Ambiguity in Cleon’s Discourse on Mytilene: Between Historiography and the Attic Comedy
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17851/1983-3636.13.1.253-278Keywords:
Cleon, historiography, Attic ComedyAbstract
This brief study intends to compare the image of Cleon drawn by Thucydides at the beginning of his discourse on the battle of Mytilene (3. 37-39) with some selected comic testimonies that deal with the same character by Aristophanes and other Old Comedy poets, such as Eupolis, Hermippus and Plato Comicus. I will analyze this thucydidean version of the discourse of Cleon, emphasizing the use of certain concepts that are more directly applied to rhetorical vocabulary but that find striking parallels with the vocabulary commonly used in Attic comedy, and especially in parabatic discourse, with a more authorial tone. I intend, above all, to establish a contrast between the general description of Cleon as a demagogue both in historiography and in comedy and the ambiguous concepts that appear in his discourse, in which he criticizes his opponents as so-called intellectuals through the use of a series of adjectives such as σοφός, δεξιός, λεπτός, συνετός. These concepts are found in profusion also in comedy, and with the same peculiar polysemy. Therefore, a comparison of their uses in the two different genres in which they appear in abundance can be well delineated if one takes the figure and the discourse of Cleon in Thucydides as the guiding thread of a research, as I intend to do in this paper.
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