Results and discussion

It appears, then, that the Aristophanic foreigner is no more primitive than many a foreigner in modern literature. The Scythian's bad Greek is sometimes understood as reflecting the ethnocentric attitude of the Greeks towards the barbarians. MacDowell (1995: 271) comments that ‘many Athenians probably thought patronizingly that a man must be stupid if he could not speak Greek properly’. While primary foreigner talk may be meant to facilitate the communication with non-native speakers, secondary foreigner talk in literature generally reflects a feeling of superiority of the author and his audience or readership (Hinnenkamp 1982: 172–85; cf. Valdman 1977: 127–8; Meisel 1977:

98).¹⁶³However, our comparison of ancient and modern material shows that the society of fifth-century Athens was not in this respect any different fromthe average modern society.

163 For an exception see Nichols (1980: 405).

Of course this is not to say that the basic image of the Scythian was not that of an uncultivated savage (Long 1986:

106–7; E. Hall 1989b: 52). All I want to stress is that the comic exploitation of linguistic shortcomings is not by itself a compelling argument. There may have been other images of ‘the Scythian’. Modern readers and listeners, too, can find the imitation of foreigners' speech funny without necessarily thinking that there is something intrinsically wrong with the foreigners' culture. In fact, for Herodotus (4.46) the Scythians are visualized as the quintessential ‘Other’ (Hartog 1988), but they are not counted among the ἔθνεα ἀμαθέστατα of the Black Sea region. Moreover, in the semimythical figure of Anacharsis classical Athens did have an alternative image of the Scythian as a potentially ‘wise’

savage—although the myth did not make Anacharsis a perfect speaker of Greek (cf. Kindstrand 1981: 7; Werner 1983:

594).

And yet, there is one linguistic point which does suggests that the Scythians were socioculturally disqualified. In fifth-century ideological discourse there was clearly a primary opposition between ‘Greek’ and ‘barbarian’ (E. Hall 1989a).

But did the Greeks really think of all barbarians as one indistinct mass? It is hard to imagine that anybody would have written a tragedy Scythians along the lines of Aeschylus' Persians, or that any Greek would have thought of learning Scythian and going into exile in Scythia, as Themistocles did in Persia (Thuc. 1.138.1–2). Support for a more differentiated view comes from Aristophanes' foreigner talk. According to Valdman (1981: 49), who discusses foreigner-talk variation in the French comic strips Tintin by Hergé and in Richard Adams's novel Watership Down, ‘the lower the status of a group of foreigners, the more stereotypic the foreigner talk used to portray their approximation to the target language’. Hence, if one barbarian is made to speak better Greek than another barbarian, the Greeks probably thought of himas more civilized and ‘closer’ to themselves. And indeed, Aristophanes' foreigners do not all speak with the same accent.

The Persian ambassador Pseudartabas utters only one sentence in broken Greek (Ach. 104):

οὐ λῆψι χρυσό, χαυνόπρωκτ᾽ ᾽Ιαοναυ

You not vill get goldo, you open-arsed Iaonian.

The iotacismin λήψει (with a wrong quantity) and the loss (or nasalization?) of final -ν in χρυσόν are reminiscent of the Scythian's Greek, but unlike the Scythian the Persian is able to pronounce aspirates and—more importantly—his sentence shows a good mastery of Greek morphology¹⁶⁴ and syntax, to say nothing of his impressive lexicon (χαυνόπρωκτος!). Furthermore, the Persian's higher position is reflected in the fact that he is allowed to say a sentence in his own language (Ach. 100–1):

(Ψε.) ιαρταμαν εξαρξαν απισονα σατρα.

(Πρ.) ξυνήκαθ᾽ ὃ λέγει; (Δι.) μὰ τὸν ᾽Απόλλω γ̓ὼ μὲν οὔ.

(Pseudartabas) Iartaman exarxa[n] apisona satra.

(Ambassador) Did you understand what he says?

(Dikaiopolis) By Apollo, I didn't.

It does not even matter whether the ambassador's sentence is actual Old Persian or not (although that, too, is a culturally important question and should not be brushed aside too lightly). What counts is that the Persian's utterance leads to a dramatic situation in which the Greeks have to struggle because they need to understand him. At that moment the linguistic power-relationship between the barbarian and his Greek interlocutors is inverted. The Scythian in Thesmophoriazusae, on the other hand, always remains linguistically inferior, however much physical power he may have over his Greek prisoner. Thus the level of intellectual and cultural foreignness correlates with the amount of linguistic proficiency.

To be sure, neither the Persian nor the Scythian is integrated into the Greek world of comedy. However, through their respective languages Aristophanes assigns themdifferent degrees of social acceptability. The anonymous (third-century?) author of the first ‘Letter of Anacharsis’ (Epistolographi Graeci, p. 102 Hercher = p. 37 Malherbe) complains, in the name of Anacharsis, that the Scythians are derided in Athens because of their imperfect command of Greek, whereas the Persians are taken seriously although their linguistic competence is equally poor. The situation which Pseudo-Anacharsis describes is exactly the same as that which we can infer from the linguistic analysis of

164 If αυ at the end of the line is not taken as a ‘vocative-ending’ but, with the scholiast (ὡς βάρβαρος δὲ τὸ αυ ἔfη, Δωρικὸν Jν ἀντὶ τοῦ ἑλληνιζομένου ‘being a barbarian he added the αυ, which is Doric rather than Common Greek’), as emphatic αὖ (as in some Laconian passages of Lysistrata : Colvin 1999: 234).

Aristophanes' foreigner talk. There could hardly be a better proof for the validity of sociocultural reconstructions on the basis of linguistic material.

5. CONCLUSION

The interpretation of language variation in comedy has revealed an implicational scale of identity and otherness in the Athenian imagination. The basic language of comedy seeks to be, against the conventions of ‘higher’ literature, a popular Athenian language in the narrowest sense. But by skilfully manipulating the linguistic form of a political discourse on war and peace in Acharnians and by transforming, in Lysistrata, the linguistic Other into a language of poetic tradition, Aristophanes endows Athens with a wider Greek identity which supports, rather than contradicts, the panhellenic vision of his plays. Beyond that identity, there is an outside world composed of foreign elements: all of themforeign in the sense of non-Greek, but some of themmore foreign, more ‘barbaric’, than others. Comedy—or at least Aristophanic comedy—does not attempt to integrate these elements, but hidden behind the clouds of condescending laughter there are the vague contours of a third and last Athenian identity: that of Athens as the centre of the entire civilized world.

Greek comedy is not just a literary genre. It is also a vast set of sociocultural attitudes encoded in language. To read the linguistic choices of comedy is a task for the linguist, the literary scholar, and the cultural historian alike.

7 Comic Elements in Tragic Language: The Case of