OUP (2015) h/b 530pp £110 (ISBN 9780199699407)
Douglas MacDowell’s edition for OUP appeared 45 years ago. He began his preface by suggesting it may be a long time before another appeared, and so he tried to produce a work that would be useful to scholars and students alike. This new edition also tries to help students tackle the Greek by glossing words and phrases and offering grammatical explanations, while at the same time giving scholars and advanced students a full, detailed commentary. Thus elementary features (such as a genitive of time within which) are pointed out and translated, while on the same line the orthography and meaning of πασπάλην are fully discussed and its final position in the line is noted as a paraprosdokian.
Sometimes a student may have to work hard (no bad thing!), as in the discussion of ‘fig-wood’ on line 145 where sycophants are described as ‘an object of loathing or ridicule’ but only by following the reference to ‘1096 with n.’ will the student new to comedy find a full explanation of what sycophant meant in Greek. B&O are unashamedly explicit when dealing with obscenities, as for example at 1364 χοιρόθλιψ, giving a literal translation (‘c- rubber’) and an analysis of the compound alongside the (unnecessary?) explanation ‘sex-fiend vel sim.’ (McDowell simply has ‘sex-maniac’). This note, incidentally, has a rare slip: ‘anticipating 1364’ in a note on 1364! Reference to Dardanis’ πρῶκτος (1376) elicits the comment ‘which here means arse rather than arse-hole’—a nice (in one sense) distinction.
This scene (1364-87) between Philocleon, Bdelycleon and Dardanis the pipe-girl involves some business for which it would have been interesting to have stage directions. B&O supply some ideas in the notes. At 1361-2 ‘P. hands the torch to D.’ arises directly from the text, but they don’t suggest what she does with it. When P. at 1372 says D. is a torch burning in the agora, they dismiss (rightly) Sommerstein’s idea that there is a shift of scene to the agora by observing that P. ‘is merely being silly’. Examination of the anatomy of the ‘torch’ starts with the split (‘cleavage’) which they say ‘might be’ formed by her legs pressed together but the erotic focus suggests to them that it refers to ‘her vulva in one way or another’. The next detail (the black thing in the middle, i.e. pubic hair) might tell against this interpretation.
An old suggestion, that P. turns D. upside down, makes reference to these parts of the anatomy easier and also makes the anatomy seem more torch-like. Besides it suits the exuberant physical clowning of P. But this interpretation has been generally ignored, perhaps because the actual torch must figure somewhere.
One obvious advance on MacDowell’s commentary is the focus on Aristophanes’ rivals and in particular the relationship of Wasps to Cratinus’ Pytine (Wine-flask) which won first prize in 423, defeating Clouds. The text has also received careful attention, resulting in a detailed analysis of the manuscripts and their often ‘complicated and obscure’ relationships. Among much else, B&O conclude that all nine manuscripts are descended from ‘a single copy of the play’. The apparatus criticus is substantially expanded. A full account of the political content of the play is given in the introduction, although the question of the ‘seriousness’ (or otherwise) of the politics receives little consideration. They come close when stating that it is ‘exceedingly unlikely’ that Athens was a kleptocracy controlled by a small coterie, and they distance themselves by imagining ‘good if conservative democrats’ talking after the performance, ‘So true; so sad, but so true; a political system that has run out of control and an ungrateful people who none the less must be protected from themselves’. The spectre of the oligarchic revolution of 411 BC is introduced, but for that, they say, ‘Aristophanes himself can scarcely be held responsible’. The introduction also contains a careful and clear analysis of the plot, but one would like to see more analysis of the humour. After all, as MacDowell put it, ‘the chief purpose of a comedy is to amuse.’
This is a substantial contribution to Aristophanic comedy and will undoubtedly be the springboard for future scholarly work on the play for many years to come.
Alan Beale