Audience Phthonos in Old Comedy

The chapter opens with an analysis of the emotional dynamics behind the text-audience relationship in Old Comedy. Plato’s suggestion (in the Philebus) that we go to the comic theatre to see our friends suffering misfortunes, and this is phthonos, is discussed, and this compared with Aristotle’s epichairekakia (Schadenfreude/spite). There is some similarity to the ‘reversal’ associated with the ‘carnival’ approach to comedy, where powerful individuals could be lampooned with impunity for some short period. The chapter suggests that one of Old Comedy’s functions is to provide a safety valve for the potentially explosive build-up of hostility between the functional elite and other citizens in democratic Athens. Passages of Aristophanes’ Acharnians, Knights, and Wasps are then discussed, in which politicians, ambassadors, and generals are satirized as groups, and individuals lampooned by name. It is argued that the reasons for hostility (phthonos) toward these groups for various supposed sharp practices are the same that allow them to be effective butts of comedy.

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