Wealth by Aristophanes - gout here, pot bellies there, ... obesity beyond all bounds

We saw Sophocles and Euripides end their long careers with masterpieces, but we do not have that luck with Aristophanes.  Wealth (388 BCE) is thin, scattershot, perhaps even a bit defeated or exhausted.

The conceit is as usual excellent.  Plutus, the god of wealth, is freed from his customary blindness by an ordinary Athenian citizen.  As a result, Plutus can finally reward the good and deserving rather than the wicked, although the series of skits that make up the last half of the play become more of a satire on satiety.  If everybody has everything, what happens?  The god Hermes comes begging for help, because no one sacrifices to the gods anymore.  All anyone really asked for was wealth and now they have it.

HERMES:  Oh for the ham I once guzzled!

CARION: You’re giving a ham performance right now if I ever saw one!

HERMES: Oh for the hot innards I used to love!

CARION: Got a pain in your own, have you, eh?  (308, tr. Alan H. Sommerstein, Penguin Classics)

Hermes succeeds in acquiring a new role as the God of Competitions.  In a satiated world, all that is left is leisure activities.  Wealth would have some real interest to a Marxist critic.

The long scene in which the personification of Poverty makes her case against Wealth, and wealth, is interesting, although it is also perhaps an example of the weakness of the late Aristophanes plays.  Too static, too talky, too purely a debate.  Still, it is curious to see the moral case for poverty:

POVERTY:  You were talking about a pauper, who has absolutely nothing to live on.  Poverty is quite different.  It means living a thrifty life, sticking to your job, not having anything to spare but not having to go short either.  (289)

Wealth produces obesity and gout, while poverty creates “lean, wiry, wasplike men” who make good soldiers.  Unfortunately, none of this develops into anything.  Gout and obesity do sound likely for the newly wealthy main characters, but we will not see it.

All of this is a sad fantasy in that, as I mentioned last week, Athens was poorer than it had been in generations.  At the play's end, the characters “reinstall Wealth in his old dwelling in the rear chamber of Athena's temple” (310).  They can dream.

The illustration is “The Triumph of Riches” by Hans Holbein, a preparatory 16th century drawing for a now lost painting.  I believe that Plutus is the hunched figure in the chariot,  Here he is not obviously blind, but is led by Fortune.  Life, or at least wealth, ain’t fair.  Go to the Department of Graphic Arts at the Louvre to see the drawing in person.

I understand anyone who reads the last Aristophanes plays and says “I’m done” but I still have two Menander plays on my schedule, the last barely surviving classical Greek plays, written seventy years after the final Aristophanes.  If I judge the importance of a text by its generation of further texts, the Menander plays are arguably the most important plays we will read. 

But really I wanted to keep going because I remember the 1972 Eric Turner version of The Girl from Samos (315 BCE) as so good.  I have not read our next play, Dyskolos (216 BCE) or The Grouch or perhaps The Misanthrope, the only play of the entire project I had not previously read, and I think I will try the Sheila D'Atri version.  His Menander book includes four plays, but two of them are fragments, as much Slavitt as Menander.  They all require some textual help, though.  My inclusion of the two most complete plays was a little arbitrary.

Anyway, next week, Menander’s Dsykolos.