Appendix I. Ritual ΑΙΣΧΡΟΛΟΓΙΑ

There are numerous ritual contexts in ancient Greece that call for joking and abuse, generally termed αἰσχρολογία ‘obscenity’. We may think immediately here of ἴαμβος ‘iambic verse’, but this category of joking must be extended to include several terms that are not altogether clearly distinguishable in meaning (the translations are therefore approximate): χλεύη ‘jest’, σκῶμμα ‘joke’, λοιδορία ‘offensive abuse’, γεφυρισμός ‘abuse’, τωθασμός ‘scoffing’, and αἰσχρολογία ‘obscenity’. Because some of these terms are used in descriptions of festivals or other ritual contexts, many experts have argued for a connection between the ritual use of abusive speech and its appearance in Old Comedy. [1] More specifically, a connection between abusive speech in ritual contexts and varieties of capping phenomena such as stichomythia or the contests of shepherds in Theocritus has been postulated. [2] The usual assumption is that there must be a prima facie connection between these—and accordingly because the abusive speech in ritual contexts involves “ritual,’’ it must be older—but when considered as a whole the evidence is more elusive than has been realized. It will repay us to review the primary evidence carefully before we conclude how it may or may not bear on capping phenomena in Greek poetic performance.

The locus classicus for the use of joking speech in a ritual context within archaic Greek literature is the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. [3] Demeter has not eaten or drunk for many days and is yearning for her daughter (202–04):

Another, later, account of this same mythical incident includes the old woman Baubo, who was said to have lifted her dress and shown Demeter her genitalia, at the sight of which the goddess was pleased and began to drink. [4] This evidence is usually considered to represent an aetiology for the usage of joking during the initiation rites at Eleusis. [5]

Joking, initiation, and contestation in the context of dramatic performance are also all brought together in the famous passage from the chorus of initiates in Aristophanes’ Frogs. They ask Demeter to save her own chorus (391–95):

On the procession from Attica to Eleusis, initiates paused on the bridge over the Cephisus river and were met with abuse known generally as γεφυρισμός. [6] The evidence for how the abuse was issued is somewhat confused, with some accounts reporting that women abused the initiates, while in others it was a man or a group of men and women who joked with the passersby. [7] Further, a scholion to Aristophanes’ Wealth (1014) reports that the women on the wagons specifically rebuked one another (λοιδορουσῶν ἀλλήλας). But this poses a problem, since the targets of abuse, the Eleusinian initiates themselves, were presumably both men and women. As we shall see, determining the precise gender of who abuses whom in rites of this sort is crucial to understanding their larger implications. Except for the scholion just noted, what this evidence does not tell us is whether the initiates were allowed in any way to return the abuse of the γεφυρισταί ‘abusers on the bridge’. We might take our clue from Iambe or Baubo’s joking with Demeter: in the Homeric Hymn the goddess is amused but does not return the joking. If this one-way pattern of joking is a feature of the Eleusinian rites, it is not as common as other rites involving mutual insult.

Other Demeter festivals and related rites show similar patterns, except that the abusive speech occurs primarily between women. In the Thesmophoria, for example, during which both Demeter and Dionysus are celebrated, a comparable kind of αἰσχρολογία takes place and the emphasis is placed on its exclusively female orientation. According to a late and often-cited scholion on Lucian, there was a certain rite among the women that was introduced from the women at Eleusis (Scholion ad Lucian, Dialogues on Courtesans 7.4.13–20 Rabe p. 280): Beyond the general characterization of the jokes and speech as shameful or indecent, we are further told that the priestesses secretly whisper matters of an illicit, sexual nature, suggesting that the joking generally has this character. Both the secretive element and the sexual nature of the joking may have parallels at Eleusis. [8] However, unlike the Eleusinian initiates on the Cephisus bridge, we now see that the joking at the Thesmophoria is mutual between the women celebrating the rites. On the whole, other evidence for the Thesmophoria supports the conclusion that women target women with their humor. [9]

The exclusivity of ridicule between women can be paralleled from other Demeter rites even when men are involved. Both the Epidaurians and the Aeginetans honored their local variants of Demeter and Kore, Damia and Auxesia, with choruses performed in honor of the goddesses and their images. The amusing saga of how the olive-wood images of Damia and Auxesia were fashioned by the Epidaurians and then later stolen by the Aeginetans, who revolted from them, need not concern us in detail here. But according to Herodotus, the Aeginetans had stolen the images and (5.83.3): We explored the meaning of κέρτομος and related terms in Part II. Here we need only mention that these women’s choruses must involve some kind of incitement to ridicule (perhaps also between the choruses themselves?), where there is an expectation of provocation. The more significant point is that these women’s choruses explicitly aim their jokes at other women within the community, not men. As in the Thesmophoric rites, once again we are dealing with an exclusively female audience for the humor. [10]

Several other festivals and processions ought not to be left out of consideration here, since they too deal with the celebration of Demeter or Dionysus and involve abusive speech. The festival of Haloa, for example, is compared to the Thesmophoria with respect to the ridicule that takes place between the women. [11] The celebration of Demeter Mysia in Arcadia is said to have incorporated laughter (γέλως) and jokes (σκώμματα). [12] At the Athenian festival of Stenia, both joking (σκώπτειν) and offensive ridicule (λοιδορεῖν) took place; interestingly, in Hesychius these terms are mentioned as if they were interchangeable and yet, as we have seen, at an earlier time the action of λοιδορεῖν unlike σκώπτειν was considered provocative enough to cause fighting or even death. [13] Further evidence for the Stenia emphasizes the mutual nature of the ridicule between the women. [14] And during phallophoric processions in honor of Dionysus, the processants jeered at (τωθάζειν) whomever they wanted from among the onlookers. [15]

Although we have noted several points of contact between these traditions, the differences are equally striking. First, only the rites of Damia and Auxesia celebrated by the Epidaurians and the Aeginetans incorporate abuse through the performance of (choral) poetry. This tradition must stand apart from the other spoken forms of abuse because it suggests, for one thing, that the degree of spontaneity and improvisation were probably less than what we find elsewhere. The jokes, for example, would have been composed beforehand in choral lyrics. These jokes denounced the local women but were meant to propitiate the images of Damia and Auxesia. We do not know whether the goddesses were included in the joking, but I think it plausible that the embarrassment of the local women was used as a measure of the choruses’ success.

The question of whether the joking in these festivals and rites is mutual or one-sided is also vital to understanding them. Iambe’s mockery of Demeter in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter and the testimony that we have for the γεφυρισταί suggest strongly that only one party is joking, while the mythical Demeter on the one hand and the Eleusinian initiates on the other are merely the recipients of the abuse. Since this evidence is closely related etymologically to the archaic Greek traditions of ἴαμβος, [16] it is worth stressing that one of the fundamental features of the iambic tradition is that it is conventional for the recipient of the abuse to be silent. [17] This could not be more different from the evidence for the Thesmophoria, which explicitly notes that the joking is mutual between the women involved. Of all the evidence considered, the mockery at the Thesmophoria, and possibly at Eleusis, most resembles the capping phenomena that we have examined in this study, except for the fundamental difference that it does not involve poetry.

After sifting the testimonia in this way, what emerges is a less than satisfactory picture of how any of this ritual joking actually worked. Clearly there are important differences in the “rules” for the joking and abuse involved in these festivals and rites. Some, for example, sanction the ridicule of men and women while others expressly involve only women. Some involve mutual joking, others do not. Nor is it easy to discern the relationship between joking of this type and what we have surveyed in this study. If we knew that the mutual mockery, for example, at the Thesmophoria involved capping, with the women besting one another through their jokes as they head toward some final resolution of a “winner,” we would have a sound basis for comparison. And while the emphasis on the mutual nature of the joking there may point in this direction, it distorts both types of gaming to conclude that it definitely does so.

Finally, as an ancient point of comparison we might think of the place fescennini verses held in Rome. These ribald and mocking verses were employed at weddings, triumphs, and harvest festivals, as well as by emperors seeking to satirize their enemies. [18] We gain no ground by positing a “ritual” origin for abusive verses employed in such a wide variety of social contexts. A basic verse-contest format is conducive to many social modalities because it is fundamentally a multilayered medium. Moreover, the search for origins cannot account for the variety of historically-attested forms of abusive speech and capping, especially as they were adapted to different performance contexts and poetic genres.