Δήμοι (Introduction)

301

city seems an obvious conclusion, even if we risk being misled here by taking
implicitly into account the argument of Aristophanes’ superficially similar
(and fully preserved) Frogs. But to rescue Athens from what?—popular mis-
government? demagogic tyranny? incompetent military leadership? general
moral and social corruption? or a toxic brew of two or more of the above?
Nor do we know whether the rescuers turned out to be uniformly well-chosen
(perhaps Solon and Aristides were precisely the tonic contemporary Athens
needed, for example, whereas Miltiades and Pericles were not) or the extent to
which Pyronides’ mission ultimately raised as many questions as it answered
(like Peisetairos’ capture of the tyranny of Cloudcuckooland and seemingly
of the entire universe at the end of Aristophanes’ Birds in 414 BCE). If Demoi
was staged in early 412 BCE (see below, Date), at any rate, it must have been
conceived before mid-summer of the previous year, since poets presented
proposals at that point to the relevant incoming archons in the hope of being
awarded a chorus (cf. [Arist.] Ath. 56.3; Cratin. fr. 17). Although Eupolis’ play
was accordingly performed after news of the final disaster in Sicily reached
Athens late that summer and ten probouloi were appointed to run the city as
part of a package of emergency measures (Th. 8.1.3), the general outline of the
plot must have been not a reaction to those events but an anticipation of them.
It is thus all the more striking that Pyronides’s response to what appears to be
presented at fr. 99.45-8 as a moment of enormous social and political need is to
recruit a group of old and widely respected (even if dead) Athenians to guide
the state, punish wrongdoers (cf. fr. 99.104-5, 112, 114-17) and propose and
dissolve legislation (test. v). Part of Storey’s argument against seeing an echo
of the witch-hunt that followed the supposed defamation of the Mysteries in
415 BCE in fr. 99.78-120, esp. 81-90, is that “we assume too readily the ear-
nestness of Eupolis ... We do well to remember that [late 5th-century comedy]
was essentially fun and games, intended to make people laugh and to win the
prize”.189 The final point in particular is far from self-evident, for the most basic
means by which a poet attracted votes from the judges seems in fact to have
been to recognize what some significant portion of the audience was thinking
in regard to an important public matter and to put an outrageous and amusing
spin on those longings or opinions.190 More specifically put, the basic plot of
Demoi suggests that the idea of an emergency board of venerable older men
chosen to serve as πρόβουλοι, although abruptly presented by Thucydides

189 Storey 2003. 114.
190 The classic statement of the thesis is Henderson 1992. For the history of the discus-
sion of the political aspects of late 5th-century Athenian comedy and the genre’s
relationship to its public, see Olson 2010a (with extensive bibliography).