The Footwear of Democracy
in Aristophanes’ Wasps and Ecclesiazusae

Gwendolyn Compton-Engle (John Carroll University)

This paper focuses on the significance of the embas, the shoe most commonly mentioned in Aristophanic comedy.  It has long been observed that this shoe is typically worn by old, lower-class male characters, but I argue that the more significant connotation of the embas in Aristophanes is as a marker of civic participation. Aristophanes uses the embas, an outdoor shoe, to characterize the man who participates in the political institutions of Athens.  References to embades in Aristophanes are most heavily concentrated in Wasps and Ecclesiazusae, the two plays that deal most directly with institutions of democracy (the jury-courts and the assembly).  In each case, the removal of these shoes against a character’s wish signifies a coerced retreat from public life and a withdrawal to one's private household.

In Wasps, embades are emblematic of Philocleon’s jury-crazed persona. Early in the play, we learn that part of Philocleon's jury-service ritual is to call for his embades right after dinner so that he can go keep watch at the courts (Wasps 103); when his fellow jurors come looking for him and he does not appear, they wonder (Wasps 274-5), "He hasn't lost his embades, has he?"  These shoes are part of Philocleon's very identity: the chorus refers to the man himself as "old embades" (Wasps 447). The chorus of jurors, too, speaks of wearing embadia (Wasps 600).  This attention to the embades provides crucial context for the dressing sequence later in the play.  Preparing his father for his visits to symposia, Bdelycleon commands him to take off his "damned embades" and put on some Lakonikai, a plusher boot (Wasps 1158-59).  When he does this, Philocleon steps reluctantly out of the shoes that have emblematized his participation in public life.  In Ecclesiazusae, the women have taken their husbands' embades, along with their cloaks and staffs, to wear as they infiltrate the assembly.  The husbands, deprived of their cloaks and shoes, are unable to attend the assembly themselves and can barely venture outside the house in their wives' Persikai (Eccl. 319).  In this play embades and Lakonikai are used interchangeably (embades at Eccl. 47, 314-15, 342, 507; Lakonikai at Eccl. 74, 269, 345, 508, and 542), because gender, not socioeconomic status, is the issue of the play.

In both Ecclesiazusae and Wasps, then, the removal of the embades marks a confinement to the private home.  Wasps emphasizes the socioeconomic aspects of political participation, hence Philocleon’s embades are traded in for plusher and less democratic-sounding Lakonikai.  Ecclesiazusae, on the other hand, emphasizes the gendered aspects of political participation, so the men’s embades are replaced by their wives’ Persikai.  In both cases, the shoes that replace embades are, in name at least, distinctively non-Athenian.