The Idler's Paradise in Attic Comedy

Abstract

This article is chiefly concerned with a well-known passage of that extraordinary miscellany, the Deipnosophistae of Athenaeus, in which the author follows his usual habit of illustrating a thesis by quoting from comedy. In the pages considered here (vi. 267e–270a) he draws his examples from a series of plays now lost—the Plutuses of Cratinus, the Beasts of Crates, the Amphictyons of Telecleides, the Miners and Persians attributed to Pherecrates, the Sirens of Nicophon, and the Thurio-Persians of Metagenes. This string of quotations, full of cookery-book vocabulary, constitutes our main evidence about the comic poets' treatment of the theme of the land of Cockaigne, Schlaraffenland, the idler's or glutton's paradise. On the basis of this evidence many sweeping generalizations on this subject have been made, some of them so wide of the mark that it may perhaps be worth while to attempt one more review of a passage already often discussed, in the hope of arriving at a fresh assessment of its true significance.Discussion of such a passage usually involves study of the extracts cited, and leads on to the hazardous business of trying to form some conception of the plays from which they are drawn. But before one follows this well-trodden path there is a more general question to be considered, the answer to which may give some guidance on the way. What is it that Athenaeus' quotations illustrate? The speaker in this part of the symposium, the philosopher Democritus of Nicomedia, has been discoursing about servants, and has already cited the Savages of Pherecrates to show that there was a time when people had no slaves, but did all their own work (263 b).