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Mark Janse: "What Women Want”: Speaking Names, Talking Birds and Other Obscure Obscenities in Aristophanes’ 'Lysistrata'

October 17, 1012
5:00 – 7:00 PM
 
Stanford Campus
Main Quad, Building 110, Room 112
 
Sponsored by the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation
 
Attic old comedy is riddled with obscenities, both explicit and implicit. Most of these have been identified since Antiquity and conveniently collected and analyzed in Jeffrey Henderson’s Maculate Muse (Oxford 1991). In his commentary on the Lysistrata (Oxford 1987), Henderson observes: “The Greeks’ great interest in the significance of words and enjoyment in revealing unexpected connections among them made them much more enthousiastic punsters than we are” This talk discusses a number of puns and double meanings that have gone unnoticed in the literature, with particular attention to speaking names and talking birds in the episode in which Lysistrata rallies the desperate young wives for continued prosecution of the conjugal strike .
 
 

Mark Janse is Research Professor in Ancient & Asia Minor Greek at Ghent University, where he studied Classics, Hebrew and Linguistics.Janse's fields of research are Ancient, Biblical and Asia Minor Greek, language change, language typology, language contact, and language death, in the ancient as well as in the modern world. In June 2005, Mark Janse and Dimitris Papazachariou from the University of Patras discovered native speakers of Cappadocian, a Greek-Turkish mixed language believed to have died out in the 1960s. He is a corresponding member of the Centre for Cappadocian Studies (ΚΚΜ) in Nea Karval and is a Senior Visiting Scholar of the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation (USA).