Prostitution and Panhellenism in Aristophanes’ Peace
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Donald Sells
Abstract
While most contributions to this volume look at the religious life of actual objects, the present chapter examines religious life from the opposite perspective, the concretization of one institution of religious practice in ancient Greece, festival attendance, in the specific genre of Old Comedy. In his comedy Peace (421 BCE), Aristophanes represents the graphic sexual objectification of Theôria (Festival), one of two personified attendants accompanying the goddess Peace, whose return initiates a new golden age in Greece. By implicitly characterizing Theôria as a prostitute, i.e., as an occasional, sexually available, and fungible object for the enjoyment of festival attendees, the comedy reestablishes the subjectivity of a nominally male Athenian audience whose opportunities to enjoy publicly funded and culturally affirmative religious festivals were radically curtailed by a decade of brutal war. With an embodied Theôria, Aristophanes evokes for his audience the longed-for pleasures of the festival circuit now made permanent in the glorious postwar utopia provided by divine Peace.
© 2016 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelei
- Preface
- Inhalt
- The Religious Life of Things A Conference Organized by Ian S. Moyer and Celia Schultz
- Introduction: The Religious Life of Things
- Gold Has Many Uses
- Omen and Anti-omen: The Rabbinic Hagiography of the Scapegoat’s Scarlet Ribbon
- The Furniture of the Gods: The Problem with the Importation of ‘Empty Space and Material Aniconism’ into Greek Religion
- Prostitution and Panhellenism in Aristophanes’ Peace
- Religious Lives of Image-Things, Avodah Zarah, and Rabbis in Late Antique Palestine
- The Religious Life of Greek Automata
- Words with power: from the Getty Hexameters to the Abgar-Jesus Correspondence
- Speech Acts and Embedded Narrative Structure in the Getty Hexameters
- Apotropaic Autographs: Orality and Materiality in the Abgar-Jesus Inscriptions
- Utility and Variance in Late Antique Witnesses to the Abgar-Jesus Correspondence
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelei
- Preface
- Inhalt
- The Religious Life of Things A Conference Organized by Ian S. Moyer and Celia Schultz
- Introduction: The Religious Life of Things
- Gold Has Many Uses
- Omen and Anti-omen: The Rabbinic Hagiography of the Scapegoat’s Scarlet Ribbon
- The Furniture of the Gods: The Problem with the Importation of ‘Empty Space and Material Aniconism’ into Greek Religion
- Prostitution and Panhellenism in Aristophanes’ Peace
- Religious Lives of Image-Things, Avodah Zarah, and Rabbis in Late Antique Palestine
- The Religious Life of Greek Automata
- Words with power: from the Getty Hexameters to the Abgar-Jesus Correspondence
- Speech Acts and Embedded Narrative Structure in the Getty Hexameters
- Apotropaic Autographs: Orality and Materiality in the Abgar-Jesus Inscriptions
- Utility and Variance in Late Antique Witnesses to the Abgar-Jesus Correspondence
