The Wasps - Historical Background

Historical Background

Cleon and the Athenian jury system: About two years before the performance of The Wasps, Athens had obtained a significant victory against its rival, Sparta, in the Battle of Sphacteria. Rightly or wrongly, most Athenians credited Cleon with this victory and he was then at the height of his power. Constitutionally, supreme power lay with the People as voters in the assembly and as jurors in the courts but they could be manipulated by demagogues skilled in oratory and supported by networks of satellites and informers. Cleon had succeeded Pericles as the dominant speaker in the assembly and increasingly he was able to manipulate the courts for political and personal ends, especially in the prosecution of public officials for mismanagement of their duties. Jurors had to be citizens over the age of thirty and a corps of six thousand was enrolled at the beginning of each year, forming a conspicuous presence about town in their short brown cloaks, with wooden staves in their hands. The work was voluntary but time-consuming and they were paid a small fee - three obols per day at the time of The Wasps. For many jurors, this was their major source of income and it was virtually an old-age pension. There were no judges to provide juries with legal guidance and there was no legal appeal against a jury's verdict. Jurors came under the sway of litigious politicians like Cleon who provided them with cases to try and who were influential in persuading the assembly to keep up their pay. However it is not necessarily true that Cleon was exploiting the system for venal or corrupt reasons, as argued in The Wasps. Aristophanes' plays promote conservative values and they support an honourable peace with Sparta whereas Cleon was a radical democrat and a leader of the pro-war faction. Misunderstandings were inevitable. Cleon had previously attempted to prosecute Aristophanes for slandering the polis with his second play The Babylonians and, though the legal result of these efforts is unknown, they appear to have sharpened the poet's satirical edge, as evidenced later in the unrelenting attack on Cleon in The Knights. The second parabasis in The Wasps implies that Cleon retaliated for his drubbing in The Knights with yet further efforts to intimidate or prosecute Aristophanes and it is possible that the poet publicly yielded to this pressure for a short time. Whatever agreement was reached with Cleon, Aristophanes gleefully reneged on it in The Wasps, presenting Cleon as a treacherous dog manipulating a corrupted legal process for personal gain.