1. Recent examples include Foley and Mee (2011), and Goff and Simpson (2011).

2. Gildenhard and Revermann (2010), 1.

3. In the book in question, Martindale (1993), 10, asks, provocatively, ‘What else indeed could (say) “Virgil” be other than what readers have made of him over the centuries?’ and, following Hans-Georg Gadamer and Hans Robert Jauss, asserts that ‘numerous unexplored insights into ancient literature are locked up in imitations, translations and so forth…In general poets have played the largest part in creating our sense of what earlier poems can “mean”, partly because their “readings” have carried such cultural authority' (7f.).

4. Martindale (2006), 2.

5. Batstone (2006), 14.

6. Gildenhard and Revermann (2010), 1: ‘The academic study of Greek drama, tragedy in particular, has been spearheading this development [of growth in reception studies].’

7. Cf. Martindale (1993) and Hall (2004), 54, who states, in agreement with Martindale, that ‘our appreciation of the original texts can be refined by excavating their afterlife, what they have “meant” in other cultures and epochs than those which originally produced them’. In fact, their approach differs from the one outlined in this article, since it depends on direct and intentional reception by a later author of a previous work, while here I propose a more active and strenuous, if messier, form of reflection. Consider the critique of Wood (2012), 171: ‘Is “reception” really the right metaphor for a confrontation with such a text…? The word “reception” suggests an unenviable state of passivity.’

8. Winkler and Zeitlin (1990), 4.

9. This procedure comes with the great risk of suggesting universal values. Readers must, as always, be on guard against assigning an easy essentialism to the products of different times and cultures. Naturally, not every people and place is ripe for analogy with every other.

10. Cf., for example, Thomas (2012), 226f., for a similar approach: ‘Certainly, comparison cannot offer “proof”—“parallels” are, after all, only parallels—but by taking us from away from the Classical world and our own preconceptions…about what might or might not be appropriate to literature and literary audiences, modern ethnographic analogies can help us to phrase our questions differently, to question the assumptions we, as classical scholars, inevitably make in the absence of any direct visual experience of those ancient Greek performances, and even suggest new ways to imagine performances in a long dead society from which only the texts remain.’

11. Al-Hakim (2005).

12. Long (1979), 45. Al-Hakim's adaptation was called Praxa after the Greek protagonist Praxagora.

13. It has been claimed that the Athenians were blindly optimistic and cheerful about their military prospects when Birds was staged in 414 BCE (e.g. Dobrov [1993], Sommerstein [1987]). But the anxiety of total risk was already in place for the Athenians after decades of doing battle with the Spartans et al., and the recent defection of Alcibiades was likely to have increased this anxiety. Cf. Arrowsmith (1973), 135, on the ‘terrible, anxious élan of military Eros—with its undertone of doom to come’ in both Thucydides' description of the Sicilian Expedition (which account is obviously enriched by the author's retrospective gaze) and in Aristophanes' Birds. Cf. Dunbar (1998), 3-5, for a balanced view of the political context and references to it in Birds. Cf. Konstan (1995), 31f., for a modern history of political interpretations of the play.

14. Cf. Crabbs (1975) for a nuanced picture of the political and cultural state of Egypt at this time.

15. In, for example, both Song of Death and The Sultan's Dilemma, characters explain their efforts to remake their identities by shaking off the cultural patterns (Song) and social stereotypes (Dilemma) thrust upon them. The former ends tragically and the latter comically.

16. Given that Al-Hakim was clearly familiar with Aristophanes (see above), the similarities between Aristophanes' play and Al-Hakim's may or may not be coincidental. Cf. Etman (2008), 151: ‘Greek influence upon Tewfik El Hakim [an alternate spelling of Tawfiq Al-Hakim]…extends to all his works and even to his very way of thinking.’ Cf. also Abul Naga (1972), 312f. Long (2002), 505, views the play as straight and strident satire: ‘It is an anti-Egyptian (perhaps anti-Arab) parable…The play is an inspired, thoughtful and vigorous denunciation of Egyptian (and Arab) politics and policies as [Hakim] saw them in the years immediately prior to the June War and his last dramatic word on Abd an Nasir.’ Cf. also Badawi (1987), 82-85, on this ‘strange work’.

17. Davies labels the ‘scientist’ ‘savant’, but I defer here to the more colloquial translation of Long (2002).

18. Al-Hakim (2002), 8. Page numbers hereafter refer to the translation from Arabic of Fate of a Cockroach by Johnson-Davies, Denys (1980)Google Scholar.

19. Apparently, both insects were similarly fascinating to Al-Hakim as a boy, as he explains in From the ivory Tower (cf. Long [2002], 500).

20. Bayart (2005), 36. He adds, ‘Need it be said that determining the criteria for what is or is not “authentic” is always problematic?’ (78). Bhabha (1994), 2, discusses ‘the invention of tradition’ as a ‘restaging of the past’ that inevitably ‘estranges any immediate access to an originary identity or “received” tradition’.

21. In 1979, Long (2002), 500, asserted that the play had in fact never been produced as a whole. (This, however, is no longer the case: notices and reviews can be found for entire productions from as recently as 2005, 2009 and 2012.) Badawi (1987), 84, also asserts that the play is really ‘two plays’.

22. Al-Hakim (2005), 17f.. Page numbers hereafter refer to the translation from the Arabic of W.M. Hutchins.

23. Cf. Badawi (1988), 3-6. One exception is performances of European plays staged in Cairo for foreign audiences from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, following Napoleon's expedition into Egypt; some of these plays were translated into Arabic. Yaqub Sannu, an Egyptian Jew, was an earlier importer of Italian tropes and French comedy in the 1870s. Another external source of early modern drama was visiting Syrian companies. Cf. Sadgrove (1996), Badawi (1988), Abdel Wahab (1974), 18-24, and Abul Naga (1972). Related traditions of drama, such as shadow plays and farces, have a much longer history in Egypt. Cf. Abdel Wahab (1974), 9-18.

24. OED s.v..

25. Al-Hakim (1981), 304, writes more explicitly on this topic elsewhere, describing his own ‘mad, anxious attempt to plug the frightful gap which ought to have been filled by the attempts of a long, unbroken chain of authors during past centuries'. However, Badawi (1987), 8, is critical of this solipsistic stance and points out that the playwright was indeed working within a tradition: ‘Here, al-Hakim seems to suggest that he has undertaken this Herculean task single-handed. But nothing can be further from the truth. Al-Hakim the dramatist belongs very much to his period.’ Badawi nonetheless designates Al-Hakim ‘the most cerebral or intellectual Egyptian dramatist’ and attributes to him the ‘deep realisation that, far from being an ephemeral activity, the theatre is, or should be, a noble and serious branch of literature’ (13).

26. Cf. Mikhail (2001), 17-26, and Etman (2008) on the various debts owed between the realms of civilisation conceived of as European and Oriental. Etman (2008), 149, comments that ‘[i]t is curious that although the Arabs of the golden Islamic Age translated many Greek texts into their own language (among these was Aristotle's Poetics) and although some of these translations were the basis of very important classical studies in Europe in the beginnings of the Renaissance, yet they did not translate any Greek play into Arabic. They did not even understand the meaning of such words as “drama”, “tragedy” and “comedy”, identifying each of them with this or that genre of their native language.'

27. Al-Hakim and others were successful in implanting theatre within the Arabic literary’ tradition, with the result that, by the 1960s, Irving Brown (1964) could proclaim theater in Egypt to be vital and ‘effervescent’, though the role of theatre, as of other literary arts, has been limited since then by various forms of censorship. Cf. Badawi (1987), 229f., and Etman (2008), 151, who writes: ‘The influence of Tewfik El Hakim was tremendous. It is enough to mention here that there are no less than six Arabic adaptations of Oedipus…El Hakim was taken as the Model by many other writers in Egypt and the Arab World. They tried to adapt Greek plays into Arabic versions.’ Cf. also Badawi (1987) on Al-Hakim and his influence on Arabic theatre, as well as Robbins (1996), Crabbs (1975) and Abul Naga (1972), 275.

28. Al-Hakim's take on mimesis in this sense is an interesting inversion of the formulation that mimesis is an exercise in engaging with the ‘other’ to remain the same, as formulated by, for example, Taussig (1993), 129: ‘Pulling you this way and that, mimesis plays this trick of dancing between the very same and the very different. An impossible but necessary, indeed an everyday affair, mimesis registers both sameness and difference, of being like, and of being Other. Creating stability from this instability is no small task, yet all identity function is engaged in this habitually bracing activity in which the issue is not so much staying the same, but maintaining sameness through alterity.’

29. Cf. Arrowsmith (1973), 129, on Peisetaerus as ‘unmistakably Athenian’ and also ‘in his closeness to other Aristophanic heroes…Dionysiac’. Hubbard (1997), 28, argues that Peisetaerus should be viewed as ‘the master sophist’. Cf. Henderson (1997) on some exceptional qualities of Peisetaerus as an Aristophanic hero. He sees him as representing the elite more than the common man (as was more standard for a hero of comedy), ‘complex to the point of being self-contradictory’ (137), and ‘both an άπράγμων and a persuader of the masses, a quietist and an imperialist, an alien expert and a ruler’. He views him, in short, as a successful Alcibiades (Henderson [1997], 139-41).

30. Cf. Konstan (1995) on this question. Cf. Arrowsmith (1973), 143, Henderson (1997), 135f., Romer (1997), 52, and Anderson and Dix (2007), 325, for hints of bad old Athens in this brave, new city. Pozzi (1985-1986), 122f., however, emphasises the starkly pastoral aspects, utterly opposed to all things Athenian, that Peisetaerus finds among the birds, at least at first.

31. I follow the Greek text of Dunbar (1998), noting textual issues throughout, including, most prominently, uncertain line attributions. Translations from the Greek are mine.

32. In fact, the word τουδί might refer to Peisetaerus himself (not Euelpides, his compatriot). Dunbar (1998), 226, points to the greater significance of the line no matter which way it is construed: ‘In either case the linking together of mortal(s) and the supreme god must have seemed piquantly bold to the audience at this stage, but later they will find the traditional gulf disappearing entirely.’

33. See Newiger (2000), 92-102, on Basileia as a true goddess here, rather than as abstract ‘sovereignty’; Anderson and Dix (2007) on how she resembles Athena in important ways and on Prometheus' role in this stealth overpowering of Zeus; and Epstein (1981) on Peisetaerus' redefinition and appropriation of Olympian religion through his marriage.

34. There is no extant evidence of such a tale, but Aelian, writing in the second century CE, does give an account of a story that is supposedly Indian, in which a prince buries his parents inside his head and, thereafter, is turned into a bird with a prominent crest as a mnemonic for his filial piety (On the Nature of Animals, 16.5). Cf. Dunbar (1998), 227f. Aelian suggests that the tale migrated to Greece and was fitted to the crested lark. Aristophanes' trickster thus either capitalises on actual folklore of the fifth century or shapes the Aesopic genre of animal legend to meet his rhetorical needs. Cf. Veyne (1988), 7, who writes that for the Greeks ‘[t]he materials of a tradition are not the tradition itself, which always emerges as a text, a tale carrying authority. History is born as tradition, not built up from source materials.’ And yet Birds itself comically calls this process of historicising into question with passages such as this.

35. Hence such judgments as that of Arrowsmith (1973), 129 and 156, who calls the birds ‘stupid and apathetic’ and ‘gullible suckers’.

36. Cf. Dobrov (1997b), 96f., on the play as ‘a “comedy of language”, whose polysemy is rooted in its exploitation of the originary transference (metaphoricity) and deferral (différance) of the signifying process’. This is evident in ways large and small—such as in Peisetaerus' use of standard linguistic polysemy to recast the significance of bird-related words and things.

37. See Dunbar (1998), 245, on the uncertainty of this line, which is printed as corrected by Blaydes (1882).

38. Cf. Dobrov (1997b), 96, on Aristophanes' ‘flaunt[ing]’ of his linguistic skills in ‘erect[ing|… a scaffolding of metaphor and metafiction’. Whitman (1964), 179f., sees this scene as suggesting that ‘the theme of the Birds is absurdity itself, and that the substance of reality is words, words, words’. Many other themes have been pegged on Birds (cf. n.55 below), but the aura of absurdity is never completely dispelled.

39. Arrowsmith (1973), 143, asserts that the chorus of birds represents ‘the dream-intoxicated flighty Athenian demos itself’. Yet it can hardly be imagined that the original Athenian audience saw the birds or themselves in this light.

40. This ‘expression of approval’ too is of doubtful attribution, but Dunbar (1998), 245, assigns it to the chorus over Euelpides.

41. Cf. Eur. Alc. 442, a drama which itself has aspects of a satyr play. Cf. Dunbar (1998), 254. Cf. also Dobrov (1993 and 1997b) for the paratragic in Birds, particularly as it relates to the Sophoclean Tereus, and Foley (2008), 17-27, for a recent look at Aristophanes' comic explorations into tragedy more generally.

42. As Konstan (1995), 38, writes of Peisetaerus and the birds: ‘[H]e must first implant a sense of lack, a nostalgia for an originary plenitude which, until he tells them otherwise, they have never missed. Inscription within human society takes the form of an initiation into desire, which is predicated on the memory—here self-consciously constructed as myth—of former sufficiency.’

43. Sommerstein (1987), 79, translates this line as ‘for I shall entrust to you/my nestlings and myself, and join your following’ and Dunbar (1998), 256, suggests ‘[m]y manner of dwelling (i.e. my bird-community) will be based on entrusting my all to you’. In my view, neither translation brings across the true sense of surrender implied by the verb.

44. See Dunbar (1998), 267f., on textual issues with this line.

45. According to Dobrov (1997b), 97, this name does not only illustrate the ‘topographic’ facts of the new city, but also itself points to the pathetic naivety of the birds: ‘[T]he name reveals Peisetaerus' sophistic snare of language (νεφέλη, or gauze net) in which fools (κόκκυγες as flighty folk, lightweights) become hopelessly entwined.’

46. Choruses of other Aristophanic plays also speak in character, but normally stop doing so at some point to speak for the playwright or as a comic chorus. What is exceptional here is that the chorus never breaks character. Cf. Whitman (1964), 169, on how this break from convention contributes to making the play a ‘singularly sustained dramatic force’ and Dobrov (1997b), 112-15, for a ‘metafictional explanation’ of this turn: in Dobrov's view, the birds are a chorus in the play-within-the-play staged by Peisetaerus. The chorus of birds is thus speaking as themselves (as a normal comic chorus would speak to the audience as a chorus of actors) and selling the play that Peisetaerus has constructed.

47. A servant (according to the scholiast) was sometimes labelled as ‘well-footed’ or the like, presumably meaning that he brought good luck. As ass could provide a good omen by way of a lucky bray. See Dunbar (1998), 309, for examples of the ever more absurd associations of things with omens or ‘birds’. See Hubbard (1997), 28f., on this passage as a parody of sophistic anthropology.

48. Cf. Dunbar (1998), 297-302, for a detailed account of the literary sources and parallels for the birds' story. See Kirk, Raven and Schofield (1983), 21-29, for other cosmogonies, including later Orphic ones, that involve progenerative eggs.

49. Cf. Arrowsmith (1973), 130, on Eros as a force of imperialistic lust in the play, a ‘galactic, and ultimately, a universal hunger’.

50. Cf. Sappho for gold used as a descriptor of Aphrodite, her environment, and erotic situations more generally (1.8, 2.14, 33.1, 96.28, 132.1); also cf. Ibycus 1a9 and Anacreon 13.2. For the violence of Eros in lyric poetry see Sappho 47, Ibycus 6, and Anacreon 68. Cf. Arrowsmith (1973), 130, on how this vision of Eros is ‘at the very center of the play…radiating forwards and backwards over the whole work…the very principle embodied by Cloudcuckooland’.

51. Dunbar (1998), 291, but see Payne (2010), 96, who suggests that the birds may in fact be accessing ‘some kind of recovered knowledge, a quasi-Platonic recollection of what they had once known in times long ago’.

52. The hoopoe, formerly the mythical king Tereus, has already had an anthropomorphising influence on the birds by teaching them language, or at least the Greek language, since he claims they were ‘barbarians’ before he arrived (199f.). Cf. Dobrov (1993), 190, 226, and Dobrov (1997b), 101f., 117-21, on the hoopoe's introduction of language to the birds and on his role more generally.

53. Peisetaerus claims to have been transformed into a bird by the addition of wings (807f.), but there is little doubt that he is as much the man as before. See Payne (2010), 96, on Peisetaerus' appropriation of wings.

54. Cf. Romer (1997), 59-62, on how the barbecuing of birds also disturbs the hierarchy of gods, men and beasts. Cf. Konstan (1995), 42, on Peisetaerus as an ‘autocrat’ and on ‘hints’ of the birds' ‘innocence betrayed’. Also see Payne (2010), 97, on Peisetaerus' ‘disdain for [the birds] as instruments of his own plan’.

55. Sommerstein (1987), 3, and Payne (2010), 98. Many scholars do not pay much attention to the plight of the birds in Aristophanes' play, but a recent article by Anne Mahoney has made a seemingly obvious but important point about these birds: no other play by Aristophanes concentrates on one theme with the thorough ferocity with which Birds focuses on birds. As Mahoney (2007), 276f., writes, ‘[t]he statistically prominent key terms in Birds, along with the staging, make birds more immediately visible and audible throughout the play than politics, eros, or urban planning’ (all themes that scholars more generally suggest to be the play's focus). Payne (2010), 99, also draws attention to the vision of the birds’ own ‘social organisation’ early in the play and argues that ‘this vision of zoological sociality continues to encompass and interrogate the human society that takes center stage at the end’.

56. Cf. Sifakis (1971), 26-29, on the generic diminishing of the chorus's role: ‘In the iambic scenes [that is, in the latter part of the play] it finds itself at the margin of the action on stage, and is content to praise and blame the hero’ (27). See also Bierl (2009), 67, on the ‘decreasing dramatic connection of the chorus’. He also paraphrases the findings of Gelzer (1970), in noting generally that ‘in the second part [of a play], the participation of the chorus in the action and its significance decline drastically, and the fantastic situation, now that it has been achieved, is only safeguarded and defended in the remaining episodic scenes’ (49).

57. Pozzi (1985-1986), 126, rightly notes that the chorus of birds mostly plays the part of ‘punctuat[ing] the successive stages in the fulfillment of Peisthetairos’ plan'.

58. Cf. Rothwell (2007), 151f., on how the birds’ vulnerability reflects contemporary anthropological ideas about early humanity.

59. Bierl (2009), 18, suggests that the lateness of comedy's entrance into the official realms of Athens (as opposed to tragedy's) left it ‘isolated from poetic developments’ and more thoroughly steeped in folk traditions and ritual. If this is true, it also perhaps encouraged a particular brand of poetic self-consciousness in comedians about comedy's generic distinctiveness.

60. Cf. Sifakis (1971), Rothwell (2007), and Bierl (2009), 78. A couple of other extant plays of Aristophanes also have choruses that involve animals (Knights and Frogs), but neither features the animals so prominently in the plot as well.

61. Cf. Sifakis (1971), 73-75, 86-88.

62. Cf. n.53 above.

63. Cf. Bierl (2009), 55, on the vital place of the chorus in Old Comedy: ‘[T]he choruses of Old Comedy represent a considerable surprise and the central performative event for the audience. The financial expenditure for the rich decoration of the costumes and masks of this fantastic entity was far greater [than for choruses of tragedy]. Its conspicuously spectacular exterior is meant to be displayed and is directly connected to the development of the comic plot.’ Sifakis (1971), 24, singles out the chorus of Birds (and that of Clouds) entering with especially ‘impressive presentation’, for their entrance is marked by both song and dance and its variegated ‘nature and appearance’ are also the objects of discussion among the characters onstage. He also speculates that theriomorphic choruses might have entered in heavy cloaks and then dropped them dramatically to reveal their impressive costumes, thus contributing to the spectacle of it all (87f., 92).

64. Sifakis (1971), 61, for one, baldly asserts that comedy ‘sprang up’ from ‘popular choral poetry’, thus intimating that choral song was a crucial aspect of the earliest attempts at what became comedy. Some scholars assert that the parabasis itself is a relic of pre-comedy that passed into later plays, but Sifakis (1971) refutes this view.

65. Konstan (1997), 265.

66. Ibid.

67. Cf. nn.35 and 45 above.

68. Cf. n.20 above.

69. Cf. Van Alphen (1991), 3: 'While “alterity” is a screen for the imagination, “identity” is the content of that imagination. In terms of the comparison with semiosis, alterity and identity are not, cannot be, two signs, mutually differentiating in order to reach meaning; rather, alterity is a code which helps identity to become meaningful, i.e. to gain content.' Cf. also Bhabha (1994), 12, on the place of the ‘other’ in literary definitions of culture: ‘The study of world literature might be the study of the way in which cultures recognise themselves through their projections of “otherness”.’

70. Bierl (2009), 77.

71. On ritual and play as a liminal space that functions to keep the normative boundaries of selfhood and society in place, see esp. Turner (1982), as well as Bakhtin (1984). See Schechner (1985) and Bierl (2009) for how this dynamic functions in theatre and comedy specifically and Taussig (1993) on the workings of mimesis and societies more generally. There is also something of phenomenology in this reading. As Hall (2004), 67, writes of this approach, ‘Untrue or distorted news reportage or political oratory, or travel guides, or biographies, can all “masquerade” as truth. Theatre can never masquerade as the truth because it is masquerade. Its insights into the society or subjectivity of the time of the production may therefore, paradoxically, be unusually veracious and penetrating.’