242

Eupolis

the Kotyto cult described by Aeschylus and Eupolis is anything more than an
imaginative confection of the exotic name of a goddess worshipped elsewhere
in Greece although not in Athens, and a set of common tropes regarding
the worship of mystery deities. See in general Schwenn 1922; Srebrny 1936;
Courtney 1980. 136-7; Jameson, Jordan and Kotansky 1993. 23-6.
Buttmann 1829 11.164 associated the action in Baptai with the charges of
profaning the Eleusinian Mysteries that drove Alcibiades into exile in 415
BCE, and Meineke 1839 1.120, Kock and Schiassi all argued explicitly that the
chorus were Alcibiades’ followers. As Storey 2003. 105 points out, we cannot
be certain that “Alcibiades” played a major role in Baptai, only that whatever
role he played was scathingly memorable; perhaps he merely appeared in an
abusive exemplary scene in the second half of the play, like e. g. Meton in the
second half of Aristophanes’ Birds. Even if “Alcibiades”—or a character who
served to represent Alcibiades, in the way that Marikas served to represent
Hyperbolos in Marikas—did have a major part in the action, moreover, there
is no ancient evidence to show that he was the chorus’ leader and thus their
advocate.138 Indeed, given that the only other known dramatic chorus made
up of exotic devotees of Kotyto is that in Aeschylus’ Edonians (cf. above),
it might just as well have been the case that “Alcibiades” opposed Kotyto’s
celebrants and ultimately got his come-uppance from them or their god, just
as Lycurgus apparently did in Aeschylus’ tragedy, and as Pentheus did under
similar circumstances in Euripides’ Bacchae a few years later.
As for alleged connections of the action in Baptai with the religious scan-
dals of 415 BCE, any play staged at the festivals that year would have to have
been approved by the relevant archon in mid-summer 416 BCE. Unless one is
willing to argue that Alcibiades’ activities were already well-known by then,
at least in certain circles, and that Eupolis conceived the idea of “outing” him
on the comic stage well before the public scandal broke—both difficult and
unlikely assumptions—this means that no comedy that made the scandals of
415 BCE its central dramatic focus could have been staged before the Lenaia of
414 BCE, by which time Alcibiades was long gone from the Athenian political
scene. Rather than forcing the historical and literary evidence together, there-
fore, it seems better to confess that we know neither exactly when Eupolis’
play was staged, nor what went on in it outside of a few small and sketchy
details (see below), nor what it had to say about Alcibiades except that it cast
him in a bad light.

138 Despite Furley 1996. 133, whose claim that “the play clearly satirized Alkibiades
for staging mock initiation ceremonies in a private setting” is merely an assertion
of a hypothesis with no actual evidence behind it.