Paul’s Knowledge of Aristophanes

Paul calls himself Παῦλος 18 times in his genuine letters (Rom. 1.1; 1 Cor. 1.1, 12, 13; 3.4, 5, 22; 16.21; 2 Cor. 1.1; 10.1; Gal. 1.1; 5.2; Phil. 1.1; 1 Thess. 1.1; 2.18; Phlm. 1, 9, 19). Acts 13.9 claims that he had another name as well: Σαῦλος (vocative Σαούλ), i.e. שאול. Given the error-prone nature of Acts, ¹ there is of course no more than an even chance that Paul had this second name. Even so, many scholars accept this as fact. ² Those who explain why, say it is because a diaspora Jew was a priori likely to have a Hebrew name. If Paul was indeed named Saul, he may well, from birth and at once, have borne an intra-tribal, Jewish name and an international, Roman one. The use of both Jewish and Gentile names was known in Paul’s circle, as we see with Silas, which is itself a form of ‘Saul’ (as Acts 15–18 names him), whom Paul calls Silvanus (2 Cor. 1.19). Indeed, it continues to this day: for example, Jacques Derrida’s father, Haïm, was referred to as Aimé, and Walter Benjamin’s friend, Gershom Scholem, went by the name Gerhart. As a hero of the tribe of Benjamin (1 Sam. 9.1-2), King Saul was a natural namesake for Benjaminites like Paul (Rom. 11.1), the more so as ‘Saul’ and ‘Paul’ are nearly homonyms. Yet in his extant letters Paul never refers to himself as Saul. ³ Likewise, the letters usually judged to be deutero-Pauline use the name ‘Paul’ ten times (Eph. 1.1; 3.1; Col. 1.1, 23; 4.18; 2 Thess. 1.1; 3.17; 1 Tim. 1.1; 2 Tim. 1.1; Titus 1.1), but never ‘Saul’. This score of twenty-eight to zero for ‘Paul’ over ‘Saul’ suggests that the choice is deliberate.

It is certainly not because this self-styled bearer of ‘the gospel for the uncircumcised (ἀκροβυστία)’ (Gal. 2.7) wants to show the world a Roman face, for he is proudly a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee (Phil. 3.5). Moreover, his readers, though living in a multicultural milieu that includes Greeks, Romans, Celts and many others, ⁴ have enviable familiarity with the Jewish scriptures, mined by Paul for proof-texts, but arguably of less significance if they go unrecognized. ⁵ So the Jewishness of ‘Saul’ can be no problem.

A quarter of a century ago T.J. Leary (1992) offered a different explanation. He argued that Paul suppressed his Hebrew name, because the Greek adjective σαῦλος describes ‘the loose, wanton gait of courtesans or Bacchantes’ (LSJ s.v., after schol. Aristophanes, Vesp. 1169c [= II.i.185, Koster and Holwerda 1978]). ⁶ One sees how a name that conjured up such an image would be infra dig, if not outright repulsive, to Paul, who deplored homosexuality (Rom. 1.26-27; 1 Cor. 6.9) and prostitution (6.12-20) and was attuned to the meaning of proper names, as he shows by his pun on Ὀνήσιμος and εὔχρηστος, both meaning ‘useful’ (Phlm. 10-11). So it would have been, that is, had he known the risk.

But could he have known? The adjective σαῦλος, whether as simplex or in compounds, is confined to two very precise niches in Greek literature: mainly Attic invective between c. 650 and c. 400 bce, on the one hand, and, on the other, scholarship produced, especially in Alexandria, between c. 130 and c. 900 ce.

As to the first (Attic) group, the iambic poet Semonides of Amorgos uses σαῦλος of someone (the relevant word is corrupt) who prances like a horse (fr. 19 IEG = 22; see Pellizer and Tedeschi 1990: 188); ⁷ the comic Homeric Hymn to Hermes (Richardson 2010: 19-20) uses the same word of a waddling tortoise, which is destined, once killed and hollowed out to form a lyre, metaphorically to become ‘a dancing girl of the feast’ (lines 25-31); ⁸ Anacreon of Teos, who was active in Athens from c. 523 to c. 490 (Campbell 1967: 213-14), primarily as a love-poet but also as a composer of invective (Lambin 2002: 111-20), uses the word once of Bassarids and once of a courtesan (411 [b], 458 PMG ⁹ = 32, 138; see Gentili 1982: 115-16). In Wasps of 422 (lines 1122-265), the Attic old comic poet Aristophanes depicts a man being taught by his son how to walk and otherwise behave in polite company, and describes his own unseemly limp as σαυλοπρωκτιᾶν, ‘walk[ing] in an affected way so as to make the hinder parts sway to and fro’ (1173, trans. LSJ with Revised Supplement s.v.), or, as Douglas M. MacDowell translates, ‘Actually I’m trying to do the waggle-bottom’. ¹⁰ Another Aristophanic character applies διασαυλόομαι, ‘swagger, dance affectedly’, to someone ranting in a fragment from an unknown play (fr. 635 PCG ¹¹ = 624). Finally, Euripides, in a tragic burlesque, the satyr-play Cyclops (line 40), uses this verb, uncompounded, of the chorus of lewd satyrs entering the orchestra singing and dancing in the parodos.

Bruno Gentili, Ezio Pellizer and Gennaro Tedeschi suggest that these references to a ‘campy’ walk belong to a peculiar social context involving male transvestitism, ¹² seemingly illustrated both by a series of 28 Attic red-figure vases in various collections, 15 of which are inscribed with Anacreon’s name, ¹³ and by the longest extant fragment of Anacreon’s invective (388 PMG = 82; see Gentili 1982: 115-16). This whole fragment is worth quoting, even though it does not itself contain the word σαῦλος, to give an idea of the social context in which Anacreon and Semonides do use the word:

Once having a shabby hat, wrapped like a wasp,

he put wooden dice in his ears and about his ribs

the bare skin of a cow,

the unwashed cover of a cowardly shield, hanging out with

bread-sellers and willing whores, villainous Artemon,

making a counterfeit living,

having often placed his neck in the stocks, often on the wheel,

and often whipped on his back with a leather strap, his hair

and beard plucked out;

now, though, he rides a litter, always wearing golden earrings,

does Cyce’s son, and always carrying an ivory parasol

just like women. ¹⁴

I do not propose here to parse this setting, which has been subject to much controversy (hypothetical ‘feast of parasols’ or sexual fetishism?), ¹⁵ but to remark, first, that such a παρὰ ϕύσιν χρῆσις (‘unnatural practice’) would have shocked Paul, whose puritanism we have noted, and, secondly, that the relevant vocabulary was never likely to outlive its odd context.

As to the second group: the fragment of Semonides mentioned above comes from the Etymologicum genuinum (§50 Calame 1970); the first fragment of Anacreon is preserved by Clement of Alexandria (Paedagogus III, xi, 69, 2 [= 1.274, Stählin 1905]), and the second in Hephaestion’s (130–169 CE) Enchiridion (xii, 40 [= 39, Consbruch 1906]).

The rest is silence. The word is unattested for four centuries before the birth of Paul around the turn of the Common Era, and for over five centuries in all by the time we meet it again in the context of book learning. Any doubt that the word was lost to common speech after c. 400 bce should vanish if one reads Lexiphanes, or ‘Phrase-monger’ of the second-century ce Lucian of Samosata, a satire on pompous orators who lavish more attention on rhetorical form than content, above all by using rare, obscure and inept vocabulary. ¹⁶ In ch. 10 of Lexiphanes the word appears – as a compelling emendation by E.E. Seiler – in a description of a certain Deinias, who is charged with calling the Hierophant and Dadouchos at Eleusis by name: ¹⁷

‘Verily’, said he, ‘that fellow, the whilom swaggerer (σαυλούμενος [Seiler; αὐλούμενος MS]), is now ensconced; for, notwithstanding his reluctation, the magistrate decked him out with wristlets and a necklace and lodged him in the bilboes and the stocks. Wherefore, being impounded, the sorry wretch fusted for fear, and trumped, and was fain to give weregelt. ¹⁸

If he really were ‘Saul’ (the name taboo to dodge unseemly puns, ¹⁹ and not used by chance only in epistles now lost to us), then Paul must have read ²⁰ at least one author in the first group who uses σαῦλος. Only one of these was he at all likely to have encountered: Aristophanes, who, as we have seen, used the word σαῦλος at least twice. In what context would a Hebrew born of the Hebrews ever encounter this most unbiblical of authors? Paul was not only a Greek speaker, but a literate one; and he was not only passively literate, but able himself to write, even though the conventions of writing Greek differ appreciably from those of his other (possibly native) language, Aramaic ²¹ (starting with doing it ‘backwards’). Barring evidence to the contrary, the most likely explanation for his linguistic skill is that he learned Greek not somehow by osmosis, but as a boy in school. I assume that he was schooled in his highly Hellenized hometown (Strabo 14.5.13) of Tarsus and not in Jerusalem at the feet of Gamaliel the Elder (pace Acts 22.3, a background hard to reconcile with his own claim that, as late as three years after his call, he was still unknown by sight to the churches of Judaea, Gal. 1.22). ²²

Until the sixth century ce, Aristophanes was staple reading in schools in the eastern Roman Empire, which included Tarsus from the time that Pompey annexed it in 66 bce (Dover 1972: 224-25). Aristophanes figured in the curriculum, because Atticizing schoolmasters deemed his plays to be the most accurate reflection of Athenian speech in its golden age and hence the best possible stylistic models for imitation. ²³ We know that Paul had at least a nodding acquaintance with Menander, Aristophanes’ successor on Athens’s comic stage, who is quoted by Paul: ϕθείρουσιν ἤθη χρηστὰ ὁμιλίαι κακαί (‘Bad company ruins good morals’, fr. 187, Koerte 1959 = 1 Cor. 15.33); perhaps he acquired this familiarity for the same propaedeutic purpose.

Since we have mentioned Paul’s literacy, it is worth noting that he wrote at least the endings of his letters himself rather than dictating everything to an amanuensis. He appears not to have been proud of his penmanship, for he says, ἴδετε πηλίκοις ὑμῖν γράμμασιν ἔγραψα τῇ ἐμῇ χειρί, ‘See what large letters I make when I am writing in my own hand!’ (Gal. 6.11). Paul may have been deliberately using a larger script at this point for emphasis, as the public notices (programmata) at Pompeii are larger than private graffiti, or this may have been a permanent feature of his writing; his hands – possibly deformed by the manual labour (1 Cor. 4.12) by which he supported himself, so as to need no fee for his preaching (9.15-18) – would naturally be clumsy with a pen. ²⁴ In either case, the remark is also a curiously Aristophanic one for Paul to make. The reason I say so is as follows. According to Greek myth the alphabet was invented by a certain Palamedes, and the great Odysseus, jealous at this and other signs of the man’s genius, plotted to kill him. Euripides staged the story and had Palamedes, who was cornered on the shore at Troy, use his new technology to send a ‘message in a bottle’ calling for help, except that – bottles not having yet been invented – he carved his message on an oar-blade, which he then threw into the sea (Euripides, fr. 588a TrGF ²⁵ ). A play by Aristophanes, Women at the Festival of Demeter, deals with a plot by those gathered at a women-only festival to murder Euripides, whom they accuse of misogyny for betraying their secrets by presenting them too realistically in his plays, so alerting their husbands that they are up to no good. Euripides enters as a character in the play and persuades a relative of his to infiltrate the festival disguised as a woman. His choice of spy is a poor one, for the relative bungles everything. The ruse is quickly discovered, when he makes a (suspiciously non-womanly) speech in the playwright’s defence. Exposed and cornered by the women, he resorts to various ploys borrowed from Euripidean escape-plays. ²⁶ Among them is the scene from Palamedes, which Aristophanes unmasks as ridiculous by making the relative, having written his message on a plank, throw it onto the wooden stage in the hope that it will ‘float away’ and find a sympathetic rescuer. I set this scene at some length to contextualize what happens next. Incompetent at everything, Euripides’ relative naturally cannot carve his message effectively either, as he explains at some length (Thesm. 780-854):

οἴμοι·

τουτὶ τὸ ῥῶ μοχθηρόν.Χώρει

χώρει. ποίαν αὔλακα;

βάσκετ᾽ ἐπείγετε πάσας καθ᾽ ὁδούς

κείνᾳ ταύτᾳ· ταχέως χρή.

Oh dear!

This ‘r’ isn’t working.

Go on! Go on! What kind of furrow is this?

Hurry, drive on by all means

this way: I’ve got to be quick. ²⁷

This would no doubt have amused the original audience, but it may well have aroused sympathy among Hellenistic schoolboys struggling with their penmanship, and been recalled by them in later years.

That Paul has Aristophanes in mind at this moment is suggested by the very next verse (Gal. 6.12), in which he says that those trying to force circumcision on the Galatians θέλουσιν εὐπροσωπῆσαι ἐν σαρκί. It is not immediately clear from the NRSV translation of this phrase, ‘want to make a good showing in the flesh’, that these words refer to putting on a show using masks (πρόσωπα), i.e. a play, with the phallus (σάρξ, used here as ‘source of the sexual urge’), ²⁸ as was the norm in Attic Old Comedy (Martyn 1997: 561). In the version of his Clouds revised by Aristophanes for publication in book form, he chastises the Athenians for giving the play third prize, since, after all, he quite unconvincingly claims (lines 538-39),

οὐδὲν ἦλθε ῥαψαμένη σκύτινον καθειμένον

ἐρυθρὸν ἐξ ἄκρου, παχύ, τοῖς παιδίοις ἵν᾽ ᾖ γέλως.

She didn’t come having stitched to herself a leather thing hanging down

red at the tip, thick, so the little boys could have a laugh.

Kenneth Dover concludes from these lines that

The comic poets sometimes represented a circumcised penis; indeed, this is the only assumption which makes sense of both ‘hanging down’ and ‘red at the end’, because the alternative, an inflamed foreskin, is not particularly humorous even to τὰ παιδία. Circumcision was not practiced by the Greeks at all, but they knew of it as a barbarian custom (cf. Hdt. ii. 37. 2, who disapproves of it on aesthetic grounds), owned circumcised slaves (cf. Pl. 267), and exploited its humorous potentialities (cf. Ach.158). ²⁹

Paul is saying, in other words, that by flaunting their own circumcision, his rivals are behaving just like Aristophanes’ fellow Old Comic playwrights.

It is hard to picture anyone teaching Aristophanes to the school-aged Paul. True, bathroom jokes may have tickled Paul, who himself waxes Aristophanic in calling all things σκύβαλα, ‘dung’, next to gaining Christ (Phil 3.8). ³⁰ In referring to ‘the gospel for the uncircumcised’ with the word ἀκροβυστία, literally ‘foreskin’, ³¹ even granted the Jewish background, ³² Paul touches on another Old Comic preoccupation (Aristophanes, Ach. 155-61, 592; Av. 504-507; Plut. 265-67). ³³ Nonetheless, the poet’s unblinking sexual tolerance would have scandalized the future apostle. ³⁴ Yet if both our premises are true, that Paul was also named Saul, and that he himself avoided using the latter name out of embarrassment, barring pure coincidence, Paul must indeed have been familiar with Aristophanes. It is no counter-argument that he evinces not the slightest interest in the playwright, ³⁵ for how many adults today go about consciously quoting Shakespeare, ³⁶ whom they once studied in school, and who stands roughly at the same chronological remove from us as Aristophanes did from Paul? This is true even if, whatever lectures about good Attic style through which Paul may have sat, were lost on him – for, as Emil Staiger once groused to Jacob Taubes, Paul writes Yiddish, not Greek (Taubes 1993: 3). No doubt stylistic compositions are among the childish things to which Paul bid farewell when he became an adult (1 Cor. 13.11).

If Paul has disavowed the name ‘Saul’, what brought the author of Acts to use it? I suggest a misapprehension. Luke knows that Paul was also named Saul, a name that in his mature, post-call phase, he declined to use. From these two facts Luke has reached the reasonable but, as it happens, false conclusion that at the moment of his call Paul, with suitable humility, changed his name from Saul (after a hero of great stature) to Paul (which by contrast means ‘small’). Such changes of name are well attested, beginning with Abraham and Sarah (Gen. 17.5, 15). ³⁷ This would explain the abrupt change of name in Luke’s narrative at Acts 13.9.

To conclude, Paul’s familiarity with Aristophanes, for which I have argued, bears on his chameleon-like ministry. Paul writes: Τοῖς πᾶσιν γέγονα πάντα, ἵνα πάντως τινὰς σώσω, ‘I have become all things to all people, so that I might by any means save some’ (1 Cor 9.22b, NRSV). This statement implies not just a willingness to meet people on their own terms, but also the ability to do so (Ehrensperger 2013: esp. 138-39). Paul can move at will between the Jewish and Gentile worlds, because his own formation in both was traditional and broad. ³⁸