Wings or Armor? Costume, Metaphor, and the Limits of Utopia in Aristophanes’s Birds

Abstract

Abstract What does Peisthetairos give the Rebellious Youth, the first of three intruders in search of wings? The interpretation of Birds 1360–69 has divided commentators since antiquity: does the youth receive wings to be viewed as weapons or weapons to be viewed as wings? On the basis of internal textual evidence and intertextual allusions, I argue for the latter option: instead of the requested bird apparatus, Peisthetairos offers military equipment. This is not a trivial question affecting exclusively, or even primarily, staging. On the contrary, the answer we provide is significant for the play as a whole: it has to do with the reflection, so central in Birds, on the ontological status of the comic utopia; hence, on the relationship between language and reality.