caa a22 4500 386344809 CHVBK 20180307111807.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161130e198904 xx s 000 0 eng 10.1017/S0017383500029338 doi S0017383500029338 pii (NATIONALLICENCE)cambridge-10.1017/S0017383500029338 Gardner Jane F. Aristophanes and Male Anxiety - The Defence of the Oikos [Elektronische Daten] [Jane F. Gardner] The therapeutic value of laughter is a commonplace of psychology; it is recognized that one of the functions of comedy is to exorcize our fears by causing us to laugh at them. This is one possible meaning of Aristotle's generalization, with ‘many more than one facet', that comedy represented people as ‘inferior' to ‘men as they are now' (Poetics 1448a 18). So, in comedy, we should not expect to find realistic portrayals of people as they actually are, but rather stereotypes, embodying the fears and anxieties, the mild, underlying paranoia about what might happen, of the audience for whom the author is writing. Aristophanes was writing for an Athenian male audience, and he had to strike a chord in them, if his plays were to be successful and win prizes. What, on the evidence of Aristophanes' plays, were Athenian men worried about? Copyright © The Classical Association 1989 Greece and Rome Cambridge University Press 36/1(1989-04), 51-62 0017-3835 36:1<51 1989 36 GAR https://doi.org/10.1017/S0017383500029338 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0017383500029338 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Gardner Jane F. NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Greece and Rome Cambridge University Press 36/1(1989-04), 51-62 0017-3835 36:1<51 1989 36 GAR CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-cambridge