Xanthias refers to several characters, notably all slaves, [1] who appear in plays by the Ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes.
Xanthias refers to several characters, notably all slaves, [1] who appear in plays by the Ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes.
In The Frogs , Xanthias is the slave of Dionysus. He delivers the opening line of the play, riding on Dionysus' donkey and debating with Dionysus about what jokes Xanthias can make. He and Dionysus trade barbs throughout the play, with Xanthias generally coming out on top. When they cross the Acheron, Xanthias is forced to carry the luggage around the lake because he was unable to participate in the Battle of Arginusae, allegedly due to pinkeye. In the underworld, Xanthias is forced by Dionysus to trade attire three times, to comedic effect—when Dionysus is dressed as Heracles, he is threatened by Aeacus, the hostess, and an ornery maid, while Xanthias as Heracles is welcomed joyfully by a nice maid. Xanthias also manages to trick Aeacus into whipping both him and Dionysus to avoid having monsters set upon him. Once the confusion about master and slave is sorted out, Xanthias flirts with the nice maid, discussing ways they secretly rebel against their masters.
Xanthias of The Frogs defies the convention of slaves introduced in earlier works by Aristophanes. In The Knights , The Wasps , and Peace , slaves fulfill two functions: they introduce the situation at the beginning of the play and they provide comedic relief by being threatened or frightened. [2] However, in The Frogs, Xanthias begins by debating with his master about what kind of joke he can tell to initiate the play. Aristophanes uses their banter to blast the low level of humor used by contemporaries, referencing Phrynichus, Lykis, and Ameipsias. Aristophanes represents Xanthias as braver and cleverer than Dionysus. Xanthias pretends to see Empousa, frightening the bumbling, slouching Dionysus. Then Xanthias tricks Aeacus into whipping both of them to differentiate between master and servant. Xanthias is clearly dominant during the latter situation, as Dionysus pleads and whines to let Xanthias change clothes with him. Despite Xanthias' superiority, however, Dover cautions against an interpretation that Aristophanes supported emancipation—he points out that Aristophanes' audience may quite possibly have seen little more in Xanthias' dominance than a confirmation of the impudence of the servant class, and the comedy of the situation can arise from a reversal of roles, similar to the comedy evoked in Aristophanes' Lysistrata and Ecclesiazusae with regard to women. [2] Brow-beating & topping a bumbling living god, Dionysus, during his multiple hallowed citations, may have had something to do with it, too.
Aristophanes, son of Philippus, of the deme Kydathenaion, was a comic playwright or comedy-writer of ancient Athens and a poet of Old Attic Comedy. Eleven of his forty plays survive virtually complete. These provide the most valuable examples of a genre of comic drama known as Old Comedy and are used to define it, along with fragments from dozens of lost plays by Aristophanes and his contemporaries.
Aeacus was a mythological king of the island of Aegina in the Saronic Gulf.
Heracles, born Alcaeus or Alcides, was a divine hero in Greek mythology, the son of Zeus and Alcmene, and the foster son of Amphitryon. He was a great-grandson and half-brother of Perseus, and similarly a half-brother of Dionysus. He was the greatest of the Greek heroes, the ancestor of royal clans who claimed to be Heracleidae (Ἡρακλεῖδαι), and a champion of the Olympian order against chthonic monsters. In Rome and the modern West, he is known as Hercules, with whom the later Roman emperors, in particular Commodus and Maximian, often identified themselves. The Romans adopted the Greek version of his life and works essentially unchanged, but added anecdotal detail of their own, some of it linking the hero with the geography of the Central Mediterranean. Details of his cult were adapted to Rome as well.
Empusa or Empousa is a shape-shifting female being in Greek mythology, said to possess a single leg of copper, commanded by Hecate, whose precise nature is obscure. In Late Antiquity, the empousai have been described as a category of phantoms or spectres, equated with the lamiai and mormolykeia, thought to seduce and feed on young men.
The Clouds is a Greek comedy play written by the playwright Aristophanes. A lampooning of intellectual fashions in classical Athens, it was originally produced at the City Dionysia in 423 BC and was not as well received as the author had hoped, coming last of the three plays competing at the festival that year. It was revised between 420 and 417 BC and was thereafter circulated in manuscript form.
The Knights was the fourth play written by Aristophanes, who is considered the master of an ancient form of drama known as Old Comedy. The play is a satire on the social and political life of classical Athens during the Peloponnesian War, and in this respect it is typical of all the dramatist's early plays. It is unique, however, in the relatively small number of its characters, and this was due to its vitriolic preoccupation with one man, the pro-war populist Cleon. Cleon had prosecuted Aristophanes for slandering the polis with an earlier play, The Babylonians, for which the young dramatist had promised revenge in The Acharnians, and it was in The Knights that his revenge was exacted. The Knights won first prize at the Lenaia festival when it was produced in 424 BC.
The Symposium is a philosophical text by Plato, dated c. 385–370 BC. It depicts a friendly contest of extemporaneous speeches given by a group of notable men attending a banquet. The men include the philosopher Socrates, the general and political figure Alcibiades, and the comic playwright Aristophanes. The speeches are to be given in praise of Eros, the god of love and desire.
The Birds is a comedy by the Ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes. It was performed in 414 BC at the City Dionysia in Athens where it won second place. It has been acclaimed by modern critics as a perfectly realized fantasy remarkable for its mimicry of birds and for the gaiety of its songs. Unlike the author's other early plays, it includes no direct mention of the Peloponnesian War and there are few references to Athenian politics, and yet it was staged not long after the commencement of the Sicilian Expedition, an ambitious military campaign that greatly increased Athenian commitment to the war effort. In spite of that, the play has many indirect references to Athenian political and social life. It is the longest of Aristophanes' surviving plays and yet it is a fairly conventional example of Old Comedy.
The Frogs is a comedy written by the Ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes. It was performed at the Lenaia, one of the Festivals of Dionysus in Athens, in 405 BC and received first place.
The Acharnians or Acharnians is the third play — and the earliest of the eleven surviving plays — by the Athenian playwright Aristophanes. It was produced in 425 BC on behalf of the young dramatist by an associate, Callistratus, and it won first place at the Lenaia festival.
The Wasps is the fourth in chronological order of the eleven surviving plays by Aristophanes. It was produced at the Lenaia festival in 422 BC, during Athens' short-lived respite from the Peloponnesian War.
Thesmophoriazusae, or Women at the Thesmophoria, is one of eleven surviving plays by Aristophanes. It was first produced in 411 BC, probably at the City Dionysia. The play's focuses include the subversive role of women in a male-dominated society; the vanity of contemporary poets, such as the tragic playwrights Euripides and Agathon; and the shameless, enterprising vulgarity of an ordinary Athenian, as represented in this play by the protagonist, Mnesilochus. The work is also notable for Aristophanes' free adaptation of key structural elements of Old Comedy and for the absence of the anti-populist and anti-war comments that pepper his earlier work. It was produced in the same year as Lysistrata, another play with sexual themes.
Peace is an Athenian Old Comedy written and produced by the Greek playwright Aristophanes. It won second prize at the City Dionysia where it was staged just a few days before the Peace of Nicias was validated, which promised to end the ten-year-old Peloponnesian War. The play is notable for its joyous anticipation of peace and for its celebration of a return to an idyllic life in the countryside. However, it also sounds a note of caution, there is bitterness in the memory of lost opportunities and the ending is not happy for everyone. As in all of Aristophanes' plays, the jokes are numerous, the action is wildly absurd and the satire is savage. Cleon, the pro-war populist leader of Athens, is once again a target for the author's wit, even though he had died in battle just a few months earlier.
The Frogs is a musical "freely adapted" by Stephen Sondheim and Burt Shevelove from The Frogs, an Ancient Greek comedy by Aristophanes. In the musical, Dionysos, despairing of the quality of living dramatists, travels to Hades to bring George Bernard Shaw back from the dead. William Shakespeare competes with Shaw for the title of best playwright, which he wins. Dionysos brings Shakespeare back to the world of the living in the hope that art can save civilization.
In the theatre of ancient Greece, the eirôn was one of three stock characters in comedy. The eirôn usually succeeded by bringing down his braggart opponent by understating his own abilities.
Culture Clash is a performance troupe that currently comprises writer-comedians Richard Montoya, Ric Salinas, and Herbert Sigüenza. Their work is of a satirical nature.
Miles Gloriosus is a comedic play written by Titus Maccius Plautus. The title can be translated as "The Swaggering Soldier" or "Vainglorious Soldier". His source for Miles Gloriosus was a Greek play, now lost, called Alazon or The Braggart. Although the characters in Miles Gloriosus speak Latin, they are Greeks and largely have Greek names, clothing, and customs. The action takes place in Ephesus, a Greek city on the coast of Asia Minor, famous for its Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
A skeuophoros was a slave or servant who carried baggage in Ancient Greece. Herodotus records that every hoplite was followed on campaign by a servant as a skeuophoros. In Aristophanes' play The Frogs, Xanthias, the slave of Dionysus, acts as his skeuophoros:
Διόνυσος ἴθι νυν ἐπειδὴ ληματίας κἀνδρεῖος εἶ,
σὺ μὲν γενοῦ 'γὼ τὸ ῥόπαλον τουτὶ λαβὼν
καὶ τὴν λεοντῆν, εἴπερ ἀφοβόσπλαγχνος εἶ:
ἐγὼ δ᾽ ἔσομαί σοι σκευοφόρος ἐν τῷ μέρει.
Ameipsias of Athens was an Ancient Greek comic poet, a contemporary of Aristophanes, whom he twice bested in the dramatic contests. His Konnos (Κόννος) gained a second prize at the City Dionysia in 423, when Aristophanes won the third prize with The Clouds.
Antigone is a play by the Attic dramatist Euripides, which is now lost except for a number of fragments. According to Aristophanes of Byzantium, the plot was similar to that of Sophocles' play Antigone, with three differences. The date of the play is uncertain, but there is evidence that it was written late in Euripides' career, between 420 BCE and 406 BCE.