Staging Judicial A(ffe)ctions: Legal Subjectivity and Comic Performance in Aristophanes

BUIS, EMILIANO JERÓNIMO

Tesalónica y Komotini

Congreso; International Conference *Greek Drama, Law, and Politics*; 2017

Universidad Aristóteles de Tesalónica y Universidad Demócrito de Tracia

Since the Athenian public was mainly composed of adult citizens who were familiar if not intimate with law, it should not be surprising that Old Comedy frequently referred to legal matters in order to accomplish its main mission: to elicit laughter and entertain the audience. The general relationship between comedy and law, nevertheless, is not straightforward. My paper is intended to survey the references to Athenian law in Aristophanes in order to show the literary strategies employed by Aristophanes when dealing with legal ?subjects? and their ?subjective? emotions on stage. As I showed elsewhere, I consider that Aristophanes has designed and implemented a literary strategy in which justice is addressed through different literary mechanisms, namely parodic exaggeration and trans-contextualization. My intention in this paper is to show that these comic devices, employed by the playwright when presenting characters on stage (such as litigants, sycophants, jurors, witnesses), are not only applied to their speech but also to the emotions they claim to endorse or reject. All these poetic mechanisms concerning the manoeuvring of legal *subjectivities* aim at criticising the permanent abuse of courts by litigious actors and the manipulation of democratic emotions in late fifth-century and early IV-Century Athens.