The mutability of Philokleon’s generational identity—both absolute and relative to his son Bdelykleon—in Aristophanes’ Wasps is well established. Critics routinely write of his ‘rejuvenation’ in the second half of the play, and it is in the scene with the flute-girl, Dardanis, that the old man most explicitly plays the part of an irresponsible youth waiting for his son (in the role of father) to die. However, inversions and perversions of generational identity pervade the whole play. Even before Philokleon has undergone his liberating transformation at the symposion, the educational roles of father and son are reversed as Bdelykleon schools him in the proper way to behave in polite society. More subtly and extensively, Angus Bowie has shown how the three agones in which Philokleon (unsuccessfully) engages during the first half of the play correspond to the three stages of an Athenian male citizen’s life: ephebeia, maturity in the hoplite phalanx, and old age in the jury.

However, critics have not observed that Philokleon goes through another, parallel journey from youth through maturity to old age in the three ‘iambic scenes’ where he is confronted by the victims of his outrageous behaviour on his way home from the symposion. Moreover, unlike the three defeats in Bowie’s agones, which successively strip him of his three identities, his victories in the iambic scenes enable him to inhabit the roles of neanias, anêr, and gerôn simultaneously. This paper will show how Aristophanes constructs this third lifecycle (counting his literal maturation before the play’s action begins) before considering its implications for the wider characterization of Philokleon and in particular the final scene.

An extra note on recording of seminars 

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