The Wasps

Aristophanes was a Greek author that achieved recognition by his satirical works. In this entry we will analize his most famous book, The Wasps, an introspective of the Greek political and justice system by a wealthy family, their servants, and dogs.

What kind of author is Aristophanes? He was a well educated Greek kid that had a clear view of the flaws in the system that he lived in. Thus, Aristophanes decided that the central theme of the majority of his plays would be destined to communicating these flaws in a satirical manner.

Taking this in account we can expect Aristophanes to direct himself into a sophisticated segment of the Greek population that had at least a general idea of their political background and ruling system. The people that read The Wasps, are often in the search of the meaning of justice and the platonic state of fairness. There is a hidden contract behind the plot: by reading this book your inner political dogmas can be challanged, you may be put to justice, you may doubt of the stand you made the day before. It implies an educated reader.

First of all let´s establish that The Wasps has a very strong historical and political foundation. In the middle of the Pelopennisian War, Greece had gotten the upper hand against a weakened Sparta, now, sensing the opportunity to finish the war, Greece supported the reckless King Cleon to go in an all out offensive against their neighbours. The old corrupt king spread his evil seed through Athens, forcing Pericles out of the fray and installing a reign of utter chaos and corruption.


The plot is also heavily influenced by the personal affairs between Philocleon and Bdelycleon. The relationship of father and son limits Aristophanes to use certain endings and also forces him to expand upon their relationship so that the reader can grasp the dichotomy of justice and family. The paradigm to be broken in here is the "father teaches the son". In this case, the son has a wiser an clearer conception of rightfulness.

Of course, the center of the argument relies on justice. What is justice? Can it be relative or is it absolut? Bdelycleon want to unravel the truth about justice to his father and also make him realize that he is an old man obsessed with putting people to trial. The characters are simple intruments employed by Aristophanes to teach a moral play about justice.

The wit behind The Wasps is the absurdity of using a comedy as a lesson about justice. Why a comedy though? A cynical tactic deployed by our playwriter. He is so enraged and frustrated by the regime of Cleon and the corruption in the polis that he decides to mock them by using an often low valued literary form (the comedy) as a bridge to communicate his discomfort.

Justice was absolutely everything to the Greeks in those days. I mean, land and system were the key  to achieve such a great status. Justice meant that the ones in power could condemn those that they despised. Justice was the key that unlocked the door to corruption, that is why it was so cherished by the Greeks. This brings us to another important thought about Philocleon and Bdelycleon...¿is it a love-hate relationship or a justice-injustice one? I would ammend this sentence and state that it  is a love for justice relationship in which Philocleon has a distortioned image of justice because he is obsessed with it. The love of justice is the converging point between the two characters. The problem resides in the ambiguity of the term "justice"; Bdelycleon must drag his father down from the clouds and teach him again the basics of justice.The structure of The Wasps is odd for a comedy, many tragedies have followed this template and it is something to note by Aristophanes. The mise-en-scene used in this play is very sober: very few characters, an animal, and two characters that are surrounded by props such as the house and the jury room.

We can find many examples of Aristophane´s The Wasps in modern culture because he placed the first brick in the creation of the parody. This type of satirical creation focuses on using irony to demonstrate the flaws of a system, person, or thing. Irony has been well used by key figures in the world, most of them well read and outspoken, have mocked institutions and people through parody. Aristophane´s comedy becomes the fixed structure of parody thanks to the importance and repercussion it had on Greek society.

What if the play was published today? It definitely would not have the same impact because the plot is outdated. Cleon is gone from this world and nobody literally gives any attention to the events that happened in the past. But we can take the idea from the comedy and adapt it into a modern justice dilemma with characters that live today. Imagine having The Wasps criticizing the Mexican political system, that would certainly be a very strong card in the fight against our actual government.

The author has given himself a free reign in the structure for this comedy. The Wasps follows a simple linear plot that never mingles itslef with analepsis or prolepsis. Aristophanes had the choice of using this resources but he went straight into the point, a decision that I applaud.

A narrative technique used by our narrator is lyrical poetry. Why did he use it? Because it was the hot thing in Greece at that moment, if you did not use lyrical poetry in your plays, oh boy, you were in trouble. This technique emphasizes on the expression of emotions by the charactes so that the reader can get a bigger picture of the emotional state of mind of that person.

Athens is Greece, that much is known. Athens is the city of wisdom and any other city is not as majestic as it. And this great city, Athens, is a foreshadowing of our actual world. Corruption, vanity, and wealth were in that time the pillars that supported the political regime. We have a brief but complete grasp of Ancient Greece by looking through the eyes of Bdelycleon and by reading the lines of Aristophanes. Th book itself is an expanded metaphor of the lost values and the apalling ways of living that the Athenians so excitedly supported.

I´ve never been a fan of the chorus in plays. They disappeared because in a way it diminished the importance of the character´s roles. By adding a chorus, many loose ends and previously unknown information by the reader is revealed. The Chorus represents a narrator that is an outsider but is always there in the action.

Let´s move on to the characters. Protagonist: Philocleon, Antagonist: Bdelycleon, Principal characters: the servants, the dog, the chorus (wasps). In this play, we have a protagonist that is the father, an old guy obsessed with putting people (and animals) through trials. The antagonist is a good guy, the son of Philocleon, a young man that will inherit Philocleon´s political rights but sees the need to restitute his father with the correct vision of justice before he dies. The other characters are the servants, whom always ten to be of use to their masters.

How are dialogues performed in the play? We see a new movement in dialogue structure in The Wasps. It distances itself from the technicality of the dialogues of the Odyssey in which epithets and airy language is employed, and executes a simple two-way dialogue that makes the play very user friendly. These dialogues between father and son are in fact a metaphor of a dialogue between the just and the unjust, they symbolically represent these attributes.

It is important to underline the different ideas this text contains, from religious to artistic, social and ethic, but most important political. This is the core of the work by Aristophanes, to communicate a political message disguised by a seemingly simple play.

The audacity in which Aristophanes places symbols is one virtue we have to acknowledge him. The dog as a non-human entity with a trial represents the path of doom that Greece would eventually approach. The figure of the father is the most important figure in Greek culture and because of that Bdelycleon is so determined to save his father.

This work is important to our actual literature because it represent the turning point of play writing with the introduction of the first parody. The Wasps is a comedy that will live on because it is timeless. Change the time, change the setting, and change the characters, but the idea of an evil corrupted regime and a small rightful figure will never cease to exist.