Adapting Aristophanes in Silicon Valley

“I do not despair because I no longer believe that politics encompasses all possible futures of our world. In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms — from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called ‘social democracy.’” — Peter Thiel (2009)

Have we entered an age of anti-politics? Consider the discontent of Peter Thiel, who echoes the arguments of Plato’s Socrates in The Republic — ironic, given Thiel’s professed disgust with totalitarianism. Thiel complains that democracy fails because it aggregates the views of those who simply do not, or cannot, think clearly about the proper goals of good government. Rather than some abstract Form of the Good, Thiel wants perfect economic freedom, freeing men like him entirely from the shackles of government. Such discontent is one of a thousand contemporary flavors, mirrored by the legislative nihilism of Freedom Caucus Republicans and by anti-globalization leftists like Russell Brand (who says he has never voted, and never will). Politics as it has been practiced since the turn of the last century seems to be broken, unresponsive, malformed.

How should we think about these criticisms, especially given the proposed alternatives? How can we frame them in a way that gets to the underlying issues, rather than the surface eddies of political life? In particular, how should we counter the utopian narratives spun by high-concept salesmen like Thiel? His solution is a total withdrawal (in the style of a John Galt) from the social contract, loading himself and his friends onto a series of artificial islands, adrift from the problem of politics. As with Plato, it seems, utopia beckons.

It is worth following this path further, however, since as much as the political utopia per se is a classical Greek invention, responses to it are as well. One possible response is found in Attic Comedy, which comes as close as we’re ever likely to get to the internal dialogue (mixing self-praise with self-criticism) of the world’s first major democracy: Athens. The members of Stanford Classics in Theater (SCIT) have found, through re-performance and adaptation, that Attic Comedy and Aristophanes in particular has given us a new perspective on these problems — even if that perspective is alternately perverse, carnivalesque, or simply baffling.

Aristophanes has always been hiding just below the surface of European political criticism — not serious enough for philosophy, nowhere near respectable enough for the well bred (Menander was much more popular, both in antiquity and up until relatively recently). Still, though subterranean, he wasn’t completely dismissed.

Niccolò Machiavelli is supposed to have adapted the Clouds as The Masks, replacing Socrates and Strepsiades with leading Florentine noblemen. It is a sign of the danger that such a work posed that he burned the manuscript, showing it only to his grandson, Giuliano de Ricci (who would later publish much of his grandfather’s work). Francis Wrangham, an English abolitionist, adapted the Wealth in 1792, titling it Reform: a Farce — featuring characters like John Bull and Thomas Paine. It is a strange work, equal parts political pamphlet and scholarly commentary on the ancient Greek text. The Wealth was also adapted in 1849 on the other side of the colonial divide by Dalpatram Dahyabhai, an Indian poet and social reformer. He called it Laxmi Natak, writing in Gujarati (which was unusual), interweaving themes of religion, identity, and moral philosophy.

Aristophanic adaptation was also common in American political satire in the 1960s and ’70s. Philip Roth’s 1971 novel Our Gang was written as a pseudo-Aristophanic comedy: the president, Tricky, spends his time stifling administration critics, assuring pro-life activists that no foetuses were inadvertently terminated in the My Lai massacre, and undergoing surgery to remove sweat glands on his upper lip (which are thought to have cost him the 1960 election).

Aristophanes’ work continues to be adapted for modern-day situations and conflicts. A 2013 production of the Birds put on in Moscow was described as a meditation on how to transform Power itself. It drew parallels between the city of the Birds and the Third Reich, along with the regime of Joseph Stalin (a conflation that, two or three years later, would be dangerous in its own right). And to see modern Aristophanic adaptation the reader has only to go to her local AMC: Chi-Raq, Spike Lee’s take on Lysistrata, is set in modern day Chicago (and was recently reviewed on Eidolon). The controversial movie has generated a heated exchange between Lee and Chance the Rapper, a Chicago native. Such adaptations abound and continue to abound. It seems that there is something in Aristophanes’ work that makes him not only worth translating — laboriously matching word for word and meaning for meaning — but also adapting, using him as a lens on modernity (whatever that modernity might be).

Enter SCIT. Stanford Classics in Theater (SCIT), a group of Stanford Classics graduate students, has translated, adapted, and performed an ancient comedy at Stanford every year since 2009 (with forays into San Francisco for ad hoc performances, such as at Humanities West, last year). Most of the time that play comes from Aristophanes—e.g. Acharnians, Wasps, Ecclesiazusae — though recent productions have also included Plautus’ Casina and Euripides’ Cyclops.

SCIT’s philosophy has always been that translation and adaptation go hand-in-hand. Our final scripts contain some sections that have stayed close to the original Greek and other sections that are more liberally adapted, replicating the sense and tone of the original where a line-by-line translation would not be appropriate. One of the major challenges of putting on Aristophanes is also a huge incentive for updating it: the thickness of Aristophanes’ political and sociological humor often simply goes over audiences’ heads. Stephen Leacock was right to complain about those who praised “the delicious sallies of [Aristophanes’] wit, sally after sally, each sally explained in a note calling it a sally.” After all, without knowing who Cleon was, the Paphlagonian of the Knights isn’t nearly as funny as Aristophanes meant him to be. Imagine an alien (of the intergalactic rather than immigrant variety) reading a joke about Donald Trump’s toupé — first he will need to know who Trump is.

The choral odes present a similar challenge. It would be futile to recreate complex choral meters strophe-for-strophe — the dense lyrics would seem irrelevant and incomprehensible to the audience. Instead, we have found it preferable to adapt the odes to the tune of modern pop songs. Some SCIT favorites include a Tea Party-themed “Mama Grizzlies” sung to the Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women,” James Madison rhyming to “Rapper’s Delight” in the Wasps, and a Nerdy ode to Beyonce in “Oh, My Twitter Birdies”. Our goal in adapting the chorus is to recreate the sense of spectacle, music, and dance in the comic choruses of Aristophanes as well as tapping into the modern tradition of musical parody popularized by the likes of Weird Al Yankovic. And in doing so, we have had to think about how the political and ethical issues of the comedy play out in a modern context.

Two things in particular have come to the fore in SCIT’s work. The first is Aristophanes’ focus on the venality and crudity of Athenian democracy. Democracy itself — occasionally anthropomorphized by Aristophanes — is a lazy, thoughtless figure with boundless appetites. This is most obvious in The Knights, where Democracy is literally feted by demagogues seeking his approval. Ordinary citizens are no better, often driven to extremes by base motive: consider Philocleon in The Wasps, a man as addicted to sitting on jury trials as though it were heroin.

It is a dirty, dirty business, democracy. Modern Americans consider such prurient phenomena — sex scandals, corruption, and so forth — to be incidental epiphenomena to our own democracy, an inevitable byproduct of human nature. Sometimes these morality tales occur at the very center of public life — think Clinton, Lewinsky, and the cigar (so easily adapted by Old Comedy actors outfitted with 14-inch prosthetic phalluses!). But these remain moral, rather than political, stories. Aristophanes’ — and thus SCIT’s — endgame is more fundamental, and posits these scandals as the churn of a deeper current driving democratic decision-making. Our politicians are essentially bad because we, the ordinary citizens who motivate them, are bad. Or, as they say in Silicon Valley — these perversions are features, not bugs, of Aristophanic democracy.

It is a dim view of democracy, not at all in keeping with the heroic narrative of the citizen-centered state that dominates modern democratic thought (ironically, the Founding Fathers were much more suspicious of democracy, and of Athens as its worst exemplum). Aristophanes engages with the nasty elements of democracy creatively (if not always constructively) and thoughtfully (if rarely prescriptively). Although Aristophanes makes democracy the problem, he does so in a way that — given the implied sodomy, flatulence, the neverending sex jokes — would never be permitted in a non-democratic setting.

In this suspicion, moreover, Aristophanes lines up with modern conservative anti-democrats like Thiel (or Leo Strauss, if we wish). But such criticism also comes prebaked with a series of antibodies against such demagoguery (or utopianism, as it often manifests itself). So a second major thread that Aristophanes pulls on, tied to his critique of democracy, is a warning over utopian promises, especially those delivered by smooth talking hucksters (whether they be digital prophets or the rhetors of 5th-century Athens).

SCIT’s adaptation choices have been heavily influenced by these charismatic characters. In 2010, for instance, we put on a version of The Clouds set in the modern university and which dwelled on the social role of the academic. We played with the idea of Socrates as an ideas man and think tank guru — someone who helped the wealthy evade their debts through intellectual smoke and mirrors (unsuccessfully, as it turned out — but it was a resonant point to make just two years after the start of the recession). Hardly utopian fantasy, but Socrates stood in for a utopian type, whose best expression came in his student, Plato.

Such figures were common in the period when Aristophanes wrote. Especially in the midst of the Peloponnesian War — a fierce conflict that unsettled many norms Athenians had taken for granted — radical thought emerged that challenged traditional political models, promising something new and better. In this environment, a man like Critias — an aristocratic fop who wrote tragedies about Sisyphus and books on Spartan furniture — could not only promise, but carry out a radical social program to Laconize Athens after the war (i.e. driving the poor out of the city to work the fields of the rich like Spartan helots). To Critias, Sparta was the ideal. To Plato, it was something altogether stranger and more abstract. We can only speculate that Aristophanes would have dismissed both.

And here we come back to Peter Thiel’s libertarian vision. He wants a tech utopia, but hard questions intervene: who will govern, and how? What concept of distributive justice will underlie it? And to what extent will it simply exist as a parasite-community on traditional government and politics (Thiel has already conceded it may be desirable to move such a colony into the jurisdiction of the United States)? We have been mulling these questions over in the process of translating and staging this year’s play, an adaptation of The Birds.

The original play focused on a pair of Athenians — Pisthetaerus (Trusty-Friend) and Euelpides (Well-Wisher) — fleeing the democracy of Athens to start a new city of their own. Having secured the cooperation of an unconventional ally, the birds of the world, they set out to build a huge city in the sky — positioned between earth and the heavens — that might catch the sacrificial smoke meant for the gods in Olympus. This is a geopolitical power play, of course, and the two humans manage to set themselves up as cosmic tyrants. The birds who provided the manpower seem to be well rewarded, though there occasionally intrudes a hint of something sinister: asked by a divine guest about the meat being served at his table, Pisthetaerus answers that it is the flesh of disloyal fowl. Is the new city any better than the old?

The parallels to digital utopianism were too tempting, and the echoes of other fictional schemes too strong, to pass up — although we considered, among others, Ayn Rand’s Galtian city, and Jonathan Swift’s Laputa (literally a city in the sky). Our version of The Birds, bringing Pisthetaerus et al. to 21st-century California, became The Nerds. The dissident Athenians became enterprising digital prophets (Pete Endeavour and Dick Gaugetté), and the birds of Aristophanes — naive and indispensable — became a legion of geeks who help them build their digital Xanadu. They too force politicians and traditional power brokers to surrender their power. Their “disruption” is as radical as the birds’. And they too produce a state that, while more effective and more agile, looks quite conventional, if no longer democratic: the birds, Olympian gods, and presumably lowly humans are left, in the end, with an unelected, charismatic monarch who merely takes over the kingship of Zeus. The Nerds meanwhile, trade the inefficient but elected government of Obama for the digital dictatorship of Gaugette.

The comparison is easy to dismiss, of course: Elon Musk has no nefarious plan to subvert the American government, and Sergey Brin isn’t out to become a tyrant. Both sell products that people are free to buy, or not. In theory. But, thoughtful people have long been arguing that the automatic link between tech and democracy is a fantasy. A recent Foreign Policy article offered a series of reasons for such suspicion, that are broadly liberal and capitalist-oriented. Larry Diamond’s was particularly relevant to our point, and can be summarized in his chosen sub-title: “Autocrats Know How to Use Tech, Too”. Who those autocrats are can be a matter of fluid uncertainty. More radical critiques proliferate on the left, sometimes abstract, and sometimes concrete, as in the case of the gentrification of the art-festival Burning Man.

We at SCIT hope that, by showing that such problems exist as part of a longer tradition, by showing that such utopianism has had a long and problematic allure for democratic audiences, we can offer — not answers, since Aristophanes isn’t very forthcoming in this respect — at least a perspective that destabilizes our familiarity with these problems. Sometimes we forget that our own democratic dilemmas have occurred before, and remembering can be clarifying.

Just as SCIT is a collaborative production, so too is this article. Special thanks goes to Sienna Kang, Ted Kelting, Kate Kreindler, Carolyn MacDonald, Alyson Melzer, Stephen Sansom, Alan Sheppard, Lizzy Ten-Hove, Scott Weiss, and especially to Mark Pyzyk, whose efforts produced much that is best of this article.

For more SCIT, 1) see a re-performance of the Nerds on January 6th at the meeting of the Society for Classical Studies (in conjuction with the Committee for Ancient and Modern Performance), 2) visit our website, and 3) stay tuned for the next play, an agonistic staging of select fragments from Eupolis, Cratinus, and (yes, more) Aristophanes!

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the views of the Paideia Institute.