From Ponêros to Pharmakos : Theater, Social Drama, and Revolution in Athens, 428-404 BCE

This paper argues that the bid of the newly emerging commercial elite for political leadership in classical Athens coincided with the formation of the ideological hegemony of the masses. The theater labeled members of this new elite poneroi and blocked the transformation of their financial into symbolic capital, demanding that chrestoi occupy leadership roles in the democracy. The label poneros denied the new leadership elite status and represented its members and their wealth as disembedded from the sphere of transactions that reproduced society and ensured the well-being of the demos. In conjunction with the label agoraios, the term poneros depicted the new elite in terms of what Marshal Sahlins has called extremes of "social distance" and "negative reciprocity." Representing genuinely elite leadership as "generalized reciprocity," the theater countered the central claim of the new elite's rhetoric that it was eunous and philos toward the demos. The label poneros expresses social resentment suppressed by the Athenian moral economy, which expresses the highest values of the polis in terms of ponos. The poneros is the reality that subverts it. The label poneros associated the new elite with pollution and made them vulnerable to ritual violence. The comic stage of the 420s features a recurring plot: the unification of the demos and the chrestoi around the expulsion of a demagogue. This paper traces the transformation of the new elite from poneros to figures which use flattery, invective, and deception for gain, bomolochoi and kobaloi, and finally to ritual scapegoats, pharmakoi, arguing that the comic theater provided the script for contests between poneroi and chrestoi for control of the city: the ostracism of Hyperbolos, the mutilation of the Hermai, and the purge of poneroi that took place during the oligarchic takeovers enact, in increasingly violent form, the social drama of the comic stage. The bloodbath the thirty perpetrated to expunge the poneroi from the polis prompted the redefinition of the poneros as an enemy of the demos irrespective of class and status. After the death of Aristophanes, the theater ceased to mediate the poneros-chrestos dialectic in a politically significant way.