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Page 1 of 2

Play and Aesthetics in Ancient Greece
  • Stephen E. Kidd
  • Published online:
    09 May 2019
    Print publication:
    09 May 2019
  • What is art's relationship to play? Those interested in this question tend to look to modern philosophy for answers, but, as this book shows, the question was already debated in antiquity by luminaries like Plato and Aristotle. Over the course of eight chapters, this book contextualizes those debates, and demonstrates their significance for theoretical problems today. Topics include the ancient child psychology at the root of the ancient Greek word for 'play' (paidia), the numerous toys that have survived from antiquity, and the meaning of play's conceptual opposite, the 'serious' (spoudaios). What emerges is a concept of play markedly different from the one we have inherited from modernity. Play is not a certain set of activities which unleashes a certain feeling of pleasure; it is rather a certain feeling of pleasure that unleashes the activities we think of as 'play'. As such, it offers a new set of theoretical challenges.

  • Chapter 4 - What Do Pleasure-Objects Do? An Inquiry into Toys

  • Stephen E. Kidd, Brown University, Rhode Island
  • Book:
    Play and Aesthetics in Ancient Greece
    Published online:
    09 May 2019
    Print publication:
    09 May 2019, pp 97-121

  • Summary

    If play can make anything into a pleasure object, what role is left for the objects themselves, whether they be toys or traditional objects of art? This chapter studies the concrete realia of ancient play—the knucklebones, dolls, dice, yo-yos, wind-up toys, and so forth—via both literary and archaeological evidence. The fact that the Greek words for “toy”—athurma and paignion—regularly denote jewelry, baubles, trinkets, and other such sparkling items lends support to the overarching thesis of this book: just as the verb paizō can denote “delight”, under which the English “play” might be thought of as a subcategory, so too paignia chiefly denotes “pleasure objects”, under which the English “toys” can be thought of as a subcategory. But this poses problems even while it lends support. Considering that play is typically omnivorous—a player can play with anything (sticks, rocks, potsherds)—what is the nature of this more limited set of objects, namely “toys”? If the pleasures of play are self-emanating, how do these special objects come to be recognized as more pleasurable than everyday objects, as if they themselves were the sources of pleasure?

  • Introduction

  • Stephen E. Kidd, Brown University, Rhode Island
  • Book:
    Play and Aesthetics in Ancient Greece
    Published online:
    09 May 2019
    Print publication:
    09 May 2019, pp 1-19

  • Summary

    Explores the differences between English "play" and Greek paidia, focusing especially on passages in which Greek paidia seems to imply an emotion, feeling, or mood (Hippocrates' Sacred Disease, depictions of personified Paidia on vases, etc.). Argues that this meaning of paidia is consequential for questions of aesthetics because play is regularly associated with singing, dancing, and music, and because Plato uses "play" as a category covering what we today think of as the "arts" (e.g. painting, sculpture, theater, music, dance, etc.). The eight chapters of the book are then overviewed. At the end, the concept of play (paidia) is disentangled from that of mimesis.

  • Conclusions: Toward a Pleasure-Model of Play

  • Stephen E. Kidd, Brown University, Rhode Island
  • Book:
    Play and Aesthetics in Ancient Greece
    Published online:
    09 May 2019
    Print publication:
    09 May 2019, pp 204-212

  • Summary

    Considers how the Greek notion of paidia might help resolve some knotty problems that often arise in modern theorizing about play. Play is often described as accompanied by pleasure or giving rise to pleasure, while, at other times, pleasure is hardly mentioned at all. The Greek notions of paidia suggest an alternative, that play is a manifestation of pleasure itself, and for this reason there can be no moment during play without pleasure, since pleasure is its defining feature. Putting paidia into dialogue with modern play theorists such as Huizinga, Caillois, Gadamer, and others, I consider both the strengths and weaknesses of such a pleasure model of play.

  • Chapter 6 - Play vs. Mimesis in Aristotle’s Aesthetics

  • Stephen E. Kidd, Brown University, Rhode Island
  • Book:
    Play and Aesthetics in Ancient Greece
    Published online:
    09 May 2019
    Print publication:
    09 May 2019, pp 143-161

  • Summary

    Aristotle’s demotion of play explains why play can claim only a marginal space in Aristotle’s aesthetic thought. If Aristotle were to identify the pleasures of art with the pleasures of play, art too would be dragged down into the realms of the frivolous. For this reason, he must find another explanation for art’s pleasures. Scholars may dispute the significance of mimesis for Aristotle’s ideas about art, but the key point focused on in this chapter is his notion of mimetic “learning”. If it is possible to “learn” from any sort of mimesis—not just paintings and sculptures but maps and medical models—and that “learning” is the source of mimetic pleasure, what separates these non-artistic mimēseis (maps, medical models) from the artistic ones (paintings, sculptures)? There is no easy way for Aristotle to make this distinction, and this may help to explain why Plato, who also recognized the intrinisic pleasures of learning, sought another pleasure source. As if lending support to Plato’s later views on play, those scholars who wish to make mimesis the centerpiece of Aristotle’s aesthetics often have a way of smuggling play back into the discussion.

  • Chapter 3 - Plato’s Play and the Tragic Paradox

  • Stephen E. Kidd, Brown University, Rhode Island
  • Book:
    Play and Aesthetics in Ancient Greece
    Published online:
    09 May 2019
    Print publication:
    09 May 2019, pp 74-96

  • Summary

    Explores the significance of Plato’s ideas about play in terms of the so-called tragic paradox, which asks, roughly: why do we enjoy watching suffering on the tragic stage, but become upset when we see actual suffering in everyday life? Plato has trouble with this problem in the Republic, in which he attempts to distinguish actual grief from the grief felt in the theater, but he approaches the problem from a new angle later in the Philebus. Here he distinguishes the negative feelings we feel when we wish someone ill in real life—the emotion is phthonos, often translated as "malice" or "envy"—and the form this emotion takes when we watch a comedy. Although phthonos seems to be present when we watch a comedy—we want the character to slip on the banana peel, we want the character to fall down the stairs—it is somehow mixed with enjoyment, and he calls this mixture “playful phthonos” (paidikos phthonos). In the theater, the reason why the spectators enjoy the spectacle of suffering is not that there is something inherently pleasurable in seeing someone suffer but because the spectators are sitting there “playing” along with the actors, and this play is pleasurable.

  • Chapter 5 - Aristotle’s Demotion of Play

  • Stephen E. Kidd, Brown University, Rhode Island
  • Book:
    Play and Aesthetics in Ancient Greece
    Published online:
    09 May 2019
    Print publication:
    09 May 2019, pp 122-142

  • Summary

    Considers Aristotle’s rejection of play in regard to his conception of the best life, or what he calls eudaimonia. Although the aesthetic questions are the main focus of this book, it must first be understood why Aristotle demotes play in the way he does, and he discusses these reasons elsewhere in his philosophy, especially in the Nicomachean Ethics and Politics. Remarkably, Aristotle, like Plato and others before him, treats the pleasures of play as self-emanating and intrinsically pleasurable. But, rather than conceiving this intrinsic pleasure as an overflow of pleasurable feeling, he reformulates play as a form of “relaxation” (anesis). Crucially, this removes any notion of goal-oriented action for play, and this is his coup de grâce for play, making it ultimately irrelevant for him in matters of real importance.

  • Chapter 2 - Why Plato Needs Play

  • Stephen E. Kidd, Brown University, Rhode Island
  • Book:
    Play and Aesthetics in Ancient Greece
    Published online:
    09 May 2019
    Print publication:
    09 May 2019, pp 49-73

  • Summary

    In three late works (Sophist, Statesman, and Laws), Plato establishes play as a new overarching category encompassing poetry, music, sculpture, painting, theater, and other forms of what we today categorize as “art”. What does Plato mean by “play” and how does this differ from his better-known conception of “mimesis”? Although moderns, especially since Darwin, tend to think of play as necessarily mimetic, Plato clearly disagrees: play, as he defines it, is that which is “for pleasure alone”, and mimesis occupies no place in his definition at all. By “pleasure alone” he seems to mean that, unlike eating, drinking, and sex, which are all processes accompanied by pleasure, play is “only” pleasure, “just” pleasure, much in line with the subjective pleasure models developed in Chapter 1. Plato is thus not simply reshuffling terms in this move from mimesis to play. The new concept allows him to achieve something which eluded him in the Republic: an explanation as to why mimetic works of art should be pleasurable at all.

  • Chapter 8 - The Value of Serious Things before and after Death

  • Stephen E. Kidd, Brown University, Rhode Island
  • Book:
    Play and Aesthetics in Ancient Greece
    Published online:
    09 May 2019
    Print publication:
    09 May 2019, pp 182-203

  • Summary

    To say that a certain play or painting is “serious” (spoudaios) art is often not the same thing as saying that tragedy is more “serious” than comedy. The former is an evaluation made from outside the act of play, the latter describes the goal-oriented or “serious” mode of engagement within the act of play. But what is the connection between these two senses of “serious”? It is argued that there is an unnoticed goal-oriented aspect that persists in the notion of “serious” even when it denotes “important”, “good”, or “of value”—and, further, that this temporal, goal-oriented structure underlies the very notion of value itself. To approach this idea, visions of the Greek afterlife as an eternity of play are considered, such as that of a lost threnos of Pindar, the underworld in Aristophanes’ Frogs, and numerous Greek burials containing board-games, dice, and other such playthings. What is “serious” in premortem life does not remain constant for a timeless, postmortem world. The reason for this is that, when “serious” is used as a term of evaluation, this evaluation is occurring under the assumption of a projected future full of implicit goals.

  • Chapter 7 - Serious Play as Goal-Oriented Play

  • Stephen E. Kidd, Brown University, Rhode Island
  • Book:
    Play and Aesthetics in Ancient Greece
    Published online:
    09 May 2019
    Print publication:
    09 May 2019, pp 162-181

  • Summary

    What does the word “serious” (spoudaios) mean and how exactly is it opposed to play (paidia)? If play is for immediate pleasure, and the serious defers that pleasure for the sake of longer-term goals, how is it possible for there to be something like “serious play”, a phenomenon so often remarked upon by play theorists and regularly attested in Greek? It is argued that serious play is "goal-oriented" play, but with significant qualifications regarding what a “goal” might mean for activities in which pleasure is available at each and every moment. Passages studied include Parysatis’ dice-game in Plutarch’s Life of Artaxerxes and Cyrus’ king-game in the first book of Herodotus’ Histories. These players are “serious” inasmuch as they are focused on the goals and rules of their game. As such, at the end, it is suggested that more- and less-serious play might be articulated in terms of tragedy and comedy: in tragic play, rules and goals persist, while in comic play they are erased and recreated with each passing fancy.

  • Chapter 1 - The Pais of Paizō: Children, Intoxication, and Play in Ancient Psycho-physiology

  • Stephen E. Kidd, Brown University, Rhode Island
  • Book:
    Play and Aesthetics in Ancient Greece
    Published online:
    09 May 2019
    Print publication:
    09 May 2019, pp 20-48

  • Summary

    It has become a truism that paizō means “to behave like a child” or perform “the spirit of childhood”, but what exactly does this mean? This chapter explores this childish mode of being as perceived by various authors, such as Diogenes of Apollonia, Plato, Aristotle, Chrysippus, and anonymous medical writers. From Homer onward, children are described as intellectually inferior to adults, and at least from the time of Heraclitus this intellectual inferiority is related to the decreased cognitive capabilities that adults experience during intoxication. But this cognitive incapacity has a positive flipside: for both children and intoxicated adults there is a physiological state of heightened pleasure. As Aristotle says, the young share the condition of the intoxicated as part of “their nature”. Deferral of pleasure for the sake of some longer-term goal—the act of reason par excellence—becomes impossible, and all that is functionally left for both groups is enjoyment and the acting out of that enjoyment. This heightened state of pleasure—one which motivates certain actions, but is not necessarily caused by those actions—offers the central clue about play’s physiological origins; after all, the verb that regularly charactizes the activities of both children and intoxicated adults is “play” (paizō).

  • ‘NONSENSE’ IN COMIC SCHOLIA*

  • Stephen E. Kidd
  • Journal:
    The Classical Quarterly / Volume 67 / Issue 2 / December 2017
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    26 July 2017, pp. 507-521
    Print publication:
    December 2017

  • In 1968 E.K. Borthwick, with a brilliant conjecture, cleared up a passage from Aristophanes’ Peace that had been considered ‘nonsense’ since antiquity. ‘Bell goldfinch’ (κώδων ἀκαλανθίς) the line seemed to be saying: a jumbled idea at best, gibberish at worst (1078). The scholium reads ad loc.: ταῦτα δὲ πάντα ἐπίτηδες ἀδιανοήτως ἔφρασεν, ‘all this is said as deliberate nonsense’, and later scholars generally follow suit (W.W. Merry, for example, in his 1900 edition of Peace refers to the line as ‘magnificent nonsense’). But Borthwick showed that this was not the case: ‘even nonsense expressions in Aristophanes’, he writes, ‘are not haphazard collocations of incongruous words signifying nothing’. What, then, to do with the ancient scholar (and those later ones) who failed to understand the passage, claiming it instead to be ‘nonsense’?

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