Wings or Armor? Costume, Metaphor, and the Limits of Utopia in Aristophanes’s Birds

Abstract

Abstract:What does Peisthetairos give the Rebellious Youth, the first of three intruders in search of wings? The interpretation of Birds 1360–69 has divided commentators since antiquity: does the youth receive wings to be viewed as weapons or weapons to be viewed as wings? On the basis of internal textual evidence and intertextual allusions, I argue for the latter option: instead of the requested bird apparatus, Peisthetairos offers military equipment. This is not a trivial question affecting exclusively, or even primarily, staging. On the contrary, the answer we provide is significant for the play as a whole: it has to do with the reflection, so central in Birds, on the ontological status of the comic utopia; hence, on the relationship between language and reality.