ROLE CHANGE

Ovid and Aristophanes: Women's Role Change

Ovid and Aristophanes: Women's Role Change

Introduction

Aristophanes here presents the hope that words and persuasion still retain some of their political meaning and power, but, given the political climate, the prognosis is not favorable. The chorus responds to this request as they have at various points previous to this, with accusations of conspiracy and aspirations to tyranny. His work has a relationship to the poems of Ovid and goes into details.

Power

Unlike his father, he employs the figure of a lower-class woman - in this case, a haranguing vegetable lady - to indicate the inherent worthlessness of such claims and of those making them (ll. 496-9). In an even more scandalous turn, his slave, seemingly encouraged by his master's comments, takes the comparison to the next level, that of outright prostitution: “My slut got sharp-tempered with me too, when I went to 108 Philocleon claims that the reason the chorus was repulsed is because they were “munching on Philocles' songs”.

Athens: In large part, the power of the state depends upon the subjugation of women. Perhaps this denial is part of the longstanding illness that Bdelycleon claims the city is suffering from at line 651, and for which his father is the proverbial “poster child.” By presenting the polis as “an objectified oikos,” Aristophanes has been able to replicate the imperial obsession of the state in Philocleon's illness, and the resultant war in the generational struggle for mastery over the oikos. What has been played down until this point, however, is the fundamental role of women in both of these undertakings.

For a brief moment, all the male characters are unified in their opposition to tyranny through their denigration of women. Even slave and master are able to experience a harmonious rather than fractious kind of equality and similarity, ...