Although there is a long tradition, going back at least to the tenth century, that would see Aristophanes' Birds as somehow related to the exile in Lacedaemon of Alcibiades, and to the fortification of the Attic township of Decelea by his Spartan hosts , current scholarship surrounding Birds is firmly in the hands of those who are antipathetic to seeing the creation of Cloudcuckooland in terms of a political allegory. ‘The majority of scholars today…flatly reject a political reading’; Birds has (...) ‘no strong and obvious connection with a topical question of public interest’; ‘attempts to find in Birds any extensive allegorical comment…are unconvincing’. Not only is it widely believed that ‘Birds… is strangely free of political concerns’. but also that ‘the theme of the Birds is absurdity itself…it is about meaninglessness’ . This is a tradition that descends from A. W. von Schlegel, for whom Birds was ‘merely a “Lustspiel”, full of imagination and the marvellous, with amusing touches at everything, but with no particular object’. This approach was reinforced by the fact that by the second half of the nineteenth century, the allegorists had apparently spun out of control. By 1879, there were no fewer than 79 accounts of the Tendenz of the Birds —some political, some ‘escapist fantasy’–on offer. The most influential allegorical interpretation of Birds was J. W. Suvern's study of 1826, but which is now generally dismissed, and only mentioned to be held up as a warning to those who might be tempted to take the allegorical route. This paper takes a different point of departure, namely Pierre Brumoy's Le thétre des grecs , an allegorical treatment that is full of good sense, and which was too hastily dismissed by Suvern, and ignored by others. (shrink)

In the Classical Museum of University College, Dublin, there is a small black glaze Attic cup belonging to the Vienna-Cup group. It is 7·7 cm high and 13·8 cm in diameter. It has been broken and repaired at some time and parts of the handles are modern, and some of the lip is restored. It might be as well to point out that the foot is whole and has never been broken. The cup is almost wholly black, except for the (...) insides of the handles, the outside edge and resting surface of the foot, and the centre of the foot which are all reserved. It looks quite normal, but if one picks it up and tilts it, one hears a rattling, almost a ringing, sound from the foot which is not only hollow, but contains three small clay pellets, as revealed by an X-ray examination. There is no vent hole.The cup is to be dated to some time within the period 475–450 B.C. I do not know of any parallels among the Vienna-Cup group, but there is another black glaze cup in Leningrad which belongs to the Kalliades-Brygos group and which has a hollow foot and rattling pellets just like those on the Dublin cup. The Kalliades-Brygos group is generally dated to between 500 and 470 B.C. This would mean that the Leningrad cup is probably earlier than the Dublin example, but they both still belong to the first half of the fifth century. The relevance to the discussion of a fragmentary foot in Toronto from a cup of Cup-Type C painted by Skythes c. 500 B.C., is debatable. In the case of this foot there is a hollow channel around the edge as in the Dublin and Leningrad examples, but it differs from them in that there was originally a small rectangular hole in it, the left side of which is preserved. The hole was apparently never closed, so that it is unlikely that the hollow held pellets as did the others, or if it did, there might have been a temporary stopper of, say, unbaked clay. The hole is a puzzle, for it seems too big to be merely a vent hole. (shrink)