Background of the activity

At the end of one of the earliest iterations of my intermediate-level course on ancient Greek economics, I asked my students to reflect on the course and think about how they would teach the material – What would they prioritise? What primary sources would they use? One woman raised her hand and said, ‘I’d use more comedies. I found several quotes in my final paper research, and we didn’t talk about them that much’. She was right. In my prioritisation of legal speeches, epigraphy, archaeology, numismatics, and modern theoretical models, I had overlooked one of the main tools in the classicist’s toolbox.

Comedy is a gateway into understanding daily life of the modern day, just as much as of ancient cultures. Aristophanes in particular used current events to contextualise the narrative of his plays, creating a familiar world for the audience and engaging in a form of ancient observational humour, as well as political critique. However, because his humour (and truly all humour) is situated within very specific socio-political moments, students can struggle to ‘find the funny’. The mores of the modern world differ so vastly from ancient Athens that it interferes with the comedic experience. As Thomas has argued, ‘…how we experience comedy impacts on our confidence and attitudes towards present comedic experiences. Comedy that conflicts with our personal values and life experience will not be enjoyed’ (Thomas Reference Thomas, Brewer and Hogarth2015, p. 257). Reading about little girls sold essentially into slavery as ‘piglets’ to be the butt of sexual jokes to avoid starvation (as happens in Acharnians, 729–781) is unlikely to find a receptive audience in the twenty-first-century classroom. Additionally, reading a transcription of an ancient performance in translation, often crammed into the night before class, is not the way to enhance the comedic experience.

Due to these barriers between ancient text and modern audience, I have found that reading the entirety of most Aristophanic comedies (Lysistrata perhaps being an exception) in an introductory class can be an exercise in frustration for myself, as well as the students. I have heard complaints from students that range from ‘there are too many names’ and ‘the names are hard to remember’ to ‘that is not funny’ and ‘this is clearly a reference to something, but I don’t know what’. Introductory-level students quickly become overwhelmed and reach a form of cognitive overload. Moreover, the expectation that the play will be funny, as a comedy is assumed to be, can intensify student dissatisfaction when their comedic expectations are not met. Without the time and focus to develop a more complete understanding of the ancient comedic genre and atmosphere of the plays, my attempts at in-class activities on comedies have often felt rushed or, in my opinion, fell flat in their execution.

Much like the ‘banking model’ of teaching (a top-down hierarchical explanation of information that depends heavily on experts imbuing students with knowledge; Freire 1970 [Reference Friere2005], pp. 71–86), I have found myself explaining to the students what is happening and why it is funny. This does not result in much amusement at the characters’ antics. Recognising the limits of this pedagogical method, I was left searching for a way through which I could activate students’ own comedic appreciation and apply it to ancient texts. Breaking down a whole text was too much; thus, I decided that instead we should focus on just a few lines and go into depth to understand their meaning, their implications, and their absurdity. I designed this activity to open the door to ancient comedy and invited interested students to read more deeply, but without losing the larger focus of the course. Students are encouraged to read comedy to complete other assignments, but I limit the amount of assigned reading outside of class.

Where Aristophanes becomes exceptionally useful in the classroom is in his employment of recognisable institutions (the laws, rules, and formal organisation) of everyday Athens as a basis for his humorous worldbuilding. Ideally, students would be able to identify rules and regulation in the marketplace of Dicaeopolis, then extrapolate the real institutions underpinning the comedic description. Once they have worked backwards to understand the real institution, comparison between the real world and the play would allow them to appreciate the comedic absurdity introduced by the playwright. As MacDowell argues:

knowledge of Athenian law can help us to understand individual lines of Aristophanes, and study of Aristophanes can give us information about points of Athenian law…when Aristophanes mentions a feature of legal proceedings, perhaps to make a joke about it, clearly we shall not see the point of the reference or the joke unless we understand what the legal feature is (MacDowell Reference MacDowell, Harris, Leão and Rhodes2010, pp. 147–148).

Through close reading of short selections of ancient comedies, students could not only gain an appreciation for the humour and social experience of the ancient world, but also for the rules and regulations engrained in day-to-day life.

However, excavating these legal features can be difficult for the introductory student who has little background knowledge of the minutiae of Greek legal and economic systems. This activity addresses these difficulties directly, by approaching a very limited selection of text with modern parallels. Students do not start by reading the text and working backwards to understanding. Rather, they put themselves into a space to understand the world Aristophanes has built, particularly where it intersects their own experiences.

Classroom activity overview

This multi-stage classroom exercise took place over the course of two 50-minute lecture periods, though it could be configured differently, condensed, or lengthened, depending on course need.

As a warmup, I broke the students into groups of four (or so) and asked them to describe a variety of commercial spaces.

• What is a store?

• What is a mall?

• What is a garage sale?

• How do these commercial spaces differ from one another?

• How do you differentiate between them?

Then, I provided a series of follow-up questions to deepen their definitions and address aspects they may have overlooked.

• How did you describe the spaces physically (construction, lay out, etc.)?

• Can or do they all occur in the same geographical locations?

• How are they regulated and managed?

• Are there any other activities happening in those locations that give them more cultural meaning or context?

Finally, they put their definitions to the test against a fourth commercial space.

• Is a market stall, or a series of market stalls, more like a store or a mall or a garage sale or does a market stall exist in a category of its own?

• In comparing definitions of these commercial spaces, what other attributes are you considering in finding similarities or differences?

• How did you come to your conclusion? Did all members of the group agree?

For the second phase of the activity, to bridge the connection between comedy and commercial space, I next shared two memes, one making a pun (Figure 1) and one for them to analyse (Figure 2). Upon presentation, students usually chuckle a bit (usually humouring the professor) and then I ask them to identify as many different layers of meaning in the second meme as possible. They needed to breakdown every aspect of the phrase ‘America’s version of a walkable city center’, in terms of the social and economic layers that produce the humorous aspect.

Figure 1.

Mall pun meme.

Figure 1 Long description

The image shows the interior of a modern shopping mall with two levels. The upper level features a glass railing, potted plants, and various storefronts with bright lighting. The lower level shows more stores, shoppers walking around, and a central area with seating. The caption reads, 'If you've seen one shopping center, then you've seen the mall,' highlighting a humorous observation about the similarity of shopping centers.

Figure 2.

America’s version of a walkable city center.

Figure 2 Long description

The image captures a busy indoor shopping mall, which serves as America's version of a walkable city center. The mall features multiple levels connected by escalators and walkways. Numerous people are seen walking, shopping, and dining. The upper level is lined with various stores, including a large electronics store and a jewelry store. The lower level has a seating area where people are dining at tables. The mall is well-lit, with large windows and decorative elements such as plants and hanging ornaments.

Asking someone to explain why something is funny not only ‘ruins the joke’, but also can be quite difficult for students to accomplish (McDermott Reference McDermott2018, pp. 340–341). Fear of social criticism hinders engagement with the material. To address this barrier, students were asked to engage with very low-stakes material – a bland meme about an old-fashioned commercial space – and activate their own perceptions of American culture and humour. This reduces student risk of censure from their peers, as the activity lacks the more charged material of most observational humour.

Once the students had discussed in smaller groups, we came back together for a whole class discussion, which often ended with observations about ‘mall culture’ and the shift away from commercial malls as centres of retail activity. Students often drew upon knowledge from other forms of media – specifically movies and television – in which malls played a larger role to supplement their own experiences. ‘Mall culture’ in the twentieth century often provided social and economic space for people of many ages. However, unlike the agora or a town square, malls are privatised spaces. As such, they can lack, or sometimes intentionally limit (see, for example, the 1972 case Lloyd Corporation v. Tanner), the political and religious aspects of earlier public spaces (Scharoun Reference Scharoun2012, pp. 88–96). As such, we problematise in our discussion the oppositional expectations of economic efficiency versus the full array of the social–communal experience.

Moving into the crux of the lesson, I introduced Aristophanes’ Acharnians and the nature of Greek comedy. The students were assigned to read a selection from the introduction of S. Douglas Olsen’s commentary to support the historical framing in the class lecture, but they had not read the play. Acharnians is a difficult comedy for students, as it ranges wildly in topic, makes the many contemporary political references so common in Aristophanes, and is full of crude sexual and bodily humour. Especially in an introductory course, the informational gap between ancient audience awareness and the modern student creates a nearly insurmountable breakdown in the jokes (O’Shannon 2014 [Reference O’Shannon, Miller and Wrenn2012], pp. 2–20). To combat this breakdown and to restrain the length of the activity, I have students focus on a selection from the text, lines 719–728, which they read and discuss in class.Footnote ¹

After reading the selection, I ask the students to visualise the marketspace. What actions are on-going? Who is included and excluded? How are the space and the commercial activities regulated? What socio-political activities are taken (or not) in Dicaeopolis’ agora compared with the Athenian agora which makes up the centre of the city? These questions allow us to discuss the impact of the Peloponnesian War on the market economy (due to Dicaeopolis’ insistence on including Spartans, Megarians, and Boeotians), and in more detail, the institutional expectations of the agora which have been replicated by Dicaeopolis, even though his market is essentially a private, not public, space. The discussions have largely ranged freely – with students making comparisons with the malls and market stalls we recently discussed, as well as identifying the role that interstate decisions, such as the Megarian Decree, likely played in creating the dire economic straits which forced Dicaepolis to establish his market in the first place (and reflects the real suffering of Athenians at the time).

Ultimately, I make sure to discuss two aspects that I find particularly relevant to a full understanding of the space and which often get lost in the wider discussion of the agora. First, the establishment of the boundaries of the agora, where the horoi delineate both the physical and legal limits of the agora (de Sainte Croix Reference de Sainte Croix1972, pp. 267–284; Whitehead Reference Whitehead2000, pp. 49 and 303; Bresson Reference Bresson2015, pp. 306–307). This inclusion is important, as Athenian law, according to Hypereides (3.4), states “ὁ μὲν τοίνυν ϵἷς νόμος κϵλϵύϵι ἀψϵυδϵῖν ἐν τῇ ἀγορᾷ (And one such law forbids lying in the agora).” If the Athenian government wished to prevent lying in a certain space, they would need to mark out the boundaries of that space, hence the horoi. But why forbid lying in the agora? Why not in temples or the ekklesia or on the Pnyx? I ask the students to think about why lying might have been prevalent enough in the market to warrant legal regulation. I also ask them to think about the process of buying and selling – who has what information when it comes to transactions? Who knows the quality of various goods for sale? How does that affect someone’s ability to get a good deal or, at least, not be taken advantage of? Information asymmetry was a consummate and problematic part of the ancient market experience (Leese Reference Leese2021, pp. 137–40). The use of horoi, laws, and market regulators or agoranomoi (as Dicaeopolis mentions in line 724) limited abuses of that asymmetry.

I also ask the students – what does it mean that Dicaeopolis replicates this aspect of the public agora in such detail? Why might that add, not only to the realistic portrayal of his market, but also to the comedic effect of the play? Students quickly recognise not only that jokes are often based on recognisable realities of daily life, but also that regulation of the marketspace is expected – both by Dicaeopolis and the play’s audience. Aristophanes uses this realistically grounded expectation to push into the comedic absurdism that imbues leather whips with sentience. I have the students try to imagine what Dicaeopolis’ agoranomoi looked like – whips without a handler; leathery strips floating in midair that snap at people under their own power. Students usually agree that this is absurd but perhaps do not see it as funny. I try then to tie it back to the modern mall example and ask them, what would be a funny or absurd version of these whips in the regulation of the modern mall? How would Monty Python, the creators of The Simpsons, or Sacha Baron Cohen describe the scene? Usually, we come to a humorous understanding that this is an ancient form of a security guard’s empty uniform rushing after shoplifters, sine corpore, to enforce the mall’s rules.

The second aspect that I include in discussion leads us back to the multiple uses of the agora. The ‘stele upon which I made the treaty’, in line 727, is set up within Dicaeopolis’ market, once again mimicking the public memorialisation of diplomacy and personal achievement in the Athenian agora (i.e., Lambert Reference Lambert2007 and Stewart Reference Stewart2023). Dicaeopolis’ private treaty and private market fly in the face of the public nature of realistic diplomacy and commercial space in ancient Athens. Thus, I ask students to think back to our discussion of the private nature of malls and how that impacts their ability to function in lieu of town squares or other more traditional socio-commercial spaces. Comparing what they have already discussed to the situation outlined in these few lines of Aristophanes tended to lead them to identify the exclusion of Lamachus and the sycophants as unusual exclusions from the marketspace. Lamachus and the sycophants are locals; they are known to Dicaeopolis. Traditionally they would be part of the socio-economic interactions of the agora, even if Lamachus and Dicaeopolis were rivals of some sort, as is made clear in line 722. However, whilst more foreigners were able to do business in the play’s market, more Athenians were kept away by Dicaeopolis’ rules. Considering that the Athenian agora was often a space for democratic discussions and informal deliberations, students connected the role of the agora to the functioning of the Athenian socio-political system (or at least identified the disconnect between Dicaeopolis’ limited, and more purely economic, agora and the standard functioning of the real space).

To conclude the exercise, I asked for a written response. The prompt read, ‘In 200–300 words, explain one aspect of the Athenian agora that Dicaeopolis left out or overlooked in creating his own market space and how that adds to Aristophanes’ humour. Then, explain one aspect of the market or comedy that you’re unclear on for follow-up discussion in our next class (muddiest point)’. These written responses allowed me to check for clarity within the lesson but also created an opportunity for me to address common misconceptions before bringing the activity to an end.

Author biography

Anna Accettola is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Hamilton College. Her research focusses on inclusion and exclusion of non-Greek foreigners in Greek economic spaces in the Classical and Hellenistic periods. She also specialises in Nabataean history and identity.