cited by Mourelatos (2008) 62. For the usual reading of φύσις as ‘nature’
as opposed to νόμος, see Austin and Olson (2004) ad 11, and my earlier exegesis,
pp. 19–27.
86
Understood as the ‘essence’ of a thing, rather than ‘beginning’, or ‘becoming’.
87
Or in contexts ‘which bring out [. . .] the sense of “becoming” in the stem φυ-’.
Mourelatos (2008) 62–3; Curd (1998) 47 n. 65. As Mourelatos (2008) 247 says,
‘Parmenides is telling us that mortals turn the legitimate quest for ἀληθείη into a
misguided adventure after “origins” . . .’
88
Here, at 12, as at their first airing at 10, and their subsequent one at 19, the negated verbs
are active in both their conjunctive and disjunctive pairings; see my exegesis pp. 18–21
and p. 21 n. 21.

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Ευ. χωρὶς γὰρ αὐτοῖν ἑκατέρου ᾿στὶν ἡ φύσις.

Κη. τοῦ μήτ’ ἀκούειν μήθ’ ὁρᾶν; Ευ. εὖ ἴσθ’ ὅτι. 12
Κη. πῶς χωρίς;
Ευ. οὕτω ταῦτα διεκρίθη τότε.
Αἰθὴρ γάρ, ὅτε τὰ πρῶτα διεχωρίζετο 14
καὶ ζῷ’ ἐν αὑτῷ ξυνετέκνου κινούμενα,
ᾧ μὲν βλέπειν χρή, πρῶτ’ ἐμηχανήσατο
ὀφθαλμὸν ἀντίμιμον ἡλίου τροχῷ,
ἀκοῆς δὲ χοάνην ὦτα διετετρήνατο.
Κη. διὰ τὴν χοάνην οὖν μήτ’ ἀκούω μήθ’ ὁρῶ;
νὴ τὸν Δί’ ἥδομαί γε τουτὶ προσμαθών. 20
[K. You’re saying that I should not either hear or see?] 10
E. That the nature of each of the two of them is distinct.
K. What, of not-hearing and not-seeing?
E. Exactly!
K. [Ha! The nature of not-hearing-and-not-seeing is . . .]
Distinct, in what way . . .?
E. This is how they were distinguished long ago:
When Aither first was separating itself out, 14
and begetting living, moving beings within itself,
that with which one must see, it crafted first,
the eye, ‘in imitation of the solar disc’,89
and for hearing, bored the ear as a funnel.
K. Aha! So, because of this funnel I’m neither to hear nor to see?
I’m beside myself to have learnt that! 20

Signposts of the Doxa, 5. Final proofs, the root

of all mortal error: b8.50–61 and Euripides’ backward
turn to beginnings (13–18)

But as Euripides finally turns to his cosmology, at 13–18, what is

really seen is his ἀλοῶν, his circular wandering, arriving back at its
own beginnings; for this story of the genesis of hearing and seeing
also takes its audience to the very roots of the deceptive ontology of
the Doxa (at b8.50–61) wherein those wandering mortals of b6
first go astray (πεπλανημένοι, b8.54; the comic irony is perfect).
In fifth-century terms (which means in isolation from this
scene), its theory of the coming-into-being of separate sense

89
Cf. Aët. iv 13.9–10 (= 28a48 DK), who alludes to a Parmenidean theory of the visual ray.

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organs, at 14–18, seems quite typical,90 even plausible, just as the

(Doxastically) ‘appropriate’ (ἐοικώς, b8.60) cosmology of the
Doxa at b8.53–60 appears so to the eyes of uncritical mortals
(ἄκριτα φῦλα, b6.7).91 But, as those who are properly attuned to
the ‘signposts’ (σήματα, b8.2) that mark out the route of what-is
already know (by lessons just learned, μανθάνω, 20, but implicitly
active from 7; b1.31, b8.51–2),92 the way to and from this poet’s
cosmology is not based on what-is but, rather, on what-is not; and it
has been shown to be so, by the utter failure of all the ontological
assumptions it has generated to pass the tests of the ἔλεγχος (7–8,
10, 12). As these fallacies of thought are now followed back to their
point of origin by means of Euripides’ backward turn to begin-
nings, they throw into relief the fundamental mortal error described
by the goddess at b8.53–60. Just like the mortals there, it is this
poet’s belief that what he describes with his story of the primordial
(physical) ‘separation’ (κρίσις, cf. διακρίνω, 13; κρίνω, b8.55) and
‘placing apart’ (χωρίς, 11, 13, διαχωρίζω, 14; b8.56) of two primary
forms are senses that are (by φύσις) genuinely independent and
ontologically distinct. But that belief is mistaken, for what he has
already committed himself to in the trials of the ἔλεγχος (7–8) is the

90
See my pp. 24–5 nn. 28–9; for the possible conflation of Empedoclean ideas in Euripides’
cosmology, see my earlier discussion pp. 23–5.
91
For the play of positive and negative senses in Parmenides’ ἐοικώς (‘appropriate’,
‘fitting’, ‘probable’, and ‘specious’, ‘likely seeming’), see Mourelatos (2008) 231; and
Bryan (2012) 58–113, who understands the ambivalence to connote ‘subjectively plau-
sible but objectively false’ (74).
92
As Curd (1998) 113–14 notes, μανθάνω implies ‘learning and understanding by perform-
ing an act of judgment’. In Parmenides’ proem there is a development between the sorts
of learning the traveller is exhorted to perform: the use at 28b1.28 DK of πυνθάνομαι (of
the Alētheia and the Doxa), a word which may denote learning by another’s exposition as
much as by one’s own experience (cf. Robbiano (2006) 52–3), is supplemented just a few
lines later at 28b1.31 DK by the use of μανθάνω (of the Doxa), which implies learning or
understanding acquired by performing an act of judgement oneself; cf. the goddess’s
imperative to her audience (stressed by enjambement) when introducing her account of
the Doxa at 28b8.51–2 DK, δόξας δ’ ἀπὸ τοῦδε βροτείας∣μάνθανε κόσμον ἐμῶν ἐπέων
ἀπατηλὸν ἀκούων. The same development is also present in our prologue: our traveller
moves from requesting to learn, πυθέσθαι, Euripides’ reasoning at 4, to presenting what
he has learnt through his own judgement at the end of the scene, using μανθάνω (20). The
moment of transition between these two sorts of learning is signalled by Ar.’s comic
exploitation of Parmenides’ goddess’s ‘deceptive ordering of words’ in our traveller’s
deliberate actual shift of word order (at 7, ‘I need not-hear?’); a rearrangement of
Euripides’ words at 5, which constitutes the first test of the ἔλεγχος and thus signals the
beginning of our prologue’s dialogical exposition of the Doxa.

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position that these two seemingly independent things are not
ontologically separate at all; rather, they form a ‘dualism of
opposites’:93
7a Κη. οὐ δεῖ μ’ ἀκούειν; Ευ. οὐχ ἅ γ’ ἂν μέλλῃς ὁρᾶν. 7b
K. I must not-hear? E. Not [-hear], at any rate, whatever you’re going to see.
[K. thinks:
‘So I have to “not-hear” (7a/b) . . . “whatever I’m going to see” (7b),
. . . which activity, for now, must not be, apparently (b8.19–20):
. . . for if my beginning to see is going to be,
. . . there is no seeing right now, obviously (8a).’

8a Κη. οὐδ’ ἆρ’ ὁρᾶν δεῖ μ’; Ευ. οὐχ ἅ γ’ ἂν ἀκούειν δέῃ. 8b
K. And so, I must not see? E. [Must]Not[see], at any rate, whatever you must hear.

This ἔλεγχος offers a set of propositions (or assumptions) from our

poet about the natures of hearing and seeing. Euripides’ replies, at
7b and 8b, show him to be on the path of the Doxa, for he fails to
practise the essential κρίσις of the Alētheia that guides travellers to
the genuine path of what-is: ἔστιν ἢ οὐκ ἔστιν; (‘is it or is it not?’,
b8.16). Instead, quite unwittingly, he blissfully echoes both the
deceptive shift of negation that ushers in the Doxa at 7a (‘. . . not-
hear?’ echoed at 7b: E. ‘Not[-hear] . . .’), and the negation of 8a
(‘. . . -not see?’ echoed at 8b: E. ‘Not[-see] . . .’), and so, without
realizing it, he produces an account of hearing (7b) and seeing (8b)
in terms that are wholly negative. Hopelessly astray from what-is,
our poet (unknowingly) tells his follower that he must ‘not-hear
whatever he is to see’ (7b) and ‘not-see whatever he must hear’
(8b), thereby implicitly binding together each of these things
(hearing and seeing) as interrelated opposites. For on this λόγος,
to be hearing is to be not-seeing and to be seeing is to be not-
hearing; and thus to be both hearing and seeing is to be neither
hearing nor seeing at all (or should be), just like all those other
followers of the Doxa at b6 who helplessly wander along this same
backward-turning path ‘deaf and blind alike’ (κωφοὶ ὁμῶς τυφλοί
τε, b6.7 (which is the implication drawn on-stage, and repeatedly
stressed, by our interlocutor: οὐ φῂς σὺ χρῆναί μ’ οὔτ’ ἀκούειν οὔθ’
ὁρᾶν; 10, 12, 19)).

93
The phrase is Curd’s (1998) 106.

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Yet if hearing and seeing are each to be distinguished in terms of

what the other is not (7b, 8b), then they are not ontologically
separate at all; rather, to speak of one is to imply the negation of
the other (and vice versa) and, thereby, implicate oneself in a
dualism that is forever backward-turning (παλίντροπος, b6.9;
e.g. . . . to be hearing is to be not-seeing . . . which is to be
hearing . . . which is to be not-seeing . . . and so on). In Parmenidean
terms, each of this poet’s opposites is therefore ‘an illegitimate mix of
what-is and what-is-not’, for its nature is thoroughly intertwined with
its counter.94 Thus, whilst Euripides’ cosmology of seeing and hearing
at 13–18, may posit the existence of two seemingly independent
primary forms/senses (telling a story of the physical separation
(διακρίνω, 13) of the eye and the ear), the λόγος it has generated in
the ἔλεγχος has already revealed that the natures of its opposites are
actually co-dependent, based upon a mixture of what-is and what-is-
not that can only lay out a negative route of inquiry. Thrown into this
light by our persistent interlocutor, it is thus a close analogue of the
mortal cosmology of the Doxa described by the goddess at b8.50–
61:95
ἐν τῷ σοι παύω πιστὸν λόγον ἠδὲ νόημα 50
ἀμφὶς ἀληθείης· δόξας δ’ ἀπὸ τοῦδε βροτείας
μάνθανε κόσμον ἐμῶν ἐπέων ἀπατηλὸν ἀκούων.
μορφὰς γὰρ κατέθεντο δύο γνώμας96 ὀνομάζειν·
τῶν μίαν οὐ χρεών ἐστιν – ἐν ᾧ πεπλανημένοι εἰσίν –
ἀντία97 δ’ ἐκρίναντο δέμας καὶ σήματ’ ἔθεντο 55
χωρὶς ἀπ’ ἀλλήλων, τῇ μὲν φλογὸς αἰθέριον πῦρ,
ἤπιον ὄν, μέγ’ ἐλαφρόν, ἑωυτῷ πάντοσε τωὐτόν,

94
Each of these observations is also applicable to the opposites at the heart of the Doxa, as
noted by Curd (1998) 106–10; see 107 for this sort of ‘enantiomorphic’ opposition, with
each opposite ‘defined in terms of what the other is not’; 109 for the backward-turning
account generated by such a dualism. Quotation: 110.
95
See Curd (1998) 122–3: ‘The account of the natures of the opposite forms Parmenides
gives in lines b8.55–9 shows that, despite the appearance of two separate entities, each of
which has its own positive and complete nature, a system of enantiomorphic opposites
actually imports what-is-not into the very heart of a cosmological system. Despite
thinking that they are on the positive route of inquiry, all theorists who depend on
opposites [cf. our 7b–8b] and who insist that coming-to-be and passing-away are real
[cf. our 7b] (and this includes most of Parmenides’ predecessors) are actually on the
negative route . . .’
96
For the reading of γνώμας, see my p. 94 n. 135.
97
Following one MS, see Palmer (2009) 386; DK emend to τἀντία on the basis of 28b8.59.

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 o n w h at - [ it ] -is
τῷ δ’ ἑτέρῳ μὴ τωὐτόν· ἀτὰρ κἀκεῖνο κατ’ αὐτό
τἀντία νύκτ’ ἀδαῆ, πυκινὸν δέμας ἐμβριθές τε.
τόν σοι ἐγὼ διάκοσμον ἐοικότα πάντα φατίζω,
ὡς οὐ μή ποτέ τίς σε βροτῶν γνώμη παρελάσσῃ. 61

Here I stop my trustworthy speech to you and thought 50

About reality; from here onwards mortal beliefs
Learn, listening to the deceitful ordering of my words.
For they decided to name two forms,
Of which it is obligatory not to name one – wherein they have gone astray –
And they distinguished opposites in body and established signs 55
Apart from one another: here, on the one hand, aitherial fire of flame,
Which is gentle, very light, everywhere the same as itself,
But not the same as the other; but on the other hand, that one too by itself
In contrast, dark night, a dense and heavy body;
All this arrangement I proclaim to you as plausible;
Thus no opinion of mortals shall ever get ahead of you.98 61

Having set out the way of what-is (b8.1–49), here, at b8.50–61, the
goddess turns her attention to relating the fundamental error of
mortal beliefs, the first mistake made along their circling way.
Mortals flounder from the Alētheia at the ‘very beginning’ of
their attempts to account for the nature of reality, she implies, for
they found their Doxastically ‘fitting’ (ἐοικώς, b8.60) cosmology
on a dualism of primary forms that are ontologically unsound
(b8.53–60).99 Just like the eye and the ear of Euripides’ cosmology,
these primary forms or μορφαί (named at b9 as Light and Night),
have been (physically) distinguished (κρίνω, b8.55; cf. διακρίνω,
13) in visible body (δέμας) as opposites (ἀντία, b8.55); but the
mortals of the Doxa have also established ‘signs’ (or ‘qualities’,
σήματα)100 that recapitulate this dualism and have set these apart

98
Trans. Gallop (1984) modified.
99
The positive associations of ἐοικώς of the opinions of mortals, which taken on their own
Doxastical terms are ‘fitting’, are emphasized by Cherubin (2005) 9–10; Robbiano
(2006) 182–4; Palmer (2009) 162–3. For ambivalence in the term when seen through
the eyes of the ‘man who knows’, see Mourelatos (2008) 231; cf. Bryan (2012) 54–113,
esp. 77. My exegesis of ‘mortal error’ is indebted to the interpretation of the Doxa
offered by Curd (1998) 98–110, quotation: 110.
100
As Mourelatos (2008) 250 notes: ‘In “Doxa” [. . . σήματα] is used with reference to the
various manifestations of the dualism [constituted by the κρίσις of contraries at 28b8.55
DK].’ Note that this is a physical κρίσις, a separation in δέμας, rather than the logical
κρίσις between what-is and what-is-not that is at the heart of the Alētheia, see my p. 118
n. 201, p. 132 n. 240, p. 138 n. 252; cf. Coxon (2009) ad 7.3–6. See Mourelatos (2008)
222 on the shared vocabulary of the Doxa and the Alētheia; σήματα as both ‘signs’ and

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from one another as well (χωρὶς ἀπ’ ἀλλήλων, B8.56; cf. 11;
διαχωρίζω, 14). As the goddess describes these signs, at b8.56–9,
it is clear that they too find analogues in the set of opposites shaped
from seeing and hearing (also explicitly χωρίς, 11) in the λόγος
given by our backward-turning poet (7b, 8b).101 For the contrary
σήματα of the Doxa, tacitly reveal that Light and Night here also
have each been distinguished only in terms of what the other is not:
thus although Light (evoked at b8.56–7 through its assigned per-
ceptual properties as φλογὸς αἰθέριον πῦρ,∣ἤπιον ὄν, μέγ’ ἐλαφρόν,
‘an aitherial flame of fire,∣mild, greatly light’) is characterized as
ἑωυτῷ πάντοσε τωὐτόν, ‘in every way the same as itself’, it is also
emphatically τῷ δ’ ἑτέρῳ μὴ τωὐτόν· ‘not the same as the other’
(b8.57–8; cf. b6.8–9), and for each property allocated to it there is
an appropriate opposite given to Night (it is τἀντία νύκτ’ ἀδαῆ,
πυκινὸν δέμας ἐμβριθές τε: ‘by contrast, dark night, a dense and
heavy body’, b8.59).102 Hence, in this cosmology: ‘to be Light is to
be not-Night, and to be Night is to be not-Light’.103 For
Parmenides, as for our interlocutor, herein lie the ontological fail-
ings of mortal cosmology and the root of the deception at its
core:104 whilst mortals posit two primary forms that appear to be
quite independent, as soon as they attempt to give an account of
either, they will stray, two-headed, just like Euripides, onto the path
of what-is-not to wander a route that is endlessly παλίντροπος
(b6.9; cf. ἀλοῶν, 2). Like his story of origins, at 13–18, and like
all others that posit such opposites as their principal forms, the
cosmology of the Doxa and the beliefs of mortals are worthy of ‘no
true trust’ (οὐ . . . πίστις ἀληθής, b1.30) because, despite their (sub-
jectively plausible) appearances, the opposites upon which they are
based are not ontologically basic or genuinely independent.105
Rather, whether revealed through Euripides’ λόγος of hearing and

‘attributes’, see Palmer (2009) 139 (on the Alētheia); and on the interpretative challenges
presented by the σήματα of either section of the poem, see J. Barrett (2004) 275–6, 286–
7, with my discussion, pp. 93–115.
101
To this extent, hearing and seeing also recall the σήματα of the Doxa spoken about by the
goddess at 28b10.1–2 DK (i.e. those mortal σήματα in the aither whose origins will be
revealed): εἴσῃ δ’ αἰθερίην τε φύσιν τά τ’ ἐν αἰθέρι πάντα ∣ σήματα . . .
102
See Curd (1998) 106–8 and Cherubin (2005) 4–8 on how these (sensible) qualities expose
the enantiomorphism of the (ostensibly separate) forms. Cf. Mourelatos (2008) 242–6.
103
Curd (1998) 108; Cherubin (2005) 7–8. 104 Curd (1998) 109.
105
Curd (1998) 109.

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seeing or the mortal σήματα of Light and Night, the natures of these
contraries are interwoven in such a way as for each to present an
illegitimate (con)fusion of what-is and what-is-not, and thus a theo-
retical beginning from which any traveller setting out is already
astray (cf. b9.3–4; indeed, all opposites in the ἐοικὼς διάκοσμος
(b8.60) of the Doxa are thus contaminated).106
Yet all this becomes apparent only if such cosmologies are put to
the test in an ἔλεγχος.107 It is this process that is performed in 1–19
of our prologue. But the genius of this comic realization lies in how
Aristophanes crafts his enactment of the mortal error of b8.50–61,
implicitly assuming the role of Parmenides’ goddess by first evok-
ing the physical predicament of mortal confusion (with a
backward-turning path of parodic circling: ἀλοῶν, 2, recapitulating
her first mention of mortals at b6);108 then framing the ensuing
exchange around an inquiry into route (4–6; b6); taking his audi-
ence directly into the thought-world of the Doxa with the deceptive

106
See Gallop (1984) 11: ‘Mortal error consists not in the naming of two forms per se but in
treating them as mutually exclusive, so that in any given context “it is not right to name
one”.’ For the Doxa’s ἐοικὼς διάκοσμος as thoroughly contaminated with this sort of
enantiomorphic opposition, see Curd (1998) 108 and esp. Cherubin (2005) 8–15: the
Light/Night framework set out by the goddess is operative implicitly in all mortal ways
of thinking: it is a conception which ‘can provide a foundation (albeit for the goddess a
flawed one) for the way mortals customarily speak of the sensible world and the way
they speak of distinct things in general’ (9). Indeed: ‘it [sc. the Light/Night schema]
seems to provide requisites for description of the kinds of sensory experiences mortals
say they have’ (8). Cf. my p. 86 n. 112, p. 138 n. 252, p. 140 n. 257.
107
Significantly, the principal Euripidean cosmological precedents supposed by
Sommerstein (1994) ad 11–18 to underlie Ar.’s parodic cosmology of 13–18 not only
feature reworkings of traditional ideas (e.g. Hes. Th. 154–206) in fifth-century philo-
sophical terms but do so by positing the distinguishing of primal forms in language
similar enough to Parm. 28b8.53–6 DK to provide grist for Ar.’s comic mill in Th., see E.
fr. 484.2–3 (Kannicht) (the separation from what was originally a single form (μορφὴ
μία) of two forms (οὐρανός τε γαῖά τ’) set apart from one another (ἐχωρίσθησαν ἀλλήλων
δίχα), and which together beget all things) and fr. 839.13–14 (Kannicht) (stating that
none of the things that come into being perish but each is distinguished one from another
and exhibits a different form (διακρινόμενον δ’ ἄλλο πρὸς ἄλλου∣μορφὴν ἑτέραν
ἀπέδειξεν)). Whatever philosophical influences might inform these examples (on
which see my p. 25 n. 29), they are clearly enough to provide a basis for Th.’s comic
caricature and elentic testing of Euripides as an eclectic fabricator of ‘likely seeming’
cosmologies founded upon two primary forms.
108
Significantly, b6’s description of the physical symptoms of the wandering thought of the
mortal authors of the cosmology given in the Doxa section of the poem (28b8.52ff. DK)
occurs in the Alētheia section (i.e. in Parmenides’ revelation, as in our comic prologue,
their backward-turning path is presented to us before we receive an exposé of the
cognitive error that causes it).

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order of his words (7a; b8.51–2); staging the cognitive symptoms

of mortal fallacy (7b, 8b; b7.4–5), and exposing the full reality of
our poet’s ludicrous path with his nonsensical negative accounts of
hearing and seeing in the trials of the ἔλεγχος (7–10; b8.55); before,
finally, tracing their fallacious separation back in this poet’s own
λόγος to the seemingly plausible (ἐοικώς) cosmology from which it
derives (13–18; b8.53–60). From 7a, what the goddess of
Parmenides’ poem compacts into one cosmology, at b8.50–61,
our prologue therefore splits between dialogical exposition
(ἔλεγχος) and cosmological epideixis. With that Euripidean turn
to cosmology, at 13–18, its comic dramatization of the fundamental
mortal error at b8.50–61 is, thus, in theory, fully realized (the
practice is yet to come, cf. 25–8, with my pp. 87–113). But the
jokes with which it is now met, at 19 and 24, continue to exploit its
fallacies. Euripides’ μῦθος for the last time:
Ευ. οὕτω ταῦτα διεκρίθη τότε.
Αἰθὴρ γάρ, ὅτε τὰ πρῶτα διεχωρίζετο 14
καὶ ζῷ’ ἐν αὑτῷ ξυνετέκνου κινούμενα,
ᾧ μὲν βλέπειν χρή, πρῶτ’ ἐμηχανήσατο
ὀφθαλμὸν ἀντίμιμον ἡλίου τροχῷ,
ἀκοῆς δὲ χοάνην ὦτα διετετρήνατο.
Κη. διὰ τὴν χοάνην οὖν μήτ’ ἀκούω μήθ’ ὁρῶ;
νὴ τὸν Δί’ ἥδομαί γε τουτὶ προσμαθών. 20
οἷόν γε πού ᾿στιν αἱ σοφαὶ ξυνουσίαι.
Ευ. πόλλ’ ἂν μάθοις τοιαῦτα παρ’ ἐμοῦ.
Κη. πῶς ἂν οὖν
πρὸς τοῖς ἀγαθοῖς τούτοισιν ἐξεύροιμ’ ὅπως
ἔτι προσμάθοιμι χωλὸς εἶναι τὼ σκέλει; 24

E. This is how they were distinguished long ago:

When Aither first was separating itself out, 14
and begetting living, moving beings within itself,
that with which one must see, it crafted first,
the eye, ‘in imitation of the solar disc’,109
and for hearing, bored the ear as a funnel.
K. Aha! So, because of this funnel I’m neither to hear nor to see?
I’m beside myself to have learnt that! 20
Intellectual conversations are really something!

109
Cf. Aët. iv 13.9–10 (= 28a48 DK).

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E. Many such things you could learn from me.
K. So how, 22
in addition to these fine things, might I discover how
I might yet learn to be lame in my legs? 24

As ludicrous as it may sound, the interlocutor’s very next question,

at 19, in response to Euripides’ cosmology, is absolutely right:110
according to Euripides’ λόγος it is precisely because of (and
through, διά) that ‘funnel’111 (ἡ χοάνη, 19), or rather, the deceptive
physical κρίσις that it represents (cf. διακρίνω, 13; διαχωρίζω, 14;
διατετραίνω, 18; ἐοικὼς διάκοσμος, b8.60), that he apparently is
neither to hear nor to see (Κη. διὰ τὴν χοάνην οὖν μήτ’ ἀκούω μήθ’
ὁρῶ; 19, its force: ‘So . . . it’s because I have a hole in my head for
hearing . . . [but physically distinct organs, eyes, for seeing,] that I’m
not to hear and not to see . . .?). It is in this first setting up of
physically separate opposites that our backward-turning poet’s
(quite unwitting) negation of hearing and seeing begins (the logic
runs something like this: the ear and the eye are deemed to be
physically different, and therefore, ontologically distinct . . . but
not really . . . for to hear is to not-see, and to see is to not-hear (7b,
8b); to do one or the other is possible (though not without straying
onto the Doxa, cf. my pp. 87–113), but to do both . . . Which is a
problem, not least in a theatre). This has been the comic lesson learnt
(μανθάνω, 20) throughout the trials of this ἔλεγχος and the destina-
tion already set for any follower of our poet’s meandering νόος by

110
Contra Austin and Olson (2004) ad 19, who compare Clouds 227–8 ‘where Strepsiades
offers a similarly puzzled response to Socrates’ closing remarks . . .’; however funny, 19
is no puzzled question; it is a logical inference, understandably incredulous because
correct.
111
Identification of the ear with a χοάνη elsewhere, cf. Pherecr. fr. 113.30–1 KA; IG I3
386.127; 387.144; Amyx 255–9; Pl. R. 411a. For the spatial and causal meanings of διά
see Burnyeat (1976); for διά + acc. as ‘through’, see LSJ s.v. B.I, ‘So it’s through the
funnel (i.e. the ear, which is to say, by your λόγος) that I’m not to hear nor to see.’ I am
grateful to Brian McGing for alerting me to the cumulative play on this meaning of διά.
But it is also perhaps ‘through’ this ‘funnel’ in another sense that the mortal confusion of
Euripides’ cosmology is implied: for if, as Rashed (2007) 27–9 has argued, Euripides’
ἀκοῆς δὲ χοάνην ὦτα διετετρήνατο (18) of the boring of the ear alludes to the original of
Blass’ (1883) reconstruction of Emp. 31b84.9 DK (<αἳ> χοάνῃσι δίαντα τετρήατο
θεσπεσίῃσιν, of Aphrodite’s crafting of the eye), then this muddled redeployment of
Presocratic sophia itself recapitulates Euripides’ comically confused conflation of the
eye and the ear that the preceding ἔλεγχος has shown to infect his entire way of thinking,
see my earlier discussion pp. 23–5.

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the goddess’s description of those mortals of b6 who wander ‘deaf

and blind alike’ (κωφοὶ ὁμῶς τυφλοί τε, b6.7).
But is there escape? Well, perhaps a last joke: it involves that
attempt of our traveller, at 22–4, to free himself from Euripides’
backward-turning path by learning to go lame in both of his legs
(σκέλη, 24). For the final irony of this (leg of the) journey is that
following Euripides’ λόγος has taught our traveller to be deaf and
blind and, thus, to be lame (χωλός) in one set of ‘(much-wandering)
limbs’ (μελέων πολυπλάγκτων, b16.1), his sense organs, but not in
those whose failure might actually help, his legs (σκέλη).112 To
follow this Euripides is, aptly enough, rather, to end up lame and
not-lame and, as it is voiced by our comic interlocutor at 24, the

112
For Parmenides’ μέλεα ‘limbs’ at 28b16.1 DK as ‘sense organs’, see Popper (1963)
408–13, (1998) 73–6, 93 n. 12 (citing Arist. PA 1.645b36–646a1); Meijer (1997) 62–
7. Prior to Plato and Aristotle there is no specialized word in Greek for the sensory
faculties or sense organs; the eyes and the ears are spoken of as ‘limbs’ (μέλεα or γυῖα)
or ‘palms’ (παλάμαι), see, in addition to Parm. 28b16.1 DK, and Parmenides’ use of
νωμάω ‘to move/ply’ (a word used in Homer of the knees, cf. Il. 10.358) of the eyes
and ears of mortals at 28b7.4–5 DK, Emp. 31b2.1 and esp. b3.9–13 DK, where
Empedocles’ use of γυῖα probably answers Parmenides’ depiction of the senses as
mortals conceive of, and use, them at 28b16, b7 DK, with Meijer (1997) 64, and where
Empedocles’ γυίων πίστις at 31b3.13 DK itself is a ‘delightful play’ on the expression
χειρòς πίστις, Kingsley (2003) 590. Like other limbs, eyes significantly could also
have ‘joints’ (ἄρθρα), see S. OT 1270. Arist.’s quotation of 28b16 DK (Metaph.
1009b22) has the variant μελέων πολυκάμπτων ‘much-bent limbs’, and κάμπτω is a
word in Homer also often used of the knees; but Arist.’s πολυκάμπτων is generally
regarded as less reliable than Theophrastus’ πολυπλάγκτων (at Sens. 3), see Coxon
(2009) ad 17.1 (= 28b16.1 DK); Palmer (2009) 386–7; Passa (2009) 48. For σκέλη
(which lack νόος) explicitly compared to (and contrasted with) the senses as both μέρη
‘members’ of the body, see Thphr. Sens. 47.10–13, 5.1, 2.7. Part of the joke here must
be that Parmenides’ μελέων πολυπλάγκτων (28b16.1 DK) already evokes the idea of
‘the weary limbs of a luckless traveller’ and, reading μελέων as the adjective μέλεος,
might even connote ‘[the confusion/muddle] of the wretched/luckless/miserable wan-
derers’: Mourelatos (2008) 255 and n. 83; but note also that Ar.’s comic concretization
of Parmenides’ μέλεα here might exploit the possibility that in Parmenides the term
connotes both the sense organs and the enantiomorphic opposites of the Doxa, see
Hussey (2006) 17. Certainly, against our opening comic lines, the fact that the
Homeric word μέλεα itself implies parts that, in their capacity as bearers of the
muscular sinuosity or tension that enables flexibility, bend back on themselves (see
Wersinger (2008) 56 and my p. 118 n. 201) is very suggestive: used of the senses in
28b16 DK (where the goddess speaks as a mortal), it perhaps implies that naïve
mortals contend with duality and enantiomorphic opposition not only in the phenom-
enal world they discursively construct by positing the primal forms of Light and Night,
but also inherently in the way they constitute their own senses (which are after all, in
28b16 DK, part of that Doxastical world so constructed). See my pp. 117–22, esp.
p. 118 n. 201.

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only path of escape from that, is a path of no walking (24, cf. 25, Ευ.
.Βάδιζε . . .).113

Journey’s end, or a fork in the road? Para-Doxa

and the door seen (25–8)

But if, as I have argued, the more astute listeners have laughed at
the mortal error of Euripides during these early lines (1–24) and
thus with the on-stage author of its comic exposé (our once merely
exasperated, but now utterly aporetic traveller), that situation
clearly changes at 25–8:
Κη. . . . ἐξεύροιμ’ ὅπως
ἔτι προσμάθοιμι χωλὸς εἶναι τὼ σκέλει;
Ευ. Βάδιζε δευρὶ καὶ πρόσεχε τὸν νοῦν. Κη. ἰδού. 25
Ευ. ὁρᾷς τὸ θύριον τοῦτο; Κη. νὴ τὸν Ἡρακλέα
οἶμαί γε. Ευ. σίγα νῦν. Κη. σιωπῶ τὸ θύριον.
Ευ. ἄκου’. Κη. ἀκούω καὶ σιωπῶ τὸ θύριον. 28
K. . . . might I discover how
I might yet learn to be lame in my legs?
E. Just you hot-foot it over here and give me your νόος. K. There! 25
E. You see that door? K. By Herakles, I believe I do!
E. Be still now! K. I’m being silent about the door.
E. Listen . . . K. I’m listening and being silent about the door. 28

113
This joke thus places a pointed philosophical spin on Euripides’ actual predilection for
creating lame heroes, a habit that, at Frogs 846, earns him the title χωλοποιός; see also
Ach. 410–11, 426–9; Peace 146–8. N. W. Slater’s (2002) 152 observation (extrapolated
from Peace 146–8) that to learn to be lame from Euripides is to become one of his
tragedies (something with which this traveller will be saddled several times before the
day is out) is quite right but misses the philosophical critique that this comic parody of
‘tragic’ lameness articulates. My reading of the irony of line 24 follows Austin and
Olson’s (2004) ad 22–4, who print Ellebodius’ ἐξεύροιμ’ ὅπως ἔτι προσμάθοιμι (endorsed
also by Henderson (2000) and N. G. Wilson (2007a)) rather than R’s ἐξεύροιμ’ ὅπως ∣ ἔτι
προσμάθοι μή . . ., which they find ‘metrical but nonsensical’. Yet against the under-
standing of σκέλη as ‘limbs’ here, R’s text may perhaps resonate as a last despairing aside
to the audience about this Euripides’ ridiculous wanderings as a thinker who disables
‘limbs/sense organs’: Κη. πῶς ἂν οὖν ∣ πρὸς τοῖς ἀγαθοῖς τούτοισιν ἐξεύροιμ’ ὅπως ∣ ἔτι
προσμάθοι μὴ χωλὸς εἶναι τὼ σκέλει; (‘K. So how might I discover in addition to these
fine things [sc. how to go deaf and blind, be lame in one set of limbs] how he [sc.
Euripides] could yet learn not to be lame in his [other set of limbs, his] legs?’). For
further conjectures in emendation of R’s text, including προσμάθω μή endorsed by
Gannon (1987) and others (‘. . . how I am also to learn not to be lame in both legs’),
see Rogers (1904) ad loc. and 183.

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Having introduced this Euripides, and then made explicit in λόγος

the error of his way (1–24; an ἔλεγχος staged, it is now apparent, so
that no such ‘mortal thought’ shall get ahead of us on the journey of
this play; cf. ὡς οὐ μή ποτέ τίς σε βροτῶν γνώμη παρελάσσῃ,
b8.61), our traveller now falls back to following the fallacious
footsteps of our poet, driven to this aporetic end not by timely
application of the goddess’s κρίσις (at b8.15–16) but by the same
comical helplessness that ‘drives’ (or ‘steers’) the faulty reasoning
(or wandering νόος) of those two-headed mortals at b6 and b7
(. . . ἀμηχανίη γὰρ ἐν αὐτῶν∣στήθεσιν ἰθύνει πλακτὸν νόον·. . .,
b6.5–6; cf. 24).
Their predicament resonates with that of our traveller at 25 in
another key respect also, for in Parmenides those who slip off the
Alētheia back onto the path of Doxa and into ἀμηχανίη do so owing
to their basic failure to control νόος (both ‘mind’ and ‘understand-
ing’).114 As the goddess implies at b7, in their confusion about the
nature of that which-is, mortals fail to direct their νόος to its natural
object, what-is, (the only fruitful target for νόημα), and instead,
unwittingly cause it to stray onto a path that implicitly invokes
what-is-not, where, driven by helplessness, νόος can only wander,
fruitlessly searching for a stable object, or a complete account
(b6.5–9).115 Accordingly, the goddess’s exhortation to her traveller
at b7 is to keep his νόος away from the path of mortal error, and,
from its first aimless step, saying and thinking what-is-not (ἀλλὰ σὺ
τῆσδ’ ἀφ’ ὁδοῦ διζήσιος εἶργε νόημα, b7.2), for there is nothing here
for νόος to grasp.116 Doxai must be put to the test, to be sure, but
only to the extent necessary for the validity of any claim to be a

114
On the necessity for mortals to control νόος in Parmenides, see Lesher (1984) 27–9. As
Curd (1998) 36 puts it: ‘[Mortal] Error results when noos is led astray or is not properly
controlled and is allowed to wander away from its proper goal or object . . .’
115
A stable object is an object that meets the goddess’s criteria for what-is, i.e. an object that
is ungenerated and deathless, complete, unchanging, motionless, permanent, a whole of
a single kind: see 28b8.3–49 DK with Curd (1998) 75–94; a complete account of what-is
is an account not predicated on or in any way involving negation, see my next note. For
the commitment of νόος to what-is, see Mourelatos (2008) 164–93.
116
As Curd (1998) 49–50 points out, an account of anything that involves negation can
never be a complete or genuine account: such an account would merely say ‘it is not this,
or this, or this . . .’ (49); it would thus render a ‘something’ into ‘not anything in
particular, thus nothing at all, and so not something that can be said or thought’ (50
n. 73).

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genuine account of what-is to be determined in the trials of the
ἔλεγχος (where, as we have seen, each test must always end in the
fundamental κρίσις of the Alētheia: ἔστιν ἢ οὐκ ἔστιν; b8.16);
the crucial point is that the instant the slightest intimation of
what-is-not (‘that things that are not are’: εἶναι μὴ ἐόντα, b7.1)
invalidates such an account, νόος should be withheld, and the
negative path ahead swiftly abandoned (b7.2).
In this lies the comic demise of our interlocutor (at 25–8); for, as
our prologue begins, our traveller is already on the path of mortal
confusion and, by explicating the fallacy implicit in every step of
our poet’s thought (rather than simply abandoning it at the first sign
of negation, (5)), he has steered his νόος further along this mistaken
route, so that with every step of his comic exposé it has been set
ever further astray from its proper object (i.e. what-is: b3; b6.1).117
His has been a comic δίζησις (a ‘delving into’), not into reality

117
This is expressly against the advice of the goddess, see 28b7.2 DK. In order to under-
stand what is at stake in this instruction we might refer to the useful image offered by
Curd (1998) 51 n. 75 of the tests or proofs (σήματα) that form the basis of the ἔλεγχος and
that must be used to evaluate any route of inquiry. These she likens to ‘turnstiles’ that
regulate passage along the path of what-is. These ‘turnstiles’ bar further access to the
route of what-is if any of the various conditions which they represent are not met by an
account of what-[a thing]-is (that a thing which-is is ‘ungenerable’ would be one such
condition). But speaking about or thinking of what-[a thing]-is-not, as Euripides has
done earlier, would equally invalidate any account and bar further productive travel. The
next step for a traveller able to draw upon the insights of the Alētheia would be to restrain
his νόος from slipping off onto the negative path that has opened ahead (b7.2) and
redirect it to the path of what-is (continually testing that he is moving in the right
direction at every step of the way by applying the proofs of b8). But the comic situation
of our prologue begins with our traveller already astray on the mortal path, having
allowed himself to be led onto this route by habit (explicitly the next thing warned
against by the goddess after her warning against steering νόος to the negative path: μηδέ
σ’ ἔθος πολύπειρον ὁδὸν κατὰ τήνδε βιάσθω, 28b7.3 DK); and, instead of retreating from
the negative path as soon as he sees Euripides’ accounts fail the most basic criterion for a
valid route of inquiry (that it not be predicated upon negation), our interlocutor sets
about debunking it (7a, 8a). He begins a δίζησις not into what-is but into mortal fallacy,
and thus, by thinking and speaking in terms of what-is-not, he is swept up himself in this
fallacy (see my following discussion). Here, then, is the circular path of periodic regress
comically enacted by 1–24: whilst previously our traveller followed Euripides’ path
merely by habit (cf. 1–4; 28b7.3 DK), now, by critically engaging with our poet (i.e. by
not restraining his νόος from this path, 6ff.; 28b7.2 DK), he is forced to do so by an
incapacity that his own sardonic δίζησις (‘delving into’) has (unwittingly) authored; the
joke is that whilst the comic audience have been shown the reality of Euripides’ falla-
cious thinking and, as we shall see, now have opportunity to escape its incapacitating
path, all that our traveller has learnt through his ἔλεγχος is to be deaf and blind, lame and
not-lame, i.e. to be precisely what he now becomes (25–8): an archetypal mortal carried
along that forbidden way.

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(ἀληθείη) and what-is, but into (Euripidean) fallacy and what-is-not

(or, if a δίζησις for reality, only for the reality of the underlying
existence and nature of this essential fallacy). The irony of our
earlier ἔλεγχος, then, is that our traveller’s explosion of Euripides’
mistaken way as invoking a path that is impossible to grasp
(παναπευθές, b2.6) has been achieved only at the cost of his own
νόος (which, directed to this end throughout, has, of course, been
striving to grasp it!); for, in demonstrating that fact (sc. that this
poet’s ἀλοῶν cuts a path wholly unlearnable, παναπευθές), our
traveller’s νόος itself has been left wandering on that very path,
bereft of any genuine objects upon which to fix (K. ‘. . . should not-
hear . . . not-see?! . . .’, 7a, 8a, 10, 12, 19), and fated ever to turn
back on itself (K. ‘. . . seeing is not-hearing . . . which is
seeing . . .?!’ 7b, 8b).118 Herein lies the comic epilogue of 1–24:
by failing at the very outset to practise the essential κρίσις of the
Alētheia (ἔστιν ἢ οὐκ ἔστιν; b8.16), our traveller also fails to let go
of Euripides’ vacillations as ‘unthinkable’ (ἀνόητος, b8.17)119 and,
thereby, to redirect his νόος to any genuine account of what-is
(b7.2); and so he ends up, at 25–8, in ἀμηχανίη120 (cf. 19, 24),
that is, not directing it (sc. his νόος) at all: 25, Ευ. . . . πρόσεχε τὸν

118
His νόος will ever turn back on itself in search of a complete account.
119
What is denied at 28b8.17 DK is not the thinkability per se of the way of what-is-not;
rather this path is ἀνόητος ‘unthinkable’ insofar as it has no true object, and thus no
ultimate destination; its end is ‘unthinkable’, see Hermann (2004) 201 n. 555.
120
Cf. Parm. 28b6.5–9 DK. Note that the helplessness to which Euripides has reduced his
audience by line 24, who should be both deaf and blind and comically entrapped in the
condition of seeing yet not-seeing and hearing yet not-hearing, is a wonderful enactment
of Parmenides’ evocation of the ἀμηχανίη of mortals who are both deaf and blind (b6.7)
and driven on by their helplessness ‘to ply an aimless eye and ringing ear’ or to see but
not-see, hear but not-hear (b7.4). For this as the proverbial condition of ἀμηχανίη (‘being
without a μηχανή’ – the predicament that his Kinsman occupies throughout this play)
elsewhere, cf. the archetypal state of human nature prior to the gift of technai from the
gods tacitly evoked by use of this imagery in Hermes’ warning to the sole mortal witness
of his thievery at Hymn. Herm. 91–2 (καί τε ἰδὼν μὴ ἰδὼν εἶναι καὶ κωφὸς ἀκούσας,∣καὶ
σιγᾶν, ὅτε μή τι καταβλάπῃ τὸ σὸν αὐτοῦ) with Strauss Clay (1989) 115–16. As Strauss
Clay has argued, these verses implicitly allude to the primitive (‘pre-agricultural, pre-
pastoral, and pre-political’) and guileless condition of post-Promethean man before
Hermes’ benefaction of civilizing τέχνη, the closest parallel to which is the state of the
Odyssean Cyclops (who famously fails correctly to recognize (what-is and) what-is-not,
cf. Hom. Od. 9.364–70). She compares Aeschylus’ cognate characterization of the
natural human state of ἀμηχανίη prior to attaining the divine help of Prometheus, at
Pr. 447–8: οἳ πρῶτα μὲν βλέποντες ἔβλεπον μάτην,∣κλύοντες οὐκ ἤκουον . . .. Cf. Heraclit.
22b34 DK; with Dem. 25.89 for the proverbial status of the expression. Cf. also Snell
(1953) 60, 62.

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 o n w h at - [ it ] -is
νοῦν. Κη. ἰδού. (E. [‘Lame?! Keep walking you, and . . .] give me
your νόος.121 K. Have it!!’). Thus each reductio ad absurdum won
earlier in the ἔλεγχος is now seen actually to have been recoiling
silently on the head of its author;122 for this traveller, in fact, never
abandoned the ‘no win’ path (οὐ γὰρ ἀνυστόν, b2.7),123 and, by
failing to do so and continually redirecting his νόος back to it and to
the δίζησις (‘delving into’) of Euripidean fallacies, he has set
himself up only to arrive right back where he (and his audience)
first began (εἰδὼς οὐδέν, b6.4; cf. 1–4) (though now comically
incapacitated by all he has learned along the way – a proper
Parmenidean mortal): another two-headed wanderer steered by a
deceived and helpless νόος along the Doxa’s circling path (cf.
b7.3), swept away (φοροῦνται, b6.6), equally deaf and blind
(κωφοὶ ὁμῶς τυφλοί τε, b6.7, cf. 10, 12, 19; but also intellectually
‘dulled’ and ‘devoid of understanding’, cf. 27–8),124 amazed and
uncritical (τεθηπότες, b6.7, cf. 19; or ‘dazed’, cf. 24; ἄκριτος, b6.7,
cf. 27–8), able to ply only an eye that is unseeing (ἄσκοπον ὄμμα,
b7.4): 26, Ευ. ὁρᾷς τὸ θύριον . . .; Κη. . . . οἶμαί γε (E. ‘See that little
door? K. I think (?) I do . . . [do I?]’);125 an ear that gives false
readings (ἠχήεσσα ἀκουή, b7.4): 27, Ευ. σίγα νῦν. Κη. σιωπῶ τὸ
θύριον (E. ‘Be still now! K. I’m being silent about the door’); and a
tongue that merely echoes (ἠχήεσσα . . . γλῶσσα, b7.4–5): 28, Ευ.
ἄκου’. Κη. ἀκούω καὶ σιωπῶ τὸ θύριον (E. ‘[Just] Listen! K. [I’m
just . . .] Listening and being silent about the door . . .ʼ).126
If the comedy of earlier lines focalizes the audience’s laughter
through the wry observations of our traveller, milking the fact that

121
For the usual meaning of this common expression, ‘Pay attention!’, see, e.g., Th. 381.
122
Indeed, the only purpose of the ἔλεγχος is to determine which accounts of what-is contain
intimations of what-is-not and fail the tests of the Alētheia. Those that do should be ‘cast
aside with no further examination’: Curd (1998) 51 n. 75, 74.
123
For the translation ‘no-win’, see Lesher (1984) 27.
124
Curd (1998) 60; for κωφός as ‘dull’, see S. OT 370–1; for τυφλός used to characterize
intellectual error, see Tarán (1965) ad loc. citing Pi. Pae. 7b 13ff.; and for ‘devoid of
understanding’, see Chadwick (1996) 291.
125
For οἶμαι as colloquial understatement, ‘of course’, ‘no doubt’, see Stevens (1976) 23;
for the sense of γε as adding intensity to a positive answer, see Denniston (1954) 130–1;
for the opposite sense, reading γε as limitive, ‘I think so (but I’m not entirely sure)’, see
Rogers (1904) ad loc.; on both, see Austin and Olson (2004) ad loc., and my following
discussion for the significance of its polyvalence here.
126
Lines 26–8 also have an important hidden dimension, not strictly relevant here, to which
I shall return.

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all that he has learnt by explicating this poet’s λόγος are the contra-
dictory lessons of the Doxa,127 then this ironic twist in our travel-
ler’s tale prompts a backward turn for them also, shifting their
laughter from Euripides onto the now not-so-critical on-stage
recipient of his tragic tuition.128 It also marks a transitional moment
in terms of the play itself. With our traveller’s surrender of νόος, at
25, the audience will be no longer treated to an unmasking of the
Doxa (not, at least, in these terms, and by him); rather, having been
shown the hidden fallacy of Euripides’ ἐοικὼς διάκοσμος (b8.60),
they now settle to laugh at this as it bedevils the minds of ἄκριτοι
mortals; that is, as Doxa plays itself out disguised in all its ‘appro-
priate’, ‘likely seeming’ (ἐοικώς, b8.60), paradoxical (i.e. para-
Doxastical), costume(s).129 From here on, that is, this audience
will engage with a world of deception, wherein shifting perceptions
cannot be trusted (but will be), and where meeting our traveller’s
earlier injunctions to test for exactly what-is and what-is-not (and
to question just where this poet is leading them) now falls
solely to them (cf. ποῖ μ’ ἄγεις . . .; πῶς λέγεις; πῶς μοι παραινεῖς;
4, 6, 9). On this comic path, it will be for the spectators to implicate
themselves in making the essential κρίσις our traveller never
did, and to recognize his fate as their ironic warning: a comic
exemplum of the dangers of being carried along by this Euripides
instead.
It is this shift at 25 to the surface level of Doxa, or, rather, to the
phenomenal world of para-Doxa, as the basic philosophical
realm of Aristophanes’ comedy, that explains the difficult lines
at 27–8 (lines which, until now, I have presented as if quite

127
A journey from πυθάνομαι, at 4, to μανθάνω, at 20, see p. 78 n. 92.
128
Of course, this only sharpens the comic attack on Euripides by showing the audience the
insidious effects of his teaching, for a full discussion of which see my conclusion.
129
As Mourelatos (2008) 225–6 writes: ‘The ἔλεγχος [. . .] that the goddess issued to mortal
men in b6 and b7 is that they do not realize that their positive terms could be shown to
make reference to unqualified negation. Her argument in b8 was designed to reveal this
discrepancy [. . .] But [in the Doxa section of the poem . . .] we find the reverse effect –
not unmasking, but concealment.’ This switch in emphasis is paralleled in our prologue
in the shift from our traveller’s theoretical exposition of the Doxa (at 1–24) to his
unwitting exemplification of its comical surface symptoms or effects (at 25–8). See
my p. 78 n. 91, p. 81 n. 99 for the possible play of negative and positive meanings in
ἐοικώς, both ‘likely seeming, apparent, objectively specious’ and ‘fitting, appropriate,
subjectively plausible’.

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unambiguous).130 Yet in order to appreciate fully their double mean-
ing as final ironical signposts (σήματα) designed to signal that we are
now watching two protagonists cognitively astray on the path of
Doxa, we must turn back to Parmenides: as the goddess describes
this fallacious route at b8.51–60 (which is to say, as mortals ‘know-
ing nothing’ (εἰδότες οὐδέν, b6.4) speak of it, for the goddess there
speaks as a mortal), the path of what-is-and-is-not masquerades
under a veneer of positive terms; ‘“Doxa” resembles “Truth”’
(Alētheia), indeed, therein lies its very ‘deceptiveness’, both for
those who would avoid it, and for those already on it.131 Whilst
believing themselves to be on a genuine route of inquiry, ‘mortals
think and speak in terms which obscure or disguise’ from their eyes
the reality that they are hopelessly astray from what-is, steered to
their mistaken route by terms that implicitly bring with them neg-
ation (cf. to be ‘hearing’ [is . . . to be ‘not-seeing’]).132 But to the
‘man who knows’ (εἰδὼς φώς, b1.3), the fact of their mistaken way is
revealed unwittingly; for whilst mortal speech both intends, and
appears (at least to those εἰδότες οὐδέν) to be positive, it is laced
with ambiguity, oxymoron and paradox. Throughout the Doxa,
mortal imagery unwittingly conflates contrary ideas or, in syntax,
turns back on itself, unknowingly giving rise to conflicting mean-
ings, thereby revealing the reality of mortal two-headedness.133
The very first line of Doxa, spoken by the goddess at b8.53, there
describing the first mistake made by mortals (the positing of two
opposite forms), exemplifies this tendency for mortal language to
engender contrary meanings (and thus to be received quite differ-
ently by two different audiences).134 Here, (at b8.53), the syntac-
tical ambiguity of μορφὰς γὰρ κατέθεντο δύο γνώμας
ὀνομάζειν·∣τῶν μίαν οὐ χρεών ἐστιν . . . generates a tension between
the goddess’s surface portrayal of mortal cosmology, that: ‘they

130
These lines have long troubled commentators, see my following discussion, esp. p. 95
n. 139, pp. 96–7 nn. 144, 146, p. 103 n. 164.
131
Mourelatos (2008) 226.
132
Mourelatos (2008) 176–7. See also Curd (1998) 59: ‘What Parmenides will show in b8
is that, despite appearances, mortals turn out to be on the negative path, though they
think they are on the positive route.’
133
Mortal speech is laced with ‘amphilogy’, see Mourelatos (2008) 227–8; Curd (1998)
59–60.
134
This example is taken from Mourelatos (2008) 228–30.

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laid down notions (i.e. they decided) to name two perceptible

forms . . .’, and its deeper reality, a reality quite contrary to this first
image, which yet surfaces through it, in the goddess’s revealing
choice of word order (and γνώμας, pl.): κατέθεντο δύο γνώμας . . .,
‘they were of two minds . . . (i.e. they did not decide) to name
perceptible forms . . .’135 For Parmenides, the question of whether
or not the ironizing effect of this contrary sense is lost or heard
and kept alive differentiates who is listening: distinguishing those
uninitiated mortals (εἰδότες οὐδέν), for whom only the positive
veneer of the first image occurs, from that more exclusive group
travelling with the ‘man who knows’ (εἰδὼς φώς, b1.3), for whom the
goddess’s warning at b8.52 still resounds (a line that ushers in
the Doxa with the instruction specifically to listen for deceit in the
wor(l)d ordering that will follow: δόξας . . . βροτείας | μάνθανε κόσμον
ἐμῶν ἐπέων ἀπατηλὸν ἀκούων, b8.51–2).136 Only these travellers,

135
See Mourelatos (2008) 229–30 for full discussion with parallels. As he has shown, by
saying γνώμας rather than γνώμην and then placing this word in close proximity with
κατέθεντο and δύο, Parmenides ‘achieves a double effect’ (229). He intends that his
hearer or reader should feel a tension between the sense γνώμην κατέθεντο (which
emerges with the pairing of δύο with μορφάς) and γὰρ κατέθεντο δύο γνώμας and detect
the ‘contrary message’ these rival construals generate (229). The notion of a deliberate
syntactical ambiguity here is further supported by Parmenides’ placement of the pivotal
word δύο metrically dead centre. Indeed, the capacity of this ordering of words to
engender contrary meanings at 28b8.53 DK is no better illustrated than by a brief survey
of its scholarly reception. Even the MSS variant reading for γνώμας, the dative γνώμαις,
which itself may have originated from an attempt by ancient readers to reduce the
ambiguity of the line, has done little to curb conflicting construals. Furley (1973) 30,
cf. n. 14, who rejects Mourelatos’ double entendre as ingenious but unconvincing, for
instance, advocates this variant (γνώμαις) in order to read: ‘they set up two forms in their
minds for naming’; cf. Gallop (1984); Curd (1998). But Mourelatos (2008) 230, who, by
contrast, reads γνώμας, gives γνώμαις a precisely opposite sense, proposing that it ‘arose
because [ancient] readers could not resist the suggestion “they were of two minds”’
(engendered by γνώμας) and, therefore, sought to concretize it with the dative γνώμαις:
‘ “they proposed through a double opinion” ’ (original emphasis). This is precisely the
same ambiguity that surrounds γνώμας. Woodbury (1986) 2, who dismisses γνώμαις as
‘not congenial in archaic verse’, reads γνώμας with δύο to give the single sense: ‘for, as
to forms, they came to two decisions (put themselves into two minds) concerning their
meaning’ (30); see Cordero (2004) 156, ‘two viewpoints’. J. Barrett (2004) 282, who
also reads γνώμας, by contrast interprets the line to give a precisely opposite (surface)
meaning, pairing δύο with μορφάς: ‘they decided to name two forms’. I infer from his
n. 53 that he agrees with Mourelatos’ diagnosis of implicit double meaning. My reading
of γνώμας is an attempt to keep the ambiguity of the line fully open; hence I follow
Mourelatos (2008) 228–30.
136
28b8.52 DK is itself ambiguous, see Nehamas (2002) 60 for the reading: ‘From this
point on, learn mortal opinions, coming to know (through listening) the deceptive world
my words concern.’

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thus freshly primed for the ambiguities belying mortal speech, will
bring to the surface the double entendre at b8.53 and appreciate its
exclusive message (i.e. the fundamental two-headedness of mortals);
for all others, this, along with the irony it engenders (an irony, aptly,
itself double, for δύο γνώμας is at once both the unwitting slip of a
mortal tongue and also a knowing wink from the goddess), will be
lost.137
This idea, that for an exclusive audience the negative reality of
mortal confusion manifests itself in the seemingly positive ordering
(κόσμος) of Doxastic language is, I suspect, precisely what our
prologue parodies in dialogue form at 25–8.138 For here, too, first
mortal words similarly reward careful listeners with ironical double
meaning, redirecting those mindful of what has come before (1–24;
cf. b8.53, b8.52) to the paradox at the heart of para-Doxa.
Ευ. Βάδιζε δευρὶ καὶ πρόσεχε τὸν νοῦν. Κη. ἰδού. 25
Ευ. ὁρᾷς τὸ θύριον τοῦτο; Κη. νὴ τὸν Ἡρακλέα
27; 27aðboldÞ οἶμαί γε. Ευ. σίγα νῦν. Κη. σιωπῶ τὸ θύριον. 27b
28a Ευ. ἄκου’. Κη. ἀκούω καὶ σιωπῶ τὸ θύριον.139 28b

Apart from the possibility of hearing two contrary meanings in our

traveller’s colloquial οἶμαί γε at 27 (either [E. . . . see that door?]
‘K. Of course I do . . .’ or ‘K. I think I do [but I’m not entirely

137
See Mourelatos (2008) 227–30; esp. 228 for the double irony here: ‘Mortals practise
amphilogy [double-talk] innocently, and thereby fall into error; the goddess practises
amphilogy with full knowledge, and thereby reveals the truth.’
138
If the preceding parody runs as I have argued, then this makes perfect sense; this pattern
of ironical slips is offered by the goddess explicitly as a paradigm of mortal speech
(cf. 28b8.51–3 DK), and a mortal is what our traveller has just become (25).
139
I use the text endorsed by Austin and Olson (2004) and N. G. Wilson (2007a). Hall and
Geldart (1901), by contrast, construe our traveller’s replies at 27b–28b as deliberative
subjunctives (‘Am I to . . .?’), punctuating these lines with question marks. See Blaydes
(1880); Rogers (1904); Anderson (1913) 44, who cites 27b–28b as part of a wider
discussion of ‘repudiative’ echo-questions in Greek and Roman drama; see also
Marzullo (2003). However, an alternative tradition, at least as old as ΣR, renders 27b–
28b as a series of indicatives: see ΣR ad loc.: Van Leeuwen (1904); Coulon (1928);
Sommerstein (1994); Henderson (2000); Prato (2001); Austin and Olson (2004). That
Gannon (1987) ad 27 (two-headedly) looks to both available precedents in his version of
the text, punctuating 27b with a question mark, but not 28b, just illustrates the fact that
what is at stake in the reading of deliberative subjunctives is a priori interpretation. I
follow the punctuation of Austin and Olson (2004) (rendering 27b–28b as indicatives) in
order to keep the full ambiguities of these lines open and to draw out their comic
polyvalence across double strata of ostensible (i.e. positive) and deeper (i.e. (ultimately)
negative or contradictory) meanings. See my comments at p. 98 n. 150 on the restriction
of meaning effected by punctuating 27b–28b as subjunctives.

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sure . . .]’),140 the pivotal break between ostensible and exclusive

readings of these lines is at our traveller’s misconstrual of σίγα at
27a; it is taken as if transitive with an object (τὸ θύριον), the central
stage door, to which our poet has just directed his, and our,
attention.141 (Ostensibly, this is: ‘E. . . . see that door? K. Of course
I do! E. Be quiet [about it]! K. I’m being quiet about the door . . .’,
26–7, echoed also with ἀκούω at 28b). Indeed, when the lines are
understood in this way, it is perfectly possible to hear little else here
at 26–8b beyond a set of silly affirmations, each one eagerly
echoing, but in truth confounding, the content of our poet’s imper-
atives at 27a–28a (Ευ. σίγα νῦν. Κη. σιωπῶ . . . Ευ. ἄκου’. Κη.
ἀκούω . . .):142
E. Come here and pay attention! K. There. 25
E. Do you see that door? K. By Herakles,
27; 27a of course I do! E. Quiet now! K. I’m being quiet about the door. 27b
28a E. Listen. K. I’m listening [to you] and being quiet about the door.143 28b

The emergence into view of distinct layers of meaning in these

lines hinges upon whether one accepts this ostensible, positive
reading (or some other ἐοικός version of it) and, in effect, follows
our poet’s directions to steer νόος to the world of appearances;144
or, rather, hears the contrary sense of our traveller’s οἶμαί γε at 27

140
See p. 91 n. 125.
141
Cf. Clouds 91–3: Στ. δεῦρό νυν ἀπόβλεπε.∣ὁρᾷς τὸ θύριον τοῦτο καὶ τᾠκίδιον;∣Φε.
ὁρῶ. . . . See Sommerstein (1994) ad loc., whose construal is correct in this detail, but
who otherwise conflates several layers of meaning that should be differentiated. See my
n. 139 above, n. 146 below.
142
For σιωπάω responding to σίγα see Frogs 1134; Lys. 530; E. Hipp. 911.
143
ἄκουε at 28a can of course be read as if taken to be transitive with τὸ θύριον (just as σίγα
has been thought to be a line earlier). Cf. Sommerstein (1994) ad loc. I advocate a
construal as if simply an intransitive imperative at this point in order to illustrate the
positive surface meaning of the line. For the alternative construal, see my discussion,
pp. 109–13.
144
This is implicitly the route taken by all commentators who, by relying only upon habitual
understanding (ἔθος πολύπειρον, 28b7.3 DK) in order to elucidate these lines, ultimately
give in to their own ἀμηχανίη and dismiss our traveller’s words as meaningless: see, for
instance, Rogers (1904) ‘this seems to be simple nonsense . . .’; Sommerstein (1994);
Austin and Olson (2004) all ad loc.: ‘Inlaw – who is eager to cooperate but (as frequently
in this scene) a bit behind the curve . . .’ In terms of the reading strategies active here, the
deliberate oxymoron of Parmenides’ ἔθος πολύπειρον, 28b7.3 DK (‘much-experienced
habit’) seems particularly pertinent. In dramatic terms, part of the comedy at 25 must
play upon the fact that the actual Euripides was notorious for directing the attention of
his audiences to stage doors in order to draw them away from what they might otherwise
see: Arnott (1973).

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(‘I think I do . . .’) and then takes heed of the implicit prompt to re-
examine Euripides’ mortal speech as it is put together by our
echoing traveller (27b–28b, cf. 28a, ἄκουε . . .), to κρῖναι λόγῳ,145
and thus follow the very same words to that which lies concealed
beneath it: paradox(a).146 Indeed, that such a κρίσις is to be made at
this point (26–8b) is signalled by a single joke that suggestively
fractures the positive veneer of what is ostensibly spoken in this
exchange, in order to serve as a σῆμα of the fallacy that was earlier
made explicit in the trials of the ἔλεγχος.147
That joke is the ‘silence’ expressed in the first rendering of our
poet’s words at 27b (a claim echoed to even greater comic effect at
28b): Ευ. σίγα νῦν. Κη. σιωπῶ τὸ θύριον. Ευ. ἄκου’. Κη. ἀκούω καὶ
σιωπῶ . . . (E. ‘Quiet now! K. Shutting up . . . [no “speaking”
here . . . not at all talking . . .] about the door. E. Listen! [i.e.
Shhh!] K. [. . . and now . . .] I’m listening and I’m . . . [blah, blah,
blah . . .]’).148 For those who comprehend what has come before
(1–24), the status of this joke as a σῆμα of the Doxa, a sign added
(ἔθεντο, b8.55) by mortals that recapitulates the dualism at the heart

145
That is, ‘to make distinctions in terms of (this) λόγος’ (28b7.5 DK), see J. Barrett (2004)
274–5; cf. 4, 6, 9. For how this imperative translates to the audience of (this) drama, see
my following discussions, pp. 119–22, 122–44, 144–58.
146
Modern commentators fail to respond in this way to the challenges of the text; they
acknowledge the possibility of a positive and a negative meaning of οἶμαί γε (explicitly,
Rogers (1904); Austin and Olson (2004); implicitly, Sommerstein (1994), all ad loc.;
also Henderson (2000) in trans.), but εἰδότες οὐδέν of the parody that has come before,
they fail to make a firm κρίσις at 25–8 between what-is and what-is-not, thereby mixing
up in their construals of these lines the negative meaning of οἶμαί γε, with the ostensibly
positive meanings of what follows at 27a–28b. (So Sommerstein (1994) trans. ‘E. Do
you see that door? Inlaw. By Heracles I think I do! E. Keep quiet then. Inlaw. I’m
keeping quiet about the door.’) Consequently, just like the mortals of Parmenides’ b6
(who also quite unwittingly advocate an illegimate mix of what-is and what-is-not; cf.
28b6.8–9 DK), modern interpreters remain confused and bewildered as to what our
traveller’s mortal speech at 26–8b genuinely (if unwittingly) says: see p. 96 n. 144,
p. 100 n. 157 for various perplexed responses, and my following discussion for both the
full (negative, or paradox[ast]ical) reality which they fail to see at 27b–28b, as well as
the issue of the exclusive audience that its recognition implies.
147
On σήματα see p. 52 n. 23, pp. 81–2 nn. 100–1, p. 89 n. 117 and my following discussion
(esp. n. 149 below).
148
On my reading, the humour of 27b–28b does not derive from sarcasm, but from irony:
the comedy here is ‘structurally triadic’, situating a speaker, who is oblivious to the
reality of his situation, in between the ironist (Ar.) and his (knowing) audience; and it
directly plays upon the binary distinctions between intention/expression, and ideal/real,
integral to the logic of ironic speech. See Gillooly (1999) xxi–xxii.

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of mortal error,149 is not difficult to see; for here, at 27b, even the
most ostensible humour (this [mis]construal of σίγα) audibly is
inseparable from a conflation of the same sort of contrary opposites
that we have already seen to infect the thought-world of para-
Doxa (cf. those earlier mortal σήματα, hearing and seeing, 7–8;
b8.53–9).150 No less than hearing and seeing, on the implicit logic
of the scene, silence and speech are mutually negating alternatives:
to be silent is to not-speak, and to speak is to be not-silent.151
Hence, to say ‘σιωπῶ τὸ θύριον’, as does our traveller, is not only to
misconstrue (and thus, inevitably confound) exactly what our poet
has called for at 27a (σίγα); it is also (unwittingly) to give voice to
no voice,152 utter words that, simply by virtue of being spoken,
can only turn back on themselves, negate their own (ostensibly
positive) meaning, and signal mortal two-headedness.153

149
See 28b8.53–4 DK, with my discussion, pp. 93–5. As J. Barrett (2004) 286 notes:
‘insofar as the phenomenal world described in the “Doxa” is discursively constituted (as
the goddess in b9 teaches), the semata of b10 [i.e. of the Doxa] prove to be aspects of
mortal discourse’. In contrast to the σήματα of the Alētheia, these σήματα are not already
existent features of the path they mark out but have been added by mortals (ἔθεντο,
28b8.55 DK), see Mourelatos (2008) 250.
150
These comments are strictly limited to our surface reading of σιωπῶ τὸ θύριον. Here,
there may be a construal of σίγα as transitive with τὸ θύριον which does not involve the
enantiomorphic opposition of speech and silence, but on the text that I advocate (see
p. 95 n. 139), there is no joke; for this construal becomes explicit only by being
articulated, which (if we read 27b as an indicative, and as carrying the sense of: ‘I am
silent about the door’) inevitably brings with it all the self-contradictory implications of
speaking of one’s present silence. (Note that this is not true if 27b is read as a deliberative
subjunctive: here our traveller may yet confound the call for silence, but he does not
contradict himself, i.e. this glimpse of mortal error is missed and thus elided (‘Am I to be
silent about the door?’). Nor is it the case if we progress from this surface level of
interpretation to look harder at the linguistic form of 27b, as, I suspect, we are meant to.
See my following discussion.)
151
This is not to make the stronger linguistic claim that λέγω and σιωπάω are antonyms;
strictly speaking, they are not – they are ‘complementaries’ (that is, each one implies the
negation of the other, and, reciprocally, the negation of one implies the affirmation of the
other); see Krischer (1981) 97–9, drawing upon the classification of Lyons (1973) 471,
(1977) 271, (1995) 128. My observation is more simple: that all forms of spoken sound
(e.g. λέγω, φθέγγομαι, βοάω, κλαίω) will, if the issue is pressed, stand in a relationship of
enantiomorphic opposition (or in the linguist’s terms ‘complementarity’) with silence
(σιγάω, σιωπάω). See Pl. Euthd. 300b5–8.
152
Cf. E. Ph. 960: . . . τί σιγᾷς γῆρυν ἄφθογγον σχάσας;
153
See Lyons (1977) 781 on analogous logical paradoxes engendered by performative
utterances which have the property of ‘token-reflexivity’ (e.g. the famous liar paradox,
‘What I am saying now is false’, said to have finished off Philetas of Cos). On its surface
construal, the same tension between the illocutionary act and the sentence that is uttered
gives σιωπῶ τὸ θύριον at 27b the force of an oxymoron. It is thus a comic enactment of

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Those with no grasp of our parody may, of course, appreciate the
humour of this joke just as readily as those able to see its wider
(para-Doxastical) reference; but for this audience, who hear only as
does this comic Euripides, there is no recognition of the speaking
silence at 27b as a σῆμα of para-Doxa. What is bound up in that
recognition is not simply laughing (again) at the absurdity of
(mortal) self-contradiction, or even identifying it as akin to the
earlier absurdities of our poet’s backward-turning accounts of
hearing and seeing (7–24). Rather, recognizing a σῆμα of the
Doxa implies heeding its implicit invitation to reflect upon it as
an artefact of mortal speech, that is, to consider its ambiguous
words, and its syntactical possibilities, and thus draw out from its
linguistic form an otherwise hidden meaning.154 Just like the listen-
ers of b8.53, only those able to respond in this way to the ostensible
joke at 27b (i.e. to hear the misconstrual of σίγα; to see the σῆμα of
being and not-being silent; and be guided by it to re-examine
both)155 will find it eclipsed by an implicit double meaning. And
only they, in turn, will finally appreciate the incipient paradox(a)
enacted through this exclusive sense a line later, at 28b, and
thereby recognize the full (comical) reality of mortal error. (As
we shall see.)
To this extent, fully transcending what seems to be played out in
the para-Doxa at 25–8 hinges upon applying νόος to ‘reading’

the semantic oxymorons of mortal speech discussed by Mourelatos (2008) 235–40, esp.
240 n. 56 citing: ἔργα [. . .] περίφοιτα (‘wandering works’) 28b10.4 DK; μέγ’ ἐλαφρόν
(‘greatly slight’) 28b8.57 DK; and esp. ἄγουσ’ ἐπέδησεν (‘driving she shackled’)
28b10.6 DK. See Krischer (1981) 100 for σιωπάω as implying willing, positive action
as opposed to σιγάω which does not.
154
The Hesiodic image of the σῆμα set up at Pytho by Zeus to serve as both a sign and a
wonder (θαῦμα) to men is pertinent here, see Hes. Th. 498–500 (cited by Lesher (1984)
28 n. 38). In analogous terms, as J. Barrett (2004) 275–7 has argued, in Parmenides
verbal σήματα both indicate a meaning and also themselves constitute part of that
meaning, seizing their listeners’ attention and demanding that they ponder their (lin-
guistic) content: ‘[their] . . . significance [. . .] is precisely the challenge they present in
understanding how they operate’ (277). Similarly, as I have shown, understanding the
σήματα of para-Doxa in our prologue, and appreciating the sophisticated parody they
help to enact, also necessitates this: treating seriously the syntactical and semantic
challenges of their difficult linguistic forms. See p. 52 n. 23, p. 98 n. 149 for σήματα
as artefacts of mortal speech; and (with Parm. 28b.8.55–6 DK) pp. 77–87 for the
Euripidean formulation of the nature of hearing and seeing (interrogated by our
Parmenidean interlocutor) as prime examples of such σήματα.
155
This capacity to identify and then to allow oneself to be guided by a σῆμα is a character-
istic of the correct exercise of νόος. Lesher (1984) 27; Nagy (1983), (1990) 202–22.

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σιωπῶ τὸ θύριον against the force of the customary or familiar

construals from which its ἐοικóς meaning derives: μηδέ σ’ ἔθος
πολύπειρον ὁδὸν κατὰ τήνδε βιάσθω,∣. . . κρῖναι δὲ λόγῳ . . .
(b.7.3–5).156 By contrast, those listeners who are not guided by
this comic σῆμα to κρῖναι λόγῳ will remain caught up in habits of
thinking and speaking that simply direct νόος to what is Doxastically
‘fitting’ (ἐοικóς). Guided in this way, only by conventional beliefs
(doxai), this group will see a single answer as to how and what the
words spoken at 27b must mean: they will be likely to hear only ‘I’m
being silent about the door’, or ‘I’m keeping silence on [the subject
of] . . .’, and they will take that construal (and its unwitting joke; our
unrecognized σῆμα) as the basis for their understanding both of the
misconstrual of σίγα (E. ‘Be silent now [about . . .]’, 27a) and of the
comic dénouement yet to come (‘I’m listening and being silent
about . . .’, 28b; effectively the same joke, louder).157

156
The goddess’s warning against customary ways of thinking and speaking at 28b7.3–5
DK concerns all mortal formulations that implicitly bring with them what-is-not: most
explicitly, speaking of changes, the coming-into-being and the passing away of things.
157
For the common pattern of verbs of silence taking external, direct objects, see Smyth
§1557 on σιωπᾶν τι (‘to be silent about something’). This sort of ostensible construal is
considered the only one possible at 27b–28b by most commentators, and endorsed with
comment by Sommerstein (1994); Austin and Olson (2004) both ad loc.; and in trans-
lation by Henderson (2000). Note that in Parmenides it is precisely this sort of reliance
on the familiar that prevents mortals from seeing through Doxa. As J. Barrett (2004) 287
writes: ‘just as the phenomenal world described in the “Doxa” appears plausible and
familiar to conventional thought, so the kind of “naming” [i.e. language use] it displays
may pass as entirely unremarkable to the unsuspecting. The lessons of the poem’s
second part lie substantially in what seems unremarkable about it.’ See 280 on
28b7.3–5 DK, where ‘the failing of mortals is the result of their adherence to conven-
tional thinking’ and Mourelatos (2008) 194–204 on Doxa as ‘acceptance’, that is, an
uncritical dependence on conventional thinking. The scholiast’s suggestion on 27b, by
contrast, is to supply a preposition: λείπει ἡ “διά”, οἷον “σιωπῶ διὰ τὸ θύριον” (ΣR ad
27b), this διά thereby echoing διά in 19: διὰ τὴν χοάνην οὖν. . ., ‘so it’s because of this
funnel . . .?!’ (‘I am being silent because of the door’). For the causative force of διά, see
Luraghi (1994). This emendation is rightly rejected by Rogers (1904) ad loc., who, in
translation at least, offers another construal of the line (‘Be silent the wicket?’) but who,
in terms of the philosophical challenge cast out to the audience by it, ultimately adopts a
parallel position to the scholiast, allying himself with an audience of confused and
uncritical listeners: ‘this seems to be simple nonsense . . .’ (where, unbeknownst to this
critic, ‘seems to be’ is precisely the point: see 28b1.31–2 DK on τὰ δοκοῦντα, with
Mourelatos (2008) 204; Curd (1998) 22). For similar construals of 27b to that given by
Rogers, offered independently and without discussion, see Dickinson (1970), Slavitt
(1998) (in rather more impressionistic translations), and lastly, Montiglio (2000) 169 (in
the course of a general treatment of silence in drama), with my p. 103 n. 164, p. 112
n. 185.

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Yet those not compelled by habit to accept τὰ δοκοῦντα (‘things
as mortals deem them to be’,158 b1.31–2) at 27b, will come to
construe an amphiboly; for whilst our traveller means to say ‘I’m
being silent about the door’ (the usual transitive usage of the verb),
to the ‘man who knows’ (εἰδὼς φώς, b1.3), his words also have the
potential to resound quite differently, unwittingly effecting another
(transitive) meaning: ‘I’m making the door itself (be) silent.’ Now,
this alternative construal of σιωπῶ τὸ θύριον is recherché, to be
sure, yet it is precisely this art of ‘(re-)reading’ the syntax of the
σῆμα at 27b(–28b) that differentiates our exclusive audience from
those ἄκριτα φῦλα (b6.7) who settle for what is ἐοικός; that is, it is
meant to involve some (ostensible) difficulty.159 Nevertheless, as
this idea is enacted at 27b–28b, recognizing these words as amphib-
olous is clearly not that difficult: for syntactically equivalent uses of
verbs of sound with objects that are consequently ‘made to clash’ or
‘to ring out’ appear in Greek poetry as early as Hesiod (where they
are equally irregular, yet understood).160 At least for the most gen-
eral of these verbs, ψοφέω, this unusual way of relating verb and
object actually gains currency on the later comic stage, as linguistic
conventions change over time. Here, our veiled transitive syntax
(‘I’m making the door . . .’), still very much only a (secondary)

158
Or ‘things which mortals deem acceptable’: Mourelatos (2008) 204.
159
See J. Barrett (2004) 268–70. More generally, we might compare the recipe for mortal
speech assembled by Mourelatos (2008) 260: ‘(a) Speak in the manner which is directly
intelligible to ordinary mortals. (b) Speak in a way that indicates the felt attractiveness of
what-is. (c) Also choose words that point toward what-is-not. (d) Choose words that
have a familiar-but-incoherent and an unfamiliar-but-illuminating meaning. (e) Choose
words that are equivocal even at the ordinary level. (f) Speak as an ironist, so as to give
the lie to the mortals’ own beliefs.’ (For ‘. . . but-illuminating’, see my following
discussion). As our play enacts these ideas, I suspect our ‘unfamiliar’ syntactical
construal (sc. ‘I’m making . . .’) may have recommended itself to a late fifth-century
audience far more readily than I have been able to suggest – especially at an implicit
second prompting and heard with ears now freshly attuned (28a, ἄκουε . . .).
160
For instance, κτυπέω, ἄχω, ψοφέω, all occur with an accusative of the sound-producing
object. Cf. Hesiod’s use of κτυπέω at Sc. 61–2: χθόνα δ’ ἔκτυπον ὠκέες ἵπποι∣νύσσοντες
χηλῇσι (‘the swift horses caused the earth to ring out with their sharp hooves’), and the
hapax legomenon of Theocritus’ later parallel use of ἄχω at 2.36 (cited by Bader (1971)
43): τὸ χαλκέον ὡς τάχος ἄχει (‘quick the bronze clashes’); see Gow (1950) ad loc., who
also cites uses of παταγέω. In these cases, the accusative is not taken as limiting or
qualifying the verbal action (as in our ἐοικóς reading of 27b); rather, it is taken to be
performing it (even if caused to do so by an external agent). Hence the construction
seems to nuance the evocation of an audible event so as specifically to emphasize the
sonority of the affected object.

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possibility at 27b–28b, openly surfaces as a usual means of describ-

ing the sound of the stage door: consider, for instance, τὴν
θύραν∣ψοφοῦσιν at Men. Dysk. 689–90.161 In fact, by the heyday
of New Comedy, ψοφέω (still then ordinarily meaning ‘to resound’
or ‘to yield a sound’) is so regularly seen in this (ostensibly odd)
syntax that it appears to have taken on precisely our second transitive
meaning: ‘to make . . .? . . . resound’.162 (Thus, Menander’s τὴν
θύραν∣ψοφοῦσιν is not ‘they’re making noise at the door’, but rather,
‘they’re causing the door itself to make noise’).163
It is essentially the same way of relating verb and object under-
lying that idiom (and other poetic examples like it) which, I
suspect, permits σιωπῶ τὸ θύριον at 27b–28b to effect its incipient
double meaning:
1. τὴν θύραν ψοφοῦσιν (unconstrued: ‘They’re making sound . . . the door’)
‘They’re causing the door to make noise.’

161
See Bader (1971) 36–7. ψοφέω is not found in this syntactical construction in Ar., nor is
the verb used in Old Comedy of the stage door (even the noun is applied to the door only
twice, cf. Knights 1326, Frogs 604). On the diachronic and synchronic relationship(s)
between Old and New Comedy (a distinction meaningless to its fifth- and fourth-century
audiences), see Csapo (2000). A preliminary study of patterns of linguistic change
between Ar. and Menander is offered by Willi (2003b).
162
In transitive constructions the verb is found in two sorts of syntax. The first and more
usual usage, in which the object describes the sound, is: (ἡ χαλκὶς) ψοφεῖ οἷον συριγμόν,
Arist. HA 535b19 (‘The chalkis [an unknown species of bird] makes a noise like a pipe’);
the second is τὴν θύραν ψοφεῖ τις ἐξιών, Men. Perik. 126 (‘Someone coming out is
causing the door to make noise’), both cited by Bader (1971) 43, 35; Frost (1988) 6–7.
163
Further examples of this transitive use of ψοφέω from Menander, see Bader (1971) 35–6,
44. If this second transitive sense of the verb derives originally from a comic idiom, note
that its currency grows well beyond this; it is also attested in first-century bc emanci-
pation documents from Delphi (where ψοφεῖν is used as a substitute for μαστιγοῦν), see
Bader (1971) 43; see also Frost (1988) 6–7. Bader (1971) 43 explains the alternative
transitive meaning of ψοφεῖν as the result of a ‘development of a transitive meaning of an
intransitive verb’, citing Schwyzer and Debrunner (1950) ii.1 72. The reminder of
Gildersleeve (1902) 125, that the distinction between transitive and intransitive is
‘from a higher point of view [. . .] futile’, and all that essentially matters is ‘habits’,
seems especially pertinent here, where the danger of relying upon ‘habitual’ or ‘conven-
tional’ understanding is precisely what is at issue; see p. 96 n. 144. In dramatic terms the
function of the idiom is to break the character’s direct address to the audience and direct
attention toward an entrance from which an as yet unseen player will eventually emerge.
(Note that this irregular syntax, which nuances the noise so that the object visible to the
audience is emphasized as sound-producing, would seem to fit nicely with this theatrical
convention, presumably heightening the mystery of what or who waits off-stage. I
suspect that the currency of the idiom also owes something to the comic personification
of the stage door.) Finally, it is only the linguistic element that is new here; the theatrical
convention certainly is not, e.g. E. Hel. 859–60; Ion 515.

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2. σιωπῶ τὸ θύριον (unconstrued: ‘I’m silent . . . the door’)
ostensibly, as is ἐοικóς: ‘I’m being silent about the door’,
but also, for ὁ εἰδὼς φώς: ‘I’m causing the door to be silent.’164

Yet, by far our best illustration of the possibility that a deeper

syntactical reading of this sort could be heard and exploited in
(syntactically equivalent) expressions of silence is to be found
amidst the parodies of late fifth-century eristical topoi offered by
Plato in the Euthydemus, a text significantly composed with
Aristophanic sophistic caricatures in mind.165 In fact, Plato’s
comic portrayal of the eristic protagonists of that dialogue wres-
tling (each other) with the sophism of σιγῶντα λέγειν provides us
both with a clear dialogical exposition of the double meaning

164
Cf. Rogers’ (1904) ‘Be silent the wicket?’, Dickinson’s (1970) ‘Silence the door?’, and
Slavitt’s (1998) ‘You want the gate to be still?’; all of these (without comment) try to
some extent to suggest the transfer of the action of the verb over to its object; cf.
Montiglio (2000) 169, ‘Shall I keep silence on the door?’, with my p. 95 n. 139, p. 98
n. 150 on the error of construing this line as a deliberative subjunctive.
165
For Plato’s Aristophanic models in the Euthd., the dialogue ‘probably richest in allusions
to Aristophanes’: Hawtrey (1981) 34, see esp. n. 21, listing allusions to Clouds (Clouds
439–42 and 453f., Euthd. 285c–d; Clouds 143, Euthd. 277e; Clouds 254, Euthd. 277d);
H. Tarrant (1991) 162–6 (Clouds). Note also the likely allusion to our Th. and Agathon’s
theory of mimēsis (Th. 149–50, 168–70) at Euthd. 284d, again, Hawtrey (1981) ad loc.
Several of the fallacies of equivocation portrayed by Plato in the Euthd. represent the
reuse of well-attested fifth-century literary or dialectical topoi, see Sprague (1967),
(1968); Ausland (2000) 25. Aristotle’s later codification of σιγῶντα λέγειν affirms the
earlier currency of this amphiboly, see SE 166a12, 171a7, 177a22; Schreiber (2003) 26–
8. He is almost certainly working from the Euthd., to be sure (cf. Bolton (1993) 121 n. 1;
Robinson (1953) 22), but he knows a range of other texts also (perhaps even the book
possibly written by Euthydemus himself; see SE 177b12–13, Rh. 1401a27; also my p. 30
n. 7; cf. Praechter (1932) 122–7 and Wilamowitz-Moellendorf (1919) 155–6, for Plato’s
possible use of such a text). The idea of a late fifth-century sophistic interest in the
syntactical possibilities of σιγάω and σιωπάω as parodied by Ar., then explicated in
dialogue by Plato, and then catalogued by Aristotle, is compatible with the historical
trajectory of other literary/philosophical motifs (where, crudely put, Plato is to Ar. and
earlier sophistic writings, what Aristotle is to Plato). Cf. Ausland (2000) 25 on the
recurring trope of opsimathēs, a motif used by Plato in the Euthd. (and elsewhere in the
dialogues), but also found earlier, in Clouds, and later, in Thphr.’s Char.: ‘Theophrastus’
characterological treatment [sc. of that topos] bears a relation to Ar.’s comic and Plato’s
dialogical uses of the type analogous to that of Aristotle’s systematic classification of
fallacies in the SE to their earlier appearances in the Dissoi Logoi and in Plato.’ For
suggestive parallelism implying that the Euthd.’s comic plays on silence represent a
development of Ar.’s in Th., see my p. 108 n. 176, and for further evidence that Plato
knows our prologue, see p. 128 n. 230, p. 141 n. 259, p. 181 n. 72 and the intertextuality
discussed earlier between Ar.’s portrayal of Euripides in our Th. and Plato’s portrayal of
Socrates in the Smp., pp. 63–6.

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I have sought to explicate and a philosophical dramatization of it in

the early 410s.166
We enter the Euthydemus at 300b in the midst of the third and
final eristic display of those Eleatic operators, Euthydemus and
Dionysodorus – just, in fact, as Euthydemus finds himself toppled
by Ctesippus, a fast-learning newcomer to eristic. Revelling in his
victory, the younger man derides his defeated elder for speaking yet
saying nothing (λέγοντα μηδὲν λέγειν, 300a8; thereby joking that he
is both speaking and not-speaking). It is left to Dionysodorus to
meet this mockery with a counter-attack, this one designed to
entrap Ctesippus in his own joke by shaping from his words a
new pair of trigger questions, 300b1–3:167
Ἦ γὰρ οὐχ οἷόν τ’, ἔφη ὁ Διονυσόδωρος, σιγῶντα λέγειν; 300b1
‘Why’, asked Dionysodorus, ‘may there not be a speaking of the silent?’
Οὐδ’ ὁπωστιοῦν, ἦ δ’ ὃς ὁ Κτήσιππος.
‘By no means whatever’, replied Ctesippus.
Ἆρ’ οὐδὲ λέγοντα σιγᾶν;
‘Nor a silence of the speaking?’
Ἔτι ἧττον, ἔφη. 300b3
‘Still less’, he said.

At the heart of this new attack is a twofold play on syntax. Here, by

exploiting the capacity of σιγῶντα and λέγοντα to serve either as
the subjects or as the objects of their respective infinitives,
Dionysodorus creates a pair of amphibolies and, thereby, readies
a trap certain to ensnare a hasty opponent. For whilst his οἷόν τε . . .
σιγῶντα λέγειν; (at 300b1) ostensibly asks ‘is it possible for what
is silent (σιγῶντα) to speak (λέγειν)?’, it can also be construed as
‘is it possible to speak (λέγειν) about what is silent (σιγῶντα)?’;
while, for its part, the question that (οἷόν τε . . .) λέγοντα σιγᾶν;

166
The irony is that precisely because such alternative transitive interpretations draw out
unusual meaning from usual syntax for verbs of silence, they are not necessarily made
explicit by modern commentators.
167
My general exegesis is indebted to the reading of Chance (1992) 170–3. Like him, I treat
σιγῶντα λέγειν and λέγοντα σιγᾶν as converse parts of the same sophism; see Hawtrey
(1981) ad loc.

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 o n w h at - [ it ] -is
(at 300b1–2) ostensibly puts, ‘is it possible for what speaks (λέγοντα)
to be silent (σιγᾶν)?’, can also be taken to be ‘is it possible to be silent
(σιγᾶν) about what speaks (λέγοντα)?’168
His trap set, by 300b3, then, Dionysodorus has successfully
elicited two firm denials from Ctesippus on what οἷόν τε . . .
σιγῶντα λέγειν and λέγοντα σιγᾶν ostensibly say (sc. respectively,
is it possible for what is silent to speak, and for what speaks to be
silent? (which it isn’t . . .)).169 The brothers’ tactic in what follows
will therefore be to manoeuvre the young man into affirming what
each amphiboly alternatively says (sc. respectively, is it possible to
speak of what is silent, and to be silent about what speaks? (which it
is . . .)).170 If they are able to do this, then they will have made
Ctesippus seem to be endorsing what he has just denied, since, in
either case, what he will have heard differently in terms of meaning
will have been identical in terms of words.171
Dionysodorus leads, attempting to clinch a swift victory by
imagining a scenario against which Ctesippus’ first denial (sc. of
οἷόν τε . . . σιγῶντα λέγειν; . . ., 300b1–2) must assuredly fall:
Ὅταν οὖν λίθους λέγῃς καὶ ξύλα καὶ σιδήρια, οὐ σιγῶντα λέγεις; 300b3–4
‘But whenever you speak of stones and timbers and irons, aren’t you speaking of
what is silent?’
Οὔκουν, εἴ γε ἐγώ, ἔφη, παρέρχομαι ἐν τοῖς χαλκείοις, ἀλλὰ φθεγγόμενα καὶ βοῶντα
μέγιστον τὰ σιδήρια λέγεται, ἐάν τις ἅψηται· ὥστε τοῦτο μὲν ὑπὸ σοφίας ἔλαθες
οὐδὲν εἰπών. ἀλλ’ ἔτι μοι τὸ ἕτερον ἐπιδείξατον, ὅπως αὖ ἔστι λέγοντα σιγᾶν.
‘Certainly not, he [sc. Ctesippus] said, if I’m walking by the blacksmiths’ shops,
for there, irons are said to speak and cry out most loudly if anyone handles them;
so here your cleverness has made you fail to realize that you’ve said nothing. But
come, you have still to demonstrate to me your second point, how on the other
hand there may be a silence of the speaking.’

168
See Chance (1992) 171; Hawtrey (1981) ad 300c2ff.; cf. Arist. SE 166a12–15.
169
This amounts to Ctesippus treating the participles as the subjects, rather than the objects,
of their respective infinitives, see Chance (1992) 171.
170
Only the appearance of contradiction is necessary to score a victory in a bout of eristic, see
Arist. SE 165a. Note that the strategy pursued here of presenting an amphibolous question,
allowing one’s opponent to commit to one reading, then setting out to dupe him into
affirming the other in order to stage a reductio ad absurdum is precisely the technique
parodied in the earlier dialogue of our prologue, see my earlier exegesis, esp. p. 28 n. 1.
171
Chance (1992) 171.

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Confronting Ctesippus with a host of inanimate objects, stones,

timbers and irons, about which one might easily speak,
Dionysodorus deals his opponent a knock-out blow. Or rather, he
appears to . . . (300b3–4). For the young man sidesteps, and, by
exploiting the everyday capacity of φθέγμα to denote both the
sounds of articulate speech as well as simply noise, he parries
this first attack with a scenario of his own – one in which iron is
not silent but is said to speak (300b4–6). Then, having successfully
evaded self-contradiction on the first limb of this argument-pair
(σιγῶντα λέγειν), he calls for an epideixis of the second (λέγοντα
σιγᾶν). Now, Euthydemus steps up:
Ὅταν σιγᾷς, ἔφη ὁ Εὐθύδημος, οὐ πάντα σιγᾷς; 300c2
(a) ‘Whenever you are silent,’ Euthydemus said, ‘are you not being silent about all
things?’
Ἔγωγε, ἦ δ’ ὅς.
‘Yes indeed I am,’ he said.
Οὐκοῦν καὶ τὰ λέγοντα σιγᾷς, εἴπερ τῶν ἁπάντων ἐστὶν [τὰ λέγοντα].172
(b) ‘So then you are being silent about speaking things, if things that speak are to
be included among all things.’
Τί δέ; ἔφη ὁ Κτήσιππος, οὐ σιγᾷ πάντα;173
(c) ‘What?!’, Ctesippus said, ‘Aren’t all things silent?’
Οὐ δήπου, ἔφη ὁ Εὐθύδημος. 300c5
‘Apparently not,’ said Euthydemus.

172
Reading Stephanus’ τὰ λέγοντα at 300c4 in place of the MS’s τὰ λεγόμενα, which,
according to Hawtrey (1981) ad 300c4, is ‘undoubtedly wrong’ and deleted as such by
Schanz. Cf. Chance (1992) 172; Levenson (1999) 133.
173
Reading Ctesippus’ ‘τί δέ’ as not simply marking a break away from the preceding
exchange or the introduction of a new topic as it is taken by Hawtrey (1981) ad 300c4
(‘Ctesippus diverts the argument’) and Chance (1992) 172, translating: ‘But what about
this? . . .’; such a construal is apposite when ‘τί δέ’ precedes a new question asked in the
midst of a series of questions put by the same speaker, as, for instance, at Pl. Gorg.
497d6–498b4, cited by Sicking (1997) 169, or Euthd. 279e4–6, 280a2, c3; but this is not
the case here. Rather, Ctesippus’ ‘τί δέ’ marks a reaction to what has been said that
invites its speaker to provide further explanation, thereby setting him up for the new
eristical question chain that follows at 300c5ff., see my p. 108 n. 176, and cf. Lamb
(1924) in trans.; aptly, surprise and incredulity (which we might well imagine Ctesippus
feigning at this point) are often concomitants to this usage, see Sicking (1997) 169–71.

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Euthydemus’ gambit is twofold: first, he secures agreement from

Ctesippus that, when he is silent, he is silent about ‘all things’
(πάντα) (a); then, slyly, he smuggles ‘speaking things’ into the
dispute as part of that category (b). The ploy is effective: the young
man seems to be teetering on the brink of affirming what, in word,
he has just denied: he is silent about what speaks (τὰ λέγοντα σιγᾷς;
cf. λέγοντα σιγᾶν, at 300b1–3, as before, still fresh). Yet just at the
point at which Euthydemus’ victory seems assured, Ctesippus
seizes the initiative, exploiting a latent ambiguity in his adversary’s
trigger question (at (a)), so as, effectively, to disqualify what he
has proposed next (b) and thus deliver himself safely from the jaws
of the sophist’s trap. For whilst the scenario that Euthydemus has
offered at (a) is, ostensibly, one of a subject (Ctesippus) being silent
about all things (οὐ πάντα σιγᾷς;), i.e. not-speaking about
anything . . ., his words can also describe quite another: a subject
who, by being silent, is making all things silent.174 It is this
possibility that Ctesippus capitalizes upon in his reply at
(c): ‘What?! Aren’t all things silent?!’ (Τί δέ; . . ., there answering
(b); but οὐ σιγᾷ πάντα; referring back to οὐ πάντα σιγᾷς; at
174
See Chance (1992) 172–3, who does not comment on the syntactical ambiguity
exploited by Ctesippus here, despite this being the only logical connective between
his counter-attack at 300c4, ‘Hang on! I thought all things are silent?’, and what has been
agreed before (‘When you are silent, you are being silent about all things / . . . making all
things silent’). The ambiguity is recognized, however, by Levenson (1999) 133–4, who
reads it not as latent but as already active and first exploited by Euthydemus in his trigger
question: ‘Panta sigas [sic] means, “you are silent concerning all things.” Panta sigas
also and equally means, “you cause all things to be silent.” Suppose, then, that thunder
crashes, or swords clash, or there is music, shouting, and laughter. Suppose that we,
hearing these things, preserve a silence concerning them. We then have panta sigas in
the sense that we ourselves are silent. But suddenly there occurs the subject – object
transposition to which the brothers, with their joke, call attention. We are silent in the
face of that which sounds, and then suddenly our silence encloses that which sounds,
pervades that which sounds. Thunder crashes, swords clash, the laughter swells to a
maximum, but all are enclosed within spheres of silence . . .’ It is interesting to note how
modern translators tip-toe around this double-meaning, evoking something of the
possibility of a syntactical ambiguity in (ὅταν σιγᾷς . . .) οὐ πάντα σιγᾷς; at 300c2, but
failing to draw out the implicit sense open to be exploited by a listener such as Ctesippus:
compare Chance (1992) 172: ‘Whenever you are silent . . . aren’t you silent on all
things?’; Lamb (1924): ‘When you are silent . . . are you not making a silence of all
things?’; both of these are more sensitive than Hawtrey (1981) 172: ‘you are silent, when
you are silent, about everything . . .’ or Sprague (1965): ‘. . . are you not silent with
respect to all things?’ (both of which, on the reading advocated here, are entirely correct
accounts of what Euthydemus means to say but fail to allow for what an eristic like
Ctesippus might be able to do with what he actually does say).

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(a)).175 On this implicit construal, if (a) is true, then the knock-out

blow at (b) cannot be: for if, by being silent himself, Ctesippus is
inadvertently making ‘all things’ (about which he is not-speaking)
silent (a), then how can ‘all things’ (which are silent) possibly
include speaking things (which are not) . . . (b) . . .?!176

175
Sprague (1965) reads this line: ‘What,’ said Ctesippus, ‘all things are not silent, are
they?’ and consequently finds it difficult to explain: see 54 n. 94 ‘Ctesippus’ objection is
not very clear’.
176
Chance (1992) 172–3. Ctesippus’ ploy reactivates the idea that silent things and speak-
ing things necessarily exclude one another, as the next lines illustrate. For now forced to
deny that ‘all things’ are silent (so as not to contradict his claim at (b) that speaking
things form part of them), Euthydemus is promptly manoeuvred onto the other horn (sc.
if ‘all things’ are not silent, ‘all things’ must then speak):
Τί δέ; ἔφη ὁ Κτήσιππος, οὐ σιγᾷ πάντα;
Οὐ δήπου, ἔφη ὁ Εὐθύδημος.
Ἀλλ’ ἄρα, ὦ βέλτιστε, λέγει τὰ πάντα; 300c5–6
Euthydemus is in an equally nasty bind: if 300c6 is true, then Ctesippus (being clearly
part of ‘all things’ himself) cannot have been silent about anything in the first place; the
older sophist’s trigger question (a) is disqualified too! Euthydemus’ only way forward
now is to qualify his answer (300c6), but, by so doing he falls foul of the law of the
excluded middle (300c6–7) and thus, finally, goes down in defeat (300d1):
Τά γε δήπου λέγοντα. 300c6
Ἀλλά, ἦ δ’ ὅς, οὐ τοῦτο ἐρωτῶ, ἀλλὰ τὰ πάντα σιγᾷ ἢ λέγει;
Οὐδέτερα καὶ ἀμφότερα, ἔφη ὑφαρπάσας ὁ Διονυσόδωρος· 300d1
εὖ γὰρ οἶδα ὅτι τῇ ἀποκρίσει οὐχ ἕξεις ὅτι χρῇ.
Καὶ ὁ Κτήσιππος, ὥσπερ εἰώθει, μέγα πάνυ ἀνακαγχάσας,
Ὦ Εὐθύδημε, ἔφη, ὁ ἀδελφός σου ἐξημφοτέρικεν τὸν λόγον,
καὶ ἀπόλωλέ τε καὶ ἥττηται. Καὶ ὁ Κλεινίας πάνυ ἥσθη καὶ ἐγέλασεν, . . .
See Chance (1992) 173 for an exegesis, and Levenson (1999) 135–6 for the insight
that Dionysodorus’ interjection οὐδέτερα καὶ ἀμφότερα ‘neither and both’ is not simply a
sign of defeat but also means what it says: ‘all things are silent and all things speak – at
one at the same time’. As Levenson argues, within the frame of Plato’s wider drama-
tization of the sophist brothers as practitioners of Corybantic mystic initiation and
‘disclosers of an ecstatic vision of being’ to their audiences (a role made explicit at
277d, see Chance (1992) 48–9, with the criticisms of Levenson (1999) 72 n. 13,
quotation: p. 13), Dionysodorus’ paradoxical interjection enacts a climactic Dionysian
(but ultimately Parmenidean) revelatory experience, a moment of ‘mystical ecstasy
where silence and sound (or being and non-being) at last prove to be one’ (136).
Indeed, in addition to its content (which collapses opposites), note the sudden, epiph-
anic, nature of Dionysodorus’ interruption, and the obvious new salience of his name;
but most significantly, as Levenson (1999) 136 points out, it is only now, at this moment
of the dialogue, that we encounter the Forms, objects of knowledge that meet
Parmenides’ criteria for what-is. See 300e–301c, with Chance (1992) 178, where, in
the next argument chain, Socrates’ answer to the question of whether the beautiful is the
same as or different from beautiful things, which exploits the notion of presence
(παρουσία) to mediate between the brother’s new antinomies, in so many words echoes
Dionysodorus’ revelation here (οὐδέτερα καὶ ἀμφότερα): beautiful things are ‘different
from the beautiful itself, though there is some beauty present (πάρεστιν) with them’

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 o n w h at - [ it ] -is
Here, then, deployed in Plato’s parody of late fifth-century
eristical practice, is the alternative syntactical reading which,
I have argued, is similarly exploited by our exclusive audience in
order to draw to the surface the double meaning of σιωπῶ τὸ θύριον
at 27b–28b (‘I’m making the door silent’).177 Yet the genius of
Aristophanes’ use of this amphiboly as the enigma at the heart of
the σῆμα of our prologue (27b) lies in the transformation it effects
in the lines that surround it; for once it is recognized, then the
incipient amphilogy of mortal speech at 27a–28b, too, is suddenly
thrown into relief:
Ευ. Βάδιζε δευρὶ καὶ πρόσεχε τὸν νοῦν. Κη. ἰδού. 25
Ευ. ὁρᾷς τὸ θύριον τοῦτο; Κη. νὴ τὸν Ἡρακλέα
27; 27aðboldÞ οἶμαί γε. Ευ. σίγα νῦν. Κη. σιωπῶ τὸ θύριον. 27b
28a Ευ. ἄκου’. Κη. ἀκούω καὶ σιωπῶ τὸ θύριον. 28b

Ostensibly, or as is ἐοικóς and heard by those ἄκριτα φῦλα, βροτοὶ

εἰδότες οὐδέν:
E. Come here and pay attention! K. There. 25
E. Do you see that door? K. By Herakles, of course I do!
27a E. Quiet now [about the door]! K. I’m being quiet about the door. 27b
28a E. Listen [to me]. K. I’m listening [to you] and being quiet about the door. 28b

Here, working backwards, from 27b (‘K. I’m making . . .’) to the
negative meaning already implicit in our traveller’s οἶμαί γε at 26–7
(‘E. . . . see that door? K. I think I do . . .’), our exclusive audience
will now infer quite a different sense in our poet’s imperative at 27a
from that which is ἐοικóς: for, if taken transitively with τὸ θύριον,

(301a3–4), i.e. they are neither identical to nor other than the beautiful itself. And see
Hawtrey (1981) ad 301b3 for the sophistic Parmenideanism of the brothers’ eristic
reduction of difference to what-is-not simpliciter, and the aporia it induces in the
dialogue that now ensues (Δ. Πῶς γὰρ οὐκ ἀπορῶ, ἔφη, καὶ ἐγὼ καὶ οἱ ἄλλοι ἅπαντες
ἄνθρωποι ὃ μὴ ἔστιν; 301b3–4). The culmination of this section of Plato’s eristic comedy
therefore bears a suggestive resemblance to Ar.’s exploitation of compresent sound and
silence (i.e. hearing and not-hearing) that we find at Th. 27–8, itself prefatory to
Dionysian-Parmenidean revelation, see my following discussion, esp. pp. 122–28 and
for the final comic epiphany that follows, pp. 128–44. Plato’s portrayal of eristics
exploiting the syntactical ambiguity of σιγάω therefore may appropriate and develop
not only Ar.’s earlier comic-mystical syntactical play on σιωπάω in our comic lines,
then, but also the Dionysian-Parmenidean epiphany structure of which it is a part (which,
as we shall see, similarly culminates in an encounter with what-is-not).
177
In what follows I treat σιωπάω as equivalent, in respect of this syntactical behaviour, to
σιγάω; note that these verbs can be used synonymously, see Krischer (1981) 107 on E.
Ion 431–2, Supp. 297–8. See p. 96 n. 142, p. 98 n. 153.

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not only does σίγα νῦν resound ostensibly, as ‘E. Be silent now [ . . .
about the door]’ but it also says ‘E. Silence [it] now! (i.e. Make
the door [be] silent . . .!).’178 (Hence the reply that follows: σιωπῶ
τὸ θύριον, ‘K. I’m making the door silent’, 27b). Similarly, working
forwards (sc. from that reply; our σῆμα at 27b), our traveller’s
next words, at 28b, will no longer appear simply to offer a positive
affirmation of Euripides’ double call for attention, σίγα . . ., ἄκουε
(as those ἄκριτα φῦλα hear it: ‘E. Listen! K. I’m listening [to you]
and being silent about . . .’, 28a–b).179 Rather, the composite
of Euripidean (mortal) speech offered here (sc. at 28b) is now
revealed to harbour an incipient contradiction: ‘K. I’m listening
[to the door] and making it silent’180 (i.e . . . trying to hear and
to make silent the same object (!), which, as we shall shortly see,
is to try to be both hearing (it) and not-hearing (it) at the same
time . . . a new comic dénouement that, I suspect, we are implicitly
enjoined to hear (cf. 28a, ἄκουε . . .)).181
To κρῖναι λόγῳ (i.e. apply the art of making distinctions) at
the amphibolous words of the σῆμα at 27b, then, is to cause these
lines to reveal an implicit reality of mortal two-headedness elided
by those who simply accept what our traveller seems to say
(‘I’m being silent . . .’[sc. (not-)]). Yet in order fully to appreciate
the deeper vein of irony that rewards those who (re-)read our σῆμα
in this way, we must recall the earlier lines of our parody (1–24);
for it is in light of the fallacious reasoning exposed there, in the
trials of the ἔλεγχος, that our exclusive audience reveal the veiled
comedy of the (mortal) words at 25–8. Here, it will pay briefly
to recapitulate the two stages of the path of mortal confusion as it is

178
For comic doors as ‘speaking things’ (φθεγγόμενα), an association clearly necessary if
the act of being silent, i.e. not-speaking, is to be possible, see Wealth 1098–9, and my
following discussion at p. 111 n. 183.
179
Strictly speaking, to take ἄκουε as transitive with τὸ θύριον, as σίγα has been taken earlier
(i.e. ‘I’m listening [to the door] and being silent about it . . .’), at this level of ostensible
meaning (as advocated by Sommerstein (1994) and Austin and Olson (2004) both ad
loc.) is to confuse two layers of meaning which must remain separate (or, in
Parmenidean terms, to conflate what-is and what-is-not). See p. 97 n. 145 explaining
this (mortal) error of interpretation.
180
Now reading ἄκουε as transitive with τὸ θύριον, cf. p. 96 n. 143.
181
Compare the much less funny dénouement enjoyed by those ἄκριτα φῦλα who fail to
recognize our σῆμα, see my discussion, pp. 95–100.

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comically realized in the first thirty or so lines that we have
discussed.182
First, para-Doxa as it was explicated in theory by means of our
traveller’s ἔλεγχος (7–8):
Mortal fallacy, the ἔλεγχος and the thought-world of para-Doxa . . .
. . . where the eye and the ear have been (physically) distinguished (διακρίνω, 13)
as separate (χωρίς) by origin (φύσις) (14–18), and yet where seeing is not-hearing
(7a–7b), and hearing is not-seeing (8a–8b); and where νόος will therefore always
be left wandering, bereft of any genuine objects (my object is to not-hear . . .?! . . .
not-see . . .?!, 7a, 8a) and fated ever to turn back on itself in its search for a
complete account (seeing is not-hearing . . . which is seeing . . . which is not-
hearing . . . which is seeing . . .?!, 7b, 8b).

Second, para-Doxastical reasoning as it is now implicated in prac-

tice, played out in the comic amphilogy of mortal speech (25–8):
Mortal amphilogy, the door seen, and the phenomenal world of para-Doxa . . .
Ευ. Βάδιζε δευρὶ καὶ πρόσεχε τὸν νοῦν. Κη. ἰδού. 25
E. Keep walking, and give me your νόος. K. There!
26a Ευ. ὁρᾷς τὸ θύριον τοῦτο; Κη. νὴ τὸν Ἡρακλέα∣οἶμαί γε. 26b–7
E. You see that door? K. By Herakles,∣I think I do
(sc . . . but I’m not really certain;
‘seeing’, after all, is . . .?! (7a–b))
27a Ευ. σίγα νῦν.
E. Silence [the door] now! (sc. Well, make it silent then, because:
(a) ‘seeing’ [it] is not-hearing [it]! (7a–b)
and . . .
(b) when a speaking thing (φθεγγόμενον), such as that door, is silent, it
will not be heard183

182
For a full structural summary of the paraphilosophy of these lines see Appendices I and
II, pp. 195–8.
183
Ancient doors turned not on hinges, but on two metal pivots housed in metal sockets in
the lintel and the threshold: grating sounds were produced whenever the door swung and
are commonly referred to, see Bader (1971) 41–3. Notably, Parmenides, who offers a
detailed description of the gates of the paths of Night and Day (cf. 28b1.11–20 DK),
evokes the sound of the gates opening by using σύριγγος of the sockets in which they
turn (28b1.19 DK), a term which recalls the shrill sound produced earlier by the spinning
axle of the chariot of the Heliades (ἄξων δ’ ἐν χνοίῃσιν ἵει σύριγγος ἀυτήν, 28b1.6 DK).
For Aristotle, the sound of pivots turning in such sockets was equivalent to the sounds
made by bronze (χαλκός) and iron (σίδηρος) (both are exemplarily σκληρός (‘harsh’) at
Aud. 802b30, 39–42); and it is these very sounds (sc. of iron) that are singled out by
Plato’s Ctesippus as colloquially referred to as ‘speech’ (φθέγμα), see Pl. Euthd.

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and . . .
(c) well, however else does one not-hear something anyway?!).184
Κη. σιωπῶ τὸ θύριον. 27b
K. I’m making the door silent.
28a Ευ. ἄκου’. Κη. ἀκούω καὶ σιωπῶ τὸ θύριον. 28b
E. Listen [to the door] . . . K. I’m listening to the door and making it silent.
(. . . which amounts to trying both to hear and to make silent the same object,
. . . which amounts to both hearing (which is not-seeing)
and not-hearing (which is seeing) at the same time . . . !)185

Here, revealed in the amphilogy of mortal speech, is the full comic

reality of para-Doxa, the comedy missed by the ἄκριτα φῦλα but
implicit throughout; for having heard the absurdity of Euripides’
300a5–8. For an equivalent personification of the metallic grinding or creaking of the
door as its φθέγμα see Wealth 1098–9, where the idiom is extended to a evoke a whining
fit (κλαυσίαω) (text Wilson):
ΚΑΡΙΩΝ
τίς ἔσθ’ ὁ κόπτων τὴν θύραν; τουτὶ τί ἦν;
οὐδείς, ἔοικεν· ἀλλὰ δῆτα τὸ θύριον 1098
φθεγγόμενον ἄλλως κλαυσιᾷ;
See Taillardat (1965) §9 cf. §272. For κλαυσιάω here we should read ‘suffers a whining
fit’ rather than ‘wants to weep’, i.e. ‘is asking for a beating’, as advocated by LSJ;
Sommerstein (2001); Henderson (2002), see Green (1892); Holzinger (1940) both ad
loc.; and Willi (2003a) 85, on verbs in –αίω. Such was the noisiness of ancient doors that
making a discreet exit required some forethought: certainly, for those stealing out at
night for some clandestine fun, silencing the courtyard or house door (by pouring water
in the sockets, a solution possible only from the inside) was a prerequisite, see Th. 487;
to get in quietly apparently required more muscles; Lucian, DMeretr. 12.3, Bader (1971)
43. Finally, for the enantiomorphic relationship that holds between σιωπάω and
φθέγγομαι, see Arist. HA 535a 20–1, where σιωπάω is explicitly presented as the
negation of φθέγγομαι and is performed with the intention that those being silent (in
this case, fishermen) will then not be heard: ὅταν θηρεύσωσιν αὐτοὺς εἰς τὸ δέλεαρ, οὐδὲ
φθεγγόμενοι ἀλλὰ σιωπῶντες ὡς ὀσφραινομένων καὶ ἀκουόντων· . . .
184
The only way to not-hear something apart from by blocking the ears is to cause it to not-
make a sound (φθέγμα) or to not-speak or to be silent. See S. OT 1386, the locus classicus
of the problem that ears are sense organs that are permanently open (or of having a funnel
for hearing . . ., see Th. 18). But note also that the reason why the Doxa is a deceptive
ordering is that what-is-not is implicit and masquerades under a veneer of positive terms;
the act of ‘not-hearing’ must therefore be approximated in terms which are positive, i.e.
its object must be made silent.
185
Cf. Dickinson’s (1970) impressionistic translation, which partly captures the enantio-
morphic relationship between hearing and seeing parodied here:
E. See that door?
M. I see it, clear as I hear.
E. Silence!
M. Silence the door?
E. Sssh! Do you hear? Silence. See.
M. Silence the door and hear it? I see.

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 o n w h at - [ it ] -is
λόγος exposed in theory, our exclusive audience now see played
out in practice the unwitting confusion in store for all those who
fail to break free from this poet’s path. To those unable to see the
para-Doxa of these lines, there is here simply a confusing, and
thus comic, door scene. Yet for those who have heeded the implicit
call to κρῖναι λόγῳ, a sharper dénouement awaits: the greatest
irony amidst this comedy of amphilogy and oxymoron is that
on Euripides’ λόγος a comic door-seen can only destroy a comic
door-scene.186
In this respect, the exclusive comedy of 25–8 models an encoun-
ter with the conventions of theatre of precisely the sort in which
the comic spectators as a whole have been engaged throughout
(for they too have been told to not-hear what they see, and not-see
what they hear). Yet in order to draw out the full philosophical
implications of their position as viewers of this comedy, we must
again look back in our discussion, this time to its very beginning:
the literary drama of Parmenides’ proem. There, the site of the
goddess’s revelation to her traveller of the paths of what-is and
what-is-not, and of the typical mortal error that leads countless
thinkers to wander on their ludicrous third way, was revealed as
being beyond the Gates of the paths of Night and Day in the region
of the House of Night (b1.9–21).187 In the Homeric and Hesiodic
traditions this is a place where all the familiar oppositions of mortal
experience collapse, since it is here, deep in the Underworld, that
all opposites finally converge. It is here, for instance, that Earth,
Tartarus, Sea and Sky all have their common sources and limits;
and that Night and Day pass each other by, crossing over the same
threshold as they exchange dominion over earth (or, conversely,

186
For the conventional way in which a door-seen should beget a door-scene, see Clouds
91–3.
187
The direction of the traveller’s journey, that is, whether the Heliades escort him from
Darkness to Light, or vice versa, or to a realm beyond these distinctions (as I argue here),
is a perennial topic of scholarly debate. Hermann (2004) 164–5 provides a synopsis of
the scholarly positions. I follow Furley (1989) 29–30; Gallop (1984) 6–7; Sedley (1999)
113; Nightingale (2004) 33, in reading the journey as one to the House of Night. Insofar
as this is a region of paradox, inversion and blurred distinctions (cf. Kingsley (1995) 77),
I hold this not to contradict Mourelatos (2008) 15–16, who argues that the journey is
‘blurred beyond recognition’; see also Curd (1998) 19; such ‘blurring’ is precisely what
we should expect from the poetic evocation of a journey to this location, see Morgan
(2000) 77–87.

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alternate their occupancy of the House of Night).188 Even before

the goddess of Parmenides speaks, then, the Underworld setting
of her revelation cleverly anticipates her message; for she speaks
at the meeting place of mortal opposites, a physical location in
which the primal forms of mortal cosmology, Light and Night,
will not simply be revealed as co-dependent by means of λόγος
but are actually experienced as undivided.189 Far from being
mutually exclusive opposites (their phenomenal properties, χωρὶς
ἀπ’ ἀλλήλων, b8.56) as mortals claim, here, at this physical site,
Light and Night reveal themselves to be complementary aspects

188
For the common ‘sources and limits’ (πηγαὶ καὶ πείρατ’) of Earth, Sky, etc., at this
location, which Parmenides evokes by saying that his Gates have a stone threshold and
yet are aitherial (28b1.11–12 DK), see Hes. Th. 807–10; Day and Night and their single
path, trodden in alternate directions: Hes. Th. 748–57. Furley (1989) 29–30.
189
See Gallop (1984) 7: ‘the youth’s encounter with the goddess is located where all
difference or contrast has disappeared. Even the antithesis between Night and Day,
which will later emerge as the foundation of all other mortal dualisms (28b8.53–9,
b9.1–4 DK), has there been transcended. In that region all is a single undifferentiated
unity. Hence the scene of Parmenides’ “poetic vision” anticipates the conclusion of his
philosophical argument.’ See also Kingsley (1995) 77 on the House of Night, and the
Underworld more generally, as a place of paradox ‘where polar opposites coexist and
merge’; and Robbiano (2006) 150–5, on Parmenides’ reuse of myth to create a ‘mostly
Hesiodic’ Underworld setting. The crucial point here is that even before Parmenides’
goddess has spoken, at this location, her doctrine of the essential unity of Light and
Night is already a reality to be experienced. Indeed, as Furley (1989) 30 has argued, that
reality accounts for the fame of the Laestrygonian shepherds at Hom. Od. 10.82–6, who
are said to live on the periphery ‘close by’ the roads of Night and Day and thus in the
constant ambient brightness of aither, and yet whose mortal alternations, founded on
habit, continue (indeed, like the Hesiodic Day and Night, they greet one another in
passing when coming home from and going out to tend their flocks):
. . . ὅθι ποιμένα ποιμὴν
ἠπύει εἰσελάων, ὁ δέ τ’ ἐξελάων ὑπακούει.
ἔνθα κ’ ἄϋπνος ἀνὴρ δοιοὺς ἐξήρατο μισθούς,
τὸν μὲν βουκολέων, τὸν δ’ ἄργυφα μῆλα νομεύων·
ἐγγὺς γὰρ νυκτός τε καὶ ἤματός εἰσι κέλευθοι.
For ἐγγύς as spatial rather than temporal, see Woodbury (1966) 612, citing Vos (1963)
18–34. As Granger (2008) 13 also notes, Parm. 28b1.11 DK, ἔνθα πύλαι Νυκτός τε καὶ
Ἤματός εἰσι κελεύθων, clearly mimics Hom. Od. 10.86 but repositions the paths it
describes in the Underworld through use of Hesiod’s ἔνθα, ‘a marker of places and
deities in the underworld’. The point is not simply to make the location of Parmenides’
revelation undecidable (cf. Granger (2008) 12–13), but rather to stress its association
with a reality that transcends mortal distinctions and alternations. Indeed, the fact that
these Gates elsewhere serve as a marker of a physical point at which the distinctions
usually drawn by mortals have no meaning is very probably why Parmenides devotes a
third (28b1.11–20 DK) of the thirty-three lines of the proem to describing them. Cf.
Gallop (1984) 7.

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of a single process;190 in phenomenal terms, there is simply no
difference between them.
In this respect, too, the setting of our prologue’s parody succinctly
encapsulates its (philosophical) content. Whilst within our play the
mortal σήματα (both Doxastical ‘signs’ and ‘qualia’) of the ear and
the eye (sc. hearing and seeing) are shown to be intertwined in the
trials of the ἔλεγχος (7–8), ultimately it is the site of that testing, the
perceptual frame of the theatre, that most readily belies their opposi-
tion. Just as at Parmenides’ Gates, where night becomes day and day
becomes night, so, too, here, in the ‘place for viewing’, hearing and
seeing prove to be virtually indistinguishable, fused together in the
single activity of looking-and-listening that is at the core of active,
participatory spectatorship.191 This, as we shall see, is the philosoph-
ical lesson of the theatron. Yet it is not simply recognizing hearing
and seeing, like night and day, as a single, undivided, whole that is at
stake in the philosophy of these first lines (nor even, realizing the

190
Cf. Heraclit. 22b57 DK: διδάσκαλος δὲ πλείστων Ἡσίοδος· τοῦτον ἐπίστανται πλεῖστα
εἰδέναι, ὅστις ἡμερην καὶ εὐφρόνην οὐκ ἐγίνωσκεν· ἔστι γὰρ ἕν, with Kahn (1979) 107–10;
Pritzl (1985) 312–14; Mackenzie (1988) 18–20; see Curd (1998) 121–2 on the possible
influence of Heraclitus on Parmenides’ thought with respect to the unity of opposites,
and the more general case put by Graham (2002) of intertextuality between the poem of
Parmenides and Heraclitus.
191
Cratin. fr. 315 KA, which echoes the call to attention routinely used at meetings of the
Athenian Assembly (clearly also another resonance of our 25–8), nicely illustrates the
synergy of the ear and the eye by balancing their activities either side of what together
they achieve, the full direction of attention (looking-and-listening): ἄκουε, σίγα,
πρόσεχε τὸν νοῦν, δεῦρ’ ὅρα. See Ar. Th. 381, with Austin and Olson (2004) ad loc.
for parallels. For the constitutive role played by the eyes in turning passive hearing
into active listening and by the ears in the activity of looking, see Ingold (2000) 243–
87; esp. 277, where the co-implication of hearing and seeing in the activity of
perception is shown to belie common scholarly assumptions about the radical oppo-
sition of these senses; i.e. that the nature of one (vision) is observational, or objectify-
ing, whilst the nature of the other (hearing) is immersive, or participatory. Fallacy of
radical separation: see esp. 268: ‘the eyes and the ears should not be understood as
separate keyboards for the registration of sensation but as organs of the body as a
whole, in whose movement, within an environment, the activity of perception con-
sists’, citing Merleau-Ponty (1962) 234, for whom the body is not ‘a collection of
adjacent organs, but a synergic system, all the functions of which are exercised and
linked together in the general action of being in the world’. An easy illustration of such
synergy: see Vroomen and de Gelder (2004) on the perceptual lessons of ventrilo-
quism, where it is precisely this incorporation of vision into audition that engenders
the illusion that it is the moving mouth of the dummy that speaks, and not the (visually
silent) ventriloquist; but, more importantly, for evidence that what the eyes see affects
what the ears hear, see McGurk and MacDonald (1976) on the so-called ‘McGurk
effect’, a perceptual phenomenon that proves, as Ingold (2000) 277 has argued on
different grounds, that ‘we “hear” with the eyes as well as with the ears’.

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mortal error of theorizing splits in experience that only seem to be).192

Rather, it is learning to use those senses, to engage the eyes and ears
fully, to look-and-listen, to let ‘nothing go unperceived’.193
In strictly negative terms, this, of course, has been implicit
throughout; it is precisely the subtext of why this Euripides dis-
courages the very first comic spectator who tries to trace his route
on the circling path of this play194 from both hearing and seeing
what follows (what will be seen; his are truly deceptive words,
‘there simply is no need . . .’; Ευ. ἀλλ’ οὐκ ἀκούειν δεῖ σε πάνθ’ ὅσ’
αὐτίκα∣ὄψει παρεστώς, . . . in fact, there is every need, 5–6). Yet the
true extent of this deception is not fully apparent until we draw out
from these words their Parmenidean resonance (i.e. what they
really say, rather than what they seem to say). Earlier I translated
this remark: ‘You need not hear all that you’ll see instantly when
you’re present’ (or ‘are standing by’), as if παρεστώς expresses
merely circumstance.195 But this construal is not the only sense
of that word active here; nor, as we should by now expect,
do the (mortal) words it qualifies simply echo a ‘commonplace’
(sc. the preferability of autopsy over hearsay).196 In Parmenidean
terms – indeed, also in the terms of Aristophanes’ earliest extant
attack on Euripidean deception at Acharnians 440–4 – the

192
For, just as any Euripidean attempt to give an account either of hearing or of seeing will
inevitably introduce a negation, so too, in practical terms, the only way of disentangling
hearing from seeing for his audience (that is, to close one’s eyes, or block one’s ears) is to
do the same.
193
The formulation is Kingsley’s (2003) 185. As we shall see, it is the critical engagement
that the philosophy of these lines demands which causes the collapse of hearing into
seeing and seeing into hearing. Of course, it is quite possible to see and hear our prologue
without engaging with it appropriately: this is the behaviour of the archetypal Doxastical
audience. They fail to detect our prologue’s Parmenidean injunction (κρῖναι λόγῳ),
readily assume Euripides’ interlocutor is a fool, accept Euripides’ λόγος about hearing
and seeing as essentially true and, thus, just like him, fail to transcend the Doxa, and they
continue to regard their own experience as merely a mixture (κρᾶσις) of ‘essentially
separate’ opposites (hearing and seeing); see my following discussion, esp. pp. 121, 156.
194
A path, made of his plays, for our comedy is, of course, a composite of Euripidean
tragedy. Numerous studies have explored the parodies of Euripides’ Telephus,
Palamedes, Hel. and Andr., from which our Th. is constructed; Zeitlin (1981) is the
classic reading. But note also the final parody of IT, see my pp. 151–3.
195
For the general use of the verb to denote presence, see Coxon (2009) ad 17.2 (= 28b16.2
DK). For the construal of the participle as ‘situational’ or ‘circumstantial’ (and in
Smyth’s terms ‘temporal’) modified in sense by αὐτίκα, see Smyth §2060–1 and §2081.
196
Austin and Olson (2004) ad loc. list literary usages of the adage, but omit Heraclit.
22b101a, b55 DK, cf. p. 17 n. 12.

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assumption that an audience ‘will see παρεστώς’ signals of its
speaker an expectation that those to whom he speaks will rely
upon their senses in a manner that is essentially passive, blindly
accepting of Doxastical thinking.197 It resonates suggestively with
the goddess’ words at b16:
ὡς γὰρ ἕκαστος ἔχει κρᾶσιν μελέων πολυπλάγκτων,198 1
τὼς νόος ἀνθρώποισι παρέστηκεν·199 τὸ γὰρ αὐτό
ἔστιν ὅπερ φρονέει μελέων φύσις ἀνθρώποισιν
καὶ πᾶσιν καὶ παντί· τὸ γὰρ πλέον ἐστὶ νόημα. 4
For as each man has a mixture of the much-wandering limbs [sc. sense organs],
So mind is present to men; for it is the same thing
which the nature of the limbs [sc. sense-organs] thinks,
both in each and every man; for the full is thought.200

197
That is, ‘in the manner of a (passive) bystander’, cf. Smyth §2062. For Ar.’s earlier use of
παρίσταμαι in Ach. to contrast an implied comic audience equipped with the knowledge
of what-really-is with an internal tragic audience left unable to differentiate between
what-is and what-is-not and which therefore ‘stands by’ guilelessly (‘as do fools’) when
faced with Euripidean illusion, see Dicaeopolis’ explanation of his requirements to
Euripides at Ach. 440–4 (440–1 itself a quotation from the prologue of the Telephus
(fr. 698 (Kannicht)) with Ruffell (2011) 349–50, and esp. 349 for the tragic audience’s
‘simple-minded acceptance of the tragic fiction’ (text Wilson):
δεῖ γάρ με δόξαι πτωχὸν εἶναι τήμερον, 440
εἶναι μὲν ὅσπερ εἰμί, φαίνεσθαι δὲ μή·
τοὺς μὲν θεατὰς εἰδέναι μ’ ὅς εἰμ’ ἐγώ,
τοὺς δ’ αὖ χορευτὰς ἠλιθίους παρεστάναι,
ὅπως ἂν αὐτοὺς ῥηματίοις σκιμαλίσω. 444
Cf. Olson (2002) ad 442–4; with my pp. 135–6, p. 135 n. 248, and p. 191 for Th.’s
reworking of Ach.’s lampooning of Euripides and its critical agenda. The only other use
of the perf. ptc. παρεστώs in the nom. sg. masc. in Ar. is attributive and describes the
bystander at Eccl. 641 who, Praxagora explains, whilst previously being content
passively to watch the spectacle of a son beating his father, will be transformed by the
new communistic reforms into a socially responsible vigilante at such sights (since,
because wives will be shared under this regime, it will always be possible that any father
so beaten might be one’s own). Lanni (1997), by contrast, discusses the influence on
court proceedings exerted by οἱ περιεστηκότες, those spectators who ‘stand at the edges
of the courtroom’ and actively listen to the cases.
198
For the reading ἕκαστος ἔχει κρᾶσιν, see DK; Gallop (1984); Meijer (1997) 58; Palmer
(2009) 386–7 discusses the variant ἐκάστοτ’; Aristotle’s quotation of 28b16 DK
(Metaph. 1009b22) has the variant μελέων πολυκάμπτων, ‘much-bent limbs’, but is
generally regarded as less reliable than Theophrastus’ πολυπλάγκτων (at Sens. 3), see
Coxon (2009) ad 17.1 (= 28b16.1 DK); Palmer (2009) 386–7; Passa (2009) 48.
199
DK, for the reading παρέστηκεν, attested at Thphr. Sens. 3, see Tarán (1965) 170; Coxon
(2009) ad 17.2 (= 28b16.2 DK); Meijer (1997) 65 n. 393; Palmer (2009) 386–7; Vlastos
(1946) and Passa (2009) 48–51 accept the variant παρίσταται (following Arist. Metaph.
1009b22).
200
Trans. Meijer (1997) 58 modified.

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Here, perhaps still speaking in her guise as a mortal, the goddess

reveals the primal state of human cognition. Mind (νόος), she says,
‘is present to’ or ‘stands by’ (παρέστηκεν, b16.2) all mortals in
exactly the same way, that is, through the mixture of the opposites
of the Doxa, Light and Night, received by a mixture of the senses,
or ‘much-wandering limbs’ (κρᾶσις μελέων πολυπλάγκτων,
b16.1).201 Mortal thought (νόημα) is thus solely composed of our
Doxastical sense-impressions (b16.3–4).202 The passivity of this
Doxastical engagement with the world is frequently taken to imply

201
Whether Parmenides’ μέλεα refers to the elements posited by mortals in the Doxa, Light
and Night, the bodily ‘frame’, or the ‘limbs’ of the body implicated in thought (or all three)
is debated: for the primal forms, see Laks (1990); for the ‘frame’ of the body as a whole,
see Vlastos (1946), and for parts of the body and, specifically, the sense organs, see Popper
(1963) 552–5, (1998) 75; and esp. Meijer (1997) 62–73, who argues that it is the effect of
the physical mixture of Light and Night on the organs of perception (μέλεα) that results in
mortal thought, see esp. 65 n. 393: ‘Impressions, quantities [of] light and darkness,
proportioned in accordance with the objects they originate in, arrive at the sense organs,
mingle and with that action simultaneously the mind has come’ (see n.393 also for the error
of comparing Hom. Od. 18.136–7 with 28b16 DK). But see Hussey (2006) 17, for the
suggestion that both meanings (primal forms and senses) may be active, cf. my p. 86 n. 112
for Ar.’s possible exploitation of this and further polyvalence in our prologue. In particular,
note that the Homeric μέλεα, which is here a mortal name, itself implies parts that, in their
capacity as bearers of the muscular sinuosity that enables flexion and flexibility, bend back
on themselves, see Wersinger (2008) 56, who argues that ‘La flexion est assurée par
l’existence des melea’, citing Arist.’s (Metaph. 1009b22) variant reading of 28b16.1 DK
(μελέων πολυκάμπτων), as the exemplary extrapolation of the term’s Homeric meaning.
Cf. Pl. Phd. 98c–d for an example of the bending of μέλη in later Attic prose. Pace Popper
(1963) 554 and Beekes (2009) s.v. μέλος, the Homeric μέλεα does not connote ‘articulation’
(which is rather the preserve of the Homeric γυῖα), see Wersinger (2008) 45–56. On the
connotation of both ‘physical mixture’ and ‘confusion’ implicit in κρᾶσις, see Mourelatos
(2008) 256, with 348 for the spurious mortal physical κρίσις to which it gestures, and my
p. 81 n. 100; and for the equivalent mixture of Light and Night, see the exemplary model of
μίξις at 28b12 DK, with my following discussion, and 28b9.3 DK, where, since mortals
have named the basic opposites of their cosmos as Light and Night, all in that cosmos is
full of Light and Night together: πᾶν πλέον ἐστὶν ὁμοῦ φάεος καὶ νυκτὸς ἀφάντου . . . But
this means not only that the world of appearance comes into being through the physical
mixture of these opposites, but also that everything in this (discursively constituted)
phenomenal world is likewise ‘full’ πλέον (28b9.3 DK) of their fallacious separation.
The kindred use of πλέον at 28b16.4 DK in order to evoke mortals’ conflation of thought
and perception thus further supports the notion that Parmenides’ mortal μέλεα not only
present ‘the material foundation of erroneous thinking’ (Cordero (2004) 161) but also, as
constituted by mortals, themselves embody the confused thinking of the Doxa, see my
p. 86 n. 112. Foregrounding these connotations, we might then perhaps read the goddess’s
use of κρᾶσις and μέλεα together at b16.1 to intimate: ‘As each man has a muddle of much-
wandering limbs (sc. Doxastical senses and primal forms), which, in their separation or
division, bend back on themselves, so . . .’
202
Meijer (1997) 66: ‘thinking is nothing but the sum of . . .’. See Thphr. Sens. 4 for further
evidence of the passivity of perception in Parmenides; in conjunction with 28b16 DK, it

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that Parmenides rejects the senses as irretrievably misleading.203
Yet, as others have noted, there is more subtlety in the poem than
this;204 to be sure, the imagery of μέλεα πολύπλαγκτα, at b16.1,
recalls the wandering minds of those ἄκριτα φῦλα at b6, mortals
who are carried along, eyes unseeing, ears unhearing (ἀμηχανίη
γὰρ ἐν αὐτῶν∣στήθεσιν ἰθύνει πλακτὸν νόον· οἱ δὲ φοροῦνται∣κωφοὶ
ὁμῶς τυφλοί τε, b6.5–7).205 But, as the goddess returns to their
predicament at b7, a more nuanced picture emerges; for, here, what
is warned against is not the eye and the ear per se but, rather, a use
of them that is aimless, undiscriminating or hollow:206
οὐ γὰρ μήποτε τοῦτο δαμῇ εἶναι μὴ ἐόντα· 1
ἀλλὰ σὺ τῆσδ’ ἀφ’ ὁδοῦ διζήσιος εἶργε νόημα
μηδέ σ’ ἔθος πολύπειρον ὁδὸν κατὰ τήνδε βιάσθω,
νωμᾶν ἄσκοπον ὄμμα καὶ ἠχήεσσαν ἀκουήν
καὶ γλῶσσαν, κρῖναι δὲ λόγῳ πολύδηριν ἔλεγχον
ἐξ ἐμέθεν ῥηθέντα. 6
For never shall this prevail, that things that are not are;
But do you restrain your thought from this route of inquiry,
Nor let much-experienced habit force you along this route,
To ply an aimless eye and an echoing ear
And tongue; but judge in terms of λόγος the much-contesting ἔλεγχος
Spoken by me.207

It is this aimless, or unguided, passive use of the senses, a use

enslaved to habitual thinking, that is contrasted with the key imper-
ative the goddess gives to her traveller in this poem: κρῖναι λόγῳ

implies that for mortals, νόος attends upon only what is present to the sense organs. See
Mourelatos (2008) 253–9 for a thorough exegesis of the ambiguities of 28b16 DK, and
for a different interpretation, Laks (1990).
203
See Vlastos (1946); Meijer (1997) 57–73.
204
Kingsley (2003) 120–2, esp. 120; Laks (1999) 261–2 on 28b7.3–6 DK: ‘Despite
appearances . . . it is a mistake to say (as is often the case) that Parmenides rejected
the senses. What is true is that the senses cannot contribute to knowledge of truth. But
what Parmenides’ goddess promises is to teach mortal opinions as well as knowledge of
the truth (b1, b10). Now certainly this implies exercising sense perception and exercis-
ing it in a correct way . . . Under certain conditions (of wisdom or insight), the senses
might well be “good witnesses”’ (original emphasis). Cf. Schofield (2003) 62.
205
Kirk (1961); Meijer (1997) 63.
206
As Kingsley (2003) 121 explains: ‘the reason why we keep falling into this state [sc. of
mortal confusion] is not because the senses themselves are misleading. It’s because we
see and hear in a daze, because we don’t know how to look or listen. Our problem is not
that we see and hear. It’s that we don’t.’ See also Laks (1999) 262; Curd (2011) 131.
207
Trans. Gallop (1984) modified.

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(b7.5). In late fifth-century public culture, the exhortation to pass

judgement in this way evokes the context of the lawcourts. Here,
the goddess’s words at b7 might serve equally to define the role of
the evaluating juror whose eyes and ears must be directed to the
scrutiny of λόγος.208 Addressing his own audience of spectators,
Aeschines makes the association explicit: νῦν μὲν οὖν ὑμεῖς ἐστε τῶν
ἐμῶν λόγων κριταί, αὐτίκα δ’ ὑμέτερος ἐγὼ θεατής· ἐν γὰρ ταῖς
ὑμετέραις γνώμαις ἡ πρᾶξις καταλείπεται (‘Now you are judges of
my words; but I shall shortly be your spectator; for the matter rests on
your judgement’, 1.196). The emphasis on actively spectating to this
effect is no less prominent in the context of the Assembly; for here
too those who do not adjudicate on political matters are said to fail
appropriately to direct their eyes and ears, thereby accepting all that
is said to them without discrimination, and allowing themselves to be
lulled into inactivity by persuasive speech and untested theory. It is
for displaying precisely such passivity that Cleon attacks the
Athenian dēmos – his own spectators – at Thucydides 3.38: for
they have become an audience, he says,
ἁπλῶς τε ἀκοῆς ἡδονῇ ἡσσώμενοι καὶ σοφιστῶν θεαταῖς ἐοικότες καθημένοις μᾶλλον
ἢ περὶ πόλεως βουλευομένοις. (3.38.7)

simply overcome by the pleasure of listening, more like seated spectators of the
sophists than decision-makers for the city.

Like the ἄκριτα φῦλα of Parmenides, these are spectators who fail
actively to judge, who accept merely the echoes of events
(ἀκροαταὶ . . . τῶν ἔργων, 3.38.4), direct their sightless eyes merely
to oratory, sophistry, and display (θεαταὶ . . . τῶν λόγων, 3.38.4). In
this expressly political frame, their fragmented and confused use of
the senses stands in stark contrast to the formalities that should be
followed in the Assembly. Here active, participatory, spectatorship
entails the full direction of attention; all who attend must: ‘Listen,

208
For the relationship between early legal procedures and the methodology (μέθοδος, ‘way
of inquiry’) advocated by Parmenides’ goddess, see Hermann (2004) 144–50; for the
forensic identity of several of Parmenides’ key terms (κρίσις, ἔλεγχος, πίστις, σήματα),
see Bryan (2012) 80–93. For the synonymity of spectatorship and active judging in the
context of the fifth- and fourth-century Athenian lawcourts, see Goldhill (2000) 169–72;
for the influence exerted on the legal process by the presence of actively spectating
bystanders (οἱ περιεστηκότες), see Lanni (1997).

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be still, focus your mind, look here’ (ἄκουε, σίγα, πρόσεχε τὸν νοῦν,
δεῦρ’ ὅρα, the Assembly call, as parodied by Cratinus, fr. 315).
Later in our play the women will mimic this formal exhortation
as they convene their own Assembly to judge Euripides’ λόγοι
(σίγα, σιώπα, πρόσεχε τὸν νοῦν, 381); yet for the comic spectators
who sit in judgement on his λόγος from the beginning, that call
has been resounding throughout, indeed it has even been voiced,
ironically, by the poet himself: πρόσεχε τὸν νοῦν . . . ὁρᾷς . . .
σίγα . . . ἄκου’ (25–8).
If the first twenty-five lines of this play expose mortal error for
their audience, then, ultimately, they do so in order to prompt us to
take up the same active, evaluating role practised in each of these
late fifth-century frames of spectatorship: for be it in the lawcourts,
or the Assembly, or this theatre, actively to spectate is to meet the
goddess’s injunction: κρῖναι λόγῳ. To do so here, however, in the
prologue of Aristophanes’ design, is to go even further – it is to
practise philosophy (indeed, what else could practising this philos-
ophy mean?);209 for if the framing of this prologue sets its audience
alongside the traveller of Parmenides’ poem, then how they will
journey on the path of this play is precisely what is implicitly at
stake. It is the same charge that was given to him at b7.3–6 (μηδέ σ’
ἔθος πολύπειρον ὁδὸν κατὰ τήνδε βιάσθω,∣νωμᾶν ἄσκοπον ὄμμα καὶ
ἠχήεσσαν ἀκουήν∣καὶ γλῶσσαν, κρῖναι δὲ λόγῳ πολύδηριν
ἔλεγχον∣ἐξ ἐμέθεν ῥηθέντα)210 that they must now strive to meet,
relying not upon habit to guide their way, but upon the judgement
of targeted eyes, attuned ears (cf. Euripides’ words at 25–8). Those
who fail to respond in this way will simply accept Euripides’ λόγος
of the essential separation of hearing and seeing and, content in that
fallacy, thus move on directing νόος passively to rely upon a κρᾶσις
of ‘much-wandering limbs’ (μελέων πολυπλάγκτων, b16.1). Only
by actively striving to κρῖναι λόγῳ can one transcend passively
accepting such Doxa, reveal the underlying unity of hearing and

209
For the way in which Parmenides’ poem similarly stimulates such philosophical activity
by ‘incorporating talk of inquiry within a revelatory framework’, see Bryan (2012) 103,
cf. 63. And note, simply by virtue of its dialogue form, the philosophy of our opening
lines invites its audience to participate themselves in the philosophical activity of its
speakers, just as do the dialogues of Plato.
210
On 28b7.5–6 DK cf. p. 68 n. 65.

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seeing and thus escape wandering on the journey of this play.211 To

that extent, our play sheds light on what Parmenides’ goddess
leaves unsaid; just how to use to positive effect senses that, if
followed thoughtlessly, will simply mislead.212 For the first lines
of our Thesmophoriazusae point us ‘not away from our senses, but
toward them’ – to acuity,213 and thus, to the exposure of fallacies
we might yet transcend. In that respect, Aristophanes’ message is
clear: faced with his Euripides, all in this comic theatre can expe-
rience the ironic revelations of Parmenides’ θεά; for the genius of
staging this philosophy is that each of us has a θέα (a ‘viewing’) of
our very own.

From para-Doxa to para doxa: revealing the φύσις

of theatre in the unthinkability of Agathon (29–205)

τόν σοι ἐγὼ διάκοσμον ἐοικότα πάντα φατίζω,

ὡς οὐ μή ποτέ τίς σε βροτῶν γνώμη παρελάσσῃ.214
The goddess’ work is to show us we are living in an illusion.215

It perhaps should come as no surprise, then, that, at 29–30, after we

have been shown the confusions of those dazed mortals incapable
of treading a constant path – how mortal error leads the luckless
into ἀμηχανίη – ‘what we’ll in an instant see . . .’ (5–6) is implicitly
revealed to be the very figure (this play situates) at the centre of
the para-Doxastical world that holds tragic mortals fast in their
helplessness, the conjurer of τὰ ἐοικότα par excellence, Agathon,
the τραγῳδοποιός.216 Yet that revelation is prefaced first by a new

211
For νοεῖν in Parmenides’ proem as a kind of understanding of ‘the fundamental unity in
kind as beings’ of mutually negating opposites that emerges precisely through contem-
plating their negation, see M. Miller (2006) 30–2.
212
See Laks (1999) 262 on Parmenides’ lack of an answer. But perhaps the answer is
already implicit in the goddess’s instruction to judge by discourse?
213
See Kingsley (2003) 121 for this formulation and the suggestion that this is also the
implicit purpose of Parmenides’ goddess. See my following discussion (pp. 122–44) for
the revelations of 29–205 that now immediately follow.
214
Parm. 28b.8.60–1 DK: ‘This whole world-ordering I proclaim to you as plausible, | so
that no opinion of mortals shall ever overtake you.’
215
Kingsley (2003) 161.
216
For Agathon as exemplar of the world-creating tragic poet, see Arist. Po. 1451b19–25,
who cites Agathon’s Antheus as the paradigmatic non-mythic play whose characters and
action were entirely fabricated by the poet. For a comic glimpse of his creation of tragic

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echoing inquiry into nature (Κη. ποῖος οὗτος Ἁγάθων; . . ., 30, pre-
saging a joke not only on Agathon’s fame, ‘Agath-who?!’217 but also
on his incipient ontological ambiguity, Ευ. ὁ τραγῳδοποιός, ‘. . . of
some sort’. Κη. ποῖος . . ., ‘Of what sort?’218), the (Doxastical) sum of
which establishes only what its object is not (tanned, strong, heavily-
bearded . . . a ‘real’ man), 29–35:
Ευ. ἐνταῦθ’ Ἀγάθων ὁ κλεινὸς οἰκῶν τυγχάνει,
ὁ τραγῳδοποιός. Κη.ποῖος οὗτος Ἁγάθων; 30
Ευ. ἔστιν τις Ἀγάθων– Κη. μῶν ὁ μέλας, ὁ καρτερός;
Ευ. οὔκ, ἀλλ’ ἕτερός τις.
Κη. οὐχ ἑόρακα πώποτε.
μῶν ὁ δασυπώγων;
Ευ. οὐχ ἑόρακας πώποτε;
Κη. μὰ τὸν Δί’ οὔτοι γ’ ὥστε κἀμέ γ’ εἰδέναι.
Ευ. καὶ μὴν βεβίνηκας σύ γ’· ἀλλ’ οὐκ οἶσθ’ ἴσως. 35
E. Here the famous Agathon happens to be living, the tragedy-maker.
K. What sort of chap is this Agathon?
E. There is a certain Agathon –
K. – not the tanned one, the strong one?
E. No, but some other.
K. I’ve never seen him!
Not the big-bearded one?
E. You’ve never seen him?
K. No, by Zeus, certainly not – at least, so far as I know.
E. But surely you’ve fucked him (but perhaps you didn’t know).

And then, by the intrusion of one of Agathon’s servants, whose

sacralizing presence suddenly prompts Euripides and his follower

worlds independent of inspiration, cf. 52–7, with Muecke (1982) 43 on the central focus
on ποιεῖν in what follows. For audience expectations of an imminent encounter with the
poet, cf. Ach. 396ff., Clouds 133ff. Importance of the concept of the tragic poet: cf. the
further specification of Agathon as ὁ τραγῳδοδιδάσκαλος at 88–9. His association with
τò εἰκóς, see Arist. Rh. 1402a10–13; Po. 1456a23–5.
217
Slater (2002) 153.
218
For ποῖος here in a qualitative sense, cf. Gannon (1987) ad loc. Petersen (1915) 63–6,
esp. 65, argues that the qualitative sense of ποῖος ‘must be absent when ποῖος is used
when sarcastically repeating a word of a preceding speaker’ (citing Ach. 62, 157); but
this ποῖος is echoing and, thus, answering, a ποιός, and at any rate, Agathon’s nature
(sc. the nature of his ποίησις) is expressly at issue in the scenes to follow. It is also likely
that a qualitative ποῖος again regarding Agathon should be read, following Rogers
(1904), at 96, garbled as ποῖο in R, and emended to ποῦ by Dobree, endorsed by
Austin and Olson (2004) ad loc. and N. G. Wilson (2007a).

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to duck for cover, thereby making of them not simply tragic

spectators, but expressly mortal ones, 36–51:
Ευ. . . .
ἀλλ’ ἐκποδὼν πτήξωμεν, ὡς ἐξέρχεται 36
θεράπων τις αὐτοῦ πῦρ ἔχων καὶ μυρρίνας
προθυσόμενος, ἔοικε, τῆς ποιήσεως.
ΘΕΡΑΠΩΝ
εὔφημος πᾶς ἔστω λαὸς
στόμα συγκλῄσας· ἐπιδημεῖ γὰρ 40
θίασος Μουσῶν ἔνδον μελάθρων
τῶν δεσποσύνων μελοποιῶν.
ἐχέτω δὲ πνοὰς νήνεμος αἰθὴρ
κῦμά τε πόντου μὴ κελαδείτω
γλαυκόν –
Κη. βομβάξ.
Ευ. σίγα. τί λέγει; 45
Θε.πτηνῶν τε γένη κατακοιμάσθω
θηρῶν τ’ ἀγρίων πόδες ὑλοδρόμων
μὴ λυέσθων.
Κη. βομβαλοβομβάξ.
Θε. μέλλει γὰρ ὁ καλλιεπὴς Ἀγάθων,
πρόμος ἡμέτερος –
Κη. μῶν βινεῖσθαι; 50
Θε. τίς ὁ φωνήσας;
Κη. νήνεμος αἰθήρ.
E. . . .
But let’s cower down out of the way, because
one of his servants is coming out with fire and myrtle
in order to burn an offering, it seems, on behalf of his poetry-making.
SERVANT
Let all the people speak no words of ill-omen
gating the mouth, for there visits 40
a holy band of Muses within
the dwelling of my master, fashioning lyric song.
Let aither windless hold its blasts
Let the grey-green swell of the sea not make a sound.
K. Bombax!
E. Silence! What’s he saying? 45
S. Let both the race of birds sleep,
and the coursing feet of the wild beasts
not be loosed.
K. Bombalobombax!

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 o n w h at - [ it ] -is
S. For the melifluous Agathon,
our leader, is going to –
K. Surely not get fucked? 50
S. Who made a sound?
K. W-w-w-indless aither.

The effect of all this apotropaic religiosity, with its abrupt escala-
tion of register from (already) highfalutin ritual formality, burnt
offerings and εὐφημία (for the ἐπιδημία of the Muses, 36–42) to
stark anticipatory silence (at 43ff., for the activity of Agathon), is to
take us from the realm of poetic inspiration and the Muses
(Hesiod’s original masters of truths and false things equivalent to
realities, Th. 27–8),219 to the quasi-divine figure that will supplant
them in this play (the τραγῳδοποιός, 49ff.).220 (For far from
simply being not-a-‘real’-man, οὗτος Ἁγάθων, it now seems, is
not really even a man.) Yet if by the hyperbole of this sudden
epiphanizing we are implicitly primed to approach his poiēsis
(52–7, 101–29) through a hymnic frame first associated with
Apollo (43–50; cf. Pi. Pyth. 1.5–13; and my p. 149 for the prefatory
Thesmophorian frame),221 that is not simply to set up the new

219
For ὁμοῖος at Hes. Th. 27–8 as ‘equivalent to’ as opposed to ‘resembling’, see Heiden
(2007). For the (only) apparent comic ambivalence (immediately dissipated by the sugges-
tion of epiphany at 43ff.) of the term θίασος of the Muses at line 41, cf. the reading of Austin
and Olson (2004) ad loc.: a routine use of the term ‘in Euripidean lyric to mean “band”’ and
here designating a troupe of Muses in visitation to a human poet in order to bestow
inspiration, with Sommerstein (1994) ad 41, who understands θίασος as ‘a company or
guild of votaries of a particular god’ and posits a use here in comic reversal of its normal
pattern: ‘the divine Muses from [sic] a thiasos in honour of Agathon’ (perhaps also in
prefiguration of the poet’s later allusive identification with Dionysus at 134–5).
220
For the formal proclamation of εὐφημία (‘pronounce words of good omen’) in Ar., see
Willi (2003a) 42–5; for the further intensification added by the call for universal silence
and its implication of imminent epiphany, cf. Birds 777–8; Pi. Pyth. 1.5–13; E. Ba. 1084,
with Dodds (1960) ad loc.; W. Horn (1970) 95–7. Agathon’s supplantation of the Muses
is implicit in the pairing of εὐφημία for (γάρ) the ἐπιδημία of the Muses but world-
stopping anticipatory silence for (γάρ) the epiphany of Agathon’s poetry making, cf.
Austin and Olson (2004) ad 39–57; Given (2007) 43; and my previous note; for the same
collection of epiphany motifs (i.e. ‘divine ἐπιδημία, itself introducing an additional
epiphany scene’) exploited in later literature, see McKay (1967).
221
Muecke (1982) 44 (on the authority of Fraenkel, cf. Dodds (1960) ad E. Ba. 1084); in
addition to Pi. Pyth. 1.5–13 (Pindar’s poetry lulling nature into silence with and for the music
of Apollo), cf. also Call. Ap. 13ff. with F. Williams (1978) ad loc.; McKay (1967); Austin
and Olson (2004) ad 43–8, Sommerstein (1994) ad 43–50 and W. Horn (1970) 95–7
compare these lines to Mesom. Sol. 1–4 (a piece of ‘new music’ for Apollo clearly indebted
to our Th.); cf. West (1992) 47–50 for the shared motif as probably originating from ‘one of
the esoteric cults of the fifth century’ (49); cf. my p. 126 n. 223, pp. 127–8 nn. 227–30.

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(cf. κλεινός, 29) poet as pretender;222 for it is expressly the incanta-

tions of Apollo, soothing their hearers to trance-like stillness, that
facilitate katabasis to and anabasis from the site of Parmenidean
revelation, the Underworld (cf. 101–29, itself, notably, a cult song
to Apollo);223 as, indeed, it is the sound of silence (above all others,
most important to Apollo) heard at the acme of that stillness that,
in Apolline esoteric cult, marks the initiate’s arrival at the altered
state of awareness essential for that journey to take place – notably,
by way of a prefatory descent into deafness and blindness.224
Indeed, for those, like us, who have practised the imperative
of Parmenides’ goddess in what has come before (κρῖναι λόγῳ;
cf. 26–8), that is precisely the state to which we too have been
brought (and thus through which we have been primed to see (cf.
10, 12, 19, and then (Κη.) ἀκούω καὶ σιωπῶ . . ., 27–8)).225
Likewise if, in turn, now against that imperative, our mortal
traveller’s mocking interjections (at 45 and 48, in travesty of the

222
Pace Austin and Olson (2004) ad 52–7; O’Sullivan (1992) 140–1.
223
For the nature-altering effects of Apollo’s poetry and lyre, see Pratt (1993) 76 on Pi.
Pyth. 1.5–13; and for the well-known relation between (Apolline) incantatory poetry and
access to another world, see Kingsley (1999) 91–2, 121–3, (2002) 379–80; for the
common and close association of Apollo with esoteric wisdom and its claimants, see Tell
(2011) 129–30; Kurke (2011) 108–12; and specifically Parmenides (who was himself
very likely a priest of Apollo in Velia): Kingsley (1999) (2003). And for the close
relationship between the wandering or twisting (Th. 99–100) ‘new music’ (of which
both our Servant’s hymn and Agathon’s own song to Apollo are prime examples) and
incantatory magical hymns (in addition to West (1992) 47–50), see Csapo (2004) 226:
‘Rejecting the logical organization and syntactical variation of hypotaxis, the poets of
New Music preferred paratactic strings of parallel syntagms, as they preferred concante-
nating strings of different rhythmic metra, to achieve an incantatory effect, accelerating
or adding to the impetus of the music’ and 226 n. 84 on its ‘riddling and circumlocutory’
form: ‘The enigmatic style may be a development from traditional dithyramb and
Dionysian art, cult, and mysteries generally (though not exclusively, since it can also
be found in lyric poets like Pindar and Simonides).’
224
Practices of incubation (involving sensory negation) and katabasis as ‘the most direct
way to wisdom and truth’ in Archaic and early Classical wisdom traditions, see Gemelli
Marciano (2008) 22, esp. n. 3 (citing among other examples Epimenides’ encounter with
Dikē and Alētheia during his incubation at 3b1 DK) and 29–32; Kurke (2011) 114–15,
for the practice of katabasis and the acquisition of esoteric knowledge as ‘a general
feature in older traditions of the life cycle of the sage’. For the climactic sound of silence,
represented in Parmenides’ proem at 28b1.6, 19 DK by the piercing sound of the σῦριγξ,
see Kingsley (1999) 128–35, (2003) 36–7, and for the experience of blinding light
precipitating divine revelation, see Gemelli Marciano (2008) 32–3.
225
Cf. Gemelli Marciano (2008) 33 on the piping tones (the sound of silence) and blinding
light precipitating divine revelation in Parmenides’ proem: ‘These are the signal for a
change in the state of consciousness that makes it possible to see the goddesses [sc. the
Heliades].’

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Servant’s lyrics) appear to deflate all that is implied by this
incantatory call (sc. approaching revelatory divinity) even before
its ostensibly unlikely beneficiary is revealed (S. ‘Let air, sea,
birds, beasts, everything, be silent . . .’ K. ‘Blah-blah-blah!’. . .
‘Yada-yada-yada!’ – S. ‘. . . For mellifluous . . . Agathon [!] is
going to . . .’, 43–9), that is so, again, I suspect, only to uninitiated
ears.226 For against our opening frame of mystic initiation,
now intensified by the priestly sonority of this Servant’s hymn
(cf. πτήσσω at 36, hieratic ἔστω at 39),227 our traveller’s
βομβάξ . . . βομβαλοβομβάξ . . . (45, 48) not only mimics the
rhythms of ritual chant (thus fracturing this song’s power to effect
cosmic still)228 but also evokes the sounds of anabatic/katabatic
climax229 (thereby, making of us initiates to chthonic revelation;

226
For the surface connotations of βομβάξ, see Austin and Olson (2004) ad 45, citing Phot.
β 212 = S β 370 (cf. Hsch. β 787) (my ‘bolomochic’ translation is Austin and Olson’s);
and Sommerstein (1994) ad loc., comparing the derogatory use of βομβός by the
Scythian at 1176 (of the low rumble or buzzing of pipes). Cf. Bain (1977) 89–90;
Moulton (1981) 114.
227
For Euripides’ earlier turn as guiding hierophant see my pp. 67–8; Agathon’s Servant as
hierokēryx, see Bierl (2009) 140 n. 144, 142; in this regard, πτήσσω ‘to cower in fear’ at
36 (cf. Ar. Wasps 1490; Birds 777) does not merely contribute to the parody of tragic
convention, cf. A. Cho. 20ff.; S. El. 78ff.; OC 111ff.; E. El. 107ff.; it is also evocative of
the Mysteries, cf. Frogs 315; Muecke (1982) 42–3; Austin and Olson (2004) ad loc.;
similarly, for the ‘hieratic’ content of the Servant’s hymn, sung in anapaests (the usual
metre for ritual chant), see Moulton (1981) 115 with Austin and Olson (2004) ad 39–40
(on ἔστω at 39); and for the retrospective significance of the Mystery schema, cf.
Plutarch’s description of the ritual search at Eleusis in On the Soul, fr. 178
(Sandbach), with the wandering in endless circles through darkness, sensory negation,
fear and finally revelation of our prologue, noting in addition to πτήσσω at 36 the holy
voice that follows (43ff.). For the culmination of the ritual search in the summoning of
Persephone/Kore from the Underworld by the hierophant (Apollod. FGrH 244 f 110b)
see my following discussion, esp. in n. 230.
228
For the hymn as a ‘virtuoso display of alliteration and assonance’, and the rythmic
complementarity of our traveller’s interjections, see Austin and Olson (2004) ad 39–62.
229
Cognate soundscape of mystic revelation, esp. the juxtaposition of soft and violent
sounds accompanying katabasis and anabasis, see Hermesian. fr. 7–1–14p (Orpheus’
descent, with Kingsley (1999) 94 for his meeting with Persephone at the end of this
descent); Plut. Mor. 590c–f, with Hardie (2004) 17. For the sounds of Persephone’s
advent in the mysteries, see also Hardie (2004) 17 on Philostr. VS 2.20; cf. Plut. Phoc.
28.2 (the hierophant’s mellifluous voice), and Lada-Richards (1999) 84, 91, citing
Apollod. FGrH 244 f 110b (the striking of a gong by the hierophant during his climactic
chant, which, according to R. Parker (2005) 353 ‘may have in fact occurred out of
doors’, i.e. in front of the telestērion); and Sourvinou-Inwood (2003) 37 and 33, for the
invocation of Persephone in her persona of Queen of the Dead. For this acoustic
dimension of the mysteries exploited elsewhere in Ar., see Clouds 291–9, where use
of the bronteion (thunder machine) as the Clouds appear (Σ ad 292) also recalls the
hierophant’s use of the gong when invoking Persephone (in a scene similarly framed

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and the yet-to-emerge poet, a quasi-divine counterpart to

Persephone).230
And, lastly, if, as that very climax arrives, at 52–7, it is finally to the
twists and turns of (Agathonian) poiēsis that we are directed (capping
the cliff-hanger of 49: S. Agathon is going to . . .?; 52–7 –

around the fear and silence of its audience), see Byl (1980) 15–16; cf. (1988); Bowie
(1993) 123 n. 102. And for the role of thunderous, clattering or clashing sounds in the
calling up of chthonic deities, see Bérard (1974) 75–87 with Theoc. 2.36–40 (Hecate) for
the specific conjunction of burnt offerings, clashing bronze and the call for cosmic
silence in such divine invocations. Hardie (2004) 16 points to the ‘strong mimetic
element’ already in these ritual noises, but see Ar.’s mimetic use of parallel vulgar –άξ
suffix words to create onomatopoeic effects elsewhere, cf. παππάξ, παπαπαππάξ, at
Clouds 392, εὐράξ πατάξ at Birds 1258, κοάξ . . . βρεκεκεκέξ at Frogs 209f., with Peppler
(1921) 158–9. For the sound of bronze as βομβός (from which βομβάξ clearly derives),
cf. Diog. Ath. TrGF 45 F 1 with Kaimio (1977) 196 n. 583; Zenob. 2.84 with Cook
(1902) 22, on an eponymous prophet at Dodona whose name was probably derived from
the reverberation of the oracular gong. Finally, consider the added humour given to our
traveller’s rejoinder at line 51 (echoing the Servant’s words at 43, to the effect that it has
not been him, but νήνεμος αἰθήρ that has been responsible for his joke at 50) once we
realize that Greek ritual gongs such as those at the temple of Zeus at Dodona were
frequently set off by the wind, and that, at least in the case of the acoustic arrangements
of Dodona’s notoriously windy sanctuary, they were almost interminably reverberating.
(Hence, at least by the fourth century bc, τὸ Δωδωναῖον χαλεῖον had even become
proverbial for people one just cannot shut up, see Cook (1902) 5–13, with references.)
230
For the general schema of the Mysteries, i.e. the wandering search for the goddess by
mystai, her invocation by the hierophant, and the climactic ‘finding of the kore’ or
advent ritual, see Sourvinou-Inwood (2003), esp. 35 for this last element in practice
involving either ‘the finding of a statue, or . . . something closely connected with the
deity which was in some way miraculous’, usually identified as an out-of-season ear of
corn. Note that the search and advent ritual took place before the sacred drama which
constituted a ritual enactment of the myth of Demeter’s withdrawal, mourning and
reunion with Persephone, and which provided the ritual script also for the
Thesmophoria, see Sourvinou-Inwood (2003) 30, 32–3, 39–40; Tzanetou (2002) on
the Thesmophoria. Later evidence from the play concerning Agathon vis à vis the
Kinsman is suggestive of the early identification of Agathon as a counterpart figure to
Persephone: see, for instance, the Kinsman’s ‘evolution’ into both an Agathon and a
Kore through the assimilation of Agathon’s clothing and traits, subsequent anodos/
kathodos to the women’s festival and mimetic performance of ‘Persephone-in-the-
Underworld’ roles (Helen and Andromeda); cf. Stehle (2002) 384–96 on the symbolic
rape of the Kinsman attendant upon the very first stages of his ‘Agathonization’ (the
jokes at 50 and 157–8 finally backfiring on their author, perhaps paralleling the rape and
abduction of Kore as the first stage of the sacred drama acted out by religious personnel
following the ritual of Persephone’s advent in the schema of the Mysteries, see
Sourvinou-Inwood (2003) 29, cf. 31). Cf. Stehle’s general view that the Kinsman is a
‘ritual substitute’ for Agathon (384), and my p. 190 n. 101 for the deeper significance of
his transformation. Parmenides’ revelatory goddess as a ‘Demeter- or Persephone-like
figure’ also: M. Miller (2006) 19; Kingsley (1999) and (2003). Agathon’s relation to this
figure, however, lies in his comic identification not with the goddess of the Alētheia but
with her symmetrical counterpart, the goddess of the Doxa, see Meijer (1997) 245 and
Kingsley (2003) 217–19 for the two goddesses as ‘two faces of a dual goddess’, and my

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Θε. δρυόχους τιθέναι, δράματος ἀρχάς.

κάμπτει δὲ νέας ἁψῖδας ἐπῶν,
τὰ δὲ τορνεύει, τὰ δὲ κολλομελεῖ,
καὶ γνωμοτυπεῖ κἀντονομάζει 55
καὶ κηροχυτεῖ καὶ γογγύλλει
καὶ χοανεύει –
Κη. καὶ λαικάζει.
S. – lay stocks, foundations of a drama.
He bends new rims of verses;
some he turns, others he joins together,
and he forges maxims and swaps names
and moulds and rounds
and funnels . . .
K. And sucks off . . .

– cf. 67–8) that is not to dispel the framing idea of Agathon as

quasi-divine poet (40ff.; for the Agathon of this play simply is
his poiēsis and his divinity thus lies in its nature-altering power to
shape its own (illusory) realities, cf. 146–72). Nor, for that
matter, is it merely to afford fresh opportunity to lambast poetic
meretricity with concretizing comic obscenity (although, of

following discussion. That Agathon is implicitly identified with Apollo (the god of
poetry and the god through which Parmenidean revelation takes place), and as a
counterpart to Persephone, before being assimilated to Dionysus (cf. Bierl (2009) 147
on the divine models of Apollo and Dionysus) at 134–5 (prefigured at 41), the god that
occupies a cognate position to Parmenides’ Doxastical goddess in respect to the con-
struction of plausible fictions taken for reality, makes good sense from the perspective of
our Parmenidean reading and was probably recognized by philosophical readers. Note,
for instance, Plato’s choice of Agathon as the quintessential tragedian in the Smp., and
the knowledge of Ar.’s Agathon that Plato’s portrayal strongly suggests, esp. his implicit
identification of the poet as a Gorgon/ias wielding counterpart to Persephone (at 198c4–
6 by allusion to Hom. Od. 11.633–5, see my p. 181 n. 72), an association significant not
only for its tacit exploitation of the Gorgianic debts of Agathon’s style, see O’Sullivan
(1992) 30 on Ar. fr. 341 KA and 35, but also for the simple reason that for Gorgias, too,
doxa – inherently unstable, deceptive, and malleable by spell-binding persuasion – is for
the majority simply all there is (see Gorg. 82b3.77, 11.11, 13, 11a.35 DK, and my p. 171
n. 40, p. 185 n. 86); note this Platonic Agathon, too, corrects Parmenides (at 195b6–c7,
because, like Hesiod, he made desire the oldest rather than the youngest of the gods, see
Morrison (1964) 49–51). For Plato’s Agathon in general as a response to Ar.’s earlier
portrayal, see Sissa (2012) and my p. 181 n. 72. And cf. Hawtrey (1981) ad Euthd.
284d5, for the likelihood that this nexus of (Aristophanic) associations connecting
Agathon with appearance underlies further Platonic characterizations, there noting
Plato’s reuse of aspects of Ar.’s Agathon scene (169–70) in order to satirize the sophism
of ‘speaking of things as they are’ that is developed by the brothers from their earlier
applications of Parmenidean stricture, see my p. 141 n. 259.

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course, for our token mortal spectator, a πρόμος that bends, and
turns, and moulds, and rounds, and funnels, i.e. hardens, and is
not-a-[‘real’]-man, can do little else, 57–62, cf. 35, 50).231 Rather,
it is to pre-empt in (a poetic fabrication of) this poet’s fabrication of
poetry, the idea central to the Agathon of this play as exemplar of the
tragic art: that of the τραγῳδοποιός as originary fabricator, supreme
manipulator of illusion (cf. 101–29).232
Yet it is not until we understand more fully the philosophical
world into which (at 24) we have been led, the ἐοικὼς διάκοσμος
of Parmenides’ Doxa (b8.60), that we can appreciate the purpose of
the craft imagery at 52–7 and experience the epiphanous power of
our perceptual encounter with the Agathon of this play. Thus far,
for the sake of the insights they have lent us, we have considered
only the fundamental error at the heart of the mortal cosmology of
the Doxa (the dualism of 8.53–61) and the consequent Doxastical
perceptions of its practitioners (founded upon an attendant model
of mixture, κρᾶσις, b16.1); but as the poem shifts its perspective to
describe the cosmos as it appears to mortals, an all-encompassing
vision of Doxastical duality and mixture emerges, at the orches-
trating heart of which lies a mirror image of the goddess we have

231
Bronze-casting imagery of 56–7, see Austin and Olson (2004) ad loc.; χοανεύω at 57
evokes the smelting and casting of metal; cf. χόανοι as crucibles ‘in which metal is place
to be fired and smelted’ used for ‘the ‘forging’ of [a] hard substance. . .’ (here, bone) at
Emp. 31b96 DK: see Palmer (2009) 301–2, and my p. 134 n. 245.
232
Pace Austin and Olson (2004) ad 52–7, who read the overall effect of this ‘chaotic
jumble of images’ as ‘to present Agathon not as a divinely inspired poet (cf. 40–2) but
as a mere wordsmith’, and O’Sullivan (1992) 140–1, 146–50, esp. 149, who suggests
this imagery is merely in keeping with Ar.’s lampooning of Agathon against a wider
comic association of ‘sexual and poetic creativity’ (cf. Frogs 96) as a passive and
unvirile effeminate who does not ‘beget’ a tragedy as do virile poets but ‘builds one up
with care like a carpenter or sculptor’. Against this reading, which remains wedded to
the binary thinking of Dover (1978) and identifies (one reading of) the Kinsman’s
vulgar mockery with Ar.’s poetic criticism, see the correctives of Duncan (2006) 38–
40, who builds upon Davidson (1998) 167–82 (cf. now (2007) 60–4) to reread Th.’s
Agathon, as configured both by Euripides (cf. line 35) and the Kinsman, as a
katapugōn (line 200) and as such not merely a passive object but an ‘actively desiring’
and ‘sexually insatiable’ subject (40); and Sissa (2012) 53–6, esp. 55 on the mistake of
equating this on-stage reception with Ar.’s primary intended criticism (as does Duncan
(2006) 41): ‘the play does not tell us what Aristophanes thought of Agathon, but what
a regular guy . . . could think about him’ in which ‘Aristophanes exhibits to the
Athenian people a tableau of crude binary thinking’ (55), and n. 91, building upon
Muecke (1982): [‘Th.’s Agathon’s:] Effeminacy is in the eyes of the vulgar beholder.’
His particular ‘softness is compatible with virility’ (53).

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met before (b1.3, 22), to whom, at b12,233 we are now reintroduced
as if through mortal eyes:
αἱ γὰρ στεινότεραι πλῆνται πυρὸς ἀκρήτοιο,
αἱ δ’ ἐπὶ τῇς νυκτός, μετὰ δὲ φλογὸς ἵεται αἶσα·
ἐν δὲ μέσῳ τούτων δαίμων ἣ πάντα κυβερνᾷ·
πάντῃ γὰρ στυγεροῖο τόκου καὶ μίξιος ἄρχει
πέμπουσ’ ἄρσενι θῆλυ μιγῆν τό τ’ ἐναντίον αὖτις
ἄρσεν θηλυτέρῳ.234
For the narrower [sc. rings]235 are filled with fire undiluted,
and those by them with night, though a share of flame is admitted;
and in the midst of these the divinity who steers all things:
for everywhere she rules over hateful birth and mixture,
directing female to mingle with male and the opposite in turn,
male with female.236

Here, at b12, in the very first moments of the mortal cosmology

built on Light and Night in which that (in)decisive opposition
is given physical expression in the ordering of a cosmos-
enclosing system of heavenly spheres or rings,237 Parmenides
introduces the divine agent of change in this world of appear-
ances: a goddess ἐν δὲ μέσῳ τούτων who steers everything
(ἣ πάντα κυβερνᾷ, b12.3) by bringing (back) together the oppo-
sites mortals so fallaciously separate. Whilst her divine powers
here instigate procreation, the sexes in b12 also serve merely
as the most exemplary case of the ‘erotic’ intermingling (μίξις) of
the opposites in the cosmology of the Doxa, in which, concep-
tually, ‘all things have been named light and night∣and these
according to their powers have been given as names both to
these and to those . . .’ (αὐτὰρ ἐπειδὴ πάντα φάος καὶ νὺξ
ὀνόμασται∣καὶ τὰ κατὰ σφετέρας δυνάμεις ἐπὶ τοῖσί τε καὶ τοῖς,

233
For the placement of 28b12 and b13 DK in the original poem just a few verses
after 28b8.61 DK (i.e. at the beginning of the Doxa section, following the positing
of the opposites of Light and Night), see Simp. in Ph. 38.28–39.18, with Coxon
(2009) 362.
234
For the comparative signifying opposition, see Smyth §313b.
235
See Aët. ii 7.1 (= 28a37 DK) with Finkelberg (1986).
236
Text and trans. (modified) Palmer (2009) 373, with 386 in defence of πλῆνται in line 1
and πάντῃ in line 4.
237
Mourelatos (2008) 253; Finkelberg (1986); cf. Cherubin (2005) 7, who reads the
arrangement of cosmic rings to indicate that: ‘Both [sc. Light and Night] are present
in portions that combine, detach, and mix in various ways to form familiar things.’

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b9.1–2).238 For those travelling with the ‘man who knows’, this
goddess is thus the Doxastical counterpart to the goddess of the
proem for whom unity is the primal reality obfuscated by mortal
activities of naming (the laying down of two forms or appear-
ances, μορφαί, b8.53–9; cf. b9.1–2),239 since her very agency in
their physical (yet discursively constructed) world implicitly
reveals the deficiency of that world arrangement.240
Yet she is also simply the goddess who through mixture brings
into being all things and presides over their passing away,241
fashioning the (deceptive) order of this (illusory) cosmos through
her mastery of mētis with which she first contrives unifying Erōs
(πρώτιστον μὲν Ἔρωτα θεῶν μητίσατο πάντων . . ., b13) and then
her primal powers of separation (later called Bellum and Discordia,

238
Simp. in Ph. 31.11–17 introduces 28b12.2–6 DK thus: ‘And Parmenides has clearly
presented the efficient cause not only of bodies that undergo generation, but also of
incorporeal things that bring generation to completion, saying: “And those over them
[were filled] with night . . . male conversely with female” (28b12.2–6 DK).’ Cf.
Finkelberg (1997) 2 (with her n. 6): ‘The Parmenidean goddess is then the cause of
the intermingling of the “forms” [sc. Light and Night], the mutual attraction of the sexes
and animal procreation being only the most familiar and illuminating instance of the
“erotic” attraction and intermingling of opposites, in the final analysis, of the two
opposite “forms”’; μιγνύς of the interaction of Light and Night: Plut. Adv. Col. 1114b.
on 28b9.1–2 DK: conceptually, the Light/Night schema is at the roots of the mortal
judgement based upon appearances that there are discrete things, see Cherubin (2005)
and my p. 83 n. 106. For a fuller discussion of 28b9 DK see Palmer (2009) 170–5.
239
According to Simp. in Ph. 39.20, this δαίμων also sends souls from the visible realm to
the invisible (sc. Hades) at one time, and back again at another; Gemelli Marciano
(2008) 36 n. 44 notes that the Pindaric thrēnos fr. 133 (SM) attributes the same role to
Persephone.
240
On the goddess of 28b12 DK’s tacit exposure of mortal error, see Mourelatos (2008) 252:
‘the goddess of mixture is herself a projection of mortal indecision’ (i.e. the failure to make
a firm logical κρίσις) whose action reverses the fallacious separation of 28b8.53–9 DK. For
Mourelatos this manifestation of divinity ‘is no longer the mediator between the real and
man, but a force that induces the worldly contraries to come together in mixture or
intercourse’ (251), but who, in this capacity, ‘plays an activist, creative, demiurgic role’
(235). Thanassas (2006) 214 agrees on different grounds, namely that, in contrast to the
mistake of 28b8.53–9 DK (the positing of enantiomorphic opposites), 28b12 DK offers a
glimpse of an ‘appropriate, positive Doxa which, by recourse to mixture rather than
separation, furnishes a partial critique of human error [sc. the mortal tendency to distin-
guish opposite forms according to appearances] and eliminates the “deceit” (28b8.60ff
DK)’. I suggest that the goddess’s recourse to mixture itself implicitly exposes the falla-
cious mortal presupposition that the opposites she will make intermingle are genuinely
separate (which, as we know from 28b8.53–9 DK, they are not). From this perspective,
mortals mislabel as mixture what is really only a return to and glimpse of primal unity.
241
Simp. in Ph. 34.12–17; 39.12 (= 28b12 DK); cf. Aët. ii 7.1 (= 28a37 DK).

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Cic. Nat. D. i. 11.28).242 As creator of Erōs and orchestrator of
coming-into-being, her role in the constitution of the phenomenal
world is thus equivalent to that of Aphrodite (hence she is so named
by Plutarch, Amat. 13.756e10), and, as the steersman who directs
the phenomenal changes that mortals take to be genuine, she is
implicitly identified as the authoress of the very ἀμηχανίη that itself
comically ‘steers’ (ἰθύνει, b6.6) the wandering minds of those
caught, deaf and blind, in the world she creates, the Doxastical
world of appearances (b6; Th. 1–28).243
And this is why the goddess of b12 holds the key to the epiph-
anic climax of our prologue and to Aristophanes’ characterization
of Agathon, the quasi-divinity of para-Doxa: this Agathon, it
now transpires, is no less the steersman (κυβερνήτης) of this illusory
world than is the δαίμων of the cosmos of the Doxa (b12.3;
cf. δρύοχοι, 52); nor, for that matter, are his wor(l)ds any less
brought into being from a mixture of (ostensibly merely sexual)
opposites (as we shall shortly see). Rather, just like the world-
engendering acts of the goddess of the Doxa, his divine activity,
at 52–7, too is cast as a virtuoso display of mētis, the (quasi-)divine
conjuring of a διάκοσμος (of drama) laid from the keel up (cf.
δρυόχους τιθέναι, 52), the new ‘felloes’ (or even ‘orbits’, ἁψῖδες,
53) of its verses ‘bent’ (κάμπτω, 53), ‘turned’ (τορνεύω, 54),
‘joined’ (κολλ-, 54), ‘moulded’ (κηροχύτω, 56), ‘rounded off’
(γογγύλλω, 56) and ‘fired’ (χοανεύω, 57) into the shape of familiar
things by poiēsis.244 Indeed, Agathon’s supposedly comical style
of composition here in fact merely transposes into theatre the

242
For the likely role of separation as well as mixture in the cosmology of the Doxa
(undiscussed in the extant fragments), see Finkelberg (1997); Curd (2002) 126, 154.
For the goddess as a mistress of mētis, and for the peculiarly intellectual nature of Erōs’
origin (‘a kind of creation but one which involves not so much giving birth as a mother-
goddess as a mental operation carried out by the intelligence typical of a knowing
daimōn who steers (kubernai) the world, plotting out its route in advance, just as a pilot
guides a ship over the sea’), see Detienne and Vernant (1978) 146; cf. Kingsley (2003)
215–16.
243
See Kingsley (2003) 215.
244
With the use of κάμπτω and γογγύλλω at 52–7 and μελοποιεῖν implying κατακάμπτειν
τὰς στροφάς at 68, cf. Detienne and Vernant (1978) 46, who discuss ‘the almost
systematic use of the terminology of the curve to describe mētis [which] is not just a
matter of the word agkulómētis but also of an adjective such as skoliós, a noun such as
stróphis, terms composed from the root *gu used to indicated curving [. . .]; and the root
*kamp, used to refer to whatever is curved, pliable or articulated’.

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divinely orchestrated metaphysical processes – which is to say,

the metaphysics of illusion – of early Greek cosmologizing from
the Pythagoreans to Plato (and very likely those of the ἐοικὼς
διάκοσμος of Parmenides’ Doxa also).245 (The implication is that
just like the audience of that Doxa, in the mechanical assembly of
Agathon’s poeticizing, we too will witness the genesis of the sort of
illusory world in which we, also, are immersed.)246

245
See Mourelatos (1987) 173–5, esp. 173 (citing Wright (1981) 34–40) for the parallel
observation that in Empedocles, cosmos-generating ‘mixture is, in all cases, a mechan-
ical juxtaposition or assembly’ of elements (see, for instance, 31b33 DK), and note that
in the case of Empedocles this is replete with the same sexual imagery involving
hardening and penetration as that exploited here, see 175–6 on earth’s χόανοι at Emp.
31b96.1 DK and cf. Ar.’s χοανεύω at 57, vulgarly extrapolated at 62. For philosophical
use of the metaphor of beginning ‘from the stocks’ (ἐκ δρυόχων) and its concomitant
laying the ‘keel’ (ἡ τρόπις), see Philol. 44a17 DK (of the cosmos, performed by a creator
god ἐν τῷ μέσῳ) with Kingsley (1994) 295 and Morrison (1955) 65 on the points of
resonance between Philolaus and Parmenides; ‘ἐκ δρυόχων’ in the context of demiurgic
activity in Plato, see Tim. 81b; cf. Laws 803a (fashioning of character). For use of
the model of wheel-felloes (ἁψῖδες) in Anaximander’s description of the orbits of
the heavenly bodies (in a cosmos likened to great chariot wheels), see Aët. ii 20.1,
25.1 (= 12a21, a22 DK) with Morrison (1955) 62–3 (and cf. 64, and Guthrie (1962–9)
ii.62 on affinities with Parmenides’ στέφαναι) and M. Miller (2006) 11, and for ἁψίς as
‘orbit’, Hymn. Is. 38, or ‘arch’, ‘vault’ see LSJ s.v. 5a–b; for the expert use of ‘dowels’
(γόμφοι) and ‘joints’ (κόλλαι) by Empedocles’ world-creating Aphrodite (who also joins
together μέλεα (or γυῖα), ‘limbs’, as at 31b20 DK just as she joins together bodies by
means of their ‘joints’ (ἄρθρα), i.e. genitals, 31b17.22 DK; cf. Ar.’s κολλομελεῖ at 54 with
my p. 143 n. 264), see 31b87, b96 (κόλλαι of Harmony), cf. b33 DK, with Mourelatos
(1987) 174 on κολλάω; and for this Cypris as a potter as well as a carpenter, kneading,
modelling and baking, see 31b73, b75, b95 DK; with Ar.’s κηροχυτέω at 56, cf. Plato’s
demiurge as ὁ κηροπλάστης at Tim. 74c6; and for the ‘turning’ (τορνεύω) of the cosmos
(and its constituents) see his cosmic carpentry at Tim. 33b, 69c, 73e, cf. 44d, with
Solmsen (1963) 480ff. for the similarity between the eclectic technai of Plato’s divine
κηροπλάστης and those of Empedocles’ Aphrodite; with Ar.’s χοανεύω at 57, cf. earth’s
χόανοι at Emp. 31b96.1 DK, with Palmer (2009) 301; finally, for testimony that
Empedocles’ cosmology followed closely the divinely orchestrated metaphysical pro-
cesses of the now no longer extant cosmology of Parmenides’ Doxa, see Censorinus,
DN. 4.7.8; Bollack (1969b) 429–30; Palmer (2009) 316–17. For a reading of Th. 52–7
which elides these resonances in favour of perceiving simply a satirical use of concretiz-
ing craft metaphor in general parody of convoluted language, novel compounds (as at
Frogs 819 of Euripides and 824 of Aeschylus) and (possibly) new technical terms for
rhetoric, see Muecke (1982) 44–6; Austin and Olson (2004) ad loc.; O’Sullivan (1992)
140–1, comparing Frogs 797–802.
246
Our experience therefore recapitulates that of the traveller of Parmenides’ poem: just like
him, having been liberated from mortal perceptions, seen mortal fallacy exposed and
wilfully colluded to enter the Doxa, we arrive at the very place at which our world – or a
world equivalent to ours – comes into being and there witness its creator at work (for us,
the orchestrating divinity of para-Doxa, the τραγῳδοποιός as comically epitomized by
Agathon).

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Yet what follows first sets out the comic premise of our play
within its philosophical topography: entrapped by his own illusions
into a comical limbo – in fact, caught, now quite explicitly, between
being and not-being – this Euripides awaits the κρίσις of the city’s
women (‘[for] . . . on this day it will be decided whether Euripides is
still alive or is a goner’, τῇδε θἠμέρᾳ κριθήσεται∣εἴτ’ ἔστ’ ἔτι ζῶν εἴτ’
ἀπόλωλ’ Εὐριπίδης, 76–7), vacillating on this third, intermediate
route (the Doxa), no less, on the paradox(ast)ically third and
yet middle (?) day of their three-day festival (80, cf. 375).247 In
this state, his only μηχανή – hence the opening journey of our play –
is to recruit the theatrical mētis of Agathon, who, aptly enough, now
recalls the helpless tragedian’s past mastery of illusion by rolling
onto stage by way of the externalizing device of the ekkuklēma
(οὐκ ἔνδον ἔνδον ἐστίν . . ., Ach. 396) just as a younger Euripides
once did himself in Acharnians (408–9, 479), 95–100:248
Ευ. σίγα.
Κη. τί ἐστιν;
Ευ. Ἁγάθων ἐξέρχεται. 95
Κη. καὶ ποῖός ἐστιν;249
Ευ. οὗτος· οὑκκυκλούμενος.
Κη. ἀλλ’ ἦ τυφλὸς μέν εἰμ’; ἐγὼ γὰρ οὐχ ὁρῶ
ἄνδρ’ οὐδέν’ ἐνθάδ’ ὄντα, Κυρήνην δ’ ὁρῶ.

247
For the paradox of ἐπεὶ τρίτη ’στὶ θεσμοφορίων, ἡ Μέση at 80, and scholarly attempts to
explain it away, see Austin and Olson (2004) ad loc. Most recently, N. G. Wilson (2007a)
and (2007b) ad loc., following Sommerstein (1994), simply elides the τρίτη. For the
correspondingly third and middle path of the Doxa that is the philosophical realm of our
comedy, see 28b6, b7 DK.
248
For this young Agathon at the height of his powers as a glimpse of the younger
Euripides, see Th. 173f.; further comic capital made from the equation of the two
poets, see Frogs 1327 (Euripides as Cyrene, i.e. full of ‘tricks’) and Th. 98 (Agathon
as Cyrene), as well as the final portrayal of Euripides as deceiver at 1160–1226 with
Sommerstein (1994) ad loc. For the metatheatrical language of ‘rolling’ (κυλίνδω) in our
play, and its attendant associations of deception and illusion, see Bierl (1990) 385–6 on
Th. 651 (cf. 767), arguing that the ekkuklēma as quintessential device of tragic ἀπάτη is
replete with these connotations; cf. Broackes (2009) 58; Crystal (1996) 357–8, and my
p. 182 n. 73 on Plato’s exploitation of κυλίνδω to characterize the movement of things
existing between being and not-being. The intertext with Ach. (and not Telephus) as
primary here: Hubbard (1991) 187 n. 87; Sidwell (2009) 36–7; the trip to Agathon’s
house in general as a refashioning of Dicaeopolis’ visit to Euripides’ abode in Ach. (Ar.’s
first extant deconstruction of tragic deception): Duncan (2006) 33; Compton-Engle
(2003) 515–16; Muecke (1982) 41–2.
249
Following Rogers (1904) ad 96; Austin and Olson (2004) and N. G. Wilson (2007a)
emend to: Κη. καὶ ποῦ<’σθ’; Ευ. ὅπου>’στίν; οὗτος. . .; for ποῖος here in emendation of
R’s ποῖο, see my p. 123 n. 218.

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Ευ. σίγα· μελῳδεῖν γὰρ παρασκευάζεται.
Κη. μύρμηκος ἀτραποὺς ἢ τί διαμινύρεται; 100
E. Silence!
K. What is it?
E. Agathon’s coming out.
K. What sort of fellow is he?
E. This man – the one who’s being rolled out.
K. Perhaps I am blind, because I can’t see any man there at all, I see Cyrene.
E. Shh; he’s preparing to sing . . .
K. . . . ant paths,250 or what’s he vocalizing?

The lines that follow offer the most famous theatrical evocation of
mixture, duality and confusion of extant Greek literature, and an
epideixis of the tragic demiurgy at the root of para-Doxa. Just as, at
the outset of the Doxa, Parmenides has us meet the goddess whose
role in the creation of the world is evoked through her manipulation
of the opposites of sex/gender, so too we now encounter the
mixture that engenders the tragic world (para-Doxa, cf. 146–72),
and its progenitor is cast precisely as the embodiment of the erotic
intermingling of these opposites (indeed, as a projection of mortal
indecision itself).
Hymning a complex monody both of solo and choral female
lyrics the metra of which seem to break apart and recombine in
constantly changing ways (101–29; cf. 52–7) and whose titillating
(‘new’) music amplifies the leitmotif of mixture and paradox (cf.
κίθαρίν τε ματέρ’ ὕμνων∣ἄρσενι βοᾷ δοκίμων, 124–5), Agathon the
τραγῳδοποιός enters our play just as an Aphrodite-figure might: to
a reception of sexual arousal and mortal befuddlement, 130–45:
Κη. ὡς ἡδὺ τὸ μέλος ὦ πότνιαι Γενετυλλίδες 130
καὶ θηλυδριῶδες καὶ κατεγλωττισμένον
καὶ μανδαλωτόν, ὥστ’ ἐμοῦ γ’ ἀκροωμένου
ὑπὸ τὴν ἕδραν αὐτὴν ὑπῆλθε γάργαλος.
καί σ’ ὦ νεανίσχ’ ἥστις εἶ, κατ’ Αἰσχύλον
ἐκ τῆς Λυκουργείας ἐρέσθαι βούλομαι. 135
ποδαπὸς ὁ γύννις; τίς πάτρα; τίς ἡ στολή;
τίς ἡ τάραξις τοῦ βίου; τί βάρβιτος
λαλεῖ κροκωτῷ; τί δὲ λύρα κεκρυφάλῳ;

250
For the mētis of ants, see Paus. 7.4.5; further significance as the creators of complex (and
archetypally wandering) tunnels and paths and thus analogues of late fifth-century ‘new
music’, see Austin and Olson (2004) ad loc.

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τί λήκυθος καὶ στρόφιον; ὡς οὐ ξύμφορον.
τίς δαὶ κατρόπτου καὶ ξίφους κοινωνία; 140
σύ δ’ αὐτὸς ὦ παῖ πότερον ὡς ἀνὴρ τρέφει;
καὶ ποῦ πέος; ποῦ χλαῖνα; ποῦ Λακωνικαί;
ἀλλ’ ὡς γυνὴ δῆτ’; εἶτα ποῦ τὰ τιτθία;
τί φῄς; τί σιγᾷς; ἀλλὰ δῆτ’ ἐκ τοῦ μέλους
ζητῶ σ’, ἐπειδή γ’ αὐτὸς οὐ βούλει φράσαι; 145
K. How sweet the song, O Holy Genetyllides,
and smelling of women and tongue-swelling
and french-kissy, so that a tingle came over my bottom
just upon hearing it!
And you young man, whoever a girl that you are, I want to ask you
in the manner of Aeschylus from his Lycurgeia.
What sort of lady-boy are you? What homeland? What dress?
Why the confusion of lifestyle? What does a lyre
say with a saffron robe? And what a lyre with a hairnet?
Why an oil-flask and a bra? How not compatible!
What commonality between the mirror and the sword? 140
And you yourself, child, are you being raised as a male?
But where is your dick? Where is your cape? Where are your shoes?
Well, then, as a women? Then where are your tits?
What do you say? Why are you silent? Or from your song
am I to seek you out, since you yourself don’t wish to explain?

Our eyes now directed to the spectacle on-stage only by the help-
less vacillations of a wandering νόος (again) caught between mutu-
ally exclusive alternatives (cf. b8.55–9; Th. 7–8), this Agathon
finally emerges as a figure of κρᾶσις (or μίξις?),251 a mixture of

251
Casertano (2011) 44–5 n. 92 has most recently highlighted the different connotations
of these terms in part on the basis of Empedoclean parallels. He argues κρᾶσις at Parm.
28b16.1DK connotes a blending or ‘melting’ of parts (‘limbs’) ‘in which each
constituent does not stay itself but changes the others and is changed with the others,
producing something new that could not be produced by the simple separate existence
of each single part: the mind. . .’, whereas μίξις of the exemplary processes of 28b12.4
DK connotes rather a union in which ‘the opposites search for each other and unite
even while staying distinct from one another’. But see Curd (2002) 146–8 for
scepticism that any analysis of these terms is obvious from Empedocles’ fragments,
and my p. 118 n. 201 for modern critics who attribute the κρᾶσις of b16 to the mixture
of Light and Night. Indeed, Curd (2011) 129 even recognizes comparable ambiguity
of κρᾶσις itself at 28b16 DK, asking ‘temper or mixture?’ For the view closest to that I
suggest underlies Ar.’s enactment of the model of 28B16 DK, see Bollack (2011) 18,
who asserts that Parmenides’ use of κρᾶσις ‘distinguishes it from fusion where
frontiers are banned [and . . .] redefines it as the co-existence of separate elements’,
and my discussion pp. 121, 156. For κρᾶσις as both a physical ‘mixture’ (like μíξις) and
a ‘confusion’ or ‘muddle’ here too, see Mourelatos (2008) 256; and for use of the

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the opposites mortals make constitutive of their own phenomenal

reality, but which here coalesce in the source of all (poetic) coming-
into-being.252 Yet if by the Kinsman’s confused exposé of such
mutually contradictory σήματα of gender (items brought together
by the poet to effect his poiēsis, 137–40) and paradoxical absen-
ces of sexual identity (μορφαί upon which νόος fixes only not to
find, 142–3), Agathon is rendered an ‘ontological puzzle’ (seem-
ingly male and female, yet not male, and not female, hence
neither male nor female at all), this is not because Aristophanes
is primarily concerned to explore issues of gender or identity
per se (as has been argued).253 Rather, this poet is rendered a
projection of mortal confusion (a τάραξις τοῦ βίου, 137; κρᾶσις)
precisely because, in parallel to the orchestrating goddess of the

terms that implies interchangeability in exegesis of 28b16 DK, see Thphr. Sens. 4.3.
Lastly, for the enactment of 28b16 DK that Agathon’s song and its on-stage reception
represents, see my p. 143 n. 264.
252
For the symptoms of Doxastical thinking manifestly on display here see Robbiano
(2006) 198: ‘The Doxa is a way of looking at reality that focuses on differences and
change, that relies on opposites in order to find an explanation for origin, differ-
entiation and change’; and Palmer (2009) 174: ‘Mortals have no inkling of follow-
ing the way of inquiry that focuses upon what is and cannot not be . . . Instead,
mortals are represented as adopting as their starting point a conception of the world
as formed from two fundamentally opposed principles, light and night.’ And for the
status of the σήματα laid down at Th. 137–40, see Robbiano (2006) 187: ‘every sign
[sc. in the Doxa] defines and separates something from what is then to be regarded
as its opposite. These sêmata are what the humans “distributed upon” reality, by
turning it into a system of oppositions. This way of focusing on what is different
(instead of focusing on what is the same) is arbitrary.’ Cf. Thanassas (2007) 70:
‘While mortals are incapable of using nous to make the distinction between Being
and Non-Being, they carry out a separation “according to the appearance,” in which
they rend the world apart and create caesura.’ This is precisely the sort of physical
κρίσις Ar. parodies in the Kinsman’s bewildered mortal response to Agathon, see
now also Sissa (2012) 55 (cf. 57): [In the Agathon scene:] ‘Aristophanes exhibits to
the Athenian people a tableau of crude binary thinking.’ For male and female as
Parmenidean opposites, and the primal mixture of these forms as ‘the most primor-
dial reality’ see Thanassas (2007) 73. For other examples of the use of ‘male’ and
‘female’ to structure experience see the co-option of these terms by Damon and his
followers in order to theorize music and criticize the ‘new music’ of which Ar.’s
Agathon is here the exemplar, Csapo (2004); and cf. the division to come at 151–6
between ‘female’ and ‘male’ plays.
253
See Stehle (2002) 380–3; Taaffe (1993) 82; Given (2007) 40–2; but for alertness to the
larger issue of the nature of reality and illusion raised by the Agathon scene, see Duncan
(2006) 43 (the phrase ‘ontological puzzle’ is hers) and Saxonhouse (2006) 136 n. 13.
Note that, against readers informed by gender studies, if anything, this scene makes a
nonsense of the distinction between sex and gender; what is at stake here is the manifest
failure of the mortal opposites of male and female as artifices of mortal κρίσις whether
articulated through σήματα or μορφαί.

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Doxa,254 he comically embodies the processes at the very heart
of the generation of this illusory world, wherein there is no
ontological stability (as we shall shortly see, 146–72),255 and
where, even as they are necessarily combined, the σήματα
(and μορφαί) of male and female simply recapitulate as fallacious
the dualism that infects all mortal thinking (cf. 1–24; b8.53–9;
b12.1–2). (And therein, of course, lies the comic efficacy of
casting this young poet – poetically autonomous, paradoxical
but, most importantly, as caricatured by comedy, notoriously
effeminate – as Aristophanes’ Doxastical deity).256 Thus it is
not only in the ontological failure of the opposites of male and
female as artifices of mortal thought (sc. of the Light/Night
schema), and of the mortal κρίσις (a physical κρίσις in δέμας)
from which they derive, that the epiphanous power of our
encounter with this Agathon resides (as is the case, for instance,
with the divine agency of the goddess of b12, or indeed, the

254
Note that at 135 the Kinsman’s inquiry is flagged (through the quotation of Aeschylus’
Edonians) as the inquiry into nature (cf. ποῖός ἐστιν; at 96, 30) of a tragic mortal
(Lycurgus) into the patron divinity of theatrical illusion who merges opposites and
renders them paradoxical (Dionysus), see Zeitlin (1981) 401. On Dionysus’ paradoxical
nature, Segal (1982) 234; Csapo (1997) 254–5; Buxton (2009) 234; on the more obvious
Dionysian aspects of Agathon’s costume and accoutrements, see Lada-Richards (1999)
33–6; Bierl (2009) 139–1: ‘Agathon appears . . . as . . . the comastic god himself’ (140–1),
and on the close fit between the Parmenidean notion of underlying unity as primal reality
and the power of Dionysus, cf. Gellrich’s comment that Dionysus ‘does not so much
destroy or confuse distinctions as configure the nondifferentiation out of which such
distinctions eventually arise’ (cited by Buxton (2009) 234 n. 14). Pairing of Dionysus
and Aphrodite (superficially wine and sex) in Ar.: Pl. Smp. 77e; and for Euripides’ treatment
of theatrical mimēsis in the Bacchae as a response to Th.’s comic reworking of Aeschylus’
scene, see Saetta-Cottone (2003), (2010).
255
See also Duncan (2006) 42. Why the mixtures of which phenomenal things are com-
posed stay together as stable things for different lengths of time and the processes by
which they retain their composition cannot be accounted for on the basis of our extant
fragments of the pluralists; see Curd (2002) esp. 156.
256
For Agathon as the inventor of independently contrived drama, see Arist. Po. 1451b19–25
(Antheus); for his paradoxical compositions featuring τò εἰκóς, see Rh. 1402a10–13; Po.
1456a23–5 (cf. Pl. Smp. 200a7); for the popular perception of effeminacy explored in Th.,
see Sissa (2012) 53–61, esp. 61, and my p. 130 n. 232; further comic allusion, Ar. fr. 341 KA
(a reference to both Agathon’s poetic style and his habit of shaving, usually attributed to the
lost Th.), and post-(our) Th., Ar. fr. 178 (Gerytades), and (possibly) Frogs 84; cf. TrGF 39
test. 11, 12, with Csapo (2004) 232, who suggests that the wider caricature ‘owes just as
much to contemporary music criticism [sc. as it does to the actual Agathon’s notoriety as a
pais kalos]’. See my n. 252 above for the binary and gendered terms of such criticism. See
also O’Sullivan (1992) 146 (cf. my p. 130 n. 232 for disagreements with his wider reading).
Duncan (2006) and Sissa (2012) discuss the Platonic Agathon (a rehabilitating rejoinder to
Ar.’s caricature).

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ἔλεγχος of 1–24).257 It is in the very absence of any ‘real’ persona

behind the poiēsis (or illusion) to find.
The two seemingly contradictory theoretical grounds the poet
now offers for his appearance, at 148–56 and 159–67, in fact, bolster
this revelation that what is genuinely at issue in our comic epiphany
is not where to place Agathon in the Doxastical κρίσις between male
and female (even if the obvious comedy of this question is kept
alive), but where to place him (sc. theatre) in the κρίσις of the
Alētheia: ἔστιν ἢ οὐκ ἔστιν; (b8.16). At 148–56 this Agathon replies
and sets out his ‘theoretical’ conception of poetic mimēsis:258
Αγ. . . .
ἐγὼ δὲ τὴν ἐσθῆθ’ ἅμα γνώμῃ φορῶ·
χρὴ γὰρ ποητὴν ἄνδρα πρὸς τὰ δράματα,
ἃ δεῖ ποεῖν, πρὸς ταῦτα τοὺς τρόπους ἔχειν. 150
αὐτίκα γυναικεῖ’ ἢν ποῇ τις δράματα,
μετουσίαν δεῖ τῶν τρόπων τὸ σῶμ’ ἔχειν.
Κη. οὐκοῦν κελητίζεις, ὅταν Φαίδραν ποῇς;
Αγ. ἀνδρεῖα δ’ ἢν ποῇ τις, ἐν τῷ σώματι
ἔνεσθ’ ὑπάρχον τοῦθ’. ἃ δ’ οὐ κεκτήμεθα, 155
μίμησις ἤδη ταῦτα συνθηρεύεται.
A. . . .
I wear my clothing with design.
For a poet-man should, in relation to the dramas
he must make, have ways in accordance with these.
For instance, if someone is making female dramas,
It’s necessary for the body to have a share of their habits.

257
For the mistaken mortal assumption that names (such as ‘male’ and ‘female’) point to
(aspects of) an ontologically independent phenomenal world, see 28b8.38–41 DK; as
the goddess makes clear, the ‘phenomenal world of mortal belief is in fact constituted by
the discursive act of naming’, see J. Barrett (2004) 285; and Palmer (2009) 173–4, on b9.
Note that 28b17 DK makes clear that in the Doxa, mortals only see the world through the
male/female schema in continuation of the Light/Night polarity that underlies their
ἐοικὼς διάκοσμος so that even differentiation between the sexes implicitly brings with
it what-is-not, see Robbiano (2006) 196 n. 497; cf. Saxonhouse (1992) 45 and 41 for part
of the Parmenidean revelation effected here: ‘To learn from the Goddess [here Ar.], the
young man must shed his deceptive senses that perceive what is many, that see the world
as divisible into male and female, night and day, light and darkness. The unity of the
world appears only as a sort of revelation.’ See Kingsley (1999) 125–6 for the reduction
of ‘appearances to the basic oppositions’ encountered by Parmenides’ traveller, effected
by his ‘travelling behind appearances’ to the ‘roots of existence . . . where everything
merges with its opposite’; cf. 75, for the collapse of all mortal opposites, including male
and female, at the site of his revelation.
258
Valakas (2009) 188.

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K. So do you straddle up, whenever you’re writing a Phaedra?
A. But if someone is writing male dramas, this quality
is pre-existent in the body; but those which we don’t possess,
mimēsis helps to hunt down these things.

A ‘poet-man’, it is here famously claimed, must cultivate habits

that correspond to his poetic objects, altering his body by mimēsis
to participate in the gender of the drama he would write. Yet having
proposed this impersonal (cf. τις, 151, 154) theorum, Agathon next
appears to take a backward turn; in response to the lewd mockery of
the gender-bound Kinsman (157–8), the poet now explains that his
mode of dress is simply akin to that of those lyric and tragic poets of
old whose poiēsis reflected their dress and, ultimately, their natures:
men like Phrynichus, who, at 165–7:

αὐτός τε καλὸς ἦν καὶ καλῶς ἠμπίσχετο. 165

διὰ τοῦτ’ ἄρ’ αὐτοῦ καὶ κάλ’ ἦν τὰ δράματα·
ὅμοια γὰρ ποιεῖν ἀνάγκη τῇ φύσει.
was himself beautiful, and dressed beautifully.
And for this reason his plays were also beautiful:
for by necessity one composes things equivalent to one’s nature.259

If this conjunction of theories – one constructionist, one essenti-

alist – appears to be paradoxical, two-headed, that is so only if,
stuck fast in Doxastical assumptions, its audience take φύσις itself
as a stable entity;260 yet as we have seen, in this para-Doxa, φύσις

259
For the role of a ‘natural necessity’ as a governing force that stipulates how natural
things must be in the Doxa (presumably governing their generation, growth and passing
away), identified by Aëtius with 28b12 DK’s goddess (Aët. ii 7.1 = 28a37 DK), see
Palmer (2009) 175–6, and note the invocation of this Parmenidean force by Plato’s
Agathon at Pl. Smp. 195b–c, see Morrison (1964) 49–51. Significantly, the jokes that
follow in lines 168–70, which play with the ambiguity of the adverbs αἰσχρῶς, κακῶς
and ψυχρῶς in order to posit a relation between the quality of poetry and the character of
its writer (e.g. since Theognis is ψυχρός he necessarily writes ψυχρῶς, 170; cf. 182,
where the charge of the women against Euripides then voiced by the poet, ὅτι κακῶς
αὐτὰς λέγω (cf. 85), is now replete with comic implication), are also appropriated and
developed by Plato at Euthd. 284c9–285a1 (first κακῶς λεγεῖν, then ψυχρῶς), in order
to cast the ‘pseudo-logical arguments’ of the eristic sophists Euthydemus and
Dionysodorus ‘as the distasteful jokes of second-rate comedians’, see Chance (1992)
92–5 with 244 n. 33; cf. Hawtrey (1981) ad 284d5, and my discussion, pp. 103–8.
260
Given (2007) 48 n. 29 lists critics who perceive contradiction here, to which should be
added, most recently, Duncan (2006) 44: ‘both [sc. theories] cannot be true, seemingly –
and yet Agathon insists on keeping them both in play. He will not be categorized. He is
self-creating . . .’

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is not connected to being (or what-is) but rather to becoming

(and hence what-is-not).261 The nature of the poet is thus always
already in flux and now transformed through mimēsis according
to the drama (s)he writes, able to morph into all manner of new
roles, where it reciprocally determines the nature of poiēsis,
according to poetic necessity (‘Knowing this,’ Agathon (dis)
ambiguates, ‘I altered myself’, ταῦτα γάρ τοι γνοὺς ἐγὼ |
ἐμαυτὸν ἐθεράπευσα, 171–2). In their paradox(ast)ical conjuncture,
Agathon’s two theories thus simply enunciate the message implicit
in our comic epiphany: behind the appearance of the poet lies
the process of ‘coming-into-being’ (mimēsis) of his poiēsis; behind
the poiēsis, the ‘becoming’ (mimēsis) of the poet. Beyond this, the
joke is on those who look harder but fail to see that there is nothing
else to find, no reality behind the making of illusion, beyond, that
is, ‘the illusion that there is’.262
But that, perhaps, is not quite true, paradoxically, of the
Agathonian poiēsis of Aristophanes’ design. For Agathon’s
song at 101–29, with which our epiphany began – a lyric
duet to Apollo as builder of the walls of Troy (and probably
a parody of the actual Agathon’s conjectured Ilioupersis, vel
sim.) – enacts a chorus’s hymnic thanks for the freedom of its
fatherland (ξὺν ἐλευθέρᾳ | πατρίδι χορεύσασθε βοάν, 102–3)263
and thus situates its Aristophanic audience amidst the festival
celebrations of a city about to fall, sung by victims of the
greatest δόλος of all. To seek out this Agathon from his song,

261
See my earlier discussion, and also Given (2007) 41–2, who, drawing on Naddaf (2005)
2–3, reconciles Agathon’s theories on parallel grounds (one can change one’s φύσις) but
misses the philosophical basis for their connection and so does not manage to transcend
the desire to find the ‘reality’ of an effeminate Agathon behind his illusory play with
costume (42). For the world of the poet as one of ontological flux, cf. Vernant (1991) 175
on this scene, where (for a Platonic reader) ‘greater emphasis is laid on the affinities of
poetry, as a species of the mimetic, with the polymorphic and gaudy world of becoming
and with the inferior part of the soul that is always unstable and in flux and is the seat in
us of the desires and passions’.
262
See Kingsley (2003) 255–8, esp. 255 and 256 for this formulation and the parallel insight
from Parmenides. Cf. Saxonhouse’s (2006) 136 kindred observation that our play raises
‘the question of whether there is a truth that can be hidden or revealed or whether all rests
within the poet’s mastery of illusion’, esp. n. 13 for a parallel assessment of Agathon: ‘In
his case, there is no hiding or revealing since there is nothing to hide or reveal.’
263
Reading R’s πατρίδι at 103 as do Austin and Olson (2004) ad loc. For the actual
Agathon’s conjectured and ill-fated (because hubristically ambitious) Ilioupersis, vel
sim., see Arist. Po. 1456a11–20.

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that is, from (the κρᾶσις of) his (much-wandering) μέλος, (as the
confused Kinsman is wont to do, 130, 144–5; cf. b16), then, is
not simply to witness the paradox(a) at the heart of theatre, see
flouted by it the κρίσις of mortals, and to reveal, in the κρίσις of
the Alētheia, its grounding only in what-is-not (thereby exposing
its Doxastical claim that εἶναι μὴ ἐόντα, ‘things that are not are’,
b7.1);264 it is to glimpse in the shifting poiēsis, a political
audience disconcertingly similar to one’s own, unwittingly cele-
brating in this very κῶμος its own deception (104).265 Herein,

264
For the way in which the Kinsman’s seeking out of Agathon ‘from his song’ unwit-
tingly enacts the faulty mode of cognition described at 28b16 DK (discussed on
pp. 117–22, cf. p. 83 n. 106, p. 118 n. 201), in which νόος ‘stands by/is present to’
confused mortals as they experience a κρᾶσις of much-wandering μέλεα, note that it is
through the κρᾶσις of Agathon’s much-wandering μέλος (130, 145) ‘song’ or μέλεα
‘parts of his song’ (received through a corresponding κρᾶσις of much-wandering
‘limbs [sc. sense-organs] that bend back on themselves’, hearing [and not-hearing]
and seeing [and not-seeing]) that νόος ‘is present’ for Ar.’s confused Doxastical
audience, see my pp. 136–40; for the dual resonance of the term μέλεα ‘limbs’ as
both ‘sense organs’ (in the pl. form) in Parmenides (and in a rare sg. in Arist. PA
645b36–646a1), and elsewhere ‘songs’ or ‘parts of a song’, see Popper (1963) 553;
Wersinger (2008) 56–61; and cf. κολλομελεῖ of Agathon at 54 (‘joins together μέλη’),
Frogs 1327–8 and Cratin. fr. 276 KA for comic puns on μέλη ‘songs’ and ‘limbs/body
parts (i.e. genitals)’; for the term’s Doxastical significance, see my p. 118 n. 201; and
for the ‘(much-)wandering’ nature of Agathon’s song: my p. 126 n. 223, p.136 n. 250;
but note also that Aristotle’s (Metaph. 1009b22) variant reading of b16.1 DK,
πολυκάμπτων, ‘much-bent (sc. limbs)’ enacted here might also connote a song of
‘much mētis’, see my p. 126 n. 223, p. 136 n. 250 and p. 133 n. 244 on κάμπτω.
Against following such wandering paths of perception of the sort comically exem-
plified by the confused Kinsman’s response, the goddess’s enjoinder, by contrast, is
clear: οὐ γὰρ μήποτε τοῦτο δαμῇ εἶναι μὴ ἐόντα (28b7.1 DK); for her implicit target
here as the third way, the wandering mortal path of confusion, see Palmer (2009) 123–
5; pace Coxon (2009) ad loc. Significantly, the culiminating and transformative
experience of Parmenides’ proem is the paradoxically absent presence of the two
mutually negating opposites that awaits the traveller after he has passed through the
gates of the paths of Day and Night, as M. Miller (2006) has shown: at this site in
the cosmos Day and Night alternate their dominion, and as they are shown to do so in
the proem – the presence of one negating the other and vice versa, but also constituted
by the absence of its counter – they reveal insights later to be experienced as doctrine
in the Doxa section of the poem. For it is this universal pattern of oppositional mortal
thought, characterized by mutually negating alternatives, that must be overcome (i.e.
the traveller must literally go through and past the gates of the paths of Day and Night
in order to meet with the goddess and experience her revelations beyond (40)), and it
is the process of cognitively transcending these negations that results in the under-
standing (νοεῖν) attendant upon experiencing what M. Miller (2006) calls the ‘epiph-
anous power of the “is” ’ (45), the realization that ‘all is full of light and obscure night
together’ (28b9.3 DK) (16).
265
Herein, as we shall see in my following discussion, lies the further significance of the
allusive prefiguration of our play’s Thesmophorian festival setting hinted at in 101–2,

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climactically staged as comic epiphany, lies the programmatic

paradox of this para-Doxa and the rest of our play: the only
reality to be found in this world of illusion is the reality of
deception, and any freedom from it is as sure to be as illusory
as the imagined reality of this play.266

ἀμηχανίη from beginning to end: para-Doxa

and the play beyond

ὅ τ’ ἀπατήσας δικαιότερος τοῦ μὴ ἀπατήσαντος καὶ ὁ ἀπατηθεὶς σοφώτερος τοῦ μὴ

ἀπατηθέντος.267
Tragedians are fools, actors are fakes, spectators are the biggest dupes of all.268
And yet as soon as we discover what Parmenides’ poem once was – not an
exercise for intellectuals, but a guide to transformation – then all the details of
what this writer says fall into place.269

The ironizing comedy of Thesmophoriazusae’s beginning can now

be seen to lie in situating us both on the ordinary mortal path of
confusion, a (parodically) circling route that culminates in an
audience with the creator of the very illusions that hold us fast in
our helplessness, and on the extraordinary journey of an initiate
guided safely by a goddess who reveals ἀληθείη (‘things as they
are’).270 But, in so doing, our opening lines merely enact the
whose ‘Χθονίαιν’ alludes to Demeter and Persephone, see Austin and Olson (2004) ad
101–3; Bierl (2009) 142 and my p. 149 n. 283. For τὰ πάτρια as a political slogan in 412/
11, see [Arist.] Ath. 29.3 with Austin and Olson (2004) ad loc.: ‘the reference to the
freedom of the fatherland may [. . .] represent a comment on the situation in contempo-
rary Athens’. For κῶμος at 104 as a ‘performative shifter, mediating between the here and
now of the performance and the then and there of the plot’, see Bierl (2009) 143, and for
the identification of Athens with Troy in fifth-century Athenian art and literature (as
cities both hubristically sacked by invaders), see Ferrari (2000); use of the paradigm of
the Trojan war by the comic poets for contemporary political critique: Wright (2007).
266
Cf. Kingsley (2003) 257–8.
267
Gorg. 82b23 DK: ‘He who deceives is more just than he who does not deceive and he
who is deceived is wiser than he who is not deceived.’
268
Bobrick (1997) 192. 269 Kingsley (2003) 300.
270
The ironizing frame of our play might be further elucidated if we turn back a final time to
Parmenides’ proem. For there we began with an anonymous traveller, speeding through
the dark and unknown, guided by the Heliades, who have come up from the Underworld to
lead him back down to the House of Night; this man is an φὼς εἰδώς (28b1.3 DK), a ‘man
who knows’, or an initiate to the mysteries of the goddess. Yet, as Cosgrove (2011) has
controversially argued, as the goddess introduces the world of appearance and character-
izes those mortals εἰδότες οὐδέν, the phrase φὼς εἰδώς becomes pregnant with negative

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Parmenidean insight that the reality revealed by the goddess of
the Alētheia and the world of the Doxa steered by its goddess are
simply two different ways of approaching the same object, the
world in which we are all immersed, that which is.271 There is
the direct route, the path of what-is, which simply is, and the path of
what-is-not, which does not exist, and our path, the path that
comically fails to appreciate that and so teeters between what-is
and what-is-not, floundering in its mistaken apprehension that
‘things that are not are’ (b7.1; Th.130–45).272
As the prologue of our play reaches its climax with a bravura
display of the reality of this ludicrous mortal predicament as trans-
posed to theatre (the world in which we are all immersed now),
recasting the world of tragedy as this beguiling world of passively
perceived para-Doxa, and comedy itself reciprocally as the implicit
revealer of reality, its opening exposé of tragic epistemology and
veiled political allusions (cf. 102–3) thus establish its wider

connotations; it comes also to connote a man who has seen the light (φῶς), a truster in
perceptual knowlege, or ‘an illuminated observer’, and thus at 28b1.3 DK retrospectively
evokes a mortal knowing nothing, whose path, the course of the sun, is changed funda-
mentally when the Heliades meet him and take him down to the Underworld. On this
second reading, the initatory connotations of φὼς εἰδώς are ironized; the ‘man who knows’
turns out not to be in the first instance an initiate but, rather, a man who thinks he knows,
whose naïve view of the world is changed by divine revelation. Our proem thus begins not
in medias res with the flight of an initiate to meet the goddess, but rather in the world of
doxa, on the path of a typical mortal claimant to truth, whose understanding about what-is
is about to be revealed as fallacious. If this reading of the ironizing duality of φὼς εἰδώς is
correct, it may well explain why it is that the frame of our play takes as its premise the
interrogation of a man who has seen, and who wanders on a path of darkness, along the
course of the sun, and also casts his anonymous interlocutor as an initiate (an φὼς εἰδώς)
into the mysteries that will thereby be revealed. The clue lies in the outcome of our ἔλεγχος:
our initiate’s only prefatory lesson from this man ‘who knows’, who ‘has seen’, is how to
not-see, be deaf and blind, a state which simply recapitulates the predicament of mortal
confusion exemplified by his guide, even as it brings us to exactly the perceptual alertness
necessary to experience the reality of the quasi-divinity whom he is made to encounter
(Agathon). If Cosgrove is correct, that is, our play may well begin with the ironizing
double meaning of φὼς εἰδώς comically concretized by its two protagonists, one a
thoroughly confused mortal who has seen and therefore ‘knows’, one an initiate (or rather,
the vehicle for our initiation) whose comical descent into ἀμηχανίη paradoxically holds the
key to our own freedom from entrapment in tragic deception. If that is so, in turn, the
Parmenidean intertext furnishes us with one reason for Ar.’s otherwise unprecedented
creation of an anonymous Euripidean follower; Euripides and Anonymous are simply two
faces of the same coin. For ‘double-coding’ in general as ‘central to comic poetics’, see
Ruffell (2011) 349–51.
271
Meijer (1997) 245; Kingsley (2003) 285–94; Robbiano (2006) 188; Thanassas (2007)
83; Palmer (2009) 180–8.
272
See Kingsley (2003) 107–10.

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thematic concern with redressing its own audience’s complicit

entrapment in tragic deception.273 Indeed, to this end, in a manner
directly parallel to the goddess’s tactics of prefatory revelation
(ἔλεγχος) and didactic deception (Doxa), the rest of our play can
itself be seen as a para-Doxastical demonstration of the truth of its
revelatory prologue (i.e. that we are all caught in ἀμηχανίη), and its
implicit enjoinder to (re)engage critically and self-critically with
the processes of theatre (101ff.) can be heard as an enjoinder that
resounds implicitly throughout.
In this respect, our opening paraphilosophy is thus comparable
to another major unannounced parody of this play operating within
the layered deceptions of our para-Doxa, the Telephus parody:
for just as the effect of seeing Euripidean motifs at the flashpoint
of our Thesmophoriazusae’s reuse of that tragedy’s plot sequence –
the Kinsman’s seizure of Mica’s ‘child’ (689) – is to prompt some
comic spectators to reflect that in several key respects they ‘have
been in a play very like it [sc. Telephus] for some time’,274 so too

273
This concern is also written into our play’s plot: the premise of our comedy is that
Athenian men have taken Euripides’ illusory portrayals of female duplicity and excess
(which, inconveniently for Athenian women, happen to be true) for reality and therefore
no longer trust their wives. For the implicit identification of this audience of
Thesmophorian husbands with the audience watching presently in the comic theatre,
see my following discussion. And note that every single tragic parody in this play stages
a tragic attempt to manipulate its audience by illusory means. As Bowie (1993) 222
notes, in restaging Euripides’ plays ‘Aristophanes demonstrates that the very idea of
tragic drama is only possible if its audience suspends disbelief and accepts, on tragedy’s
own terms, [. . .] the illusion of reality . . .[i.e. not the reality of illusion]’. For the erosion
of the epistemic authority of the senses effected by Euripidean tragedy in the course of its
deceptions, see, in addition to our opening lines, the uncertainty that hangs over the
Kinsman’s sensory perceptions during the first third of the play, and the Andromeda
parody’s further exposé of the bewildering effects of tragic epistemology at the end of
the play (at 1056–1104). In addition to the (unwitting) confusion that surrounds seeing
Agathon’s door at 26, the Kinsman is also not sure if he sees Agathon or Cyrene (97–8),
or even himself or Cleisthenes (235) – both of which, of course, are good cross-dressing
jokes but, nonetheless, also reiterate what it means to be an audience so inured by tragic
illusions as to have entirely lost the ability correctly to discern what-is and what-is-not
(or to be an audience taught by Euripidean theatre to see but not-see, hear but not-hear
the reality of its own deception, 1–28). Note that the women, by contrast – bastions of
comic reality in this play – constantly reissue the tacit imperative to scrutinize the stage:
σίγα, σιώπα, πρόσεχε τὸν νοῦν·. . . (381); πανταχῇ δὲ ῥῖψον ὄμμα, καὶ τὰ τῇδε∣<καὶ τὰ
κεῖσε> καὶ τὰ δεῦρο∣πάντ’ ἀνασκόπει καλῶς (665–6); ἐπισκοπεῖν δὲ πανταχῇ∣κυκλοῦσαν
ὄμμα χρὴ χοροῦ κατάστασιν (957–8). Text Austin and Olson (2004).
274
See Bowie (1993) 223; he continues: ‘in Telephus, the king, disguised as his opposite, a
beggar, infiltrated the hostile Greek camp and made a speech in self-defence; he was
forced to seize Orestes when a messenger brought news of the presence of a spy in the

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the effect of appreciating as Parmenidean our play’s πολύδηρις
ἔλεγχος (b7.5) and opening journey to a comic ‘god(dess)’ of para-
Doxa is to prompt the recognition that the subsequent contours of
our comedy also conform to a wider (para-)Doxastical topography.
Indeed, it is to reveal the truthful deceits of Parmenides’ goddess and
her ironic mode of revealing mortal error as latent structuring devi-
ces at work in the comedy to follow.275
Consider, for instance, our play’s nested festival setting: for
having warned its spectators of the dangers of following this
Euripides into ἀμηχανίη, taken them to the origins of theatrical
illusion and entrusted them with the pretence of privileged insight
into the comically flawed Euripidean deceptions to follow (cf. ἁνὴρ
μὲν ἡμῖν οὑτοσὶ καὶ δὴ γυνὴ∣τό γ’ εἶδος, ‘this one [sc. the disguised
Kinsman] is a man to us, but a woman in appearance’, 266–7), our
Thesmophoriazusae effectively begins again (a new prologue com-
mences at 279),276 drawing its audience into an illusory structure
parallel in didactic function to the Doxastical cosmology fabricated
by Parmenides’ goddess. This audience now enters an imagined
festival:277 a (Demetrian) world constructed within the (Dionysian)

camp and a search was started. Nearly one hundred lines before Mnesilochus seizes the
child (689), Cleisthenes has come in to warn the women (574), who institute a search
(656ff.); before that Mnesilochus has infiltrated the Thesmophoria in disguise and made
a speech of self-justification. The slightest of hints that we are in a “Telephus” is given in
a quotation from that play in the last line of Mnesilochus’ scandalous speech (519), but
this is scarcely sufficient to alert many to the double nature of the action’ (224). Cf.
Austin and Olson (2004) lviii.
275
By extension, the purpose of our play’s comedy – just like the goddess’s ironic jibing of
mortals stuck fast in their fallacies – can be seen as essentially restorative, see Bobrick
(1997) 192, building upon Reckford (1987) 3–13 (on Peace), and his emphasis (at 68)
on the darker aspects of comic self-recognition.
276
See Taaffe (1993) 87–8; W. J. Slater (2002) 159.
277
For the Parmenidean precedent, see Kingsley (2003) 161: ‘The goddess’ work is to show
us we are living in an illusion. But the only way for her to do this is by entering the
illusion and creating an illusory structure in it that will help us to realize we are
surrounded by illusion. If we listen to what she is saying, follow her in what she is
doing, we will gradually start to find ourselves inside that structure she has built – able to
look out at the world we used to live in from the perspective of this structure . . .’ As we
enter the goddess’s creation, narrated to us as the Doxastical mortal world of 28b8.51ff.
DK, we must orient ourselves using the σήματα given to us in the Alētheia, against which
the fallaciousness of the σήματα laid down by mortals is revealed, see my earlier
discussion, esp. p. 52 n. 23, p. 68 n. 65, p. 89 n. 117, and, on mortal σήματα: pp. 81–2
nn. 100–1, p. 98 n. 149, pp. 99 nn. 154–5. Ironically, the Thesmophoria of this play has
become one significant area in scholarship where illusion has been taken for reality, see
Clinton (1996) 119 esp. n. 27 on the common scholarly tendency to confuse comic
creation with actual cult practice (especially with regard to Ar.’s placement of the festival

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world to which it has become inured, the purpose of which is to

prompt its spectators to look again at the deceptions of the Dionysia
and their own place within it: to re-experience as sham reality the
recent constructs of the Euripidean stage (in the para-tragedies
that follow) and witness tragedy’s insidious effects as it lands its
first spectator in helpless straits and then attempts to engineer his
(and ultimately its own) escape by duping a range of others.278
Time and time again in this play it is the illusory construct of comic
reality – that is, the world of the women’s festival and its characters –
that throws into relief the nature and operation of tragic illusion and
its attempts to dictate reality, such that our Thesmophoriazusae – as a
theatrical construct itself – implicitly enacts the central paradox
of Parmenides’ poem: that there is no reality without illusion and
no illusion without reality.279 Here, just as in Parmenides, to be
undeceived by our play’s exposé of how theatre deceives us, we too
must first subject ourselves to its deceptions.280 Yet whilst our play’s
Demetrian illusion focuses our attention on the plight of our traveller
(the Kinsman), thereby switching the premise of the play from
the rescue of Euripides to the rescue of his (token) audience, it

on the Pnyx). The point is that such congruence between male and female spheres is the
achievement of the play: for the modelling of the women on the Athenian citizen
Assembly, for instance, see Haldane (1965).
278
Here, our comic audience is shown a chronological survey of Euripidean μηχαναί, three
tragic ploys explicitly identified as deriving from Euripidean drama (Palamedes, Hel.,
Andr.), framed by two tragic parodies that are unannounced (the Telephus and IT). For
studies of the metatheatrics of our Th., see Muecke (1977); N. W. Slater (2002). McClure
(1999) 226 makes the general point that in revealing the mechanics of theatre this play
illuminates the truth; cf. Foley (1988) 44. But note that the metatheatrics of this play are
concerned also with voicing a critique of audience receptions and spectatorial compe-
tencies: a crucial issue here is Ar.’s theatrical exploration of the recognition and
misrecognition of (as well as the utter failure to recognize) intertextual allusion. See
my following discussion.
279
For the collapse of tragic illusion against the ‘extra-dramatic realities’ of the comic stage,
see Bowie (1993) 222–5; for the co-dependence of deception and reality in Parmenides,
see Kingsley (2003) 257.
280
See Kingsley (2003) 211 for the equivalent insight in respect to Parmenides. Here, it is
surely significant that the one Aristophanic play that dwells at length upon the problem
of correctly discerning the reality of illusion (or tragic deception) in general does not
overtly draw attention by self-referential means to its own status as a comic drama
(‘apart from the parabasis (where it is normal)’), see Bowie (1993) 224. For Ar.’s use of
theatrical deception to castigate and educate his spectators, see Bobrick (1997) 191, who
compares the stance Ar. must take in his deconstruction of theatre as a sham reality to the
‘Cretan liar of the famous paradox who declared that everything he said was false’. But
note that this paradoxical position of the truthful deceiver is also the didactic stance
assumed by Parmenides’ goddess (cf. 28b8.51–2 DK).

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does not simply force us to reflect again upon the ἀμηχανίη to
which tragedy reduces its (complicit) spectators (cf. 1–28, even if
his reward for deafly and blindly following this Euripides is to
end up stuck fast in bonds of comic reality and his own deception
as befits a Parmenidean mortal).281 Nor, for that matter, does it
merely expose the futility of all the μηχαναί Euripides explicitly
deploys to rescue him (which far from releasing those bonds simply
serve to exacerbate his plight). Rather, just like the divine artifice
narrated by the goddess of Parmenides,282 the purpose of the comic
artifice of this illusory festival and of the survey of Euripidean
theatre it provides us with opportunity to (re-)see, is to introduce a
duped theatrical audience – its own spectators – to themselves
(exactly as our prologue implies; for the political allusion of ξὺν
ἐλευθέρᾳ∣πατρίδι, at 102–3, is nested, most significantly, at 101–2,
within a prefiguring allusion to our play’s Thesmophorian frame,
cf. 101–4: ἱερὰν Χθονίαιν ∣ δεξάμεναι λαμπάδα κοῦραι ξὺν
ἐλευθέρᾳ∣πατρίδι χορεύσασθε βοάν.∣τίνι δαιμόνων ὁ κῶμος;).283
What is at stake in this issue of self-recognition – that is,
distinguishing oneself from those ἄκριτα φῦλα unable to tell
what-is from what-is-not; seeing the reality of illusion and thereby

281
For the ‘tremendous emphasis’ given to the bonds (δεσμά, 1013 with Austin and Olson
(2004) ad 1012–14) that hold the Kinsman after his discovery and arrest by the women,
see Austin and Olson (2004) li and ad 930–1; cf. 940, 943, 1013, 1022, 1032, 1035,
1108, 1125; for this as the Kinsman’s explicit reward for following Euripides, see 1008;
and for Euripidean μηχανή as a central thematic of our play, see 87, 765, 926–7, 1131–2,
and Moulton (1981) 141. For the bonds of existence in Parmenides, see 28b8.26
(μεγάλων ἐν πείρασι δεσμῶν), 31 (πείρατος ἐν δεσμοῖσιν); cf. b8.13–15, 37–8 (πέδαι),
42–3, 49 (πείρατα) DK with Gemelli Marciano (2008) 41–4. For the divine insight given
in the poem that we are all in fact trapped in a state of ἀμηχανίη, held fast in bonds of
reality and deception; and that we fail to recognize the nature of our own condition
because as mortals we have never learnt to discern what really is but have allowed our
wandering minds to trust only the tricks of ἀπάτη over which Aphrodite presides, see
28b6.5–9; b12, b13 DK; Plut. Mor. 756e–f, 926f–927a.
282
See p. 147 n. 277.
283
The ‘two Chthonic goddesses’ referred to in 101 are Demeter and Persephone, see
Austin and Olson (2004) ad 101–3 and Bierl (2009) 142, who note the prefiguration of
the Thesmophorian action of our play that this allusion effects. For the ‘mirror that the
comic playwright holds up to his audience’ throughout this play (esp. in the characters of
the Kinsman, the women, who recall the Athenian citizen Assembly, and the Scythian),
which is anticipated here in the nested political allusions of Agathon’s song, see Bobrick
(1997) esp. 189–93. For the equivalent emphases in Parmenides on illusion as our only
path to reality, and self-recognition – which is to say, the recognition of our own
entrapment in illusions we have ceased to see – as our only route to breaking free of
entrapment in deception, see Kingsley (2003) 196–9, esp. 288–90.

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breaking free from tragedy’s hold – crystallizes fully only at (what

passes for) the resolution of our play. Here tragedy extricates itself
from critical scrutiny by trickery and poetic sleight-of-hand, impli-
cating its audiences in recognizing their own deception or simply
being deceived. At 1160 Euripides returns in order to negotiate
reconciliation with the Thesmophorians. His proposal is to cease to
slander women in his tragedies, and in future depict them only as
good (1160–3). Just as past audiences have been taken in by trag-
edy’s illusory portrayals of Stheneboeas, Phaedras and Melanippes
(400–6; 545–50), so too future audiences, he expects, will similarly
be deceived (1167–9). The women accept, yet by so doing, they too
unwittingly join that future duped audience; for the irony of their
position is that by endorsing Euripides’ new illusory image of
women as good, they implicitly reinforce the idea that in reality
they are, in fact, bad. By his deceptive handling of co-dependent
opposites, Euripides extricates himself to dupe and dupe again (cf. 1–
28).284 Indeed, on several levels, his backward turn here is crafted
precisely so that nothing will change. For Euripides’ offer to portray
only virtuous heroines has already been fulfilled by the actual
Euripides in the tragedies of 414–412 (Helen, Andromeda and
Iphigeneia in Tauris).285 Thus by watching the same audience,
who at the start of this play set out to censure the tragic poet
and now at its close agree to be deceived by him on these terms
(and, worse, to collude in the deception of others), the spectators of
this comedy are shown a ‘reality’ congruent with their own past,
whose future can only be . . . That Euripides’ deceptive proposal is
patently fulfilled ‘proleptically’ in the very parodies he stages

284
See Austin and Olson (2004) lxv: ‘The radical change [t]his Euripides proposes
[. . . is] in a larger sense no change at all but a back-handed affirmation of the status
quo. For women to be “good” in the way the Aristophanic Euripides and Mika would
have them be, it must also be generally conceded that they are “bad” for the two
categories are mutually dependent.’ Cf. lv: ‘. . . Euripides’ enemies get exactly what
they ought not to want’.
285
See Austin and Olson (2004) lxv for this point. They continue: ‘by proposing to bring
“good” women on stage the comic Euripides offers to do something the historical
Euripides had arguably undertaken a full year earlier’. See also Sommerstein (1994)
ad 848, who argues that the change to staging virtuous women evident in the
Euripidean plays of 412 was made in response to the failure of Euripides’ tragedies
of 415 (one of which was Palamedes, which is a monumental flop in our comedy,
848). But see also my next note for the censure of earlier Euripidean women, and
p. 152 n. 291 for the date of the IT.

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during the course of our play (sc. Helen, Andromeda and Iphigeneia
in Tauris) simply concretizes the implication:286 by authoring for
himself the role of ‘saviour of virtuous women’, this Euripides has,
in effect, been coaching us for the only part his resolution scripts for
us to play. (A part already sketched at 1–28.)
Ironically, that is, to accept these parting terms – to allow
Euripides to escape our critical judgment as he does the women’s –
is to fall victim to a tragic deception that is the sum of every attempt
at deceit by illusion that has come before: not to become, but to be,
and to have always been, an audience deceived by the very escape-
ploys it thinks it has been watching fail all throughout this play.287
But Euripides finesses that deception; our attention is diverted
from the deceptive backward turn of the play’s resolution by the
last obstacle the tragic poet contrives to have us see: the Scythian
guard. The women now allied to his cause, Euripides turns to a
μηχανή able to secure the escape of the Kinsman from the clutches
of the guard (1128–32): a Madam’s disguise and a dancing-girl
named Fawn (Ἐλάφιον, 1172). Lured off-stage by the girl, the
Scythian leaves ‘Artemisia’ (Euripides) in charge of the prisoner
and by the time he returns . . . Our Thesmophoriazusae is ending
with the laughter of catharsis that unites Euripides and all in this
comic theatre at the expense of the duped barbarian.288

286
See Austin and Olson (2004) lxv: [Euripides’ proposal merely] ‘. . . puts into words
something that has been apparent on stage for over 300 lines and that simultaneously
represents a coherent (if tendentious) interpretation of recent theatrical history’. What
that interpretation implies in terms of the recent reception of Euripides, however, is an
Athenian audience that once critically evaluated tragedy on the basis of its insidious
effects (see Hall (1997) xviii on the lack of success of the Med. and first version of Hipp.
because of their subversive females) but which, now placated by recent Euripidean
heroines, has ceased to do so (just like the women of this play).
287
Pace Bowie (1993) 226–7: ‘by imposing on Euripides the promise not to slander women
again, the play has in effect restored normality to Euripidean tragedy and so to the
city. . .’ Rather, in Euripides’ deceptive resolution, Ar. sets us a challenge; and if we fail
to recognize what needs to be recognized (sc. our own entrapment in Euripidean illusion
and the continued threat that tragedy represents), if we allow this Euripides to slip away,
Euripidean tragedy will keep its audiences, and everything else ostensibly at stake in this
play (sc. male – female relations), exactly the same. See Austin and Olson (2004) liv for
the important point that, as far as Athenian men are concerned: ‘women are “good” (i.e.
“desirable to have in one’s house or bed”) for the same reason as they are “bad” (i.e.
“because of their potential complicity with someone who might manage to get them into
his house or bed”)’.
288
Hall (1989) 50.

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Yet if this is the last deception that we are primed to see

(by Euripides: 1128–32; 1172–5), it is, again, on a deeper level,
also one that threatens to dupe us too (and not merely on grounds
of being diversionary). It is all too easy to gloss this concluding –
and ‘logically superfluous’ – episode as a scene in which
Euripides (now feminized like Agathon, but old and so even more
‘degraded’) is finally shown to succeed only by resorting to staging a
comedy where his own tragedies have failed;289 or, to introduce, as it
were, a poetic resolution to the finale of our play: to allow Euripides
to redirect our hostilities and our laughter to the patsy of the scene,
the Scythian (who, supposedly, is not like us, does not know
what we know, 1128–32), and clear the way for simply reading
comedy as trumping tragedy, Euripides curbed; the dangers of tragic
drama ‘purged’.290
But, as Bobrick has shown, in fact, the genuine subterfuge
of this scene lies in Euripides’ disguised deployment of one
last of his own schemes, drawn this time, from the very first
lines of Iphigeneia in Tauris (a play, which, if we are correct in
dating to 412, significantly, was among, if not simply was, the
most recent of Euripidean tragedies our comic audience could
have seen).291 Here, unlike the three preceding μηχαναί mobilized
from Euripidean drama, Aristophanes does not have the tragic
performer signal for his spectators the source of his ruse (i.e. that a
tragedy is being performed). Rather, irrespective of the privileged
perspective we seem to have been given by Euripides’ words at

289
The quotations and the reading are Sommerstein’s (1994) ad 1160–1226.
290
This is the reading of Bowie (1993) esp. 227. For Euripides’ use of the term βάρβαρος at
1051 as the first step of a sustained strategy to divert critical attention away from him by
the creation of a common enemy, see Austin and Olson (2004) ad 1050–1; Bobrick
(1997) 190. Contra Austin and Olson (2004) lxvi, however, note that this is not simply a
ploy designed to distract the comic spectators from ‘the irresolvable (although allegedly
resolved) conflict between men and women with which most of the play is concerned’; it
is a ploy designed by Euripides to distract the audience that would judge him, and that
makes the issue of whether or not we succumb to it imperative.
291
See Bobrick (1991). The date of IT is unknown, see Marshall (2009), who favours a
date in the ‘probable range of 419–413’ and so argues that ‘IT surely predates Hel.’
(145). For the suggestion that IT was the third tragedy staged at the City Dionysia of
412, alongside the Hel. and the Andr. (explicitly parodied in our play), see M. E.
Wright (2005) 50–2. Wright also argues that the parodies of Th. probably reflect the
order in which these tragedies were staged, i.e. Hel.–Andr.–IT (52). For the philo-
sophical connections between Hel., Andr. and IT (sc. the common theme of illusion
and reality), see 50, 278–337.

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 o n w h at - [ it ] -is
1128–32,292 the very reason for his last ploy’s success on-stage
(that is, the fact that its illusion is not ruptured; that it is taken for
reality)293 is used subversively by our comic scene in order to expose
us to tragic deception; to force the issue of our difference from the
Scythian, a character who, tellingly, cannot see tragedy.294 The last
laugh of this comedy, that is, is not on a Euripides forced to abandon
‘tragic stratagems in favour of disguise as a comic bawd with a
dancing girl’;295 it is on the duped audience that is content in that
misperception that he leaves behind.296 An audience whose last
image of this play – which it will assuredly fail to see – is of itself
floundering at the fork of two paths as it tries to follow a Euripides
whom it saw but entirely failed to see.297

292
Euripides’ words at 1128–32 in fact explicitly point us away from thinking about his
tragic scripts and thus prove deceptive, as N. W. Slater’s (2002) 178 innocent reading of
them illustrates: ‘Euripides’ question in 1128 is despairing: there are no logoi, certainly
none among his own compositions, to which he can now turn.’ Preferable is the reading
of Bobrick (1997) 190 (although she, too, fails to see the insidious deception at work):
‘Even in appearing to give up on his theater as an effective weapon against the Scythian,
Euripides cannot stop drawing on it as a source.’
293
See Bobrick (1991) 72–3: ‘[In Th.] theater that presents itself as theater is ineffective as a
means of rescue, but theater that disguises itself as “real life” meets with better success.’
N. W. Slater (2002) 179 sees the power to create reality that this scene establishes
reflected in Euripides’ use of the legal imperative λέλυσο at 1208 (R’s self-correction
endorsed by Austin and Olson (2004) and N. G. Wilson (2007a)), language appropriate
for a judge with the power to stipulate how things are. Sommerstein (1994) ad loc.,
following Bentley, disagrees, endorsing the emendation λέλυσαι.
294
The implicit question is: can we? Pace Hall (1989) 50–2, who is correct to see the
Scythian as a spectator who lacks the cultural background necessary to see tragic
allusion, but whose scholarly attention is so diverted by Euripides’ strategy of self-
definition against the barbarian Other, that she fails to read this back onto the Athenian
audience who, by implication, should be able to see the tragic allusion (i.e. the
Euripidean deception); cf. Bobrick (1997) 189; Willi (2003a) 224.
295
Bowie (1993) 224; Sommerstein (1994) ad 1160–1226; Moulton (1981) 141; the
suggestion that Euripides stoops to perform comedy here is also refuted by Silk
(2000) 322 n. 57, who argues instead that the tragic poet engineers his escape simply
by means of a ‘piece of theatrical-Euripidean disguise’ on the basis that: ‘a madam
(“bawd”), though a strikingly low figure, is not in fifth-century terms as distinctively
comedic a stereotype as in later Greek comedy; and in this last scene, symptomatically,
E. impinges as almost a “straight figure” (and markedly more so than the satirical target
he was in the first scene)’.
296
Pace Bowie (1993) 224; Sommerstein (1994) ad 1160–1226; and Hall (1989) 52.
297
For the Scythian in this final scene as a reflection of the gullible comic spectator, see
McClure (1999) 236: ‘The part of the gull, now taken by the Archer, corresponds to that
of the dramatic spectator, as well as to the juror in the courts, who is easily taken in by the
illusory tableaux placed before him’; see also Bobrick (1997) 190, for whom the
Scythian likewise represents an unflattering portrait of an easily duped Athenian citizen
audience. Contra N. W. Slater (2002) 302–3 n. 100, who remains constrained in his

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Having cast into relief tragic illusion by staging the rupture of

its parodies against the ‘extra-dramatic realities’ of the comic
stage – shown us repeatedly that its audience must collude for its
deceptions to succeed298 – the last scene of this play plunges us
back into that very same illusion. If our Thesmophoriazusae gives
its spectators a chronological survey of Euripidean tragedy, pri-
ming them to see the reality of tragic trickery, the final deceptions
it offers its audience are pointedly ones it must negotiate alone.
The issues of recognition and self-recognition that are implicitly
raised here at the end of the play thus bear significantly on the
opening paraphilosophy we have explored. In both cases, specta-
torial competencies are crucially at stake, and it is the success or
failure of its audience correctly to read ‘dramatic’ (which is also to
say, philosophical) a/illusion that determines its critical awareness
of the surrounding play and secures its freedom from entrapment in
tragic deception.299 Indeed, in the case of our ἔλεγχος and epiphany
reading of the character by the polarities of Hall (1989). For the παλίντροπος path of the
Scythian, see Th. 1222a–6:
Το. ὠ μιαρο γραο. πότερα τρεξι την ὀδο; 1222a
Ἀρταμουξια.
Κο. ὀρθὴν ἄνω δίωκε. ποῖ θεῖς; οὐ πάλιν
τῃδὶ διώξει; τοὔμπαλιν τρέχεις σύ γε.
Το. κακοδαιμον. ἀλλα τρεξι. Ἀρταμουξια.
Κο. τρέχε νῦν κατ’ αὐτοὺς <ἐς> κόρακας ἐπουρίσας. 1226
For the image conjured by ἐπουρίζω here, cf. 723–5 (Χο. [. . .] τάχα δὲ μεταβαλοῦσ’ ἐπὶ
κακὸν ἑτερότρο-∣πος ἐπέχει τύχη.) and the sea imagery at Hom. Od. 9.81 that resonates
closely with Parmenides’ picture of backward-turning mortals adrift in their ἀμηχανίη at
28b6.5–6 DK: Mourelatos (2008) 19, 24–5. Hall (1989) 52 n. 71 also compares the role
of the (pro-Euripidean) chorus here with the Greek chorus-leader of IT, who similarly
misdirects the barbarian messenger who seeks to report the escape of Iphigeneia to King
Thoas.
298
For the necessary (knowing or unwitting) collusion of the tragic audience in creating
tragedy’s illusion of reality, see Bowie (1993) 222–3 (quotation: 222); Muecke (1977);
cf. my p. 146 n. 273. For examples within the play, see the failure of the Hel. (850–924)
and Andr. (1010–1127) parodies due to the obstinate refusal of their on-stage audiences
(Crytilla and the Scythian respectively) to play along. And note we might read the final
IT parody also as an implicit castigation of self-interested Athenian audiences; for this
last deception succeeds on-stage both because its theatrical source is unrecognized and
because this comic Euripides gives his audience what it wants.
299
With the recognition of the unannounced Telephus parody, the issue is whether or not the
comic audience sees the first failure of Euripidean μηχανή; with the recognition of the IT
parody, by contrast, it is whether or not we see the success of Euripides’ final tragic
ruse – which is to say, whether or not it is truly successful. In the case of our opening
paraphilosophy that frames these examples the issue is more basic still: how we will
enter into the comic illusion that follows, what sort of audience we will be. See my
following remarks.

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 o n w h at - [ it ] -is
this is imperative; for what our opening ἔλεγχος is designed to enact
is a ‘moment of crisis’, to bring us to a fork in the road, to the
absolute necessity of critical distance from Euripides and theatre;
of making a κρίσις.300 (That is, precisely the situation its audience
will be left with at this play’s end.)301
In this respect, also, our Thesmophoriazusae echoes
Parmenides’ poem. As Kingsley explains, whilst at b7.5–6 the
goddess issues to us a clear imperative to judge the πολύδηρις
ἔλεγχος spoken by her, that enjoinder is followed just lines later
(at b8.16) with the explicit statement that the issue has in fact
‘“already been decided”, “judgment has already been passed”’.302
Irrespective or whether or not we are keeping up with her reason-
ing, the critical decision here has of necessity long since been

300
The phrase is Kingsley’s (2003) 135.
301
Similarly, our play’s first tragic parody, the Telephus parody, which is not explicitly
announced (see Austin and Olson (2004) lviii; Bowie (1993) 223–4) foreshadows the
critical challenge issued to the comic audience by its last tragic parody (of IT): recog-
nizing the reality of tragic deception (or spotting the extent of the parody). In other key
respects, too, one might argue that our play is circular in design; most obviously, it takes
its audience from one duped circling audience trying to follow Euripides (the Kinsman)
to another (the Scythian), and from a past audience (Athenian husbands) duped by one
contention of tragic theatre, to a future audience dupable by its opposite. This structure
again can be taken to mirror Parmenides’ poem; here too, the goddess’s revelations are
essentially circular (as she implies at 28b5 DK: ξυνὸν δέ μοί ἐστιν,∣ὁππόθεν ἄρξωμαι· τόθι
γὰρ πάλιν ἵξομαι αὖθις). Through the correct exercise of his eyes and ears, her initiate will
arrive back precisely at the point from which he began but wholly changed by the insight
that he has received. This experience of transformation is enacted in the journey of the
poem: the traveller is taken from the opinions of mortals to the realm of divine under-
standing and then back again to the realm of human understanding, see M. Miller (2006)
15. Affinities with our Th. are not difficult to see; for this is a play designed to take its
spectators from uncritical immersion in the deceptions of tragic theatre into a realm of
comic reality, wherein is exposed tragic theatre’s insidious illusions, and then sugges-
tively place them back into the realm of tragic deception to renegotiate their own way.
Just as in Parmenides, mortals here (by which I mean any audience not able to make a
firm κρίσις between what-is and what-is-not) who are not able to recognize themselves as
mortals – to acknowledge and rectify their failure to recognize the reality of their own
deception – are precisely those destined to end up in endless circlings of their own:
treading paths of perception that never manage consciously to connect the beginning of
their experience (in the terms of our play, the predicament of the Kinsman in our first
lines) with the end (the predicament of the Scythian). For this capacity of holistic critical
awareness as the defining characteristic of the perceptual state to which our play
implicitly incites its audience, that is, ‘the peculiar quality of intense alertness that can
be effortlessly aware of everything at once. [. . . and that] feels, listens, watches [. . .]
misses nothing’ known as mētis, see Kingsley (2003) 186–7; esp. 187: ‘Mêtis is the
encircler; the completer of the circle; the awareness that allows us at any moment, in
spite of the raging torrent of appearances, to connect the beginning to the end.’
302
Kingsley (2003) 133.

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made: ἔστιν ἢ οὐκ ἔστιν; κέκριται δ’ οὖν, ὥσπερ ἀνάγκη (b8.16),

there is only one viable path to take, the path of what-is. Our critical
powers in evaluating her ἔλεγχος in truth are neither here nor there;
indeed, there is no time for reflection, only for κρίσις. Either we
follow her lead and work hard to attain insight into reality, or we are
‘left behind’ to circle at the site of all mortal floundering, the fork of
this road.303
Yet, of course, in practical terms, we have no option but
to follow.304 Our only choice is how we make the journey that
the goddess and this play compel us to take: do we set out seeing
but not-seeing and hearing but not-hearing as this Euripides
would have us, that is, plying a ‘κρᾶσις of much-wandering
limbs’ (κρᾶσις μελέων πολυπλάγκτων, b16.1)? Or do we set
out already primed to look-and-listen, to direct eyes and ears
critically attuned to the only path of perception that is ‘single-
limbed’ (μουνομελές, or ‘whole of limb’ οὐλομελές, b8.4),305 the
path of what-is? Here, for our comic spectators, just as for
the initiate of the goddess, there is ‘no neutral territory’; simply
by virtue of hearing and seeing we are already implicated,
already participating, such that even the failure to register
the need for κρίσις is already to have made our choice.306
Far from posing a problem to the staging and reception of its frenetic
philosophical play, the brevity of our Thesmophoriazusae’s
πολύδηρις ἔλεγχος (‘most controversial demonstration’) is precisely
the point.

303
See Kingsley (2003) 132–5, esp. 135.
304
As Kingsley (2003) 127, 143 has argued is true also of Parmenides’ poem.
305
οὐλομελές (of the path of what-is) is attested by Plutarch (Adv. Col. 1114c) and Proclus
(in Prm. 6.1077, 6.1084) and endorsed by DK. Proclus also gives οὖλον μουνομελές at
in Prm. 6.1152, a reading endorsed by Gallop (1984) ad loc. on the basis of J. R.
Wilson (1970) 32–4; but both variants are widely regarded as a modification of the
οὖλον μο(υ)νογενές attested by Clement and Simplicius, and defended by Tarán (1965)
88–93; Coxon (2009) ad loc.; Passa (2009) 61–6; Palmer (2009) 382, and others. With
both variants, Bryan (2012) 99 n. 141 compares Xenophanes’ description of holistic
divine perception at 21b24 DK and suggests that these readings of Parmenides’ text
might have derived from ancient readers’ desire to associate Parmenides’ Βeing with
Xenophanes’ whole-seeing whole-hearing and whole-thinking divinity, noting that if
μέλεα (at 28b16.1 DK) in Parmenides are to be understood as sense organs, and thus ‘if
Parmenides describes Being as some kind of “whole-sense-organ”, the similarity to
Xenophanes’ god, which senses and thinks as a whole, is striking’.
306
See Kingsley (2003) 169 for this point in relation to Parmenides.

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 o n w h at - [ it ] -is
Indeed, it is those spectators most likely to perceive as παρεστῶτες
(that is, ‘in the manner of passive bystanders’) – to gloss the first
moments of this play as merely a bit of fun at the expense of sophistic
thought, and thereby, miss the epiphanic power of its culminating
scene – who are also those most harshly judged by it (and the rest of
our play); the mass of citizens that Aristophanes repeatedly casti-
gates for its gullibility, the χαυνοπολῖται of Acharnians (635), those
wandering theatre- and assembly-goers who see but do not-see, hear
but do not-hear what is really played out before their eyes and ears
(cf. Ach. 442–4).
Even they can appreciate the general critique of Euripides
articulated in our opening lines; it hardly requires great philo-
sophical acumen to do so.307 Rather, it is the critique of itself
that is not recognized by the audience who first complacently
extracts itself from the comic predicament of Euripides’ on-stage
follower by virtue of the fact that its members are all obviously
hearing and seeing and then settles back self-contentedly to
laugh at the transvestism of this comic Agathon. To that extent,
the prerequisite of greater knowledge in order to see that it is
how one perceives – how one participates in this play – that is
crucially at stake here is entirely in keeping with the dual critical
agenda of our Thesmophoriazusae (which castigates both
Euripides and any audience that would willingly be misled by
him); but it is also in keeping with the tensions that already
surround the recognition of our play’s tragic parodies (especially
those that are unannounced, the Telephus parody and the final
parody of Iphigeneia in Tauris) and entirely resonant with those
that attend upon the paradoxes of Parmenidean revelation.
Parmenides’ own journey makes it quite explicit that in order to
experience the revelations of the goddess one must have divine
knowledge even before hearing what she has to say; one must
be able to negotiate a journey far beyond the beaten track of
men (ἀπ’ ἀνθρώπων ἐκτὸς πάτου, b1.27) and descend to the

307
This is after all a scene that shows a tragedian already established in the comic
imagination as a composer of deceptive speech who conflates being and not-being (cf.
Ach. 395–479) persuading his audience that it should neither hear nor see precisely what
(and while) it is hearing and seeing.

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 a ri s t op h an e s ’ thesmophoriazusae

Underworld whilst yet still alive.308 An initiate into her divine

insights about reality and illusion, that is, just like the comic
audience primed by its very own comic epiphany to negotiate
tragic deceptions ahead, can be none other than a man ‘who
[already] knows’ (ἐιδὼς φώς, b1.3).

308
Kingsley (1999) 61–2; but cf. also (2003) 62–7 for the poem as ‘not just a text that only
speaks to those in the know’ but also, as a text that affords its audience the prefatory
knowledge its author’s own revelation presupposes, itself ‘an initiation’ and, as such,
full of deceptive riddles that ‘stun’ and ‘mislead’ those who fail to negotiate them
correctly (63, 67).

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 CONCLUSION

ξυνὸν δέ μοί ἐστιν,

ὁππόθεν ἄρξωμαι· τόθι γὰρ πάλιν ἵξομαι αὖθις.1

Where have we, another exclusive audience of Aristophanes,

arrived? Our philosophizing Thesmophoriazusae ends as it begins,
its tacit challenge to its audience, the necessity of seeing through
(which is to say, in) the layered artifices of comic a/illusion, the
reality of its own deception, and, in that liberating self-awareness,
escaping the νίος that binds it in this play.2 In this concluding section,
then, I expand the narrow focus of our discussion so far to follow the
cues of our prologue’s nested and prefiguring political allusions
(101–4), addressing the reasons for staging such an intricate philo-
sophical critique of Euripidean tragedy and its complicit spectators at
the Dionysia of 411. Our comedy’s elenctic exposé of Euripides and
Parmenidean revelation of the deceptions of theatre, I shall suggest,
is motivated by the philosophical challenges thrown down to the
epistemic authority of the eye and the ear by the tragic explorations
of mortal doxa staged by Euripides just a year earlier, in the tragedies
of 412.3 Indeed, as we shall shortly see, in the uncertain climate of
April 411 the epistemic authority of the senses, the proper use of the
eye and the ear (which is to say, νόος) and the ability to negotiate
illusion are intensely political matters. But in order to establish just
how the philosophy of perception can be expressly political in this
way, I first turn us back to Thucydides’ famous account of a dis-
affected Athenian dēmos at 3.38 of his History.

1
Parm. 28b5 DK: ‘It is the same to me, | from where I should begin: for there I shall return
again.’
2
My phrasing is indebted to Kingsley (2003) 283, for whom deception is ‘the noose that
binds us’.
3
In what follows I focus exclusively on the Hel., which holds centre stage in our Th.; for a
full discussion of the cognate philosophical themes of the Hel.’s companion plays of 412,
the Andr., and probably the IT, see M. E. Wright (2005) 50, 278–337, and for the issue of
the disputed date of the IT see my p. 152 n. 291.

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Spectator politics: Thucydides 3.38

Γοργίας δὲ ὁ Λεοντῖνος ἐκ τοῦ αὐτοῦ μὲν τάγματος ὑπῆρχε τοῖς ἀνῃρηκόσι τὸ

κριτήριον . . .4

In the summer of 427 Cleon stood before his fellow citizens to

address an audience on the verge of a backward turn. Against an
Assembly now vacillating over its previous day’s decision to
destroy the city of Mytilene in punishment for its attempted revolt
against Athenian ἀρχή, he launched a scathing attack. As
Thucydides presents Cleon’s indictment of the dēmos, at 3.38,
the source of the Athenians’ indecision and of the political malaise
of which, Cleon claims, it is a part is simple: they are, he asserts,
entirely in a daze, perversely estranged even from their own sen-
sory experience. Instead of plying their eyes and ears in the practice
of a single adjudicating activity (i.e. looking-and-listening), their
attention is fragmented, their control over their senses confused:
they direct their eyes to the words of speeches, and their ears to the
events they purport to represent.5 In Cleon’s words, they are θεαταὶ
μὲν τῶν λόγων . . . ἀκροαταὶ δὲ τῶν ἔργων (3.38.4):6 spectators

4
Sextus Empiricus’ introduction to On What Is Not, Gorg. 82b3.1–2 DK: ‘Gorgias of
Leontini began from the same position as those who destroyed the criterion . . .’
5
Note that Cleon’s charge here is not that the Athenians are content with accepting hearsay
as the basis for their judgements over gaining direct knowledge of the matter at hand by
sight, or even that they should simply listen to words and be spectators of events. As
Allison (1997) 199–200 says: ‘spectators of events, is irrelevant here; it would simply
result in stating the obvious [. . . Rather . . .] the antithesis [sc. between listening to events
and looking at words] is a rhetorical ploy; the pair are actually conjoined: Athenians do
both of these absurd things.’ (More precisely, the point is twofold: first, the Athenians do
two things instead of one (i.e. in their inattentive state they are simply hearing and seeing
instead of looking-and-listening); secondly, they do those two things at cross-purposes to
one another). See Allison (1997) 200: ‘If he [sc. Cleon] simply meant that people were
guided by what they hear rather than what they personally have witnessed, he would not
have needed the next clauses.’ For those clauses, see my p. 160 n. 7.
6
See Gomme (1956) ad loc. ‘The rhetoric is effective; but the distinction is, of course, false
(for in a theatre there is no difference between θεαταί and ἀκροαταί), and disappears in the
next clause, where they [sc. the Athenians] listen to words (ἀπὸ τῶν εὖ εἰπόντων).’ The
point stands even if the parallel with the theatre is not strictly correct; for Cleon it is an
epideixis of the sophists which is the pertinent comparison, see Nightingale (2004) 51
n. 40; pace Goldhill (1994) 352–7. But the attention paid to the senses in this speech,
coupled with the evidence of our philosophical Th., might in fact lend rather different
support to Goldhill’s view that theatrical spectatorship could equally be implicated in such
evocations of the sophists.

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 c o nc l us i o n

profoundly alienated from their own experience,7 hardly aware of

the reality around them, and utterly mesmerized by the accounts of
clever speakers instead (3.38.5–6):
. . . καὶ μετὰ καινότητος μὲν λόγου ἀπατᾶσθαι ἄριστοι, μετὰ δεδοκιμασμένου δὲ
μὴ ξυνέπεσθαι ἐθέλειν, δοῦλοι ὄντες τῶν αἰεὶ ἀτόπων, ὑπερόπται δὲ τῶν
εἰωθότων . . .
. . . best [only] at being deceived by new-fangled accounts and not willing
to follow what has been approved; slaves of every unfamiliar paradox, and
disdainful of what is familiar . . .

In short, Cleon continues, his fellow citizens behave just like an

audience of the sophists (σοφιστῶν θεαταῖς ἐοικότες καθημένοις).8
That is, they respond to words passively and uncritically, as if λόγοι
were uncomplicated sense perceptions; they fail to direct their
senses to uncover the reality that clever speechmakers may
obscure. In their political passivity, Cleon suggests, they thus
embody the effects of the καινότης promulgated by sophistic teach-
ers:9 they are hopelessly confused, swept away by their passive
perceptions, their eyes and ears misaligned, their capacity to κρῖναι
λόγῳ completely destroyed.10

7
Indeed, as the next clauses stress, what is truly at stake in Cleon’s criticism of the dēmos as
θεαταὶ μὲν τῶν λόγων . . . ἀκροαταὶ δὲ τῶν ἔργων is the Athenians’ failure to bring into
play their own experience in evaluating the various accounts given by clever speakers of
events they (sc. the Athenians) themselves have seen. See Allison (1997) 200 on οὐ τὸ
δρασθὲν πιστότερον ὄψει λαβόντες ἢ τὸ ἀκουσθέν, ἀπὸ τῶν λόγῳ καλῶς ἐπιτιμησάντων·
(3.38.4–5) ‘in this last clause, he [sc. Cleon] contrasts what was done (τὸ δρασθέν) with
what was heard (τὸ ἀκουσθέν) on the one hand, and for each of these contrasts the means,
by observation (ὄψει) on the one hand and the clever critics with their speeches (ἀπὸ τῶν
λόγῳ καλῶς ἐπιτιμησάντων) on the other’. In this respect, the Athenians qualify as
‘spectators of words and listeners of events’ also by virtue of their failure to consider
what they have seen and what they have heard together.
8
See 3.38.7: ἁπλῶς τε ἀκοῆς ἡδονῇ ἡσσώμενοι καὶ σοφιστῶν θεαταῖς ἐοικότες καθημένοις
μᾶλλον ἢ περὶ πόλεως βουλευομένοις.
9
For the association of καινότης (3.38.5) with the sophists in general, see Macleod (1978)
70; for the specific connection of καινός with λόγος (and Gorgias), see Allison (1997) 202,
esp. n. 68 citing Gorg. 82b11a26 DK. Note the use of καινός at Clouds 480 (of Socrates),
1397, 1399, 1423 (of his self-serving pupil, Pheidippides), 896, 936, 943, 1031 (of the
Weaker Argument), 547 (of Ar. himself). See also Th. 1130 (of Euripides), and p. 177
n. 61, p. 193 n. 110.
10
See Allison (1997) 198: ‘the point Cleon makes is [. . .] that uncritical reliance on sense
perceptions, especially when coupled with pleasure (3.38.7), produces inversions and
corruptions of reasoning’.

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It has not gone unnoticed that the spectre of Gorgias seems to lurk
behind several key aspects of Thucydides’ account at 3.38.11
Cleon’s rhetorical tropes are not only all arguably Gorgianic but
also suggestively staged in the same year as Gorgias is said to have
visited Athens, and to have ‘struck dumb’ (ἐξέπληξε) a similar
audience with the grandeur of his speeches12 and the rich ironies
of his self-refutations.13 But Thucydides also draws upon the
premise of sensory segregation, so prominent in Gorgias’ most
stupefying speech – a speech defending the outrageous position
that nothing is – and strikingly extrapolates this in the words of
Cleon,14 as he juxtaposes the sensory befuddlement wrought on the
audiences of sophistic (sc. Gorgianic?) epideixeis, with the devas-
tating political consequences that such effects have in the arena of
serious decision-making, the Assembly.
That such imagery of sensory befuddlement should feature so
prominently in Cleon’s evocation of an Assembly audience’s polit-
ical passivity nicely illustrates the political dimension of the effects
that the λόγος of our sophistic Euripides is similarly shown to have
on the senses of his audience in our Thesmophoriazusae.15 Indeed,
in the brief discussions to follow, I will suggest that the opening

11
See Gomme (1956) ad 3.38.4: ‘This is very much in Gorgias’ manner, parisosis,
homoioteleuton, and the rest (just what Kleon professes to be attacking)’; see also
Gomme ad 3.38.7; and Macleod (1978) 71, who, stressing that Cleon’s speech is
Gorgianic, recognizes that Cleon ‘panders to the very tastes of the audience which he
repudiates’. That this is the only mention of the sophists in the entire History is thus not
coincidental. For the influence on Thucydides of the models of emotion and perception
set out by Gorgias in his Encomium of Helen and especially on his depiction of fear as an
affect brought into being through sight and λόγος, see V. Hunter (1986).
12
Diod. Sic. 12.53.3; Dion. Hal. Lys. 3 (11.6 UR); see Verdenius (1981) 119–22 and
O’Sullivan (1992) 127–8 on Gorgianic ἔκπληξις. See also Pl. Smp. 198b5–c6.
13
For the air of self-refutation in Cleon’s speech, note that, as many critics have observed,
Cleon produces just the sort of καινός argument by which he would have the Athenians
not be persuaded. Indeed, in Ar., it is Cleon himself who is responsible for reducing the
Athenians to such passivity, see Knights 261, 755, 804, 1032. For similar images of
Assembly audiences alienated from themselves, eyes gaping, and νόος wandering, see
Knights 752–5, 1111–20; cf. Montiglio (2000) 156–7.
14
Like Gorgias in On What Is Not, Cleon here fragments his audience’s experience of
spectatorship and then extrapolates the alienation bound up in that action by presenting
each sensory component of the practice as utterly misaligned. See my earlier discussion,
pp. 33–6.
15
Indeed Loraux (1988) 121 has argued that the criticism voiced against the Athenians by
Cleon at Thuc. 3.38 is precisely that they use their eyes to not-hear (‘leurs yeux à ne pas
entendre’).

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Parmenidean elenctic comedy of our play directly answers the

ideological threat posed by Euripides’ recent dramatic exploration
of certain philosophical tenets about mortal perception and the
primacy of doxa and their uncritical reception by complicit
Athenian audiences. Those philosophical ideas, and their implica-
tions, will emerge as closely parallel to those presented by
Thucydides in Cleon’s speech, with its conjoined motifs of sensory
segregation, alienation and political passivity. In this respect I will
argue that the affinity between the imagery drawn upon by
Thucydides’ Cleon and that which Aristophanes associates with
his Euripides should prompt us to position both as responses to the
political implications of the teachings of Gorgias or of those in his
milieu.16 Certainly, as we shall see, if Gorgias’ presence is implicit
at Thucydides 3.38, his influence is manifestly felt in the plays (but,
perhaps, especially in the Helen) presented by Euripides to the
Athenian public in 412.
Before I examine the political subtext of our paraphilosophy,
then, I turn first to its comic pretext, and the contribution that our
prologue might make to our understanding of the relationship
between Aristophanes and philosophy.

Comedy and tragedy, 412–411 bc

δεῖν ἔφη Γοργίας τὴν μὲν σπουδὴν διαφθείρειν τῶν ἐναντίων γέλωτι, τὸν δὲ γέλωτα
σπουδῇ, . . .17

The Helen, it has been said, is the ‘most explicitly philosophical’ of

all Euripides’ escape-tragedies, a play that, in its self-conscious
ruminations on illusion and reality, language and its objects,
‘comes as close as it can to a theory of theater itself’.18 But its

16
See V. Hunter (1986) for the ‘incontrovertible link’ between Thucydides and Gorgias in
their treatment of perception; Verdenius (1981) on Gorgias’ theory of doxa and deception
as a critical response to the Eleatic theory of knowledge; and my p. 45 n. 9 for comparably
extreme theorists of mortal doxa such as Xeniades (who has been associated with
Gorgias); cf. Palmer (1999) 129, esp. n. 19. For Ar.’s wider engagement with Gorgias,
see my p. 32 n. 12 and following discussion pp. 189–94.
17
Gorg. 82b12 DK: ‘Gorgias said one must destroy the seriousness of one’s opponents with
laughter, and laughter with seriousness . . .’
18
M. E. Wright (2005) 278; Zeitlin (2010) 269.

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use of philosophical ideas is playfully sceptical, if not also delib-

erately self-contradictory, and its ‘theory of theater’ deeply ambiv-
alent. The play’s manifest debts to sophistic thought, and especially
to Gorgias, are well known; indeed, the patterns of influence tradi-
tionally drawn between Euripides’ retelling of the Helen myth and
the sixth-century ‘palinode’ of Stesichorus have been challenged in
favour of reading the Helen as a creative response to the epistemo-
logical and ontological themes of Gorgias’ Encomium of Helen and
On What Is Not.19 But alongside its Gorgianic elements, the
Helen’s exploration of illusion and reality also exploits parallel
textual strategies and epic images to those also used by Parmenides
in his own poetic evocations of the mortal predicament of untu-
tored thought and perception.20 And the result is a backward-
turning mediation on mortal confusion that spills its own crafted
aporia from the stage in a multiplicity of ambivalent contrarieties.
The conceit of Euripides’ tragedy is that the real Helen never was
at Troy; unbeknownst to all who fought that war, in truth, an εἴδωλον
was sent in her place to endure the conflict, whilst the real Helen was

19
For the view that Euripides draws upon the poem of Stesichorus, see Kannicht (1969) 26–
41; C. Segal (1971) 561 (though noting that unlike Stesichorus’ use of the notion of a
phantom Helen, Euripides’ use of the εἴδωλον ‘has the philosophical function of asking
what reality is’); Bassi (1993); Zeitlin (1981) 200–3; for the contrary reading favouring
the influence of Gorgias’ Encomium of Helen, see M. E. Wright (2005) esp. §2.3 (80–
115), 277 cf. n. 200, who also argues for the influence of Gorgias’ On What Is Not. Cf.
272 n. 180 for a discussion of the dating of Gorgias’ Encomium, where it is argued, based
upon Gorgias’ claim that at the time he was writing no poet had deviated from the
traditional version of Helen’s culpability (82b11.2 DK), and the possible presence of
Gorgianic themes in Euripides’ Trojan Women, that a date of 415 (or earlier) seems likely
(although Preuss (1911) 9 argues for a date of 414). The treatment of the Helen myth by
Gorgias at this approximate date, M. E. Wright (2005) 276 argues, ‘provides an answer to
two questions – first, why Euripides should have turned his attention with such intensity
to the reality-and-illusion theme in 412 (even though he had touched on it previously);
and second, why Euripides should have chosen to explore this theme through the myth of
Helen in particular . . .’ That is to say, ‘Euripides is responding directly to a new, exciting,
“cutting-edge” philosophical debate . . .’
20
The general Parmenidean influence on the Helen is noted by N. Austin (1994) 27, 154 and
Allan (2008) 47; Foley (1992) discusses the Egypt = Underworld setting evoked by
Euripides’ use of the mythic schemata of the Demeter/Persephone story (also exploited of
course by our Th., see Bowie (1993) 214–17, Stehle (2002) and my p. 128 n. 230); the
specific tactic of using Parmenidean ideas about the mortal conflation of what-is and
what-is-not in order to explore the limits of mortal perception arguably finds a dramatic
precedent in 458 bc in A.’s Ag., see Kouremenos (1993). But for the new-found currency
of Parmenidean ideas during the 410s attendant upon their widespread dissemination by
means of the tendentious and selective appropriations of the sophists, see my earlier
discussion, pp. 43–6.

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transported to Egypt. There she spent the war in isolation and

chastity, while Greeks and Trojans fell in the futile hope of winning
her as a prize.21 Amongst them, Menelaus, for whom the real Helen
waits in Egypt, is the most painfully deceived, believing his wife to
be living an adulterous life in Troy, while in truth she fights to remain
loyal to him by rejecting the attention of the Egyptian king. Indeed,
as Euripides’ play begins, and the Spartan king is shipwrecked on the
coast of Egypt, it gradually becomes apparent that he is monumen-
tally confused; what he has unwittingly brought back with him from
Troy is merely a phantom. Hence, aptly, just like those backward-
turning mortals of Parmenides’ b6, since leaving Troy with his prize
(γέρας οὐ γέρας, 1134) this Menelaus (dubbed ὁ πλανήτης, 1676) has
been wandering on a path that has caused him to criss-cross the sea
(πορθμοὺς δ’ ἀλᾶσθαι μυρίους πεπλωκότα∣ἐκεῖσε κἀκεῖσ’ οὐδ’
ἀγύμναστον πλάνοις, 532–3) for seven circling years (ἑπτὰ
περιδρομὰς ἐτῶν, 776).22 Even when finally reunited with his wife
in the almost abortive recognition scene at the centre of the play, he
continues unwittingly to confuse what-is (the real Helen) for what-
is-not (an apparition), all the while locating his own floundering at
the archetypal site of all Parmenidean mortal confusion, the fork of
two roads (ὦ φωσφόρ’ Ἑκάτη, πέμπε φάσματ’ εὐμενῆ, 569; cf. Th.
858), where he, like so many others, plies an eye that looks yet does
not see (οὔ που φρονῶ μὲν εὖ, τὸ δ’ ὄμμα μου νοσεῖ; 575; cf. 576–80).
Yet Menelaus is not alone in his conflation of what-is and what-
is-not; Euripides’ play is full of characters that cannot make or
maintain a firm κρίσις between these things.23 And as this tragedy
unfolds, their faulty reasoning not only infects but is designed to

21
As Euripides’ play opens, the situation is that Proteus, the king of Egypt, who had ensured
Helen’s safety, has just died, and she is being pursued by Theoclymenus, the heir to the
throne, with (a forcible) marriage on his mind. In the hope of bringing his plan to fruition
he has sworn to kill all Greeks who land on Egyptian shores. But Menelaus has been
shipwrecked off the coast.
22
For ἀλάομαι see Hel. 532, 401; cf. ἀλατείᾳ βιότου∣ταλαίφρων, 523–4 (cf. ἀλώμενον, Parm.
28b14 DK, with my p. 55 n. 30); for πλάνη see Hel. 533, 774, 1676, (cf. Parm. 28b6.5,
b8.54 DK, with Mourelatos (2008) 24–5 and Robbiano (2006) 137–8 on the Odyssean
resonance of the term, also active in the Hel.). Indeed, for Menelaus’ predicament in the
Hel. as a tragic development of Homer’s portrayal of Menelaus stranded on Paros at Od.
4.351–480 see Allan (2008) 27.
23
In addition to the implicit equal confusion of Paris, there is also Teucer, Hel. 72–7, 116–
23; Helen and Menelaus, cf. 563–4; Theoclymenus is deceived into thinking that
Menelaus is dead when he is not, cf. 1196f.; and in more general terms, as C. Segal

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infect its audience too. Almost from the play’s outset, for instance,
the contrasts that Euripides initially uses in order to establish a
relationship of polarity between reality and illusion (contrasts such
as ὄνομα/σῶμα or πρᾶγμα, δοκεῖν/εἶναι, λόγος/ἔργον)24 are increas-
ingly used in such a way as to blur any such tidy antitheses.25
When, early in the play, Helen laments her fate, saying ἀλλὰ πάντ’
ἔχουσα δυστυχῆ∣τοῖς πράγμασιν τέθνηκα, τοῖς δ’ ἔργοισιν οὔ, her
words confound the audience’s expectations in precisely this way:
as Wright observes ‘instead of [using] ὄνομα (illusory) versus
πρᾶγμα (real), or λόγος (illusory) versus ἔργον (real), she makes
two “real” terms opposed to each other’.26 Even in the very terms
in which it leads the audience to think about what is (real) and what
is not, that is, Euripides’ play deceptively turns back on itself. And
its (deliberate) effect is not only to portray confusion; it is to
confuse per se.27
Against this backdrop of deceptive speech and mortal floun-
dering, only one character is distinguished positively: she is
Theonoe (Θεονόη), the Egyptian prophetess who is associated
with divine insight (as her name suggests). Her entrance is
announced by two torch-bearing handmaidens reminiscent of
the Heliades whose light-bringing actions prefigure our encoun-
ter with the goddess of Parmenides’ poem.28 Like the goddess,
too, she also eschews untested appearances and, at least by the
end of the play, has proved not only to be the sole sure conduit

(1971) 559, 562, and others since have argued, Helen herself exists ‘in the world of both
appearance and reality’ and thus everything with which she is intimately involved has a
divided, self-contradictory, quality. Cf. in particular, Downing (1990) and Zeitlin (2010).
24
The classic structuralist analysis is C. Segal (1971) see esp. 574, 582, 591.
25
M. E. Wright (2005) 291–3.
26
Hel. 285–6 cited and discussed by M. E. Wright (2005) 292 (he continues: ‘So what do
Helen’s words here mean?’): ‘The escape-tragedies do not do what they at first seem to be
doing, viz. simply replacing false, deluded opinion with true knowledge [. . .] as the plays
progress it becomes impossible to assign a truth-value to anything’ (original emphasis).
27
M. E. Wright (2005) 294 spells out the problem: ‘Because the plays (sc. Hel., Andr., IT)
contain so much that is deceptive or illusory, and so many varying levels of ambiguity, we
are bound to reflect that the words and appearances which are presented as true are no
different in kind from those which are presented as false. We have no way of knowing
which ones correspond to reality – and it becomes increasingly possible that none of them
does. What proof is there?’
28
For the entrance of Theonoe, see Hel. 865–72; for the Heliades, see Parm. 28b1.5–10
DK, with my pp. 49–50.

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to reality, but also one who will deceive others in accordance

with justice.29
The entire play can thus be read as a dramatic exploration of
mortal error – but one whose poetic success is predicated upon its
audience’s epistemic failure: for unlike Parmenides’ poem, here, on
the tragic stage, there are no firm σήματα to mark out one path from
another.30 Confusion is all there is; Euripides’ audience may watch
mortals unwittingly turning back on themselves, but, ultimately, it
is simply left to flounder too.
Indeed, from its scene-setting prologue the Helen self-
reflexively celebrates its own power to fragment its audience’s
νόος through oxymora, amphiboly and palintropia of all kinds by
extrapolating the traditional ambivalence of its eponymous heroine
(that is, Helen’s propensity to embody and be surrounded by dual-
ities and reduplications).31 As Downing has brilliantly shown, the
play’s first lines, spoken by Helen herself, and situating their
audience in Egypt, in fact elicit confusion in exactly this way:
their most striking word (Νείλου μὲν αἵδε καλλιπάρθενοι ῥοαί, 1),
itself carries incipient contradiction (the play of κάλλος, ‘beauty’ of
appearance, and παρθένος, ‘virgin’, paradoxically connoting both

29
See Hel. 13–14: καλοῦσιν αὐτὴν Θεονόην· τὰ θεῖα γὰρ∣τά τ’ ὄντα καὶ μέλλοντα πάντ’
ἠπίστατο. Cf. 530, where Theonoe again is referred to as ἣ πάντ’ ἀληθῶς οἶδε (with Allan
(2008) ad loc. on the authenticity of this line); cf. 317–18, 823. See C. Segal (1971) 587,
for whom she represents ‘the embodiment of the highest reality’. Cf. 604; Burnett (1960)
157–9; Conacher (1967) 294–7, 301–2. But note that even this may be deceptive too, see
my p. 185 n. 85. Theonoe’s collusion in the deception of her brother is expressly couched
as collusion in the service of justice (998–1031), and one which will involve action that
will appear to be harmful to her brother’s interests but in reality will be for his benefit, see
esp. 1020–1: εὐεργετῶ γὰρ κεῖνον οὐ δοκοῦσ’ ὅμως,∣ἐκ δυσσεβείας ὅσιον εἰ τίθημί νιν. Cf.
Kingsley (2003) 494 on the philosophical theme of deception intertwined with ‘rightness
and justice’.
30
Or if there are, they are the σήματα of the Doxa: self-contradiction, etc., see my p. 52
n. 23, p. 81 n. 100, p. 98 n. 149, p. 138 n. 252.
31
Zietlin (2010) 263–4 discusses the ‘doubling and division’ and ‘repetitions and replica-
tions’ that are the essential feature of the Helen tradition: in addition to those discussed
here, she points out that Helen is also given two mothers (Leda, and Nemesis, Hes. fr. 176
MW), is one of two sisters, has two brothers (the Dioscouri, Castor and Pollux, who are
both dead and yet alive and, since made immortal by Zeus only every other day (see Cypr.
1.3), alternate their appearance in the same place of the night sky as a single star), marries
one of two brothers, takes a further husband in Paris, remarries again when he is killed
and, lastly, is herself divided ontologically by virtue of possessing an εἴδωλον. My
discussion of Euripides’ extrapolation of this doubling motif in the following pages is
indebted to Downing (1990) 1–4; cf. Meltzer (2007) 195–7.

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the εἴδωλον as opposed to the ‘new’ virginal Helen, and also the
character who is speaking, in whose singular persona κάλλος and
παρθενία yet coexist). The syntactical ambiguity of the very next
two lines (ὃς ἀντὶ δίας ψακάδος Αἰγύπτου πέδον | λευκῆς τακείσης
χιόνος ὑγραίνει γύας, 2–3) prompts vacillation of a further kind,
between competing accusative objects of ὑγραίνω, πέδον and γύας.
Next, allusions to both Homeric and Herodotean Helen traditions
evoke two Proteuses (the polymorph sea-god, Proteus of Paros, and
his Herodotean humanized reworking, Proteus of Egypt, 4–5) just
as Helen introduces one (Φάρον μὲν οἰκῶν νῆσον, Αἰγύπτου δ’ ἄναξ,
5), thereby displacing earlier claims of truth and fiction with a new
synthetic λόγος that advertises its own constructedness.32 This new
dualistic Proteus (who is dead, yet later still dwelling in his house,
οἰκεῖ, 460), in turn, is said to have wed, from among the maidens of
the sea (of which there are fifty), one (μία, 6) whose name is
proverbial for many (Ψαμάθη, ‘Sandy’, 7; hence, from many he
got one, and from one, many). She, for her part in this tale, bore him
‘twofold children’ (τέκνα δισσά, 8), of which the first, a son, was
called Theoclymenus, ‘god knowing’, a borrowing of an Homeric
seer’s name (Od. 15.256), but one ironized by Helen’s etymologiz-
ing so as to intimate that it derives from yet another’s fame (cf. the
emphatically placed, displacing aorist διήνεγκ’ at 9–10: †ὅτι δὴ†
θεοὺς σέβων∣βίον διήνεγκ’, [sc. . . . a boy called Theoclymenus]
‘because he [i.e. Theoclymenus’ dead father, Proteus . . .?] spent
his life worshipping the gods’); so that this Theoclymenus’ one
name evokes two personas (seer and suppliant, i.e. ‘one who obeys,
κλύω, the god(s)’), neither of which he himself can rightly claim.33
The other, Proteus’ daughter, by contrast, carries two names where
we might expect one (Eido and Theonoe, in place of the Homeric
Eidothea), the first of which (Eido), used only in pre-adolescence,
evoking both appearance (εἶδος/εἴδωλον; cf. ‘ἀγλάισμα (image) of
her mother’, 11) and knowledge, while the second, Theonoe, ‘god
32
Downing (1990) 4, reading line 5 as genuine, contra Dingelstad; see Allan (2008) ad loc.
for the issue of authenticity.
33
That this Theoclymenus entirely lacks his Homeric namesake’s foresight is crucial to the
plot; and no less so is his lack of Protean piety, for when Theoclymenus finally obeys the
gods this play ends. For the assumption that words correspond to reality as a fallacy
typical of Parmenidean mortals, see 28b8.38–41 DK with my p. 140 n. 257. Allan (2008)
ad loc., following Nauck, by contrast, argues that these words at 9–10 are interpolated.

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knowing’, bestowed in (still virginal) adulthood, enjoying the

explanation (cf. τὰ θεῖα . . . ∣ . . . ἠπίστατο, 14–15) her brother’s
never knew. Then there are two fathers for Helen (Tyndareus, the one
who either just is Helen’s father, or perhaps ‘is only famous [along-
side Sparta]’ (the absent copula at line 17 permits either), and Zeus,
the one who is (only?) said to be, 17–18; cf. 21; inverting Gorg. Hel.
3). They, in turn, belong to two different λόγοι, of which the one
recounted here, concerning Helen’s divine parentage, brings this
cascade of doubling to pleonastic tail-chasing, as Zeus takes the
form of a ‘swan bird’ (κύκνου . . . ὄρνιθος, 19) and then comes by
this deceit to Helen’s mother, Leda, as if pursued by an eagle (20), a
bird also symbolic of Zeus,34 until the entire λόγος is cast into doubt
by Helen’s sceptical aside (εἰ σαφὴς οὗτος λόγος . . ., 21).
Yet if all these bifurcations and backward-turning dualities
evince the paradoxical mixing of what-is and what-is-not that
underlies the fictive reality of Euripides’ new poiēsis, their effect
is not simply to foreground the play’s thematic questions of
identity; rather it is to enact in its audience, as artifice to be enjoyed,
the very predicament of its doxa-bound protagonists, the archety-
pal Parmenidean state of mortal two-headedness: ἀμηχανίη.35

34
Downing (1990) 5–6.
35
Indeed, later in the play, the chorus even sings this spectatorial condition into the
action as they take the unknowability of the gods as an exemplary site of the general
human epistemological and ontological helplessness epitomized by Helen’s predicament,
1137–43 (text Allan (2008)):
ὅτι θεὸς ἢ μὴ θεὸς ἢ τὸ μέσον
τίς φησ’ ἐρευνάσας βροτῶν;
μακρότατον πέρας ηὗρεν ὃς τὰ θεῶν ἐσορᾷ 1139–40
δεῦρο καὶ αὖθις ἐκεῖσε καὶ πάλιν ἀντιλόγοις
πηδῶντ’ ἀνελπίστοις τύχαις.
Cf. Allan (2008) ad 1139–43: ‘δεῦρο . . . πάλιν: the zig-zagging run of the adverbs
captures the bewilderment of the human spectator [i.e. of τὰ θεῶν]’; which is also to
say, I would add, the ἀμηχανίη of the Euripidean audience of these very lines (cf. ὅτι θεὸς
ἢ μὴ θεὸς ἢ τὸ μέσον), not to mention the numerous other backward-turning contradictions
engendered from the outset of this play by the ‘divine dispensations’ of Euripides’ new
Helen story. The bleakness of this picture of the discovery of the ‘furthest limit’
(μακρότατον πέρας) of doxa-bound human knowledge in the face of the unknowable
workings of the gods, which to aporetic humans look merely like happenstance, is further
emphasized when we consider that for Parmenides it is only insofar as they reach the
furthest limits (πείρατα) of our phenomenal world and confront the divine that otherwise
worthless doxai accrue any positive value, see Kingsley (2003) 277–80, esp. 279, on
Parm. 28b1.32–3 DK: ἀλλ’ ἔμπης καὶ ταῦτα μαθήσεαι, ὡς τὰ δοκοῦντα∣χρῆν δοκίμως εἶναι
διὰ παντὸς πάντα περῶντα, ‘nevertheless, you will learn these things also, how the things

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(Hence, what the first twenty or so lines of Thesmophoriazusae so

comically parody, the first twenty or so of the Helen beautifully
exemplify).
Indeed, most ironic of all, to this end, even in its valuation of
deception itself, Euripides’ play turns back on itself, such that the
transformation of Euripides’ protagonists in the middle of the play
from victims to agents of ἀπάτη does not simply reiterate – albeit
now disconcertingly playfully – the essential ‘vulnerability of
humans to deception and manipulation by appearance’, as Helen
fabricates an εἴδωλον of her own (a ‘dead’ Menelaus) and with it
dupes (scripts and acts) her way to escape, and Menelaus does
likewise; it also leaves its twin-headed audience with two conflict-
ing assessments of deception and of the charge of its key terms,
ἀπάτη, τέχνη, δόλος, μηχανή.36 That these terms gain their positive
connotations in ways that tacitly reflect, and reflect upon, the
tragedian’s own craft as illusion-maker and the complicity (i.e.
the self-deception) of his audiences, and yet retain their negative
charge, of course only further problematizes that ambivalence.37
It is for this reason that the Helen provides a ready explanation
for the comic pretext – the casting of Euripides as promulgator of
ἀμηχανίη – of the Parmenidean critique staged in the first lines of
our Thesmophoriazusae. Certainly, for Euripides, who for so long
flirted with the theme of illusion and reality,38 to have staged a play
that exploited both thematic imagery and linguistic strategies char-
acteristic of Parmenidean mortal confusion alongside not just
Gorgianic ideas about the primacy of doxa (cf. Gorg. Hel. 11)
they resolved to be, | ought to be trustworthy, passing through everything from end to
end’. According to Kingsley, the ‘passing through’ (περῶντα) that renders doxai accept-
able implies getting to the furthest limits of human thought, what we think we know, and
‘crossing the boundaries of existence’ (279) to encounter the goddess and her divine
perspective that is otherwise always beyond us.
36
Downing (1990) 8, 11–13, esp. 13 ‘In this way, the play perpetuates our moral along with
aesthetic awareness of these key terms; it keeps their hybrid, paradoxical double identity,
the embarrassment of multiple referents that frustrates easy exchange and keeps their
character essentially plural, divided, geminated.’; cf. Allan (2008) 49, who points to the
lighter tone of these scenes of deception as a corrective to M. E. Wright’s (2005) reading
of outright nihilism.
37
Downing (1990) 12.
38
Euripides’ interest in this theme is parodied by Ar. as early as 425, see Ach. esp. 395–6,
440–4 (cited in p. 117 n. 197), a parody of the Telephus (fr. 698 (Kannicht)), itself performed
in 438. See Segal (1993) 38, who notes that reference to the reality–illusion problem
surfaces ‘somehow or other in nearly every Euripidean play’. Cf. my pp. 55–6 n. 30.

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and the nature of perception but also the ontological paradoxes

of On What Is Not means that he could easily be caricatured as
deliberately conflating what-is and what-is-not.39 Yet the sophisti-
cation of our comedy’s engagement with Parmenides suggests a
deeper understanding of Euripides’ philosophical aims; for in
bringing together these things, the Helen merely draws out the
single premise upon which Parmenides’ revelations about the
nature of what-is and Gorgias’ dizzyingly self-refuting refutation
of Eleatic premises in On What Is Not and his account of the human
condition in the Encomium of Helen all ironically agree: the fun-
damentally deceptive nature of our world of doxa.40 And it is rather
that poetic choice upon which Aristophanes’ caricature seizes.
Indeed, the way in which Euripides’ play reuses Gorgias, carefully
synthesizing aspects of his Encomium of Helen and of On What Is
Not to articulate a pessimistic vision of the limits of doxa-bound
human knowledge, in philosophical terms, in itself, supports an
identical conclusion.41 Either path, that is, circles around a Euripides
of 412 thoroughly invested in the archetypal mortal conflation of
what-is and what-is-not – and, in his confusing and sophisticated
explorations of epistemological and ontological themes, glibly (mis)
leading his audiences along that forbidden way too.42 This, I suggest,
accounts for why it is that, a year later, Aristophanes casts his comic
Euripides at the start of our Thesmophoriazusae (a play entirely made
39
In broad outline, the study of M. E. Wright (2005) also supports this kind of reading,
see 295 on Euripides’ self-contradiction, a feature of the play which Wright attributes
(in my view too narrowly) solely to Gorgianic influence, and 337 on what Wright
perceives to be its nihilistic message.
40
See Kingsley (2003) 489–90, esp. 489: ‘[Gorgias in On What is Not] . . . is being just as
radical as Parmenides himself – and he reaches the same ultimate conclusion that our
complicated world of existence and non-existence, of change and movement, is utterly
illogical and completely unreal. [. . .] He [sc. Gorgias] is so effective in undermining his [sc.
Parmenides’] position that, in the last resort, Parmenides’ position and his own become the
same.’ For the primacy of doxa in Gorg. 82b11.11 DK, here, too, characterized as inherently
unstable and deceptive, see C. Segal (1962) 111–14; Verdenius (1981).
41
For the influence of Gorgias’ On What Is Not on E. Hel., see M. E. Wright (2005) 277
‘Euripides’ original contribution [sc. to the Helen tradition] lies not in his novel defence
of Helen [. . .] but in the fact that he has combined the separate theories of Gorgias’
Encomium and On What Is Not into a single, unified argument.’
42
Cf. M. E. Wright’s (2005) 280 interpretation of the message of Euripides’ play illustrates
the potential for aporetically reading outright nihilism, even if it de-emphasizes the play’s
(likely also Gorgianic) ambivalence about deception: ‘It is impossible for human beings
to make any firm statements about reality, existence, or personal identity; it is impossible
to tell the difference between reality and illusion, or even what “reality” is. Much of

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up of parodies of Euripides’ plays) as an archetypal mortal astray on

the path of Parmenides’ Doxa. In this comic frame, our Euripides
will, of course, eventually be enticed to play his own character
of Menelaus explicitly;43 but the comic pretext of its opening lines
is that this Euripides is unwittingly playing his own Menelaus
(first victim then agent of deception) from the very beginning.44
One insight that emerges from a close reading of our prologue,
then, is that our Thesmophoriazusae is not just parodying tragedy as a
rival art form;45 it is staking out a polemical claim to greater mastery
of illusion (i.e. doxa), and it demonstrates that claim, for those able to
see, in those terms that evince the highest available form of such
expertise in 411: that is, the terms of the fifth-century masters of
illusion, and specifically, of the father of them all, the philosophical
sophia – the metaphysics of illusion – of Parmenides.46

Comedy and philosophy

τίς δὲ σύ; κομψός τις ἔροιτο θεατής.

ὑπολεπτολόγος, γνωμιδιώκτης, εὐριπιδαριστοφανίζων.47

human action is based on delusion. We cannot believe the evidence of our eyes and ears;
we cannot trust language to represent reality [. . .]. In short, we cannot understand
ourselves, other people, or the world’ (original emphasis).
43
Th. 850–923.
44
As Silk (2000) 242 has argued, ‘the Euripides of this play is [. . .] a personification of the
“real” Euripides’ own plays’. But what this observation means in philosophical terms, in
the wake of the escape-tragedies of 412, is that Ar.’s Euripides is the personification of
Parmenidean mortal error.
45
See Bowie (1993) 217–25, for whom Ar.’s parody of the Hel. answers Euripides’ use in that
tragedy ‘of many things which comedy might have felt to be its own trade-marks’ (219).
46
Pace Silk (2000) 322. Cf. Bowie (1993) 220, who likewise argues that Th. offers ‘a
continuous demonstration in various spheres of the superiority of comedy as a dramatic
form’ ‘in which Ar.’s general message is: “Anything Euripides can do . . .”’ (225). But
note that our parody is not simply concerned with poetic competition; it is also offering
damning political criticism both of Euripides and of the self-interested and complicit
Athenian dēmos – even if that criticism is missed by more cursory readers; see my earlier
discussion, pp. 144–58.
47
Cratin. fr. 342 KA: “Who are you?” Some smart spectator might ask, | an elusively subtle
one, a coiner of maxims, a Euripidaristophanizer.’ The only context of the fragment is
the observation of Σ Areth. (B) on Pl. Ap. 19c: Ἀριστοφάνης ὁ κωμῳδιοποιός . . .
ἐκωμῳδεῖτο δ’ ἐπὶ τῷ σκώπτειν μὲν Εὐριπίδην, μιμεῖσθαι δ’ αῦτόν. See most recently
Bakola (2010) 24–9; but esp. O’Sullivan (2006), who makes a persuasive case that
Cratinus here uses the same metatheatrical device (in which the ‘playwright refers to a
question asked about the play by a sophisticated member of the audience’ (168)) as Ar.
uses at Peace 43–8, there alluding in parallel terms to a young sophisticated spectator

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The last suggestion – that Aristophanic comedy might, albeit

for its own ends, aggressively assert a claim to philosophical
sophia – may seem surprising. Indeed, more familiar with a com-
edy characterized by coarse language and everyday concerns, some
have dismissed comedy’s philosophical interests out of hand;48
comedy defines itself in opposition to philosophy. Despite the
more nuanced image developed in recent decades of a poet simul-
taneously courting the attention of sophisticated viewers and
mass appeal in his treatment of the sophists, the view that Dover
articulates when discussing Aristophanes’ portrayal of Socrates in
Clouds continues to provide a set of implicit judgements about
what comedy is not:49
We study Greek literature and philosophy, and in this study we set ourselves very
high standards of accuracy. In order to understand Nu. we must make an imagi-
native effort to adopt an entirely different position, the position of someone to
whom all philosophical and scientific speculation, all disinterested intellectual
curiosity, is boring and silly. To such a person distinctions which are of funda-
mental importance to the intellectual appear insignificant, incomprehensible, and
often imperceptible.

(νεανίας δοκησίσοφος, 43) who criticizes the dramatic action (cf. my p. 7 n. 16).
‘Cratinus’ devastating critique’, O’Sullivan argues, ‘is to identify the young smart-
alec with Aristophanes himself’ (168).
48
Note that at Pl. Smp. 221e–22a2 Alcibiades implies it was possible to have a similarly
mistaken reaction to Socrates on parallel grounds. Wians (2009) 2 acknowledges (and
regrets) that Aristophanes receives only ‘scant mentions’ in his recent edited volume
addressing the connections between Greek literary and philosophical texts of the Archaic
and Classical periods.
49
Dover (1968) lii; see now also O’Sullivan (2006), who likewise asserts Ar.’s close
engagement with novel intellectual trends against the foil of Dover’s still-influential
reading (169 n. 16). For the currency of Dover’s view, which derives from the claim
that Ar. simply glosses intellectualism by creating composite images of trendy thinkers of
the sort allegedly exemplified by the comic Socrates of Clouds, see Irwin (1989) 68–70,
232 n. 1, cited by Vander Waerdt (1994) 55 n. 22 (who rightly refutes the notion that Ar.
was hostile to philosophy and contests the notion that he would ‘attach sophistic traits at
will to a composite figure if he wished to illustrate the corrupting effects of a particular
kind of philosophical activity’ (57) and instead sees in the Aristophanic Socrates an
adherent to the views of Diogenes of Apollonia hinted at by Plato’s intellectual biography
of his mentor (74)). Comparably contra Dover (1968) xxxii–lvii, Willi (2003a) 105–17,
116 also insists on the ‘inner coherence’ of Aristophanes’ Socrates, whom he reads as a
figure who not only propounds Diogenean teachings but also ‘lives in a Pythagorean
setting, and uses Empedoclean language’. Cf., e.g., Pl. Men. 76d–e with my pp. 36–42;
O’Regan (1992) 42; Hubbard (1991) and Bowie (1993) 102–33, esp. 133 on Clouds:
‘“Aristophanes” is [. . .] an ambiguous figure in the text, who both displays and ridicules
philosophical activity’ (where philosophical activity here means the study of philosoph-
ical texts through which to acquire the requisite knowledge for accurate parody).

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This failure to frame Aristophanes as a sensitive commentator on

the trends of his own intellectual milieu is compounded by the
assumption prevailing in recent scholarship that, unlike a tragic
audience, a comic audience cannot possibly have appreciated any-
thing more than a cursory treatment of philosophical ideas. So keen
is Wright to rescue Euripides from being anything less than serious
in his treatment of correspondingly ‘serious’ ideas, for instance,
that he goes so far as to assert a fundamental difference in both the
extent and the quality of tragedy’s engagement with philosophical
thinkers. In contrast to Euripides, Wright argues:
Comic poets, typically, treat philosophical ideas in a superficial way; they repre-
sent philosophy or philosophers, often in a caricatured or satirical manner, but
they rarely engage with ideas in a dynamic sense or add new ideas [. . .]
Aristophanes’ attitude may have been rather more complex, and his presentation
of ideas more detailed, than that of his rivals, but it seems that the taste of the
comic audience was for less philosophy and more jokes.50

Underlying this view is the insidious tendency prevalent in some

recent studies of comic responses to the sophists to generalize
about Old Comedy’s engagement with intellectual ideas based
only upon the evidence of direct quotation or its passing references
to certain individuals by name.51 The almost a priori result of such
work is that, with the exception of Aristophanes’ ill-fated ‘gamble’
in Clouds, in which (a caricatured version of) the practice of
philosophy is shown in greater detail, Old Comedy does not engage
closely with philosophical thinking.52 Yet, as our close reading has
50
M. E. Wright (2005) 234–5.
51
See Carey (2000), whose fine discussion of the fragments of Ar.’s rivals prudently
acknowledges both ‘the distorting effect of the accident of survival’ (most strikingly in
relation to Gorgias, Prodicus, Hippias and Thrasymachus, who are ‘ignored in the frag-
ments of Aristophanes’ rivals’ (427)) and the possibility of the wider misrepresentation of
Old Comedy using such fragmentary material (430); his tentative conclusions are used by
M. E. Wright (2005) 234 n. 32 in support of the view cited; cf. Nightingale (1995) 61–3.
52
See Carey (2000) 428–9, who observes that like Eupolis’ and Ameipsias’ explicit attacks
on Socrates, ‘Aristophanes’ passing references to Prodikos and Gorgias, and to Sokrates
in Birds show a [. . .] lack of interest in intellectual content’, although he acknowledges
that ‘given the limited scope for detailed exposition in jokes made in passing, this is
hardly surprising’. Carey’s conclusion (against which he judges Ar.’s Clouds to have
been exceptional) therefore points to ‘the seeming avoidance of sustained engagement
with the intellectual content of contemporary thought by the comic poets’ who ‘evidently
[. . .] felt that the audience had little interest in the ideas of contemporary rationalists and
little desire to see those explored in the theatre’ (431).

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shown, that conclusion simply projects onto comedy a failing that

is largely (if not entirely) our own.
Indeed, it is salutary to note that of the eleven Aristophanic
comedies to have survived in their entirety, two plays, Clouds and
Thesmophoriazusae, are concerned with negotiating and policing the
use and abuse of philosophical ideas, at least one more,
Ecclesiazusae, explores the pragmatic implications of a philosophical
utopia, and the jokes of four others, Acharnians, Wasps, Birds and
Frogs, give us further evidence of the comic poet’s critical awareness
of a range of sophistic and philosophical themes, ideas and thinkers.53
If intellectuals are treated in cursory fashion in extant comic
texts, however, it is likely to be because, by and large, they were not
perceived by the comic poets as serious rivals.54 As Clouds dem-
onstrates, when sophistic and philosophical thinkers are made the
object of extended comic attention it is because of their alleged bad
influence on society and the dynamics of their popular reception;
that is, there is a strong moral dimension to comedy’s treatment of
the sophists as poseurs and irresponsible, even self-serving, teach-
ers, and of their self-interested and potentially distorting popular
audiences as equally deserving of sanction.55 Social criticism in

53
For the policing of certain kinds of philosophical activity and their popular reception in
Clouds, see O’Regan (1992); Papageorgiou (2004); Hesk (2007); Broackes (2009); for
Eccl. as a comic exploration of the pragmatic implications of utopian philosophical ideas,
see Nightingale (1995) 176–8. For the philosophical parody of Euripides as a thinker who
conflates being and not-being, see Ach. 395–400; similarly, arguably Ach. (634), and
certainly Wasps (421) and Birds (1694–1705) comment upon the impact of the work of
Gorgias on Athenian cultural and political life, see my p. 32 n. 12, p. 191 n. 102; Birds
also alludes to Socrates (1553–64), who is alluded to again at Frogs 1491 and at Ar. fr.
392 KA, and to Prodicus (692), who is referred to at Clouds 361 (and whose Choice of
Heracles (Xen. Mem. 2.1.21–34 = 84b1–2 DK) the play’s agōn inverts, drawing upon a
range of sophistic sources in order to associate the sophists with vice (and not virtue), see
Papageorgiou (2004)), and at Ar. fr. 506 KA; and Orphic (and perhaps also Empedoclean)
ideas are parodied at Birds 693–702 (for which see my p. 180 n. 71). See Carey (2000).
Griffith (2013) 93–6 offers a brief survey of Ar.’s sophistic debts in Frogs; but see Willi
(2003a) 87–95 for the language of literary criticism the play ‘stages’ (94), and N. W.
Slater (2002) 193, 198 for its sophistic Euripides. One can only speculate as to the
intellectual topography of the remaining thirty or so known Aristophanic plays that do not
survive; but it is perhaps apposite to note that there are good reasons why more explicitly
paraphilosophical comedies might not have been preserved.
54
Nightingale (1995) 62–3.
55
Nightingale (1995) 63; Carey (2000) 429. For Clouds’ portrayal of Strepsiades’ distorted
reception of Protagorean claims and his self-serving and unethical motivation to acquire
the skills of sophistic argument, see 112–18 with O’Regan (1992) 31–3.

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these terms is even more prominent in the context of dramatic

competition, wherein the poet is explicitly entrusted with the role
of instructor of the city (διδάσκαλος).56 Indeed, from this public
platform, new and innovative ideas deployed without due regard
for what is sōphrōn for the city were regarded as profoundly
dangerous: certainly, within our Thesmophoriazusae it is the alleg-
edly harmful real-world consequences of the values promulgated
by Euripides as well as the effect of his revelation of women’s
secrets (his imprudent truth-telling) that are invoked by the women
as the cause of their charge against him.57 For Aristophanes too, the
pragmatic implications of tragedy’s exploration of mortal ἀμηχανίη
and Gorgianic doxa in 412, I suggest, engendered a parallel
response, prompting him to write a damning indictment of his
own against Euripides into the subtext of our comic play.
Here, as we have seen, the practice of philosophy itself is
made the object of parody only on the most superficial level.58
What is genuinely lampooned is Euripides’ (deliberately) self-
contradictory and insidious deployment of philosophical ideas,
that is, his promulgation of arguments that appear to be valid
but result only in error, and, thus, his irresponsible, and, by
comic extension, erroneous and confused practice of philoso-
phy.59 In this respect Euripides’ exploration of epistemological

56
The poet as teacher is a standard topos, see Frogs 1055–6; for the poet’s attendant moral
responsibilities see the extended treatment given this theme in the agōn between
Euripides and Aeschylus, 907f.; cf. Ach. 628, Peace 738, Birds 912. For Ar.’s rival
claim as τὰ βέλτιστα διδάσκων to the city, see Ach. 658, and Frogs 686–7, where the
comic chorus describes its task as to ξυμπαραινεῖν καὶ διδάσκειν the city.
57
See Th. 445–58 alleging the harmful effects of Euripides’ atheism on the garland-seller
industry, a claim then comically undermined at 458 by the garland seller’s closing reference
to an apparently flourishing trade, see N. W. Slater (2002) 162; Sommerstein (1994) ad loc.
58
That is, the level on which an audience genuinely in the thrall of the actual Euripides
might perceive only comic nonsense (i.e. on the level of a reading that is essentially a
misreading). Cf. Clouds’ complex and shifting comic exploitation of Socrates’ intellec-
tualism and philosophical practices (and their on-stage reception) at 143–239 with
O’Regan (1992) 35–48; Vander Waerdt (1994).
59
Ar. mocks Euripides’ association with Socrates for parallel reasons, i.e. that for all his
exposure to intellectual ideas, what results – according to Ar.’s comic extrapolation – is
simply ‘bad tragic poetry’, see Frogs 1491–9 with Nightingale (1995) 63 (quotation hers),
and my p. 66 n. 58. See Nussbaum (1980) esp. 81 and Vander Waerdt (1994) 76–7, cf. 57,
for the view that, even if according his ideas (comic) philosophical integrity, Clouds
likewise implicitly censures Socrates for irresponsibility, on the grounds that his decon-
struction of social mores supplies no positive alternatives, and that his philosophy is open to
popular misunderstanding and cynical exploitation (as is exemplified by Strepsiades’ and

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and ontological themes in the Helen, his deceptive conflation of

what-is and what-is-not, always ran the ironic risk of being comically
repackaged as ineptitude; indeed, in the strictly Parmenidean terms
set by our prologue, it is.60 Aristophanes’ genius in 411 is partly to
seize upon that possibility, lampooning the glib inconsistencies of
Euripidean ‘philosophizing’. But, more seriously, it is also to call
Euripides to account (on the meta-level, as the women do on the
superficial level) for the damaging effects on his audience of his un-
sōphrōn use of new (καινός) and (potentially) dangerous sophia.61
Aristophanes’ strategy is subtle, but damning, both for Euripides, and
for those among his spectators who would willingly be duped by
him.62 Addressing the audiences of Euripides’ most recent tragedies,
he implicitly stages a competition in sophia over the mastery of
illusion between comic discourse, with its firm idea of what-is and
what-is-not,63 and Euripidean tragedy, in which that distinction must
be, has been and now on the comic stage continues to be entirely
confused.64 In this contest the onus to judge is on each comic
Pheidippides’ reception of it): i.e. that unlike Ar.’s sophia, which is deployed for the good of
the polis, Socrates’ sophia is un-sōphrōn and has corrosive civic and political effects. Cf.
Hubbard (1991) 95.
60
For the essential philosophical context of Gorgias’ On What Is Not as a (self-refuting)
attempt to refute Eleatic premises, see Wardy (1996) 9–14, and my p. 36 n. 6, p. 44 n. 5;
for Ar.’s reply to Euripides’ Gorgias- and Parmenides-inspired philosophical explorations
of the human condition to be to stage a Parmenidean reductio ad absurdum against him
would thus be entirely appropriate. The serious point underlying the choice is that for
subsequent thinkers Parmenides provided ‘a manual for constructing a responsible
natural philosophy’, see Graham (1999) 175, and Curd (1998).
61
For Ar.’s self-presentation, by contrast, as a poet both sōphrōn and sophos in equal
measure, see Clouds 529, 537 with Hubbard (1991) 94–6; for the καινότης of Euripidean
theatre see Th. 1130: καινὰ προσφέρων σοφά (itself a quotation of E. Med. 298); note that,
like the claim to being sophisticated (δεξιός), originality or newness is also claimed by Ar.
himself, see Clouds 547, 1044, Wasps 1053; see Silk (2000) 45–8; the tension between
positive and negative uses, see Bowie (1993) 132–3; cf. my p. 193 n. 110.
62
In this way, just as the women’s anger against Euripides for successfully teaching men that
they are bad is really directed at the male audience’s reception of those Euripidean ideas (cf.
Bobrick (1997) 183), so too the veiled philosophical criticism of our play’s early lines
serves both as an indictment of Euripides and an indictment of any theatrical audience
intellectually complacent (or indeed, in the wake of the failure of the Sicilian expedition,
self-interested) enough to be corrupted by him. See my earlier discussion, pp. 144–58, and
cf. the moral castigation of Socrates and Strepsiades in Clouds (cf. 1454–5).
63
For comedy’s metatheatrical dimension, including the direct address to the audience – a
convention that explicitly breaks the theatrical illusion – see Bain (1975); Thiercy (1987);
N. W. Slater (2002) 61, 130, 133. For the direct address outside the parabasis see Peace
50–3, 664.
64
The contrast that Ar. constructs between comedy and tragedy in these terms is explicitly
illustrated within our Th. by his parody of the recognition scene between Helen and

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spectator; but their verdict decides only their own fate. Either
they heed the call to make a firm κρίσις on the path of this play,
or they are left behind to circle just like the tragic audience of the
Helen.65
Cratinus’ comic jibe with which we began thus proves to be
devastatingly accurate: Aristophanes was precisely that smart spec-
tator of Euripides, and one who, as far as our Thesmophoriazusae
is concerned, has proved far too ὑπολεπτολόγος, ‘elusively subtle’,
in his philosophical answer to him to be appreciated by most
modern critics.66 As for whether his philosophical re- and enjoin-
der (Th. 25–8) would or could have been heard by his own audi-
ence, the burden of proof clearly rests on those who implausibly
imagine that those of Aristophanes’ late fifth-century spectators
familiar with the public epideixeis of sophistic and philosophical
debate saturated by Eleatic ideas could not and did not appreciate
its call.67
Menelaus at E. Hel. 555–639. Here, Critylla plays the comic audience to Euripides’
Menelaus and the Kinsman’s Helen and persistently refuses to be taken in by their
pretence to be tragic personae they are not, see 855–924, but esp. 855–8 with Zeitlin
(1981) 187–8, who comments that all ‘the questions of illusion and reality, of truth and
falsehood, of mimesis and deception are [here] reframed in metatheatrical terms’ (188).
Pace Zeitlin, however, I would suggest that Critylla does not ‘misrecognize’ the identity
of the Hel. parody; she sees only what-is. Hence, as Austin and Olson (2004) lxi say, she
‘repeatedly insists that Menelaus/Euripides must be deeply confused, since he seems not
to understand where he is or whom he is talking to (e.g. 879–80, 882–4)’.
65
See pp. 144–58; cf. p. 183 n. 78.
66
O’Sullivan (2006) 164–5 suggests that Cratinus’ use of the word alludes to ‘a subtlety
[that] is underhand and escapes notice’. He continues: ‘lesser mortals may not notice the
new-fangled subtlety of Aristophanes [. . .] but [it is . . .] there lurking beneath the surface’
(165). See also Bakola (2010) 24–9 on the tacit juxtaposition underlying Cratinus’
criticism in fr. 342 KA between his own inspired poetry and Ar.’s new brand of
‘intellectualist’ technical poetry.
67
Certainly, any difficulty a modern audience may have in appreciating how ancient
listeners could have followed philosophically sophisticated quick-fire dramatic dialogue
should be recognized for what it is: a failure to situate the argument strategies of our
extant philosophical texts in their original performance context. The audiences of soph-
istic and philosophical epideixeis would have been large and varied, see Gorg. 82b11.13–
14 DK; Guthrie (1962–9) iii.41; Bonanno (1997); and sophistic performances themselves
were characterized by ‘amazingly short’ quick-fire argumentation, often with ‘almost no
“theoretical” framework to speak of’, providing crowd-pleasing displays of intellectual
ingenuity, see Lee (2005) 27–8 (discussing the Δισσοὶ Λόγοι). Indeed, it is salutary here to
highlight again the significant affinities between Aristophanic comic dialogue and Plato’s
portrayal of the sophist brothers’ displays in the Euthd. and especially the speed with
which it was evidently possible to acquire the building blocks of Eleaticizing arguments,
see my pp. 28–32, esp. p. 29 n. 5, and pp. 43–6. On the saturation of fifth-century
intellectual culture with Eleatic ideas, see my p. 45 n. 9. For the public recitation of the
hexameter poetry of Empedocles and others, see Diog. Laert. 8.63–70. Parmenides’

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That Aristophanes should advise the city through philosophy

in this way and, what is more, that he should do so by dramatizing
it in dialogue form therefore supplements the fact of his comic
indictment of Socrates in Clouds in explaining the great interest in
the comic poet shown by that philosophical dramatist par excel-
lence, Plato.68 Plato’s relationship to Aristophanes is deserving
of an extended study in its own right,69 as the commonalities
between our Thesmophoriazusae and the Euthydemus, as well as
the specific points of allusion traced earlier between our play and
the Symposium, suggest. But the philosophical acumen paraded in
our prologue – that is, Aristophanes’ use specifically of paraphilo-
sophy to expose erroneous, un-sōphrōn and harmful philosophical
activity – not only considerably sharpens the reasons for Plato to be
so polemically engaged with answering the comic caricature of his
mentor but also presents a telling precedent for aspects of Plato’s
own rejoinding portrayal of Aristophanes and Agathon in that

hexameters would have been easily memorized, of course (see Kahn (2003) 157–8), but,
in addition to this, note the availability of written versions of such philosophical argu-
ments during the late fifth century, see Pl. Ap. 26d–e (texts of Anaxagoras on sale in the
orchēstra – a public space, whether this refers to the reused performance space of the
theatre of Dionysus, or, as some scholars think, an otherwise unattested area of the
agora – for less than a drachma), and their quotation in private conversation, Pl. Prm.
128b (Zeno reading aloud his own arguments); Pl. Sph. 237a, 285d (citation of verses
from Parmenides’ poem by the Eleatic visitor for philosophical discussion). See
R. Thomas (2003) 164–7 on the ‘written versions of the doctrines of Zeno, Anaxagoras
and Parmenides’ alluded to by Plato in these and other moments; and Charalabopoulos
(2012) for the performance of Plato’s dialogues.
68
For Ar.’s comic indictment of Socrates in Clouds and Plato’s claims concerning its
impact on the popular misperception of Socrates, see Pl. Ap. 18b–19d (Ar. deployed as
part of Plato’s Socrates’ rhetorical denigration of his ‘present accusers’); cf. Xen. Oec.
11.3; this comic portrayal as the tacit grounds against which aspects of Plato’s own
characterization of Socrates should be understood as a corrective, see Rashed (2009);
Vander Waerdt (1994) 52 and n. 17 notes ‘the numerous Platonic texts’ that ‘undertake
to answer’ Ar.’s indictment of Socrates. Plato’s interest in Aristophanic comedy, see
Clay (1994) and Nightingale (1995) esp. 172–92. See Charalabopoulos (2001) (2012)
for the performance of Platonic dialogue as itself a dramatic event. It is striking in this
respect that Plato’s aporetic dialogues, those in many ways closest to our prologue,
share similar themes and seek, as Von Reden and Goldhill (1999) 265–6 demonstrate,
to ‘promote in the reader an awareness of a performance on the self – as the reader
becomes a judging, participating spectator of his own performance also. The[se]
dialogues [. . .] not only introduce and redefine spectatorship in (and through) philo-
sophical discourse, but as a series contain a metadialogue about watching, listening and
reading, which does not offer conclusions but encourages the audience to look at
themselves for an answer.’
69
As Nightingale (1995), Broackes (2009), Rashed (2009) and Sissa (2012) have shown.

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dialogue. It is surely not coincidental here that Socrates goes on

to redeploy a crucial idea dramatized by the comic poet (that love
is in essence a lack or need) to reveal the deficiency of his imme-
diate rival Agathon’s encomium, just as (Socrates’) Diotima is
subsequently (and anachronistically) said to have once done so
herself in correction of the young Socrates (200a–201c; 202d; cf.
205d10–e1, and 212c4–6, where Aristophanes, at least, is not taken
in by Socrates’ fiction), or that the comic account in which this idea
is central then elicits as serious critical attention from (Socrates’)
Diotima as does the tragedian’s speech with its proto-philosophical
(‘sub-Socratic’), mesmerizing, but ultimately doxa-bound and defec-
tive words (205d10–e1; 212c4–6; cf. 198b–201b10).70 That attention
has much to do with comedy’s epistemological commitments, which
are resolutely material, particular and wedded to the phenomenal, and
with Plato’s own agenda to blend and transcend the genres of comedy
and tragedy in the philosophically superior account of (Socrates’)
Diotima; but, in the implicit contest in sophia (re-?)staged by Plato, it
is, nonetheless, this essential insight of comedy, arrived at aetiologi-
cally through its own comic blend of the popular, the medical, and the
philosophical (traditional fable, and Hippocratic and Presocratic allu-
sion),71 no less than the ‘sub-Socratic’ Gorgianic offerings of tragedy,

70
The phrase is Sedley’s (2006) 50. Whilst correct, the Platonic Aristophanes’ insight is
itself also deficient, as Diotima later explains, for its omission of the notion that love
desires not simply the completion or wholeness of the self, but what is good for it
(205d10–e5). Diotima’s subsequent blending of ideas drawn from both Aristophanes’
and Agathon’s speeches: Corrigan and Glazov-Corrigan (2004) 135–7.
71
Kurke’s (2011) 308–21 reading of Plato’s Aristophanes’ speech (189c2–193e1) as
simply a ‘traditional fable’ vs. the superior ‘sophistic fable’ of Diotima omits the
likely Presocratic elements of its comic aetiology. For greater complexity and even the
possibility of Platonic allusion to Ar.’s popular Parmenideanism, see Ruffell (2011)
17, who argues that Aristophanes’ speech ‘can be read as a send-up of the Eleatic
monism – reality as a fixed, unchanging sphere – that cast a shadow over fifth century
thought, in the same way as it is parodying the content of traditional creation myths’.
Indeed, with Aristophanes’ description of the shape of primordial humans at 189e5–7
as ‘spherical’ στρογγύλος (νῶτον καὶ πλευρὰς κύκλῳ ἔχον), cf. Diogenes Laertius’
testimony that Parmenides posited a στρογγύλος earth (28a44 DK), and Parmenides’
eternal, ungenerated, spherical (εὐκύκλος σφαίρη) image of reality (28b8.43 DK). But
see Casertano (2011) 36–7 and Craik (2001) 112 (who discusses the Hippocratic
resonances in Aristophanes’ speech as a sophisticated ‘para-medical’ rejoinder to
Eryximachus), on the ubiquity of such sphere imagery amongst the early philoso-
phers, and Rowe (1998) ad 189e5–7 and O’Brien (2007), who suggest that Plato has
Aristophanes here allude to Empedocles’ ‘whole-natured forms’ (31b62 DK) and
to his two-faced, two-chested monsters with their mix of genders (31b61 DK); see

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upon which (Socrates’) Diotima is shown to depend in elaborating her

new philosophical understanding. Indeed, that Plato’s portrayal of
Agathon itself (here too, significantly, a tragic poiētēs who extends the
concept of poiēsis to render desire the cause of all creation, and who,
by allusion to Hom. Od. 11.633–5, is subsequently himself rendered
by Socrates a Gorgon/ias-wielding stand-in for Persephone) is almost
certainly a reworking of Thesmophoriazusae’s earlier characterization
of the poet as an Aphrodite-like counterpart to Persephone, whose
identity is nothing more than his own poiēsis, only further ironizes the
apparent precedence Agathon’s ‘sub-Socratic’ speech enjoys over the
discourse of comedy in our gradual ascent to Diotima’s revelations.72

also Rashed (2011); cf. Palmer (2009) 313–17 for the similarities and differences
between Parmenides and Empedocles’ cosmologies, and Rowe (1998) ad 189e3, where
Aristophanes’ ‘androgynous kind’ is also compared to the double-gendered Erōs found in
Orphism (on which see Vernant (1989) 468), the cosmogony of which is parodied at Birds
693–702. On the comparably complex mix of Hesiodic, Orphic and, perhaps,
Empedoclean influences in the Birds passage, see Guthrie (1935) 92–6; Dunbar (1995)
ad loc.; Willi (2003a) 104, 107. For Plato’s satirical treatment of Aristophanes’ eikastic
myth as inferior to Platonic philosophy in the Smp., see Corrigan and Glazov-Corrigan
(2004) 70–8, 80–2, who notice that Aristophanes’ composition both embodies the kind of
poetic mimēsis that Socrates criticizes in R. and contains at its centre a comically defective
act – parody, even – of Platonic diairesis.
72
For Agathon’s speech as the ‘most advanced non-Socratic account of love’ of a crucial
sequence of speeches – Aristophanes, Agathon, Socrates – and, as such, an account that
(re)constructs its speaker as the most fruitful candidate for the Socratic ἔλεγχος, see
Sedley (2006) 52, 65–7, quotation: 66. For Agathon’s assimilation of poiēsis with erōs:
197a3–b3, an association later theorized by Diotima, 205b4–d9, see Sedley (2006) 61,
and that renders erōs a poet just like Agathon, and Agathon, reciprocally, a wielder of
erōs, in development of his (Aphrodite-like) Aristophanic precedent in Th. (who, as we
have seen, elicits desire and simply is his poiēsis). (See Duncan (2006) 40 and Sissa
(2012) 53–6 for readings of the virility of Th.’s Agathon, his erotic effects on Doxastical
thinkers and their possible implications, pace O’Sullivan (1992) 146–50). It is therefore
most significant that, for Socrates, Agathon’s words are not only reminiscent of Gorgias
(καὶ γάρ με Γοργίου ὁ λόγος ἀνεμίμνῃσκεν, 198c1–2) but are rendered so most strikingly by
allusion to Odysseus’ sudden panic in Od. 11.633–5 that Persephone may send up from
the house of Hades the Gorgon’s head (Smp. 198c2–5 . . . ὥστε ἀτεχνῶς τὸ τοῦ Ὁμήρου
ἐπεπόνθη· ἐφοβούμην μή μοι τελευτῶν ὁ Ἀγάθων Γοργίου κεφαλὴν δεινοῦ λέγειν ἐν τῷ
λόγῳ ἐπὶ τὸν ἐμὸν λόγον πέμψας αὐτόν με λίθον τῇ ἀφωνίᾳ ποιήσειεν. Cf. Od. 11.633–5:
ἐμὲ δὲ χλωρὸν δέος ᾕρει,∣μή μοι Γοργείην κεφαλὴν δεινοῖο πελώρου∣ἐξ Ἄϊδος πέμψειεν ἀγαυὴ
Περσεφόνεια, and the wordplay at Th. 1103–4), which, in parallel to his Aristophanic
precursor, implicitly makes this Platonic Agathon, too, an erōs-marshalling counterpart
to Persephone. Cf. O’Sullivan (1992) 29–30 on Ar. fr. 341 KA (usually attributed to the
lost Th.) as a similar parodic reference to Agathon’s Gorgianic debts, cf. 35 and 126 on
Ar.’s possible punning precursor to Plato’s Gorgias/Gorgon wordplay at Ach. 1131, with
which cf. Th. 1103–4. Plato’s characterization of Agathon using the allusive frame of
Odysseus’ nekyia (an implicit literary foil for the Smp., as for the Prt., throughout) is
appropriately multifaceted and shifting, see Planinc (2004) esp. 332–3. But it is surely not

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In fact, read in this way, against Thesmophoriazusae’s use of

Parmenides to philosophize the world of the Dionysia as the world
of mortal doxa, Plato’s choice in Republic V to turn specifically
to Dionysian theatre in order to characterize his own Doxastical
mortals as Parmenidean spectators – lovers of sights and sounds
who fix their νόος only upon objects that are ‘wandering’
(πλανητόν, 479d7–9) and whose opinions accordingly ‘roll back
and forth somewhere between what is not and what really is’
(μεταξύ που κυλινδεῖται τοῦ τε μὴ ὄντος καὶ τοῦ ὄντος εἰλικρινῶς,
479d3–5)73 – not only further testifies to the common philosoph-
ical ground claimed by late fifth-century comedy and Platonic
philosophy but also arguably recapitulates precisely the same sort
of philosophical appropriations from comedy operative at several
levels in works like the Symposium. It also, of course, renders
entirely sensible the charge Plato lays against the comic poets
earlier in Republic V at 452a–d: that what the comedians do
wrong is to treat as merely funny ideas of profound philosophical
value that should be taken seriously.

coincidental in light of this congruent portrayal that for many scholars (and for all its
‘sub-Socratic’ resonances) Agathon’s speech emerges as embodying a paradoxical and
‘anti-climactic coincidence of opposites – superabundance and hollowness’ (original
emphasis), see Corrigan and Glazov-Corrigan (2004) 93–4, quotation: 94. For a reading
of Plato’s treatment of Agathon as a portrayal that redeems the tragic poet from his comic
(Doxastical) reception portrayed on-stage in our Th., rehabilitating Agathon from ‘comic
character’ into a ‘philosophical interlocutor’ as the poet, thus rendering the Smp. a ‘partial
remake of the Thesmophoriazusae’, see Sissa (2012). Further evidence of intertextuality:
note Plato’s possible reworking of the Kinsman’s stillness-fracturing joke at 51 (νήνεμος
αἰθήρ) as part of his Agathon’s poetic evocation of the stillness effected by Erōs at 197c6
(νηνεμίαν ἀνέμων). Finally, note also the tacit connection with Euripides, and specifically
Euripidean deception, that Agathon’s words likewise evoke for Socrates; see Socrates’
quotation of E. Hipp. 612 that follows at 199a5–6.
73
Palmer (1999) 79; Crystal (1996) 357–8, 360. For κυλίνδω and its use in comic idioms for
metatheatrical deception/illusion, see Bierl (1990) 384–6; of Ar.’s Clouds (again, objects
that roll between being and not-being) and its parallel usages in Plato, see Broackes
(2009) 58, and my p. 135 n. 248, p. 56 n. 31. Significantly, Plato’s other use of theatrical
illusion to model the world of doxa, in the parable of the cave, sharpens its critique of
comedy, drawing upon the illusions created by thaumatopoioi, the vulgar comic shows of
Megarian shadow puppeteers that elicit mockery even from Ar. himself (cf. Wasps
55–66), in order not only to make his metaphysical point but also to issue a polemic
against the culture of comedy ‘most memorably represented by Aristophanic theater’, see
Gocer (1999) esp. 121; cf. Platter (2007) 87–9 for Ar.’s use and abuse of Megarian
comedy. Visible here is only Ar. the second-rate magician, not Ar. the dazzling logician;
but note that the eristic of the Sophist who deals only in appearances is also tarred by the
same brush (235b5–6), see Taylor (2006) 165–6.

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Yet even this damning criticism itself tacitly acknowledges an

interest amongst the comic poets in exploring the pragmatic impli-
cations of philosophical ideas, a mode of comic reception perhaps
best illustrated by the affinities scholars have long noted between
Ecclesiazusae and Socrates’ subsequent defence throughout
Republic V of numerous ideas also found in that comedy.74
Indeed, other utopian Aristophanic comedies, too – most obvi-
ously, Wealth – can be read similarly, as satirical pragmatic explo-
rations of ideas and issues taken up elsewhere as philosophical in
nature.75 In the late fifth and early fourth centuries the comic poets
were clearly engaged in appropriating, reworking and dramatizing
philosophical λόγοι for their own (serio-) comic purposes.76
Certainly, our Thesmophoriazusae exemplifies an Aristophanic
response to, and reuse of, early philosophy that is absolutely
grounded in its own pragmatic, which is to say, political, concerns
(as we shall shortly see).77 Quite contrary to the criticisms of
Plato’s Socrates, here, as in Clouds, the project of exposing as
‘ridiculous’ (γέλοιος) goes hand in hand with offering the dēmos
serious philosopho-politico advice.78 (Just as is the case for the
philosophical audience of Plato’s own brand of satire practised in
dialogues like the Euthydemus).
Both Clouds and Thesmophoriazusae, in fact, show us an
Aristophanes explicitly concerned with the disfigurement of dem-
ocratic discourse by arguments that appear to be valid but harm-
fully deceive or result in error, and with answering the threat posed

74
Nightingale (1995) 176–8 discusses the intertextuality between Eccl. and R. V. To summa-
rize her survey of scholarship, the two texts are generally configured as each reworking
material from a philosophical source from the late fifth or early fourth century (177). But the
possibility of a Platonic reworking of Ar. is entirely open (178). Cf. Tordoff (2007).
75
For a full discussion of the way in which late fifth-century comic poets problematize and
question the concept of utopia explicitly in response to earlier treatments drawn from the
work of the philosophers, see Ruffell (2000).
76
See, for instance, the parody of Empedoclean and Pythagorean ideas in Crates’ utopian
comedies Thēria (fr. 19.1–2 KA), and Amphictuones (fr. 2 KA) with Ruffell (2000) 481–2.
77
As Nightingale (1995) 176–8 has argued in the case of Eccl.; cf. N. W. Slater (2002) 237.
78
In this respect, as in a number of others, including its emphasis – albeit, here, implicit –
on (the right sort of) κρίσις, our Th. clearly anticipates Frogs. See N. W. Slater (2002)
180 for the relationship of the two plays as comedies that both advise the dēmos
under the shadow of immediate political crisis. Cf. Storey (2012); and see Bakola
(2010) 67–70 for the explicit poetic κρίσις Ar. dramatizes in Frogs and one reading of
the possible implications of its anti-Euripidean outcome against Cratinus’ earlier
characterization of Ar. at Cratin. fr. 342 KA.

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to the proper instruction of the dēmos by those who would prom-

ulgate them.79 And it is surely significant in this respect that
the one Platonic dialogue ‘probably richest in allusions to
Aristophanes’, the Euthydemus, is also a satire on sophistic techni-
que explicitly concerned with pointing out and parodying falla-
cious neo-Eleaticizing arguments.80 It is equally telling that the
two comic plays to which it alludes most are Clouds and our
Thesmophoriazusae: for Plato, at least, these comedies evidently
shared parallel interests in the practice and pragmatic implications
of pre-Platonic philosophy and could therefore be used, in vindi-
cation of his mentor, to harness Old Comedy’s serio-comic voice of
criticism against Socrates’ rivals (the ‘sophists’).81
Lastly, for modern philosophical readers, too, Aristophanes’ use
of philosophy may prove equally instructive: certainly, the early
lines of our Thesmophoriazusae provide an important example of a
late fifth-century popular appropriation and redeployment of
Parmenides’ poem (then available in its entirety); and one which
has far more at stake in terms of its implicit claim to mastery over
philosophical sophia than any modern interpretation of the extant
fragments. In this respect, what is most striking about that comic
reading, as it has emerged from this analysis, is that it strongly
implies that Parmenides does not reject the senses outright.82 That
impression may well owe something to the political agenda of
Aristophanes’ reading, to which I now turn. Nonetheless, it clearly
should prompt us to return to Parmenides’ poem (and to the rest of
Aristophanes’ play) with senses more attuned to the κρίσις that both
enjoin their audiences to make.

79
See O’Regan (1992) esp. 1–21, 94–105; Papageorgiou (2004); Hesk (2007).
80
Hawtrey (1981) 34.
81
Hawtrey (1981) 34. Plato’s reuse of the comic criticism of these plays in the Euthd. is
perhaps most evident in the way in which he has Socrates’ eristic opponents tarred with
the brush of the same comic language as Ar. uses in Clouds to castigate Socrates, see
Brock (1990) 43–4; affinities of wordplay and sophistic argument between the Euthd. and
our Th., see my pp. 28–32, p. 31 n. 11, p. 103 n. 165, p. 108 n. 176, p. 141 n. 259; Smp.’s
intertextuality with our Th., see Sissa (2012) and also my pp. 63–6, p. 128 n. 230; Plato’s
appropriation of the social criticism of Old Comedy, see Nightingale (1995) 181–5.
82
As Laks (1999) 261–2, Schofield (2003) 62, and Kingsley (2003) 120–2 have argued, see
my pp. 117–20; a further implication of Ar.’s concretizing enactment of mortal error
might be that Parmenides’ μέλεα (28b16.1 DK) in the late fifth century could indeed be
understood as referring to ‘sense organs’, see my pp. 86–7, 117–22.

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Drama, philosophy and the politics of the senses

τάλαινα φρήν, παρ’ ἡμέων λαβοῦσα τὰς πίστεις ἡμέας καταβάλλεις; πτῶμά τοι τὸ
κατάβλημα.83

καὶ πολλὰ μὲν γελοῖά μ’ εἰ-

πεῖν, πολλὰ δὲ σπουδαῖα . . .84

Yet if, as I have suggested, Euripides’ staging of the philosophical

problems of mortal doxa as evoked by Parmenides and theorized
by Gorgias provides the comic pretext for our prologue’s parody, it
will be clear from the preceding discussion that Aristophanes’
genuine object here lies in redressing the political implications of
bringing those ideas to a mass public. By teaching its audience that
there exist no stable epistemological grounds on which to assess
the truth of anything seen or heard (indeed, that no genuine knowl-
edge is possible per se)85 the synthesis of myth, philosophy and
rhetoric presented by Euripides to the dēmos in 412 posed a serious
ideological threat to the political processes of Athenian democracy.
Here, again, as at Thucydides 3.38, the insidious influence of
Gorgias surfaces. In its assertion of the deceptiveness of both
sight and λόγος, his Encomium of Helen theorizes an extreme
passivity of the viewing subject in a world in which the majority
(οἱ πλεῖστοι) are simply prisoners of changeable doxa.86 For
Gorgias, here, sight (ὄψις) constitutes a dangerous conduit to the
external world, through which the mind itself is helplessly
‘moulded’ (τυποῦται) by what it sees.87 λόγος, too, now always
received through the ears passively, has equivalent effect; hence it

83
Democr. 68b125 DK, the senses’ reply to the mind: ‘Wretched mind, after taking from us
your assurances, do you overthrow us? Our fall will be your defeat!’
84
The task of the comic chorus as defined by it at Frogs 389–90: ‘May I say many funny
things | and many serious things . . .’
85
See M. E. Wright (2005) 296, who notes that even the Hel.’s ‘Theonoe’s “omniscience” is
probably another illusion [. . . she] is said to be omniscient’ (original emphasis); cf. 337
and my p. 167 n. 29.
86
Gorg. 82b11.11, 13 DK. For Gorgias, doxa is simply the ‘ordinary state of human
communicable knowledge’ whose inherent instability makes possible the deception
(ἀπάτη), and self-deception (i.e. collusion), upon which persuasion (πειθώ) depends,
see C. Segal (1962) 111–13 (quotation: p.111).
87
See Gorg. 82b11.15 DK: ἃ γὰρ ὁρῶμεν, ἔχει φύσιν οὐχ ἣν ἡμεῖς θέλομεν, ἀλλ’ ἣν ἕκαστον
ἔτυχε· διὰ δὲ τῆς ὄψεως ἡ ψυχὴ κἀν τοῖς πρόποις τυποῦται. See Wardy (1996) 47: ‘the

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has the power to compel.88 According to this model of perception,

not only Helen but each one of us is fundamentally at the mercy of
what we see and hear. As Goldhill notes, the political implications
of this philosophy in an Athenian context are clear:
If democracy depends on speech-making [. . .] and on the ability of each citizen to
judge, evaluate, scrutinize from the audience in order to make an informed
decision, Gorgias threatens the whole logic of democratic subjectivity by asserting
that the citizen is the victim, the passive experiencer of words and sights, and not
the active regulating citizen of democratic ideology.89

This, as we have seen, is precisely the subtext of the speech against

a city of passive Athenian spectators given to Cleon by Thucydides
in the year of Gorgias’ visit to Athens some fifteen years earlier.90
As Euripides stages the key elements of Gorgias’ philosophy for
his audiences of 412, he thus creates a spectacle, the effects of
which are similarly to alienate and confuse with sights and sounds
that are profoundly deceptive.91
On one level, Euripides makes quite explicit his exploration of
Gorgias’ model of perceptual passivity and its implications.92

perceptual model evoked is one according to which the visual organs are mere channels
permitting the ingress of images which strike the psychē without its reacting rationally or
purposefully’. Cf. Pl. Men. 76d–e, with my earlier discussion, pp. 36–42.
88
When coupled with persuasion (πειθώ), it, too, τὴν ψυχὴν ἐτυπώσατο ὅπως ἐβούλετο,
82b11.13 DK; cf. 8, 9–10; with Wardy (1996) 47: ‘“Moulding” both summons up a
mechanical rather than rational mode of persuasion and contributes further to the
portrayal of the psychê as something entirely passive [. . .] taking the impress of the
logoi without any resistance.’ See C. Segal (1962) 142 n. 44. For the power of speech to
compel (and for the helplessness of its hearer), see Gorg. 82b11.12.6–7 DK.
89
Goldhill (2000) 173 (also building upon Wardy (1996) 25–51).
90
V. Hunter (1986) has shown that Gorgias’ theories regarding the effects of λόγος and ὄψις
on their passive recipients are present also in Thucydides’ History. In this respect, she
concludes: ‘The link between Gorgias and Thucydides seems incontrovertible’ (426). For
the Athenians of 3.38 as passive recipients of sights and sounds, see my earlier discus-
sion, pp. 160–3. Note also that the pleasure of listening that bests the Athenian powers of
judgement (ἀκοῆς ἡδονῇ ἡσσώμενοι, 3.38.7, cf. 40.2) recalls Gorgias’ model of the
emotional effects of speech; cf. V. Hunter (1986) 423.
91
See M. E. Wright (2005) 295: ‘Gorgias in the Encomium showed how Helen was
overpowered by words (λόγοι) and outward appearance (ὄψις); now we, the audience,
[watching Euripides’ Hel.] are being beguiled by the persuasive – why not deceptive? –
λόγοι and ὄψις of drama.’ Wright continues to argue that, just like Gorgias, Euripides thus
creates a play which has “in-built “self-refutation”’ as ‘a recurring strategy of presenta-
tion, whereby our initial expectations are later frustrated’.
92
For an example of perceptual passivity explored on-stage that clearly draws upon the
Gorgianic notion that deceptive appearances are a sickness of the eye, see the recognition
scene between Menelaus and Helen at E. Hel. 574–8 and cf. Gorg. 82b11.18 DK.

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Here, the failed recognition scene between Teucer and Helen, at

Helen 119–22, is typical. (The real) Helen, who is as yet unidenti-
fied, questions Teucer, who remains convinced that it is what
he sees now that is not to be trusted – despite being taken by
the likeness of the woman he addresses to the (εἴδωλον) Helen
whom he has just left behind:
Ελ. σκόπει δὲ μὴ δόκησιν εἴχετ’ ἐκ θεῶν.
Τε. ἄλλου λόγου μέμνησο, μὴ κείνης ἔτι. 120
Ελ. οὕτω δοκεῖτε τὴν δόκησιν ἀσφαλῆ;
Τε. αὐτὸς γὰρ ὄσσοις εἰδόμην, καὶ νοῦς ὁρᾷ.

H. Watch out, in case it was an illusion from the gods that you saw.
T. Change the subject: do not talk about her any longer.
H. Do you imagine what you witnessed was real?
T. I saw it with my own eyes – and my mind sees.93

As Kannicht noted, the last line here is likely to be an allusion to

Epicharmus’ words: νοῦς ὁρῇ καὶ νοῦς ἀκούει· τἄλλα κωφὰ καὶ
τυφλά.94 With them, Euripides sets up a devastating critique of
all of Teucer’s sensory and intellectual certainties about what is real
and what is not; for the effect of Euripides’ allusion is to enact a
competition between philosophical positions in which he uses the
tacit irony that the audience already knows that what Teucer takes
to be real is not real in order to refute the possibility of certain
knowledge for his characters on any level of apprehension. Teucer,
that is, is implicitly shown to be wrong here on two counts: his eyes
cannot be trusted; and neither can the deeper sight plied by his νοῦς.
But the problem, as we have seen, is that as the play progresses,
the audience’s basis on which to judge such moments of deception
(i.e. to separate what-is from what-is-not) in this way is steadily
eroded; any irony born earlier of their privileged position as view-
ers of this tragedy rapidly turns back on itself. Indeed, it soon
becomes apparent that in its staging of the misperceptions of its
characters, the Helen not only teaches its spectators to distrust their
senses explicitly but does so insidiously, in implicit and unexpected
93
Text and trans. M. E. Wright (2005) 301, to whom my reading of this passage is indebted
(cf. 301–2).
94
Epich. 23b12 DK with Kannicht (1969) ad loc.; against several recent editors, Allan
(2008) ad loc. and M. E. Wright (2005) 266–7 follow Kannicht (1969) ad loc. in retaining
line 122 as genuine.

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ways, rendering them entirely passive participants in its pessimistic

philosophical scenario (as Aristophanes claims, cf. Th. 1–28).
Looking for a reality behind the deception, but able to trust neither
their eyes nor their ears, ultimately they become just like the
mortals of the play and, indeed, of Parmenides’ poem; guided
only by ἀμηχανίη, beguiled by their πλακτὸς νόος and thus carried
along κωφοὶ ὁμῶς τυφλοί τε, as τεθηπότες, ἄκριτα φῦλα (b6.5–7).
As Euripides explores the problems of perception in the Helen,
then, the (deliberate) effects of his deceptive philosophizing are,
in a political sense, deeply disenfranchising. Not only does the
epistemological uncertainty of the escape-tragedies of 412
present an implicit case for non-participation in political decision-
making;95 the effects it has on its audiences actually work to
destroy their capacity to participate (cf. the imagery of Thuc.
3.38). Like true Gorgianic listeners of any λόγος, they essentially
become ‘moulded’ by its message.
Yet it is only when that message is placed in the volatile
political climate prevailing in the spring of 411 that the full
extent of the threat posed by its ideas can be appreciated.
Between the Lenaea and the Dionysia of that year Athens had
suffered a bloodthirsty campaign of political murder orchestrated
by those of the city’s hetaireiai rallied to the oligarchic cause
by Peisander; the overthrow of democracy was imminent
and, indeed, would follow with his return in early June. As
Thucydides describes it at 8.66, the situation at around the time
of our Thesmophoriazusae was thus little short of desperate – the
city, under a reign of terror; its citizens, entirely aporetic.
The Assembly still met, but it was now under the strict control
of the oligarchic conspirators, whose number and certain identi-
ties were not known. Its once-active citizen audience, in turn,
was now paralyzed with mutual suspicion and fear; old allegian-
ces were deceptive, appearances could not be trusted, and it
was impossible to tell who was and who was not implicated in
the conspiracy. Their minds cowed by a pervading sense that
conspiracy infected the entire city, and their liberty to judge
destroyed by the threat of violence, the dēmos, Thucydides

95
Note the possibility of reading nihilism as the message of the play described in p. 171 n. 42.

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says, had fallen into a fearful silence.96 On the eve of the City
Dionysia of 411, the ostensibly comical issue of not being able to
distinguish what-is from what-is-not, of being trapped in illusion
and aporetically searching for what is real, was thus not only
acutely topical philosophically; it was also deadly serious
politically.97
Indeed, Thucydides’ own account of the events leading up to the
reign of terror, with its emphasis on political fragmentation, decep-
tion, the impossibility of discerning falsehood, and paradox, itself
testifies to the topicality and political seriousness in 411 of the
programmatic themes of our play. As Greenwood observes: ‘The
events of Book 8 are characterized by deception (and counter-
deception), double-dealing and the persuasive use of speech to
obscure underlying realities. Recurring motifs include suspicion
(hupopsia), acting in secret (krupha) and lack of trust (apistia).
Deception is taking place on so many levels that Thucydides himself
expresses uncertainty about what was really going on . . .’98
It is against this incendiary political backdrop that Aristophanic
comedy thus subtly answers the mortal ἀμηχανίη and Gorgianic
tenets (now disturbingly resonant) authorized a year earlier by
Euripidean tragedy, staging a devastating reply in kind. Exposing
the fallacies of Euripidean philosophizing and its subversive impli-
cations, Aristophanes issues a veiled enjoinder to the Athenians of
411 not to be persuaded by Euripides’ epistemological pessimism,

96
Thuc. 8.66.2–3.
97
For Th.’s awareness of this political situation, see Austin and Olson (2004) xliii:
‘Although Lys. displays no overt awareness of an immediate threat to Athens’ democracy
[. . .] Th. does; and the obvious implication is that the play was staged at a time when the
oligarchic conspiracy was more advanced and could no longer simply be ignored’; cf.
N. W. Slater (2002) 180–1. Our philosophical reading of the play therefore bolsters recent
correctives of the view that our Th. is simply an apolitical comedy. For this position see
Lang (1967) 181 and Sommerstein (1977) 120, but esp. (1994) 4: ‘Thesmophoriazusae
[. . .] is not a political play and was never designed to be. It is a drama about drama and
about gender’. Cf. Silk (2000) 320: ‘[Th.] is a play with no overt political content (apart
from the presence of Euripides and Agathon) with very little topical reference of any
kind’ and should therefore be placed ‘on the opposite end of the spectrum’ from Knights,
‘a play where issues, political issues [. . .] are unmistakable’ (334).
98
Greenwood (2006) 89–97 (quotation: 90); cf. 85, noting prior characterizations of Book 8
in terms of ‘fragmentation’, ‘division’, ‘disintegration’ by Rood (1998) 253 (who points
out the mirroring in the ‘fragmented’ structure of the book of the ‘greater complexity’ of
the deterioriating situation it describes), Connor (1984) 215, and others. Cf. Shear (2011)
31 for the passivity of the dēmos in Thucydides’ account.

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but to return to their senses, and actively to κρῖναι λόγῳ, that is, to
restore their full attention (νόος) to the judgement of his words.99 In
this comic frame, those words will be drawn from a range of
Euripidean tragedies and, one by one, each will be revealed to lead
nowhere other than to self-deception, deceit, ἀμηχανίη.100 Salvation,
both for the individual and for the city, is shown to lie only in
transcending the ἐοικός (Doxastically ‘appropriate’, which is to say,
‘subjectively plausible’) philosophical vision of the Helen, and ply-
ing eye and ear together, to direct νόος to the reality its illusions
would obscure: the reality of its (which is to say, this) audience’s
own helplessness in (Euripidean) deception, its own utter surrender
of νόος. (The very same insight that is also at the heart of
Parmenides’ goddess’s Doxastical deception.)101

99
Note that the conjectured allusion to the oligarchs of 411 in our Th. at 356–67/8 (see, e.g.,
Dover (1972) 170–1) uses imagery suggestively close to that with which Ar. characterizes
Euripides at the beginning of the play: if oligarchs are alluded to here, they too are figures
who would threaten the status quo with (amongst other things) their deceptive treatment of
opposites; thus the words of the female Chorus at Th. 356–67/8:
. . . ὁπόσαι δ’
ἐξαπατῶσιν παραβαίνουσί τε τοὺς
ὅρκους τοὺς νενομισμένους 356–9
κερδῶν οὕνεκ’ ἐπὶ βλάβῃ,
ἢ ψηφίσματα καὶ νόμον
ζητοῦσ’ ἀντιμεθιστάναι,
τἀπόρρητά τε τοῖσιν ἐχ-
θροῖς τοῖς ἡμετέροις λέγουσ’
ἢ Μήδους ἐπάγουσι †τῆς
χώρας οὕνεκ’ ἐπὶ βλάβῃ†, 363–6
ἀσεβοῦσ’ ἀδικοῦσί τε τὴν πόλιν. 367=8
ἀντιμεθιστάναι should be taken as ‘to change into their opposites, turn back to front, put
into reverse’, see Sommerstein (1977) 125 and n. 81 (pace Dover (1972) 171); cf. Austin
and Olson (2004) ad loc. (Ar.’s) Euripides, of course, is precisely one who would
deceive this audience, turn opposites back on themselves, reveal women’s secrets and,
as this comedy progresses, commit sacrilege for the sake of gain (by infiltrating a
women’s festival); but most importantly, by leaving his audience unable to tell what-is
from what-is-not, he is also one who would profoundly wrong the city. Cf. Euripides’
association with the Medes in the Assembly curse at 335–7 (for Austin and Olson (2004)
ad 335–9, a standard pairing of enemy with enemy).
100
For ἀμηχανίη as the (only) reward for following this Euripides, see Th. 1008, and my
pp. 87–92, 122–44.
101
See Kingsley (2003) 205–11, 255–8, 291–4. The ability to negotiate illusion success-
fully and remedy our helplessness, in turn, implies turning the very same skills of mētis,
by which we effected our self-recognition, and by which the illusions that hold us fast are
created (cf. Th. 52–7, 101–29, with my pp. 122–44), back against the deceptions that
threaten to entrap us; letting nothing in this world of illusion get ahead of us. It is
tempting to compare the Agathonization of the Kinsman that follows our epiphanic

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In this respect, our Thesmophoriazusae clearly develops the

critique of tragic and political deception mediated by paratragedy
on the comic stage fourteen years earlier in Acharnians, a play
similarly concerned with teaching the dēmos to see the deceptions
of illusory speech and long suspected of tacitly alluding to the
speeches of Gorgias (cf. Ach. 634).102 Indeed, that didactic pre-
occupation surfaces throughout Aristophanes’ plays.103 In parallel
to the emphasis given to deconstructing theatrical illusion in both
Acharnians and our Thesmophoriazusae, for instance, the place
given to assembling and disassembling persuasive political per-
formances in plays such as Knights and Wasps clearly shows us a
comic poet concerned with schooling his spectators to see rhetoric
for what it is and to recognize deception.104 Yet the fact that our
Thesmophoriazusae styles itself specifically as a paraphilosophical
satire of tragedy in this respect gestures significantly toward the
increased popular currency both of Gorgianic and of Eleatic ideas
in Athens at around 413–411, and to their shifting political reso-
nance against the vicissitudes of its recent history. Certainly, for an

revelation of Agathon as para-Doxastical deity in this play, a scene by which the

(unwittingly) duped affects to become the duper (see my p. 128 n. 230) . . . and, of
course, is eventually rumbled but which also functions as the comic vehicle by which Ar.
takes us into his illusory festival and thereby effects our full arousal to self-recognition
and self-awareness. How do we negotiate illusion? We embrace its deceptions and learn
to use the superior perspicacity and cunning of our (comic) mētis to turn them back on
themselves.
102
φησὶν δ’ εἶναι πολλῶν ἀγαθῶν αἴξιος ὑμῖν ὁ ποιητής,
παύσας ὑμᾶς ξενικοῖσι λόγοις μὴ λίαν ἐξαπατᾶσθαι 634
μηδ’ ἥδεσθαι θωπευομένους, μηδ’ εἶναι χαυνοπολίτας.

(Text Wilson). For the political claim that comedy equips its audience to see through the
deceptions of poetic language implicit here, see N. W. Slater (2002) 60–1; the ancient
tradition of an allusion to Gorgias’ ambassadorial displays to the Athenians in 427 at
634: Olson (2002) ad 634–5; see O’Sullivan (1992) 126–9 on Ach. 633–40 for the
suggestion that the issue of the impact of Gorgias on Athenian social and political life
may have already featured in Ar.’s Babylonians, my pp. 160–3 for Thucydides’ kindred
literary response to Gorgias, and my p. 32 n. 12 for Ar.’s subsequent returns to this issue
in several comedies. For Ach.’s portrayal of a tragic audience duped by Euripidean
(Telephian) deceptions and unable to differentiate between what-is and what-is-not, see
p. 117 n. 197; and for the Telephus parody of our Th. as a re-activation of the Telephus
parody in Ach., see Hubbard (1991) 187 n. 87; Sidwell (2009) 36–7. In parallel to Ar.
here, Plato’s engagement with tragedy also centres upon the ‘false set of values that
(he thinks) tragedy promulgates’ and how these relate to the political practices of
democracy, see Nightingale (1995) 68, citing Pl. R. 568c.
103
See N. W. Slater (2002) 236–8 and my p. 32 n. 12.
104
See Foley (1988) 43; N. W. Slater (2002) 236–8.

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audience of 412 turning to the tragic stage in the wake of the

cataclysmic defeat of the military expedition to Sicily, the scepti-
cism of the Gorgianic epistemology and the philosophical vision
of doxa so cannily popularized by Euripides’ plays of that year
was undoubtedly powerfully resonant; for in 413 a campaign that
the dēmos were thoroughly convinced would be easily won and
bring great rewards – a campaign that the Assembly had voted to
undertake based precisely upon what its members had heard of
what others had seen, and which had inspired such confidence
that at first the Athenians even refused to believe that it had
failed105 – had ended in the worst defeat Athens had known.106
An Athens of 412, that is, had good reasons to admit a Gorgianic
world. By April of 411, by contrast, the epistemology that may
once have helped un-self-critical spectators obviate their responsi-
bility for the folly abroad now threatened to bring the dēmos to an
even greater crisis at home. In the volatile climate prevailing during
the City Dionysia, overt criticism of Athenian political passivity
was little short of suicidal;107 the register already set by Euripidean
theatre, the agenda already laid out in Acharnians, paraphilosoph-
ical critique thus provided a means by which to articulate implicit
criticism of the dēmos under the guise of an extended satire on
Euripidean tragedy. If politics appears to be ‘studiously avoided’ in

105
For the disbelief of the Athenians at the defeat of the expedition to Sicily and the desire
to obviate their own accountability for the disaster visible in the animosity it inspired
toward those persuasive speakers whose words recent events had shown to be deceptive,
see Thuc. 8.1.
106
For the resonances of Euripides’ exploration of the Helen story and the Sicilian expedition
even in premise (on the basis that both were destructive wars ultimately revealed to have
been fought merely for the sake of illusory percepts, phantoms), see Rehm (1994) 126–7.
And note, if the story preserved by Plutarch (Plut. Nic. 29.2–3, 542cd) that following their
defeat in Sicily Athenian sailors were allowed to win their freedom if they could sing parts
from Euripidean tragedies does not itself simply borrow from the model of our Th. (as I
suspect is the case), then it is quite possible that the predicament of those Athenians
captured in that campaign, as well as those Euripidean spectators that allowed themselves
to be taken in by Euripides’ epistemological pessimism a year later, is being satirically
mirrored on-stage in our Th. My thanks to Liz Irwin for alerting me to this possibility.
107
On the impact of the political climate of 411 on the comedies staged that year see the
comments of Sommerstein (1977) 120 (arguing in favour of dating the Lys. to the Lenaea
of 411 and our Th. to the City Dionysia of that year): ‘Aristophanes survived all the
political upheavals of the years 411–403; it is very, very hard to credit him with the
suicidal recklessness that it would have taken to put on a play like Lys. [i.e. a play with
overt political references, the most significant of which (Lys. 489–91) slanders
Peisander, the key instigator of the oligarchic coup] at the City Dionysia of 411.’

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this play, and philosophy (albeit fleetingly) takes centre stage, the
reason lies surely in our Thesmophoriazusae’s immediate political
resonance.108
Cleon’s speech at Thucydides 3.38.5–6, with which we began,
cast the Athenian Assembly as δοῦλοι ὄντες τῶν αἰεὶ ἀτόπων,
ὑπερόπται δὲ τῶν εἰωθότων (‘slaves of every unfamiliar paradox
and overlookers of what is usual’). That is a charge that could well
be levelled against the spectators of the Euripidean tragedies of
412. By contrast, in sensory terms, as is well known, comedy
expressly grounds itself in the everyday, in ‘popular epistemology’,
as the smells of Peace, or the copious food imagery of Knights and
other plays attests;109 but in view of this reading of our
Thesmophoriazusae, that, perhaps, too emerges as both a political
and a philosophical choice. Knights, in particular, may show us a
comic poet using essentially the same tactics to involve his audi-
ence as do the demagogue protagonists of that play whom he would
repudiate: that is, explicitly playing to the tastes of his audience by
casting out various foods to the dēmos in order to win their
collective attention. But the tensions here are no greater than
those that surround Aristophanes’ own claim to possess precisely
those qualities (καινότης, δεξιότης, σοφία) which he shows to be so
dangerous when deployed by socially irresponsible sophists or by
his equally sophisticated un-sōphrōn rivals like Euripides.110
108
Pace Lang (1967) 181: ‘[By the time of the City Dionysia of 411 . . .] politics were (had
to be?) studiously avoided in favour of literary escapism.’ N. W. Slater (2002) 180 gives
a more nuanced position: ‘the crisis of 411 casts its shadow over the Thesmophoriazusae
[. . .] Beneath the jokes about Agathon and Euripides lies a very real concern about the
freedom of the democracy to hear all advice and all information necessary to make its
decisions, a freedom threatened by the mutual hostility of the factions.’ See also Austin
and Olson (2004) xliii cited in my p. 189 n. 97.
109
Reckford (1987); Tordoff (2011); Clements (2013); Telò (2013); I am very grateful to
Robin Osborne for the phrase ‘popular epistemology’.
110
For καινός of subversive or dangerous (philosophical or sophistic) ideas, see Clouds 480
(of Socrates); 1397, 1399, 1423 (of Pheidippides); 896, 936, 943, 1031 (of the Weaker
Argument); Th. 1130 (of Euripides), and my p. 17 n. 10. For δεξίος as a negative term, see
Clouds 148, 418, 428, 757, 834, 852 (of the sophists); 1111, 1399 (of Pheidippides). For
σοφός and its cognates used in a similarly negative way, Clouds 94, 205, 331, 412, 489,
491, 517, 841 (of Socrates and his school); 517, 764, 773, 1202, 1207, 1309 (of
Strepsiades); 1111, 1370 (of Pheidippides); 895, 1057 (of the Weaker Argument);
1378 (of Euripides); Th. 9 (again of Euripides), Frogs 66–71; cf. p. 177 n. 61. For
Ar.’s claim to possess all three of these qualities himself, see Clouds 545–8, with
Hubbard (1991) 94–106, and Bowie (1993) 132–3. Similarly, for Ar.’s (ideal) audience
as δεξιός, see my p. 7 n. 16.

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Certainly, framed against a tacit backdrop of late fifth-century

debates about epistemology, Aristophanes’ strategy of mobilizing
his own community’s tacit commensal knowledge to evocative
ends is no less political for that ambivalence. Against the larger
philosophical enterprise of questioning the epistemic authority
of the senses, epitomized here by Euripidean tragedy’s reduction
of its audience to helplessness, Aristophanic comedy expressly re-
enfranchises its audience by constantly returning it to its sensory
perceptions. This it does most obviously by peddling its own brand
of popular epistemology. But in 411, against the political implica-
tions of its own audience’s apparent surrender to tragic ἀμηχανίη, it
also does so subtly and spectacularly: philosophizing theatre to
reawaken its spectators to the truth of their own deception, and
liberate them from the aporia of the naïve and tragic search for
another reality beyond. If, of the philosophers, it is Democritus
(‘the laughing philosopher’), with whose words this final discus-
sion began, who imagines what the senses might say to the hubris
of the mind, it is Aristophanes who most publicly voices their reply.

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 APPENDICES

Appendix I. Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae 1–28: the

comic realization of Parmenides, 28b1, b2, b6, b7, b8.50–61 DK

1–2 and the play’s temporal framing: Open during a journey (to revelation;
cf. παρεστώς at Th. 6, 39ff.) unfolding during ὄρθρος (a period associated
with revelation and adjudication), through the ‘dark and unknown’ (Th. 1;
cf. ἀδαῆ, b1.3; 8.59; ἄφαντος, 9.3, of Night) that began at dawn (Th. 2;
cf. Heliades, b1.9–10) and that will culminate at a site at which Night
becomes Day (b1.11; Th. 66ff.), that is, at a physical location at which the
mortal distinction between ‘Light’ and ‘Night’ is shown to be fallacious
(see Appendix II for the structural equivalence of the opposite attributes of
‘Light’ and ‘Night’ and the opposites forged from seeing and hearing as
both σήματα of the (para-)Doxa).
1–6: The physical predicament of mortal confusion; ἀλοῶν, backward-
turning circlings and an inquiry into route (b6, b7, b1; πυνθάνομαι, Th.
4; b1.28).
6: Pointing out a path impossible to point out: φράζω (b2.6, 2.8; b6.2)
7a: Passage into the thought-world of the Doxa signalled by the deceptive
switch of word order (b8.51–2), an adherescent οὐ revealing the
beginnings of mortal error (b8.53–4).
7–10: Staging the symptoms of mortal confusion: a ringing ear and an
echoing tongue (b7.4–5), and the extrapolation of futurity with the notion
of a beginning yet to be (μέλλῃς ὁρᾶν, 7; cf. ὄψει, 6; μέλλει ἔσεσθαι, b8.19–20;
cf. ἔσται, b8.5). Euripides’ account of hearing and seeing as enantiomorphic
opposites exposed in the trials of a πολύδηρις ἔλεγχος (b8.53–9; b7.4–6).
10: Tragic persuasion and internalizing necessity: δεῖ (5) transformed into
χρή (10) (cf. χρή, b6.1; χρήν, b1–32; cf. χρεώ, b1.28; χρεών, b2.5, b8.11,
b8.54; χρεóν, b8.45; χρέoς, b8.9)
13–18: Revealing the root of all mortal error. Tracing Euripides’
fallacious separation of hearing and seeing back to the Doxastically
‘appropriate’, ‘likely seeming’ (ἐοικώς) mortal cosmology from which it
derives (b8.53–60).

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 a p p e nd i c e s
22–4: Full circle: learning Euripidean lessons (a journey from πυνθάνομαι
to μανθάνω, cf. Th. 4, 20, 22, 24; πυνθάνομαι b1.28 (of all things);
μανθάνω b1.31 (of the beliefs of mortals), b8.52 (of the beliefs of
mortals via the goddess’s deceitful ordering of words)) and paying the
price of following the path of mortal confusion: deafness and blindness
(b6.7; b7.4) and the classic symptoms of ἀμηχανίη (b6.5): seeing but not-
seeing, hearing but not-hearing (b7.4).
25–8: The surrender of νόος (b7.2) and the comic fate of every Euripidean
traveller (b6). A step back into the phenomenal world of para-Doxa, a
fork in the road, and an implicit enjoinder to the comic audience: κρῖναι
λόγῳ (‘the πολύδηρις ἔλεγχος spoken by me [sc. Ar.]’, b7.5–6), or
continue with this Euripides? Which path will you choose on the
journey of this play?

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 appendix ii

Appendix II. Thesmophoriazusae 1–28: two paths

of perception and the para-Doxa

(1) Perception and Para-Doxa, (2) Perception and Doxa,

Aristophanes, Th. 1–28 Parmenides, 28b7, b8, b16 DK.
5–6: Accepting Euripides as guide Passive perception, blindly
is implicitly to agree to perceive accepting of appearances,
passively, in a manner blindly determines the mind of mortals
accepting of what seems to be, (for as there is a much-wandering
to see παρεστώς. κρᾶσις of the Doxastical senses,
so ‘νόος “stands by” or “is present”
to men’, τὼς νóoς ἀνθρώπoισι
παρέστηκεν . . .’, b16.2).
11–14: Euripides practises a κρίσις Mortals practise a κρίσις (physical
(physical separation) (διακρίνω, separation) (κρίνω, b8.55) and a
13) and a placing χωρίς (apart) placing χωρίς (apart) of opposite
(11, 13; διαχωρίζω, 14) of the perceptible forms (μορφαί) . . .
eye and the ear, distinguishing (named Light and Night, b9).
two forms (cf. E. fr. 484, fr. 839
(Kannicht)) . . .
7–10: . . . and with them, the . . . and with them, the σήματα of
σήματα of the eye and the ear Light and Night (b8.55–9).
(seeing and hearing), made
respectively parallel to the σήματα
of Light and Night in the mimēsis
of Euripides’ cosmology (cf. ‘. . .
ἐμηχανήσατο∣ ὀφθαλμὸν ἀντίμιμον
ἡλίου τροχῷ’, 16–17, contrived in
Aither, 14–16, with Aët. iv 13.9–
10 (= 28a48 DK) for the visual ray
of Parmenides’ cosmology; and
b10.1–2, ‘εἴσῃ δ’ αἰθερίην τε φύσιν
τά τ’ ἐν αἰθέρι πάντα∣σήματα . . .’).
The phenomenal world of this play The phenomenal world is brought
comes to uncritical spectators into being through a physical
(ἄκριτα φῦλα, βροτοὶ εἰδότες mixture, μíξις, of the elemental
οὐδέν) through what, following opposites of the Doxa, Light and
Euripides’ account of seeing and Night (b9, b12), and mortal
hearing, they take to be a physical thought is simply the sum of this

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 a p p e nd i c e s

(cont.)

(1) Perception and Para-Doxa, (2) Perception and Doxa,

Aristophanes, Th. 1–28 Parmenides, 28b7, b8, b16 DK.
mixture (a κρᾶσις or μíξις?) of the μíξις perceived through a κρᾶσις of
eye and the ear. the senses (b16).
25–8: Allowing νόος to rely solely Passively relying upon this κρᾶσις
on this mixture of the senses of the senses however, is to allow
as Euripides describes them, νόος to be led astray by ‘much-
invariably means rendering oneself wandering limbs’ (μέλεα
deaf and blind, i.e. helpless. Such a πολύπλαγκτα, b16.1).
spectator is now fated to wander on
Euripides’ backward-turning path
for the remainder of the play.
By contrast, distinguishing oneself Distinguishing onself from the
from such ἄκριτα φῦλα, ἄκριτα φῦλα entrapped in this
transcending this ordinary mortal predicament means learning to
state of passive perception, means κρῖναι λόγῳ (b7) and to νοεῖν
heeding the call to κρῖναι λόγῳ correctly (thereby understanding
(a call unwittingly issued by or recognizing what is, or things
Euripides himself at 25–8 with the as they are).
formalities of Assembly-order:
ἄκουε, σίγα, πρόσεχε τὸν νοῦν,
δεῦρ’ ὅρα), and to νοεῖν correctly,
i.e. to reattune oneself to the reality
of tragic deception by actively
spectating, looking-and-listening.

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 appendix iii

Appendix III. Thesmophoriazusae 29–172: journey’s

end and the full revelation of ‘things as they are’: the
‘Agathon scene’ and the epiphany of Aristophanes’ divinity
of para-Doxa (28b12–13 DK)

29–51: A new inquiry into nature and ritual preparations.

52–7: Theatrical poiēsis and the metaphysics of illusion.
101–45: Divine revelation: Agathon as Doxastical divinity (b12–13),
quasi-divine counterpart to Persephone and to Dionysus
(and implicitly mirror image of Ar.), and theatre as para-Doxa;
the collapse of mortal opposites in the generation of illusory
worlds of the sort in which we are all now immersed;
philosophical epiphany means transcending the κρίσις of mortals
to reveal the Doxastical nature of theatre in the κρίσις of the
Alētheia.
148–72: Agathonian poiēsis and mimēsis and, in the absence of any
reality behind the illusion, the revelation that it is only the
illusion that is real; the recognition of our own entrapment in
deception (cf. 101–4) as the means by which we are set free.

199
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 INDEX OF PRINCIPAL PASSAGES DISCUSSED

Aeschines 130–45: 136–40

Against Timarchus 148–56: 140–1
196: 120 157–67: 141–2
Aeschylus 171–2: 142
Prometheus Bound 266–7: 147
447–48: 90n120 356–67/8: 190n99
Aristophanes 850–924: 154n298
Acharnians 855–924: 177n64
395–6: 55n30, 170n38 1010–1127: 154n298
395–400: 175n53 1128–32: 151–3
396: 135 1160–9: 150–1
408–9: 135 1172–5: 151–3
440–4: 116–17, 117n197, 170n38 1222a–6: 153n297
442–4: 157 Wealth
479: 135 1097–9: 111n183
633–5: 191n102
634: 32n12, 191 Cratinus
635: 157 fr. 315 KA: 115n191
Peace fr. 342 KA: 1n3, 172n47, 172, 178,
43–8: 7n16, 172n47 183n78
Thesmophoriazusae
1–5: 52–67 Empedocles
5–10: 67–9 a49: 24n27, 25n29
5–24: 12–27 a86: 20n18
7–10: 70–5 b2.1: 86n112
11–13: 75–7 b3: 36n6
13–18: 77–84 b3.9–13: 86n112
19–24: 84–7 b17.22: 134n245
25–8: 87–113 b20: 134n245
29–35: 122–3 b33: 134n245
36–51: 123–8 b54: 25n29
52–7: 128–34 b61: 180n71
76–80: 135 b62: 180n71
95–100: 135–6 b73: 134n245
101–4: 149 b75: 134n245
101–29: 136, 142–4 b84: 24n28, 25n29
102–3: 142–4 b84.9: 24–25, 25n29, 85n111

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 i n d e x o f p r i n c i p a l p a s s ag e s d i s c u s s e d
Empedocles (cont.) 498–500: 99n154
b86: 24n28, 25n29 748–57: 114n188
b87: 24n28, 25n29, 134n245 807–10: 114n188
b95: 134n245 Works and Days
b96: 130n231, 134n245 564–70: 59–60
b96.1: 134n245 fr. 176 MW: 167n31
b100.3: 25n29 Homer
Epicharmus Odyssey
b12: 187 10.82–6: 114n189
Euripides 11.597–8: 56n31
Helen 11.601: 56n31
1–21: 167–9 11.633–5: 181n72, 181
13–14: 167n29 Homerica
72–7: 165n23 Homeric Hymn to Hermes
116–23: 165n23 91–2: 90n120
119–22: 186–7
285–6: 166 Menander
401: 165n22 Dyskolos
523–4: 165n22 689–90: 102
532–3: 165n22, 165
555–639: 177n64 Parmenides
563–4: 165n23 b1: 49–50
569: 165 b1.1: 49, 52
574–8: 186n92 b1.2: 49
575: 165 b1.3: 49, 52, 66n59, 66, 93, 94, 101, 131,
774: 165n22 144n270, 158
776: 165 b1.4: 49
865–72: 166n28 b1.5–10: 49–50,
998–1031: 167n29 b1.6: 111n183, 126n224
1020–1: 167n29 b1.8–11: 52, 66
1134: 165 b1.9–21: 113–15
1137–43: 169n35 b1.11: 114n189
1196f.: 165n23 b1.11–20: 111n183, 114n189
1676: 165n22, 165 b1.19: 111n183, 126n224
b1.22: 131
Gorgias b1.27: 157
Encomium of Helen (b11 DK) b1.28: 66, 78n92
3: 169 b1.28–9: 52
11: 128n230, 170, 171n40, b1.30: 82
185n86 b1.30–1: 66
12.6–7: 185–6 b1.31: 78n92, 78
13: 128n230, 185–6 b1.31–2: 101
15: 185–6 b1.32–3: 169n35
18: 186n92 b2: 50–1
b2.6: 90
Hesiod b2.7: 91
Theogony b6: 48–9, 51
27–8: 125 b6.4: 72, 91
154ff.: 24n27, 83n107 b6.5: 51, 55–6, 70, 75

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 i nd e x o f p r i nc i p al p a s s a ge s d i s c u s s e d
b6.5–6: 88 b12.4: 137n251
b6.5–7: 119 b13: 132
b6.5–9: 88 b16: 117–22, 143n264
b6.6: 72, 91 b16.1: 86n112, 86, 118, 137n251, 156
b6.7: 72, 79, 86, 91, 101 b16.3: 76
b6.9: 51, 55–6, 80, 82 b17: 140n257
b6.8–9: 75–6 Plato
b7: 51, 68–9, 88–9, 120 Euthydemus
b7.1–2: 44 283d: 45
b7.2: 88, 89n117 283e7–286b6: 44
b7.3: 89n117 300b1–c5: 103–8
b7.3–5: 100 300c5–d5: 108n176
b7.3–6: 121 Meno
b7.4: 91 76c4–76e4: 36–42
b7.4–5: 72, 91 Protagoras
b7.5–6: 53, 155–6 315b5–9: 56n31
b8.1–3: 52 Sophist
b8.1–49: 52 236d10–237a9: 44
b8.3: 70 239c9–241d9: 45
b8.4: 70, 156 Symposium
b8.6: 70 174d4–7: 65
b8.15–16: 88–92 175b1–2: 65–6
b8.16: 79, 140, 155–6 198b–201b10: 180
b8.17: 90 198c1–2: 181n72
b8.19–20: 72–3 198c2–5: 181n72
b8.43: 180n71 200a–201c: 180
b8.50–61: 51, 77–83, 93–5 202d: 180
b8.51: 78 205d10–e1: 180
b8.51–2: 70–1, 78n92 212c4–6: 180–1
b8.53: 93–5 220c3–d5: 63–6
b8.53–4: 71 Pseudo-Aristotle ([Arist.])
b8.53–9: 132 De Melisso Xenophane Gorgia (MXG)
b8.54: 77 980a20–b8: 33–6
b8.56: 114 980b14–17: 36n5
b8.60: 78
b8.61: 88 Telecleides
b9.1–2: 131–2 fr. 41 KA: 8n17
b10: 98n149 Thucydides
b10.1: 76 History
b10.1–2: 76, 82n101 3.38: 160–3
b10.5: 76 3.38.4: 120
b12: 130–3, 141n259 3.38.7: 120

223
 GENERAL INDEX

Agathon 149, 153n297, 169n35, 169, 170,

Antheus, 122n216, 139n256 176, 188, 189, 190n100, 190, 194
Ilioupersis, 142 amphiboly/amphilogy
and Gorgias, 181n72 in Plato’s Euthydemus, 103–8; see also
and ‘new music’, 125n221, 126n223, eristic; sigaō
136n250, 136, 138n252, of mortal speech as a sign of mortal
139n256 confusion
effeminacy of in comedy, 130n232, and Euripides’ Helen, 167
139n256, 139, 142n261 in Parmenides, 93–5
in our Thesmophoriazusae, 1, 4, 5, 9n18, in Thesmophoriazusae, 95–103,
10n22, 48, 63n52, 66, 146n273, 109–13
152, 157, 189n97, 190n101, anankē, ἀνάγκη, 141n259
193n108 Anaxagoras, 7n16, 20n18, 24n27, 25n29,
‘Agathon scene’ and Aeschylus’ 45n9, 47n11, 178n67
Edonians, 61n48, 139n254 antilogia, ἀντιλογία
and mimēsis, μίμησις, and poiēsis, and the eristics, 28–32, 36n6, 44n5
ποίησις, 140–2 Aristophanes
likely Platonic allusion to, 31n11, Acharnians, 7n16, 32n12, 54n27,
103n165, 141n259 57n32, 116–17, 117n197,
as tragōidopoios, τραγῳδοποιός, and 135n248, 135, 157n307, 157,
exemplar of the tragic art, 122–44 175n53, 175, 176n56, 191n102,
epiphany of, as quasi-divine 191, 192
counterpart to Persephone, Babylonians, 32n12, 191n102
125–8; and as god(dess) of Birds, 52n24, 175n53, 175, 176n56,
para-Doxa, 130–42 180n71
Platonic characterization of and Clouds I, 3n8, 3, 7n16, 30n8, 31n10,
Thesmophoriazusae, 179–81 46n10, 174
alētheiē, ἀληθείη, 50, 67, 76, 80, 90, 144 Clouds II, 3n9, 3–4, 7n16, 10, 13,
aloaō, ἀλοάω 31n10, 31n11, 62n51, 66n58,
and threshing, 53–5 85n110, 103n165, 113n186,
as a comic concretization of the 127n229, 161n9, 173–9,
backward-turning path of 182n73, 183–4, 184n81,
Parmenides’ b6, 55–6 193n110
amēchaniē, ἀμηχανίη, 48, 88, 90n120, Ecclesiazusae, 17n10, 57n32, 61n48,
90, 96n144, 119, 122, 133, 62n51, 117n197, 183; see also
144n270, 146, 147, 149n281, Plato, Republic V

224
 ge n er a l in d ex
Frogs, 17n10, 31, 52n24, 54n27, 66n58, chelidōn, χελιδών, 57–62; see also orthros
67n63, 87n113, 96n142, chrē, χρή, 13, 18–19, 74–5, 75n82,
102n161, 127n227, 127n229, 75n83, 79
134n245, 135n248, 139n256, chreōn, χρεών, 71, 93
143n264, 175n53, 175, 176n56, Crates, 183n76
183n78, 185n84, 193n110 Cratinus, 1n3, 3n8, 115n191, 121, 143n264,
Knights, 7n16, 102n161, 162n13, 172n47, 178, 183n78
189n97, 191, 193
Lost Thesmophoriazusae, 30–1, dawns, Thesmophoriazusae’s two,
139n256, 181n72 57–63; see also chelidōn;
Lysistrata, 28n2, 58n37, 58, 96n142, orthros
189n97, 192n107 deception
Peace, 7n16, 87n113, 172n47, 176n56, in Parmenides, see Parmenides; Alētheia
177n63, 193 goddess of; Parmenides; Doxa
Thesmophoriazusae theatrical, see Aristophanes;
and Euripidean tragedy of 412 bc, Thesmophoriazusae; Euripidean
163–72 tragedy; kulindō
and para-Doxa, 144–58 dei, δεῖ, 12–19, 71, 72, 73–5
political context and politics of diakosmos, διάκοσμος, see eoikōs;
perception of, 120–2, Euripides; comic caricature of;
142–4; see also and Gorgias; Parmenides; Doxa
Thucydides divine revelation
recognition and self-recognition in, Aristophanic, 52–3, 66, 67–9, 83–4,
144–58 144–58, 190n101; see also
temporal framing, see chelidōn; Agathon
dawns; orthros in Plato’s Euthydemus, 108n176
Thesmophoria of as didactic deception Parmenidean, 48, 49–52, 83n108,
and purpose of paratragedy in, 113–15, 126, 140n257, 143n264,
147–9, 149n283 144n270–145n272, 144–5,
Wasps, 7n16, 23n22, 32n12, 54n27, 155n301, 157–8, 171
62n51, 127n227, 175n53, 175, see also orthros
182n73, 191 dolos, δόλος, 142, 170
Wealth, 110n178, 111n183, 183 doxa, δόξα, see Gorgias; Parmenides;
and Gorgias, 32n12, 32, 33–6, 43–7, Protagoras
191n102, 191–2; see also
Thesmophoriazusae, and Eleaticism, 33n1, 36n6, 44–7; see also
Euripidean tragedy of 412 b c ; eristic; Melissus; Zeno
political context and politics of elenchos, ἔλεγχος
perception of in Parmenides, 51–2, 69, 73, 89n117,
and philosophy, 1–4, 173–84 89, 91n122, 92n129, 119, 146,
and popular epistemology, 193–4 155–6
Athenian spectatorship of Thesmophoriazusae’s prologue,
as active adjudication and contrasted with 67–86, 88–91, 97, 110–11, 115,
perceptual and political passivity, 140, 144n270, 147, 154–8
115–22; see also Aristophanes; Socratic, 64, 65n57
Thesmophoriazusae; political Empedocles
context and politics of perception and Aristophanes’ speech in Plato’s
of; paristamai; Thucydides Symposium, 180n71

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Empedocles (cont.) Euripides
and Gorgias’ On What Is Not, 35n4, Andromeda, 5n12, 62n49, 116n194,
36–42, 44n5 148n278, 150–1, 152n291,
and Parmenides, 20n18, 45n9, 47n11, 154n298, 159n3, 166n27
86n112 Bacchae, 139n254
and Thesmophoriazusae’s Euripidean Chrysippus, 25n29, 83n107
cosmology, 23–5, 47n11, 47, Helen, 5n12, 116n194, 148n278, 150–1,
85n111 152n291, 154n298
metaphysical processes of, 130n231, as exploration of Gorgianic ideas and
134n245, 137n251 Parmenidean mortal confusion,
on the senses, 20n18, 23–5, 85n111, 163–72; Thesmophoriazusae as
86n112 response to the political
public performances of, 42n22, 178n67 implications of, 177–8, 185–94
eoikos, ἐοικός, 96, 100–10, 190 Iphigeneia in Tauris, 148n278, 150–8,
eoikōs, ἐοικώς 159n3, 166n27
Aristophanes’ para-Doxa as, 83–4, Melanippe the Wise, 25n29, 83n107
92; see also eoikos Palamedes, 116n194, 148n278, 150n285
positive and negative meanings of, Telephus
78n91, 81n99, 92n129 and Aristophanes’ Acharnians,
world-ordering (diakosmos) of 117n197, 135n248, 170n38,
Parmenides’ Doxa as, 78, 81, 83, 191n102
130, 134, 140n257 and Thesmophoriazusae, 116n194,
epideixis, ἐπίδειξις, sophistic 146, 148n278, 154n299,
and Gorgias’ On What Is Not, 34, 35n4, 155n301, 157
36n6, 41, 43, 46 comic caricature of
and Thucydides 3.38, 160–3 as associate of Socrates in the comic
atmosphere and public audience of, tradition, 8n17, 66n58, 176n59
42n22, 178n67, 178 as paradoxical conflator of what-is and
in Aristophanes’ Frogs, 31 what-is-not in Acharnians,
in Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae, 55n30, 135, 157n307, 170n38,
23, 28–32, 84 175n53
in Plato’s Euthydemus, 28–32, 31n11, 106 as tacit foil for Plato’s Socrates in the
eristic Symposium, 63–6
argument strategies of in Plato’s in Thesmophoriazusae, as mortal
Euthydemus and Aristophanes’ fabricator of (‘likely seeming’)
Thesmophoriazusae, 28–32, 46, cosmologies, 23–6, 77–87; see
47, 103–8, 141n259 also Chrysippus, Melanippe the
in Plato’s Euthydemus and Sophist Wise
as tendentious appropriators and Euripidean tragedy
redeployers of Parmenidean alleged harmful effects of, 117n197,
stricture, 33n1, 43–5, 44n5, 163–72, 176–8, 185–94
45n9, 64, 182n73; see also and necessary collusion of tragic
Melissus; Parmenides; audience in deception, 150,
widespread dissemination of 154n298
ideas during the fifth century; Euthydemus and Dionysodorus
Plato; Zeno historicity and Platonic characterization
topoi of and use of amphiboly in the of 28–30; see also Plato,
Euthydemus, 103–8 Euthydemus, and Aristophanes’
in Plato’s Meno, 37 Thesmophoriazusae

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Gorgias of phenomena that roll between what-is
Encomium of Helen and what-is-not, 56n31, 182n73
epistemology of, 185–6 melea poluplankta, μέλεα πολύπλαγκτα,
primacy and nature of doxa in, see Parmenides; Doxa; untutored
170–1, 185 senses and sensory experience in
On What is Not
as a response to Eleaticism, 33–6, Melissus
44n5 as eristic and representative of
and Empedocles, 35n4, 36–42 Eleaticism, 36n6, 43–5,
and Euripides’ Helen, 163–72, 185–94 44n5, 45n9
and Thucydides, 160–3, 186n90 mellō, μέλλω, 72–5
and Xeniades, 163n16 mimēsis, μίμησις, and poiēsis, ποίησις, in
see also Aristophanes; and Gorgias Thesmophoriazusae, see
Agathon; in our
illusion, see deception Thesmophoriazusae
intertextual allusion, see Aristophanes; mixis, μίξις, 118n201, 131, 137n251, 137
Thesmophoriazusae; recognition see also krasis
and self-recognition in; mortal error, 48, 70, 71–84, 83n106,
spectatorial competencies 88n114, 88, 98n150, 98, 99, 113,
115–16, 121, 122, 132n240, 147,
krasis, κρᾶσις, 116n193, 117–18, 121, 130, 172n44, 184n82; see also
137n251, 137, 138, 143n264, Parmenides; Doxa; opposites of
143, 156; see also mixis as fallacious
krinai de logōi, κρῖναι δὲ λόγῳ mystic initiation, imagery of,
as crucial Parmenidean enjoinder of b7, in Parmenides, 49–50, 144n270,
68n65, 68–9, 97n145, 119–22 144–58
as tacit comic imperative and means in Plato’s Euthydemus, 108n176
through which the reality of in Thesmophoriazusae, 67–9, 125–8 see
mortal confusion is revealed, 69, divine revelation
97, 100, 110–13, 116n193,
119–22, 190 necessity, see anankē; chrē; dei
Athenian capacity to do so destroyed in negation
Thucydides, 160–3 ‘adherescent’ οὐ in Parmenides, 71
krisis, κρίσις in Thesmophoriazusae 13–15,
and adjudication, 120n208 14n6, 71
of Thesmophoriazusae’s women, 135 ambiguities of in Aristophanes, 13–17,
as logical distinction in Parmenides’ 14n6, 18n15, 18–21
Alētheia and essential test of mortal confusion and, 51–2, 88–9; see
Doxa (and of para-Doxa), 79, mortal error
81n100, 88–92, 97n146, 97, strictures against in Parmenides, 44,
139–40, 143, 155–6, 178 50–1, 72–5
as physical separation in Parmenides’ noos, νόος
Doxa and in Thesmophoriazusae’s judicious use of in Parmenides and
para-Doxa, 78, 80, 81n100, 85, para-Doxa, 51–2, 99–100,
111, 118n201, 132n240, 138n252, 189–90; see also krinai de logōi
138n253, 139–40, 143 wandering of,
in Aristophanes’ Frogs, 183n78 and Doxastical perceptions, 117–22,
kulindō, κυλίνδω 137–40, 143n264
and tragic deception, 135n248 and Euripides’ Helen, 167–70, 188

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 g e n er a l in d ex
noos, νόος (cont.) proem
and mortal failure to control in destination of as site where all
Parmenides, 48, 70, 85–7, 96, mortal opposites collapse,
100, 111 113–15
in Aristophanes’ Knights, 162n13 journey of, 144n270, 157–8; and
sensory negation as precondition
orthros, ὄρθρος for, 126; see also silence
and divine revelation and adjudication, widespread dissemination of ideas during
61n48, 61, 66; see also chelidōn; the fifth century, 43–5, 45n9,
dawns; Thesmophoriazusae’s two 178n67
Persephone, see Agathon; Parmenides;
paristamai, παρίσταμαι, 116–18 Alētheia; goddess of
Parmenides ‘-in the Underworld roles’ in
Alētheia Thesmophoriazusae, 128n230
as the only legitimate route of inquiry, physis, φύσις
50–2, 88–9 in Parmenides’ Doxa, 76
as the true account of reality, 70; see and ‘Agathonian’ mimēsis, μίμησις,
also sēmata and poiēsis, ποίησις, 140–3
goddess of, 49–50; as authoress of Plato
didactic deceptions, 146, Euthydemus
147n277, 147–9, 148n280 allusions to Aristophanes’ Clouds and
strictures against negation in, see redeployment of comic criticism,
negation; sophistic appropriation 31n11, 103n165, 184n81
of; see eristic and Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae,
see also elenchos 28–32, 44–5, 103n165, 103–8,
Doxa 128n230, 141n259, 178n67,
as a discursive construction of mortals, 179; see also Agathon; in our
80–3 Thesmophoriazusae
as a ‘likely seeming’ world-ordering see also eristic
(diakosmos), see eoikōs Meno, 36–42
as comical, third, and backward- Protagoras, 23n22, 23n25, 26n32,
turning, mortal ‘route’, 48–9, 52n24, 56n31
51–2, 55–6 Republic V
and the further archetypal symptoms and Ecclesiazusae, 183
of mortal confusion, 48–9, 72, 79, and Thesmophoriazusae, 182
86, 90n120; see also noos Sophist, 44n5, 44–8, 178n67,
goddess of mixture at centre of, 130–3 182n73
mixture in, see krasis; mixis Symposium
mortal naming in, 71, 72n75, and Thesmophoriazusae, 52n24,
100n157; see also amphiboly/ 56n31, 63–6, 128n230,
amphilogy; sēmata 141n259, 179–82; see also
opposites of as fallacious, 77–83 Agathon; in our
separation in, see krisis Thesmophoriazusae; Euripides;
untutored senses and sensory comic caricature of
experience in, 86n112, poiēsis, ποίησις, and mimēsis, μίμησις, see
117–20; see also krasis, Agathon; in our
see also amēchaniē; amphiboly/ Thesmophoriazusae
amphilogy; eoikōs; mortal error; Protagoras
sēmata as respondent to Parmenides, 45

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Reality (what-is), see alētheiē of the comic Euripides lampooned, 20,
24–5, 47n11, 85n111
sēmata, σήματα spectatorial competencies, 148n278, 154,
as aspects of mortal discourse in 169n35; see also Aristophanes;
Parmenides’ Doxa 52n23, 80, Thesmophoriazusae; recognition
81n100, 81–3, 83n106, 97–103, and self-recognition in
138n252, 147n277; and in and the ‘fallacy of audience limitation’,
Aristophanes’ para-Doxa, 48, 2–4, 178n67, 178
81–3, 92–103, 115, 137–40,
138n252 Telecleides, 8n17, 66n58
as ‘signs/signposts’ or ‘proofs’ of what-is Thucydides
in Parmenides’Alētheia, 51–2, and Gorgias, 162–3, 186n90
52n23, 70, 78, 88n115, 89n117, on Athenian political passivity, 120,
147n277 160–1, 188–9, 193
sigaō, σιγάω on the months preceding the oligarchic
in Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae, coup of 411 bc, 188–9
97–103, 109–113 Troy as quintessential site of deception,
in Plato’s Euthydemus, 103–8 142–4; see also Agathon;
silence Ilioupersis; dolos
sound of in Parmenides, 126; see also
sigaō; siōpaō Zeno,
siōpaō, σιωπάω, 97–103, 109–113 as eristic and representative of Eleaticism,
sophia, σοφία 36n6, 43–5, 44n5, 45n9
competition in philosophical and poetic, and written doctrines of, 178n67
and Aristophanic claims to, 3n8,
172–3, 176n59, 177–81, 184 Xeniades, 45n9, 45, 163n16

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