RUDE TALK IN ATHENS

Historical recovery of an Athenian playwright who scandalized his society.

Novelist, screenwriter, and comedy writer Smith takes the now-forgotten playwright Ariphrades as the central character in his breezy, bawdy riff on fifth-century Greece, contemporary Greek life, the significance of art, his own development as a writer, women’s equality, wine, conviviality, pleasure, and sex. Smith’s interest in the obscure playwright was piqued when he came upon this quotation in Courtesans and Fishcakes, British historian James Davidson’s 1998 book about classical Athens: “At some point in the last quarter of the fifth century a man called Ariphrades had managed to acquire notoriety as a practitioner of cunnilingus.” In a culture where Dionysian festivals featured drunken parades of men “carrying large cocks and shouting obscenities as they cavorted through town,” Ariphrades’ reputation seemed curious, to say the least; consequently, Smith set out to find out what was behind it. Aristophanes—“the big swinging cock of Athenian comedy”—regularly took aim at Ariphrades in his satirical plays, which themselves were “colorful, loud, and very rude.” It may be, Smith thinks, that performing cunnilingus offended men because the act would be seen “as submitting to women” and therefore a betrayal of Athenian patriarchy. Or maybe Ariphrades had become too much of a rival. Smith became curious, too, about the deletion of Ariphrades from literary history: Not even a fragment of his work remains. “He was eradicated,” writes Smith. “To me, that’s a signal that he was important in some way we don’t understand.” Through research and interviews with experts, the author concludes that “the transgressive challenging of cultural and societal norms through sexuality, might be the only legacy Ariphrades leaves us.” He skewered “the aristocracy, the ruling class, the status quo,” and he seemed to have no need for convention. "We need to cultivate enthusiasms like his,” Smith claims. “We need more people to go down on each other.”

A racy, raunchy, entertaining reimagining of ancient Greece.