2025 Theses Doctoral

Where’s Xanthias?: Visualizing the Fifth-Century Comic Male Slave

De Klerk, Carina

The working assumption in the scholarship on Aristophanes is that fifth-century comic slaves were instantly recognizable in performance through aspects of their body, costume, and/or mask. This project seeks to corroborate the claim that the fifth-century comic male slave was probably not differentiated visually from other types of characters. In so doing, I stake out an additional set of new claims. Since the appearance of a comic actor in the playing space did not seem to instantly announce whether or not he was playing a slave role, slave identities were instead likely inflected through performance. Any delay in the inflection of a character’s identity as a slave would create the opportunity for that character’s identity to be ambiguous.

This potential for ambiguity is not exclusive to the comic slave but is rather inherent in the comic male body and costume which, in the fifth century, does not seem to have differentiated social type. Indeed, two early artifacts apparently display a recognition of the potential for the comic body to be ambiguous through depicting comic figures who bear a strong visual similarity to one another in scenes that seem to invite the exploitation of that ambiguity. The bulk of this project explores a range of ways in which that potential for ambiguity is activated and played with in the fifth-century comedies of Aristophanes, in particular in the case of comic slaves.

In the first two chapters, I consider how artifacts relating to the performance of comedy and the extant plays of Aristophanes both support the view that the fifth-century comic male slave probably looked like a typical comic character. In the third chapter, I explore the revelation of character identity in the opening scenes of Wasps and Women at the Thesmophoria. Through close readings that seek to reconstruct how these scenes would have unfolded in performance, I argue that where the reader sees slaves clearly in the opening scene of Wasps, the original audience might not have, and, conversely, where the reader tends not to see a slave in the opening of Women at the Thesmophoria, the original audience might have. In both plays, the ambiguities surrounding character identity contribute to a core function of the Aristophanic prologue—capturing audience interest and curiosity. Two chapter length studies on Knights and Frogs follow.

In Knights, I argue that the ambiguity of the comic body is politicized through an extensive engagement with oligarchic sentiments and attitudes. By not distinguishing slave from citizen, the ambiguity of the comic body underlies and visually develops the pervasive blurring of legal status categories in this play, while also becoming a sign and symbol of the perversion of social hierarchies that an oligarch might associate with democracy. The ambiguity of the comic body is further exploited in the contest between the Sausage Seller and Paphlagon, contributing to the difficulty in distinguishing whether the Sausage Seller will be similar to Paphlagon or not, as visual differences between the two are collapsed. Ultimately, the engagement with oligarchic sentiments about the perversion of social and moral hierarchies in the democracy are part of an elaborate form of misdirection. The Sausage Seller is not the same as Paphlagon, as he proves through restoring order. In this way, the ambiguity of the comic body is re-politicized as, through the figure of the Sausage Seller, it becomes emblematic of the potential of a citizen in the democracy, a potential that is not constrained by social background.

Finally, I argue that it is precisely when legal status boundaries become especially blurred in Athens with the mass enfranchisement of enslaved people who fought at the Battle of Arginusae that we begin to see a visual and verbal contraction of the potential ambiguity of the comic slave in Frogs. This curtailing of the potential for the comic slave to be ambiguous is a key contribution to the later development of the comic slave, as the visual code for the slave becomes much more defined in the fourth century. It is also essential for understanding how this play responds to that contemporary mass enfranchisement of the enslaved people who fought at the Battle of Arginusae.