When Pathos Becomes Comic: Subverting Political Emotions in Aristophanes

BUIS, EMILIANO JERÓNIMO

Berlín

Congreso; Internationale altertumswissenschafliche Konferenz *Pathos und Polis. Einsatz und Wirkung affektiver Elemente in der griechischen Welt*; 2017

Freie Universität Berlin y Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft

From a perspective interested in emotional pragmatics, it is possible to explore the ways in which Athenians felt their involvement in judicial affairs, either as litigants, jury members (dikastai) or spectators. From an interdisciplinary perspective focused in law and classics, what I intend to show here is that Old Comedy made fun of these legal interactions in ancient Athens by a series of comic devices which were based upon the democratic *affective* machinery and its political limits on stage. By subverting *shared* feelings and promoting ?personal? subjective interests, Aristophanes´ characters seem to attack the very basis of political *pathe*. If citizens who were attending the theatre identified the democratic (male) appropriation of judicious civic feelings as antithetical to (tyrannical or feminized) hyper-emotivity, Aristophanes will place uncontrolled individual feelings at the centre of his plays. At the end of the day, in Athenian trials (as forensic oratory and political comedy can show) empathy between the speaker and the jurors is rhetorically created on the basis of (culturally) accepted and rejected emotional experiences. This paper will therefore focus on the communicative experience provided by drama and will address how Aristophanes revisited emotions such as anger (*orge*) and pity (*eleos*) at the heart of his comedies in order to disarticulate their contents in front of an audience which was capable of understanding judicial rituals and their inherent affections.