Eurycles the possessing prophetic demon Now people pay attention if you like frank
advice. The poet now wants to censure his audience. For he says that he is the victim of an undeserved wrong after conferring many benefits upon them. Initially he did not do this openly, but secretly, by helping other poets. In imitation of the prophetic method of Eurycles, he entered their stomachs and poured out lots of comedy. But after this he openly ventured out on his own, in chariots drawn by his own Muses rather than other people's.
Scholiast R: Eurycles was a prophet who manifested himself through others, so he says, "Just as Eurycles gave to others, so did I."
424 B.C. (Aristophanes);
Hellenistic-Byzantine
(scholia)
Aristophanes Wasps 1015-22, with scholia
Scholiast Lh: This Eurycles was called a ventriloquist [engastrimuthos], since he prophesied to the Athenians through the demon he had inside him.
. . . Hence all prophets were called ventriloquists [engastritai] and Eurycleids [i.e., "Descendants of Eurycles"], after Eurycles, who had been the first to do this.
Aristophanes' analogy for the process by which he came to put his own name to his comedies after writing them for others speaks for itself. There is no need to suppose that the Eurycles in question, famous to Aristophanes and his audience, was contemporary; he may well have belonged to myth. Both Aristophanes and Plato (33) make it clear that the original Eurycles was a possessing demon, not a host. The confusion in Scholiast Lh here, in the Platonic scholiasts, and in the Suda (34) may derive from the fact that the name, alongside "Eurycleid," did in time come to be applied generally to the hosts of this variety of demon (35).
Post a comment