Prostitution and Panhellenism in Aristophanes’ Peace

Abstract

Abstract While most contributions to this volume look at the religious life of actual objects, the present chapter examines religious life from the opposite perspective, the concretization of one institution of religious practice in ancient Greece, festival attendance, in the specific genre of Old Comedy. In his comedy Peace (421 BCE), Aristophanes represents the graphic sexual objectification of Theôria (Festival), one of two personified attendants accompanying the goddess Peace, whose return initiates a new golden age in Greece. By implicitly characterizing Theôria as a prostitute, i.e., as an occasional, sexually available, and fungible object for the enjoyment of festival attendees, the comedy reestablishes the subjectivity of a nominally male Athenian audience whose opportunities to enjoy publicly funded and culturally affirmative religious festivals were radically curtailed by a decade of brutal war. With an embodied Theôria, Aristophanes evokes for his audience the longed-for pleasures of the festival circuit now made permanent in the glorious postwar utopia provided by divine Peace.