II. Philokleon the νεανίαϲ

In the first iambic scene, an unnamed man rushes onstage immediately after Xanthias’ narration of the symposion and Philokleon's entrance with the aulos-girl, Dardanis:

The anomalous nature of this description is amply demonstrated by the unease it has caused among commentators and critics, and the strategies it has forced them to adopt to explain it.Footnote ¹⁶ Sansone even suggests emending νεανίαϲ to the more literally true νεανικόϲ (‘like a young man’).Footnote ¹⁷ MacDowell adopts a characteristically and sensitively naturalistic approach by suggesting that it is a genuine case of mistaken identity prompted by the accuser's understandable inference from Philokleon's antics.Footnote ¹⁸ Biles and Olson reject such an approach to Aristophanes’ dramaturgy but are equally keen to normalize the scene by emphasizing that Philokleon is acting not as but like a young man.Footnote ¹⁹ Van Leeuwen is likewise particularly careful to insist that neither actual rejuvenation nor mistaken identity are in question, but only youthful behaviour.Footnote ²⁰ Lenz arguably comes closest to embracing the scene's paradoxical quality, noting that ‘the assignment of youth to Philokleon, which twists the actual realities, is straightaway accepted by him and played with further in his reply.’Footnote ²¹ Each of these interpretations is, in its own way, correct. It is Philokleon's lawless behaviour which makes him appear to be a youth and this appearance is focalized through the fallible perceptions of the accuser, though the audience's perception of this (perhaps young) actor playing an old man playing a youth is no more reliable. However, in the non-naturalistic, anti-realistic world of Aristophanic comedy—and even in Wasps, which lacks giant dung-beetles or talking birds, elderly jurors have real stings and dogs make prosecution speeches—these factors do not explain away Philokleon's actual rejuvenation but rather establish it.Footnote ²² As Bowie puts it, ‘[t]his joke about his rejuvenation, so often repeated, cannot be merely farcical. We are dealing with a true rolling back of the years for Philocleon.’Footnote ²³ Or, in Hutchinson's more succinct formulation, ‘Philocleon now behaves like a νεανίας, and is one’.Footnote ²⁴

However, the rejuvenation is neither simple nor final. It is notable that Bowie's splendid discussion immediately leaps from the Dardanis episode to the exodos, omitting the further developments and complications that accrue in the intervening iambic scenes. It is true that the initial exchange with the first accuser seems not only to assert Philokleon's new status as a rejuvenated νεανίαϲ, but to reinforce it by rejecting his earlier status as a γέρων:

Philokleon's total rejection of jury duty marks a volte face from his previous status as an obsessive φιληλιαϲτήϲ (‘trial-lover’, 88), his ‘cure’ from his madness, and with it a rejection of his associated status as an old man.Footnote ²⁵ His claim that the accuser and his companions are doing or saying ἀρχαῖα is a comically incongruous insult for an old man to aim at (presumably) younger interlocutors. Starkie compares it to Strepsiades’ expressed surprise in Clouds that his son Pheidippides ‘[is] a lad and [has] old-fashioned ideas’ (παιδάριον εἶ καὶ φρονεῖϲ ἀρχαιϊκά, Nu. 821).Footnote ²⁶ The parallel will be an important one for Philokleon's later, more paradoxical assertion that the old are younger than the young, but here his assertion is bolder though less complex: Philokleon rejects his status as an old man and adopts wholesale the persona of a youth berating the outmodedness of his elders.

This reinvention of himself as the νεανίαϲ his accuser has called him goes hand in hand with the rejection of what had been his persona in the earlier part of the play: the accuser's ἀρχαῖα are the old-fashioned things associated with the old men among whom Philokleon no longer counts himself, but they are also his ‘former’ (LSJ ἀρχαῖος 3) persona as old man and juror.Footnote ²⁷ From being fixated on trials, he can no longer bear even to hear about them and his insatiability has turned to disgust, expressed with the quintessentially Aristophanic αἰβοῖ.Footnote ²⁸ His penultimate jibe, ποῦ 'ϲτ’ ἠλιαϲτήϲ; (1340), does primarily serve as ‘a rhetorical question implying “There's no juror here” and underlin[ing] the lack of recourse to justice that the accuser can expect.’Footnote ²⁹ However, it also draws attention to the fact that Philokleon-the-juror, indistinguishable from Philokleon-the-old-man, is not here.Footnote ³⁰ At this stage, Philokleon's rejuvenation does seem to be straightforward and radical.Footnote ³¹ He is now a νεανίαϲ and becoming that has entailed total renunciation of his status as a γέρων. Even for the ultimate recreative-discontinuous character, this is a radical metamorphosis.Footnote ³² It should be noted, however, that unlike his previous ephebic phase in the first of Bowie's agones, here in this brief agon with the accuser Philokleon is victorious and as a result not stripped of his status as a νεανίαϲ.

Indeed, so far from being stripped of his youthful persona, Philokleon develops it to considerable comic effect in the ensuing scene, with Dardanis and later Bdelykleon. Furthermore, he superimposes a second identity upon it. His persona is no longer purely that of a νεανίαϲ, with Bdelykleon as the corresponding γέρων. It is in this scene that the paradox of his status as simultaneously νεανίαϲ and γέρων is established, and it will be maintained through to its climax in the final scene. Pace Rusten, it is not quite the case that ‘[t]hese roles [sc. Philokleon as νεανίαϲ, Bdelykleon as γέρων] are not discarded until 1379f., when Bdelykleon calls his father back to reality and Philokleon begins to show a preference for age over youth’.Footnote ³³ Throughout Philokleon's speech to Dardanis, the audience is never permitted to forget (quite apart from the aforementioned visual dimension, which modern readers of the play all too easily forget) that he is a γέρων as well as a νεανίαϲ, and conversely he retains his youthful vigour and violence even when asserting the superiority of age in the fist-fight with his son. The gloriously comical incongruities of Philokleon's speech and in particular its inversion of what would at least later become the standard comic relationship between strict father and unruly son have been often and well discussed. The incongruity of an old man speaking in these terms can be taken as a comedic end in itself, or even as tinged with pathos.Footnote ³⁴ However, in this scene, the incongruity is not primarily based on the gap between appearance and reality.Footnote ³⁵ Rather it is a means of expressing the paradox of Philokleon's dual status. It is not so much that he is acting like a νεανίαϲ while, in Vaio's ‘bitter reality’, he is ‘really’ a γέρων, as that he embodies both age-statuses at the same time.

The distinctive feature of the elderly Philokleon's play with the persona of a reckless youth is that it always keeps both identities in view simultaneously. This is most clearly evident when he talks about waiting for the strict Bdelykleon to die:

The casting of Bdelykleon in the role of the strict father led Crichton to the attractive and ingenious formulation that ‘Philocleon as young rake is actually the grandson of Philocleon as old juror’.Footnote ³⁶ Attractive though it is, it does not fully capture the paradox that Aristophanes conjures. It would have been perfectly possible for Philokleon to inhabit the role of the νεανίαϲ so completely—in keeping with his total rejection of the role of γέρων in the confrontation with the first accuser—as to refer to Bdelykleon as his actual father. We might compare the situation in Plautus’ Casina (720–59) where the roles of master and slave are reversed between the senex amator Lysidamus and his slave Olympio.Footnote ³⁷ Although this is part of the larger (doomed) ruse to give Lysidamus sexual access to Casina by marrying her to Olympio, it is not a scene of impersonation which would require strict adherence to roles but rather ‘some horseplay’, as Konstan puts it,Footnote ³⁸ which is clearly demarcated by acknowledgments that the real slave–master relationship is still in place. Nevertheless, for the course of the brief horseplay, Lysidamus fully and straightforwardly (if ironically) adopts the role of slave (seruos sum tuos, ‘I am your slave’, 738) and assigns that of master to Olympio (opsecro te, | Olympisce mi, mi pater, mi patrone, ‘I implore you, my Olympiokins, my father, my former master’, 738f.), while the latter likewise speaks of his master as a slave (quid mi opust seruo tam nequam?, ‘What need do I have for so worthless a slave?’, 741).

Philokleon could easily have spoken in the same terms of what he would do when οὑμὸϲ πατὴρ ἀποθάνῃ (‘my father dies’) or about the watchful eye of his πατρίδιον (‘little father’), casting himself as the only υἱόϲ that Bdelykleon has.Footnote ³⁹ The incongruity would have remained intact and indeed offered a sharper dissonance between the discrete categories of νεανίαϲ and γέρων, between the illusory persona that Philokleon adopts and the reality established by his costume and the action of the play so far. By choosing instead to employ the topoi associated with a dissolute son talking about his strict father, but using language that acknowledges that this is in fact a father talking about the son (οὑμὸϲ υἱόϲ; τὸ γὰρ υἵδιον), Aristophanes obliterates the distinction between νεανίαϲ and γέρων. Philokleon is acting as a youth—or in Hutchinson's formulation, ‘he is one’—at precisely the same moment as he is acknowledging his status as an old man. His waiting for his son to die is not a son's action displaced onto a father, since a son does not have a υἱόϲ. Rather it is a filial action that only a father could perform, the paradoxical essence of youthful old age and senescent adolescence. Philokleon is νεανίαϲ and γέρων in one.

This paradoxical coexistence of νεανίαϲ and γέρων recurs during—and indeed is the key element of—Philokleon's victory over Bdelykleon at the end of this scene. If the elderly component of Philokleon's character in the scene with Dardanis has been neglected by scholars, then his continuing youthfulness in the confrontation with Bdelykleon has been similarly overlooked. Rusten's assertion that ‘Philokleon begins to show a preference for age over youth’ in this sequence identifies its key feature, but obscures the two facts that, except for the brief exchange with the first accuser, he never really stopped valuing old age, and that his youthful character is maintained even here. The key lines are those in which Philokleon uses against Bdelykleon one of the very anecdotes that his son had taught him as repartee for the symposion, combining the verbal victory with a violent physical re-enactment of it:Footnote ⁴⁰

Philokleon's emphasis on Ephoudion's age and the carefully pointed antithesis between older and younger in line 1385 do indeed assert a preference for age over youth, but they do so by foregrounding the paradoxical quality of age's victory and the fact that it is achieved by acting in a youthful manner. The concessive force of the participial phrase ἤδη γέρων ὤν clearly implies the antithesis that, ‘even though he was already an old man’, he fought well as one would expect a young man to. Even to articulate that ‘the older man knocked down the younger’ presupposes an assumption that the roles would normally be the other way round. Philokleon's paradeigma Ephoudion behaves as a νεανίαϲ at the very time that his status as a γέρων is being stressed, just like Philokleon the old-young lover. When Philokleon imitates that paradeigma by knocking down the νεώτεροϲ Bdelykleon, he is a γέρων behaving as a νεανίαϲ, not only in his unexpectedly superior physical prowess, but because the action itself—in the context of the Dardanis scene and through evocation of the previous year's Clouds—becomes that of a πατραλοίαϲ (‘father-beater’), the father-cum-son and aged νεανίαϲ beating the son-cum-father and youthful γέρων.Footnote ⁴¹ The first iambic scene closes with a further expression of Philokleon's paradoxical dual status, as Bdelykleon observes that, like a child, his father has ‘thoroughly learnt his lesson’ (ἐξέμαθεϲ), but a lesson that is about how an old man can behave like a youth.

III. Philokleon the ἀνήρ

The second iambic scene follows immediately, as the bread-seller, Myrtia, enters and addresses her summons-witness, Khairephon:

Philokleon's status as ἀνήρ is not delineated in this scene by an association with hoplite warfare, as it is in Bowie's second agon.Footnote ⁴³ Rather, Philokleon is an ἀνήρ as the unmarked, normative, default centre of a patriarchal society and even universe, a mature citizen male human, set in opposition to (or perhaps more accurately, having set in opposition to him) his gendered, political, and zoological others, without the delimiting and diminishing specification of youthful immaturity or enervated senescence.Footnote ⁴⁴ Like Hermippos’ Thales, he is human not beast, man not woman, Greek not barbarian, and more specifically he is Athenian citizen, not metic or foreigner.Footnote ⁴⁵ These characteristics, these instances of being safely on the right side of a polarity, also mark a stage of maturation and set him apart from the androgynous liminality of the ephebe and the political limbo of the unenrolled child, or even the qualified civic status of the youth in his twenties.Footnote ⁴⁶

Philokleon's status as man-not-woman is most clearly established by his opposition to and victory over the female bread-seller, Myrtia, the sole woman among the three complainants, one of just two female characters in the whole play and the only one with a speaking part. The audience is subtly but repeatedly reminded of her femininity, though mere readers of the play must as ever remember that her gender is also obvious to spectators from her mask and costume. Verbal reminders are provided incidentally by Philokleon's reference to her as ταύτῃ (‘this woman’, 1395) and addressing of her ὦ γύναι (‘o woman’, 1399), and more markedly by her own use of ‘an oath used in comedy exclusively by women’, μὰ τὼ θεώ (‘by the two goddesses’, 1396).Footnote ⁴⁷ Perhaps most marked, however, is her self-identification as the daughter of citizen parents: Μυρτίαϲ | τῆϲ Ἀγκυλίωνοϲ θυγατέροϲ καὶ Ϲωϲτράτηϲ (‘Myrtia, the daughter of Ankylion and Sostrate’, 1396f.).Footnote ⁴⁸ Commentators have rightly identified Myrtia's anxiety to establish her citizen status and the way in which her attempt to do so is ironically undermined by the reference to Ankylion, apparently a stock figure notorious for incestuous or other transgressions. However, they have overlooked how the basis of Myrtia's anxiety and the failure of her attempt to allay it are also underlined by the anomalous form of her self-identification, as if she were a citizen male.Footnote ⁴⁹

Sommerstein is of course correct that, in Greek comedy, ‘[w]omen name themselves and each other freely, even when addressing men’ and ‘that there is a tendency in Aristophanes…to identify women indirectly by naming their male relatives’ so that ‘the evident implication is that so far as men outside the family were concerned, a married woman's only identity was as somebody's wife’.Footnote ⁵⁰ However, Myrtia is here establishing her own identity, using her own name and those of her parents rather than her husband. If we exclude the special case of the anthropomorphized trireme, Nauphantes, daughter of Nauson (Ναυφάντης γε τῆς Ναύσωνος) at Knights 1309, the closest and perhaps only parallel is Kritylla in Thesmophoriazousai. When Kritylla identifies herself as Κρίτυλλά γ᾿ Ἀντιθέου Γαργηττόθεν (‘Kritylla, [wife/daughter] of Antitheos from Gargettos’, Th. 898), whether Antitheos is the name of her (dead, 446) husband or father,Footnote ⁵¹ her inclusion of the demotic is clearly marked and anomalous, so that ‘in the spirit of the women's assembly, she appropriates the male form of état civil.’Footnote ⁵² Lenz and Sommerstein have rightly stressed that the naming of both parents establishes Myrtia's full citizenship, but while they are also correct in seeing this as an assertion of her civic right to be protected from ill treatment, it simultaneously throws into relief the limitations of those civic rights vis-à-vis the ‘fuller’ full citizenship of an adult male.Footnote ⁵³ As a woman and hence a citizen with only partial citizen rights, Myrtia is not permitted to give evidence in court and is thus reliant on a male κλήτηρ (‘summons witness’) to bear witness to her summonsing of her attacker. That attacker, Philokleon, is set in sharp contrast as both ἀνήρ and πολίτηϲ.

It is not only Myrtia whose diminished gender and citizenship status throw Philokleon's role as ἀνήρ into relief. Her (or Aristophanes’) choice of Khairephon as summons-witness has puzzled critics.Footnote ⁵⁴ While the full implications of that choice may continue to elude modern readers and audiences unfamiliar with aspects of his reputation which have been lost over time, his depiction in this scene throws marked and surely significant emphasis on his pallor:

The precise relevance of the allusion to Euripides’ Ino and in particular the substitution of the playwright himself for one of his characters (probably Athamas) is also elusive and the recent papyrus discoveries of fragments from the tragedy have unfortunately shed no new light on it.Footnote ⁵⁵ Nevertheless, it is clear that his notorious pallor, which is also mentioned in Clouds and Birds, in this scene at least is closely associated with effeminacy, providing as it does the principal point of comparison with the tragic heroine Ino. As Taaffe puts it, ‘[h]is pale skin suggests effeminacy. At best, his masculinity would be compromised and the authority of his testimony weakened. At worst, the witness might be mistaken for a woman and so not be able to testify in court.’Footnote ⁵⁶ Philokleon emphasizes not only Myrtia's need, as a woman, for a summons-witness (γυναικὶ κλητεύειϲ), but the unsuitability for the job of Khairephon of all people (ϲὺ δή)Footnote ⁵⁷ as one whose effeminacy renders him the civic as well as the sexual equivalent of a woman. In the agonistic context of the iambic scene, both emphases presuppose the superiority—and the fact that it can be presupposed reinforces that superiority—of Philokleon as man and full citizen.

However, it is not only in gender and politics that Philokleon's status as ἀνήρ is set above Myrtia's. Thales’ first polarity of human and beast is also brought to bear as Philokleon uses an anecdote about Aesop and a dog to attempt to silence his accuser.

In employing an Aesopic fable ostensibly to defuse a hostile situation, just as with the Sybarite tales he uses with his next accuser (1427–40), Philokleon is either incompetently or, more probably, wilfully and mischievously misapplying his son's earlier advice that these are perfect techniques to ‘turn the matter [of drunken violence] into a joke so that [the victim] lets [him] off and leaves’ (κᾆτ' εἰϲ γέλων | τὸ πρᾶγμ' ἔτρεψαϲ, ὥϲτ' ἀφείϲ ϲ' ἀποίχεται, 1260f.).Footnote ⁵⁸ Where Bdelykleon envisaged the reconciliatory effect of communal laughter, his father weaponizes the Aesopic to render his opponents the objects of derision so that they leave the field of battle and let him off by defaulting.Footnote ⁵⁹ Myrtia herself recognizes his tactic as she immediately responds ‘Are you also deriding me?’ (καὶ καταγελᾷϲ μου;, 1406), the καί indicating that this verbal assault is in addition and parallel to his earlier physical one. As well as offering Myrtia something that is ‘a subtle but undeniable misrepresentation of the facts and offensive at the same time’,Footnote ⁶⁰ Philokleon makes the further unexpected move of interpreting his son's formulation ‘some funny Aesopic story’ (λόγον…τινα, | Αἰϲωπικὸν γέλοιον, 1258f.) not as a beast fable entirely populated by anthropomorphized animals, but as a story featuring Aesop himself that sets up a sharp distinction between the human and the animal. It is this aspect of the λόγοϲ that contributes to Philokleon's depiction as ἀνήρ in this scene.

Animal imagery, often connected to Aesopic fable, is famously pervasive throughout Wasps and is most frequently associated with Philokleon himself.Footnote ⁶¹ In the course of the play he is described as or compared to (often by himself) a non-specific ‘beast’ (κνώδαλον, 4), limpet (105), bee (107 bis, 366), jackdaw (129), mouse (140, 204), donkey (189, 1306, 1310), horse (192), sparrow (207), weasel (363), and of course wasp (430).Footnote ⁶² This ‘multifaceted human-animal identity of Philocleon’, as Miles terms it,Footnote ⁶³ makes it all the more marked that in the confrontation with Myrtia he firmly identifies himself with the human Aesop against the female dog who transparently stands for his opponent. The detail of having Aesop walking home from a feast, as Philokleon was from the symposion, clearly identifies the two, even if he more tendentiously transfers his own insolence and drunkenness onto the dog. The identification of Myrtia with the dog, however, produces a rather more complex effect than merely providing ‘an excuse for him to shout “You stupid bitch!” in the woman's face’, though that is undeniably part of the old man's intention.Footnote ⁶⁴ On one level, it dehumanizes her, exploiting the culturally constructed superiority of ἄνθρωποϲ over θηρίον, Αἴϲωποϲ over κύων, to assert Philokleon's superiority over Myrtia. Yet its very assimilation of the bitch to the bread-seller—most jarringly in ‘Aesop's’ suggestion that the ‘dog’ buy wheatFootnote ⁶⁵—activates that complex of associations which equates ideas of the canine and the feminine. As Franco puts it, ‘[t]he symbolic overlap between dog and woman [was] a perfect training ground for exercising ideological strategies that maintained feminine subordination.’Footnote ⁶⁶ Myrtia is demeaned, not so much because she is constructed as dog rather than woman, but because dog and woman are constructed as equivalents. Her overlapping statuses as γυνή and κύων emphasize the antithetical and superior status of Philokleon as ἀνήρ.

Throughout the scene, Philokleon's status as the ἀνήρ that Myrtia initially calls him is reinforced by setting him in polar opposition to the femininity, animality, and limited citizen status of Myrtia as well as to Khairephon's effeminacy. The paradox of his triple status as νεανίαϲ, ἀνήρ, and γέρων is foregrounded less than in the preceding scene. Nevertheless, being depicted as a mature man with full citizen rights and powers while simultaneously behaving with the wanton outrageousness of a youth and wearing the headpiece (and presumably employing the gait and gestures) of an old man maintain the audience's sense that he is all three.

IV. Philokleon the γέρων and his ‘Death’

The third and final accuser—another man—addresses Philokleon as an old man, bringing his tripartite lifecycle across the three iambic scenes to its logical conclusion:

Finally, Philokleon is identified, not as a νεανίαϲ or ἀνήρ, but as the γέρων as which his costume and backstory also designate him. However, this acknowledgment of his old age is immediately undercut by its juxtaposition with an accusation that jarringly reasserts his youth.Footnote ⁶⁷ ὕβριϲ was closely connected with youth, as in the famous Sophoklean fragment:Footnote ⁶⁸

In setting out the qualities of old age, Aristotle specifically differentiates the ὕβριϲ of youth from the κακουργία (‘malice’) of the elderly (Rh. 1390a), while, at the other end of the age spectrum, Xenophon marks it out as a tendency which develops when males undergo the transition from being παῖδεϲ (‘boys’) to μειράκια (‘lads’, often equivalent to νεανίαι; Lac. 3.1f.). Plato describes Ktesippos as good and noble in nature ‘except that he was a ὑβριϲτήϲ on account of being young’ (ὅϲον μὴ ὑβριϲτὴϲ διὰ τὸ νέος εἶναι, Euthd. 273a). Most pertinently for Philokleon, Agathon's servant in Thesmophoriazousai reacts to one of Mnesilokhos’ characteristically outrageous insults by wryly commenting, ἦ που νέοϲ γ' ὢν ἦϲθ' ὑβριϲτήϲ, ὦ γέρον (Th. 63). As Austin and Olson unpack the implications of the particles, ‘You must certainly have acted outrageously when you were young, old man, [if you're acting this way now]!’Footnote ⁶⁹ The implicit incongruity of a γέρων acting as a ὑβριϲτήϲ leads the servant to infer that Mnesilokhos must a fortiori have been a ὑβριϲτήϲ when he was a νέοϲ and at the age when such ὕβριϲ is to be expected.

Back in Wasps, the incongruity of the old man's hubristic behaviour is emphasized already in Xanthias’ (Philokleon's slave) narration of the symposion at 1299–325. The notion that behaviour rather than years is the determinant of life-stage is introduced when the chorus justify calling Xanthias παῖ (‘boy’, but also ‘slave’), ‘for it's fitting to call someone who takes a beating “boy”, even if he's an old man’ (παῖδα γάρ, κἂν ᾖ γέρων, | καλεῖν δίκαιον ὅϲτιϲ ἂν πληγὰϲ λάβῃ, 1297f.). At the symposion, Philokleon was ‘by far the most outrageous’ (ὑβριϲτότατοϲ μακρῷ, 1303), even against some very disreputable competition, and ‘thoroughly insulted’ (περιύβριζεν, 1319) the whole company. The incongruity of an old man's behaving in this way is indicated lightly by Xanthias’ introduction of him as ὁ γέρων (1299) and more pointedly when Lysistratos addresses him ὦ πρεϲβῦτα (1309) before noting his similarity to a nouveau riche Phrygian or a donkey in a chaff-heap. Most marked of all is Xanthias’ description of how the old man beat him νεανικῶϲ, not just ‘vigorously’, but ‘like a young man’, with Philokleon also inverting the slave's age too by calling him παῖ παῖ (1307).Footnote ⁷⁰

This is not, of course, to say that mature men are never accused of ὕβριϲ or of being ὑβριϲταί. MacDowell is absolutely correct to declare that the ‘usual view is that it is in the teenager or the young man that hybris is most often found…[b]ut hybris can exist in old men too; youth or age is not part of the definition of hybris’.Footnote ⁷¹ Nevertheless, it is striking how often the association with youth is still made even when the ὑβριϲτήϲ is not a young man. Two of the closest, as well as among the most famous, parallels for Philokleon's humiliating physical assault are to be found in Demosthenes’ speeches against Konon and Meidias. Both are men in later middle age, Konon a little over fifty (D. 54.22), Meidias a little under (D. 21.154), but both are repeatedly accused of and associated with acts and displays of ὕβριϲ.Footnote ⁷² However, far from this being treated as something the jury might normatively expect fifty-year-old men to indulge in, even here the association of ὕβριϲ with youth is emphasized. Meidias’ act of ὕβριϲ against Demosthenes is one of the two ‘crowning acts he put on the entirety of his youthful pranks’ (κεφάλαι᾽ ἐφ᾽ ἅπαϲι τοῖϲ ἑαυτῷ νενεανιευμένοιϲ ἐπέθηκεν, 21.18) and he chose this option rather than acting as khoregos in competition with Demosthenes as a way to ‘manifest his youthful intemperance’ (ἐνεανιεύσατο, 21.69). The incongruity of an older man's behaving in a manner associated with the young is even more pointed in the case of Konon, who, unlike youths who can be afforded indulgence, performs his act of ὕβριϲ, as a man ‘who is over fifty, in the presence of younger fellows and these sons of his, and [acts] not to steer them away or prevent them, but himself is the leader and foremost and most loathsome of them all’ (ὅϲτιϲ δ᾽ ἐτῶν μέν ἐϲτιν πλειόνων ἢ πεντήκοντα, παρὼν δὲ νεωτέροιϲ ἀνθρώποιϲ καὶ τούτοιϲ υἱέϲιν, οὐχ ὅπωϲ ἀπέτρεψεν ἢ διεκώλυϲεν, ἀλλ᾽ αὐτὸϲ ἡγεμὼν καὶ πρῶτοϲ καὶ πάντων βδελυρώτατοϲ γεγένηται, 54.22).Footnote ⁷³ While ὕβριϲ can be associated with tyrants, barbarians, the wealthy, and others with no particular reference to age, it is clear that, when age is an issue, as it is with Philokleon, Konon, and Meidias, the sense that such behaviour is the province of the young and incongruous in the old is never far from the surface and very frequently breaks through.

So it is when the third accuser juxtaposes his address of Philokleon as γέρων with the accusation of ὕβριϲ. In case the audience misses the crucial word, Bdelykleon immediately and despairingly repeats it, incredulously asking if this youthful crime is really what the accuser is charging an old man with (ὕβρεωϲ, ‘wanton assault’, 1418).Footnote ⁷⁴ As in all three iambic scenes, the incongruity generates humour, but it also expresses the paradox of Philokleon's dual (or triple) status, an old man who is also sufficiently a youth that he possesses both the vigour and the arrogance to commit the quintessentially youthful crime of ὕβριϲ.Footnote ⁷⁵

Despite this persistence of his νεότηϲ into the γῆραϲ of his accelerated third lifecycle, there are initially signs that Philokleon may be showing a degree of mellowing and moderation in keeping with his age and stage.Footnote ⁷⁶ When the panic-stricken Bdelykleon offers to pay the accuser compensation for his father's misdemeanours, Philokleon offers of his ‘own free will to settle the matter’ with his victim (ἐγὼ μὲν οὖν αὐτῷ διαλλαχθήϲομαι | ἑκών, 1421f.) and confesses to assaulting him. However, his method of ‘settling’ is once more the wilful misapplication of his son's pre-sympotic advice, this time using two of the Sybarite tales which Bdelykleon paired with Aesopic fables (1259), to insult his accuser.Footnote ⁷⁷ Unlike the aggressively masculine, anthropocentric Aesopic anecdote targeted at Myrtia, but like the inconsequential lasisma (story about Lasos) which follows it, the content of Philokleon's Sybarite tales to the third accuser have little significance for the construction of his generational identity. Rather it is their aggressive quality that marks him as reverting to or persisting in hubristic youthfulness. This is even more the case if Kaimio is correct in speculating that, as with the blow to Bdelykleon that mimetically accompanied Philokleon's narration of Ephoudion's felling of Askondas, he here (again) strikes the accuser while narrating the breaking of the ἐχῖνοϲ (‘jar’) by the Sybarite woman in 1435f.Footnote ⁷⁸

Regardless of whether the violence is also physical or solely verbal, it demonstrates that, despite Philokleon's apparent reversion to behaviour befitting his (biological) age, this γέρων is continuing to act with the ὕβριϲ of a νεανίαϲ. This continuity is explicitly flagged to the audience by how the other characters onstage react to each of the Sybarite tales. Bdelykleon responds to the first by declaring ‘these acts of yours too are just like your other behaviour’ (ὅμοιά ϲου καὶ ταῦτα τοῖϲ ἄλλοιϲ τρόποιϲ, 1433).Footnote ⁷⁹ The τρόποι of the main characters, their ‘“manners, ways, typical patterns of behaviour”…which stand in an ambiguous relation to [their] φύσις’,Footnote ⁸⁰ especially Philokleon's (1002), but also Bdelykleon's (135) and the chorus’ (454, 1102), and in particular the possibility of changing them (504f., 748, 1450f., 1459f.), are a major theme of the play. Although the influences that shape and the criteria that characterize such τρόποι are complex and multifaceted, age-appropriateness is prominent among them. That there were distinct τρόποι in which the young and old respectively were expected to behave can be seen from the drama of the period. Euripides’ early Peliades includes sententious advice delivered to a young girl (Collard and Cropp suggest Pelias to Alkestis)Footnote ⁸¹ about appropriate behaviour:

Gender roles are, of course, also in play here and Pelias goes on to talk about marriage and leaving business to men, but there is clear emphasis on age here (τέκνον, παῖϲ, even παρθένου) and what constitute appropriate τρόποι for the young. At the other end of the spectrum, the fourth-century Middle Comedy poet Philetairos (Aristophanes’ son, according to some traditions) rebukes an old man who has been spending too much time with prostitutes: ‘Because you are an old man, cease these τρόποι’ (παῦϲαι γέρων ὢν τοὺϲ τρόπουϲ, The Huntress fr. 6.1 PCG).Footnote ⁸² The addressee must cease his behaviour because he is an old man, a syllogism with the implied premise that this is not the societally approved behaviour of an old man.

Philokleon's τρόποι had appeared to be harmonizing with the status of γέρων which the accuser had assigned to him, but this was an illusion (or a deception) and his hubristic Sybarite tales are ‘just like’ (ὅμοιά, 1433) his youthfully hubristic behaviour towards the first accuser, Myrtia, and her witness Khairephon in the other iambic scenes, and towards all three of his victims in the offstage rampage that preceded them. The same point is made in a slightly different way by the third accuser's response to the second Sybarite tale: ‘Keep on acting hubristically, until the arkhon calls your case’ (ὕβριζ', ἕωϲ ἂν τὴν δίκην ἅρχων καλῇ, 1441). The continuous force of the present imperative, as well as the ring composition with the charge of ὕβριϲ that the accuser made on entrance (1418), stress that this is ongoing behaviour, ‘just like’ Philokleon's other τρόποι, and that he persists in acting as a νεανίαϲ, even though the opening address established him as the γέρων that his headpiece and backstory have always made him. Once again, in the third of this second series of agones, he is victorious, as the third accuser leaves the arena. Instead of being successively stripped of his identities as νεανίαϲ, ἀνήρ, and γέρων, he has maintained each of them while paradoxically (and acceleratedly) passing through the stages of life.

Despite this victory—or perhaps as an extension of it—Philokleon's third lifecycle still comes to its natural end with a symbolic death. The pre-parabasis agones also ended in a metaphorical death, which some critics take as part of the initiatory process ushering him from his old life of jury-mania to his new life of ease and pleasure.Footnote ⁸³ Following Philokleon's triumph in the third of the post-parabasis agones, Bdelykleon finally loses patience and decides to take action:

Bdelykleon's intervention takes the play full-circle and marks the failure of his attempt to cure his father as he reverts to shutting the old man up inside the house.Footnote ⁸⁴ This ring composition produces in the audience a sense of false closure, though one kept in tension with their expectation of the conventional convivial finale. The action of physically ‘carrying’ his father ‘inside’ (εἴϲω φέρω ϲ') serves as an inverted funereal ἐκφορά (‘carrying out’). Yet, in keeping with Philokleon's multiple age-statuses, it also renders the old man a babe in arms.Footnote ⁸⁵ However, it is Philokleon's abortive introduction of one final Aesopic λόγοϲ that most clearly marks his carrying indoors as a symbolic death, albeit one very different from that following the acquittal of the dog Labes in the mock-trial at the end of the first half of the play.

Although this is the first extant reference to it, scholars generally agree that the story of Aesop's death at the hands of the Delphians must have been well established and well known by 422 BCE.Footnote ⁸⁶ The extreme allusiveness which Bdelykleon's interruptions impose upon his father's fragmentary recounting of the story strongly suggest that the audience would have been easily able to fill in the gaps. In revenge for telling the unpalatable truth about them, the Delphians framed and falsely accused Aesop of stealing a sacred vessel of Apollo, then dragged him from a shrine (either of Apollo or the Muses) where he had taken sanctuary. Before they executed him, he narrated a fable of how a dung-beetle took revenge on an eagle who had killed a hare, despite the beetle's offering it protection. The humble beetle kept destroying the eagle's eggs, even on the lap of Zeus, showing that even the lowly can enact justice upon the mighty. Philokleon's deployment of the story is particularly complex, treating it as a sort of meta-fable, since he is implicitly comparing himself to Aesop who is in turn comparing himself to both the hare and the dung-beetle.Footnote ⁸⁷ Scholars rightly emphasize both figures’ identification with the dung-beetle and its significance for the low, Aesopic-cum-comic ‘revenge’ that Philokleon, like Aesop, will exact.Footnote ⁸⁸ However, they tend to downplay or ignore the allegorical significance of the hare. Van Dijk neatly draws the parallel between Philokleon's being hauled offstage and Aesop's being dragged from his sanctuary (implicitly, as the hare was taken from the dung-beetle's protection), but he interprets the relationship between their subsequent fates as one of incongruous contrast: ‘Aesop faces his execution, Philocleon his exit.’Footnote ⁸⁹ However, when Philokleon has been characterized in successive scenes as going through the stages of life from νεανίαϲ to ἀνήρ to γέρων, and follows this by comparing himself to someone (who is in turn comparing himself to something) at the moment of their death, there is surely a strong encouragement for the audience to see this exit as a symbolic death, the conclusion of Philokleon's third lifecycle.Footnote ⁹⁰

Unlike Philokleon's earlier symbolic death, defeated in three agones and declaring himself to be ‘nothing’, this death comes at a moment of total victory and, despite a temporary setback, declares that he will not only have his revenge but will live on as the dung-beetle. Ironically, it is Bdelykleon for whom this is the final exit, the theatrical death.Footnote ⁹¹ Philokleon will return for the exodos but his son will not. It is tempting to take Bdelykleon's final, exasperated cry—his last line in the play—as partially literal as well as metaphorical. Just as Aesop's dung-beetle did to the eagle and its eggs, so Philokleon with his own dung-beetles will indeed not just ‘bore to death’ (ἀπολεῖϲ, LSJ 2) but actually, albeit symbolically, ‘kill’ (LSJ 1) him. Paradoxical to the (false) end, Philokleon completes his third lifecycle with a death that involves his being carried inside not outside, like a child not a corpse, a death that ‘kills’ his killer, leaving the way clear for his return, like the dung-beetle, for a grand, comic finale.

V. Philokleon (re)redivivus Footnote ⁹²

Following a brief and elusive choral ode (1449–73), the exodos opens in a manner strikingly similar to that following the second parabasis. Just as Xanthias there narrated Philokleon's outrageous behaviour both at the symposion and on the way home (1292–325), declaring him ‘a most baneful pest’ (ἀτηρότατον…κακόν, 1299), so the same slave here offers a briefer account of a private party that the old man has just had in the house (1474–81) and warns the audience: ‘Look! Here comes the pest’ (τουτὶ καὶ δὴ χωρεῖ τὸ κακόν, 1483). In the three iambic scenes which followed Xanthias’ earlier speech, Philokleon vanquished three antagonists in succession before facing an ambiguous struggle against his own son. In the exodos, he vanquishes in quick succession the three sons of Karkinos and then the father himself in a dance-fight.Footnote ⁹³ The whole of the exodos can be taken as an accelerated replay of the iambic scenes. Yet while, in the earlier scenes, the complexity of Philokleon's age-status was plotted against his third lifecycle from νεανίαϲ to ἀνήρ to γέρων, here, in a fully Dionysiac dissolution of boundaries, his youth and age are paradoxically simultaneous throughout.Footnote ⁹⁴ The previous iambic scenes are, then, not so much accelerated as conflated into a single assertion of Philokleon's old-young victory over his adversaries.

The careful construction of this implicit paradox over the course of the iambic scenes gives greater piquancy and significance to the explicit paradox that Xanthias, quoting Philokleon, expresses:

Scholars have rightly placed great emphasis on the paradoxical nature of Philokleon's self-positioning. As Hutchinson puts it, he ‘paradoxically mixes old and young: he outdoes a younger father's sons in dancing; he champions the old tragic dances, but aims to show contemporary tragic dancers as the real Κρόνοι (1480f.).’Footnote ⁹⁵ What has not been observed is how this paradoxical mixture of old and young has been developed in the preceding three scenes by Philokleon's transition through the three stages of life while maintaining (again, paradoxically) all three at once. It is in this context that the audience is fully able to appreciate the coexistence of old and new, aged and young, in Philokleon and the play that he in many ways emblematizes.Footnote ⁹⁶

A great virtue of interpreting Philokleon's progress through the post-parabasis iambic scenes as a third lifecycle in which he maintains the status of old and young simultaneously is that it is compatible with and can contribute to many of the diverse interpretations—political, poetic, social, and ethical—of the final scenes and of the play as a whole. At the same time, that very compatibility means that it is less potent as a tool for privileging one interpretation over another and so does not in itself offer a key to unlocking the play's ‘meaning’, if we should want to place such restrictive shackles on this most Protean of comedies. The triumph of Philokleon over his antagonists which goes hand in hand with his ‘final, defiant inversion of the laws of transience’Footnote ⁹⁷ sits less easily (though it is by no means exclusive of) what might, broadly speaking, be termed pessimistic readings that anticipate mundane repercussions for his carnivalesque behaviour,Footnote ⁹⁸ or even see the final scene as ‘an impending outburst of tragic havoc’.Footnote ⁹⁹ Certainly Philokleon's antisocial behaviour springs in large part from his combination of youthful recklessness and senile irresponsibility, so that, if we imagine the playwright and his audience as disapproving of or even despairing at that behaviour, then they would doubtless have held the same attitude towards its cause. The paradoxically old-young nature of Philokleon would then contribute to his status as one of the ‘characters who egotistically, almost manically, trample over their fellow citizens [and so] can hardly count for a large audience of Athenians as normatively admirable, yet the comic momentum of their behavior seems also to exclude any moralistic disapproval of them.’Footnote ¹⁰⁰

My preference—and I must stress that the case for the third lifecycle does not stand or fall with this broader interpretation of the play—is that the audience is encouraged to support Philokleon and his old-new worldview, whether it applies to politics, poetics, or both. Whether his victory constitutes that of radical democracy made new or a modified, representative form of democracy, whether that of comedy over tragedy, tragedy over epic, Kratinos over Aristophanes, or simply Aristophanes over all-comers, Philokleon is triumphant at the end and the paradoxical coexistence of old and new, aged and young in him reflects the traditional innovation that the play endorses.Footnote ¹⁰¹