Speaker: Donald Sells, University of Michigan
Donald Sells has published articles on Aristophanes and Old Comedy, focusing the intersection of comic theater with the Athenian economy and politics. His book Parody, Politics, and the Populace in Greek Old Comedy, will be published later this year by Bloomsbury Academic.
This paper argues that the automatist utopia described in a fragment of the lost play Miners, by the late fifth-century comic poet Pherecrates, preserves an idealized utopian afterlife whose particular pleasures seek to redress the distinctive deprivations suffered by slaves in fifth-century B.C.E. Athenian mining concessions. Contrary to the assumptions of scholars since antiquity, Pherecrates’ luxurious underworld of gastronomic and alcoholic abundance is more than a hackneyed recycling of automatist tropes of late fifth-century comedy. This idealized utopian afterlife is imaginatively conceived by and for mine slaves with the aim of comically redressing the distinctively awful and cruel deprivations they endured in the tunnels and work stations of Attica’s extensive mining regions. Now silent and sedentary symposiasts, these slaves enjoy limitless pleasures in eternal bliss and without a trace of the notorious compulsion or brutality characterizing ancient mining. Pherecrates’ play not only treats the automatist paradise in an original fashion, but also conceives it from the perspective of one of Athenian society’s most marginalized populations.