As a new Congress gets to work, one venerable tradition seems likely to continue: Mocking politicians goes back a long way, at least as far back as the foundation of democracy in ancient Athens.

A report in the American Journal of Archaeology considers the case of Cleon, an Athenian statesman who is credited with victory over the Spartans in 425 B.C. Cleon earned immortality as a villainous demagogue in the playwright Aristophanes' Knights, which was produced a year after the victory.

A new translation and archaeological discussion from Emory University classicist Mike Lippman and colleagues offers a different view of the play's comic enmity from one offered by historians.

After capturing 120 knightly Spartans, legend has it, Cleon and his generals presented the Spartan shields as war trophies and placed them in the Agora, the center of Athenian government.

In Knights, a villain representing Cleon faces off with a rival for the favor of Demos, a character representing the Athenian people.

Lippman and colleagues investigated a curious series of lines in which the Cleon character brags about the shields he captured. The rival turns this bragging against Cleon by pointing out to Demos that the shields still have their handles, unnecessary for display, and could be used in a coup.

Demos is warned that Cleon's followers will seize "the gates to our daily bread," which historians have taken to mean seizing the granary used to feed Athens.

But there are a few problems with this idea, Lippman suggests, not the least of which was there was no granary. Another is that the display area in the Agora was too small to hold 120 Spartan shields.

Instead, the study suggests that Aristophanes meant Athens' citizens were in financial, rather than physical, danger, and the shields were a plot device inspired by where they were actually displayed in the ancient city.

The researchers point to "24 pairs of very unusual cuttings preserved in three rows" on the face of the Temple of Athena Nike, which overlooked the ramp leading to the gate of the Acropolis. Athena Nike was the goddess of victory and her temple was likely visible to play-goers seeing Aristophanes' work.

Scholars have disagreed over the purpose of the cuttings for more than a century. Lippman argues they held hooks for ceremonial displays. Each cutting is big enough for precisely placed hooks that could have held a Spartan shield with its handle attached, the Lippmann team says. "With a single stroke, the Nike temple bastion was transformed into a gleaming tower of bronze — a spectacular trophy," they write.

If the handles were left on the shields for display rather than functional purposes, the study proposes that Aristophanes was talking about cash (or to Athenians, "obols") when he warned about the theft of bread — chiefly the pension handed out from war coffers atop the Acropolis to old men (such as Demos) who served on juries. "The joke is not that Demos is worried about the seizure of the city," they conclude, "but that he groans over the loss of his three-obol daily jury allowance!"

Well, it was funny to the Greeks. "Cleon's shields were a perfect target for his comic critics, Aristophanes first among them," the study authors conclude.

I'm all for supporting classical scholarship, but I have to draw the line at far-fetched attempts at sensationalism by coming up with startling new twists on 2500-year-old material, achieved by resort to non sequiturs and stretching points beyond reason. In this piece on Cleon, the takeoff point to get Lippman and his colleagues where they want to go is that "the gates to our daily bread" can't mean a granary, as has been assumed, because there was no granary in ancient Athens, and from there they reason that the danger facing Athens in Aristophanes' play was not physical but financial, backing this up with some archaeological evidence that has nothing to do with a work of comic fiction. The trouble with all this is that "the gates to our daily bread" does not have to refer to a granary building but just means "our access to food" in general. It is a shame that interest in the classics has declined to such an extent that those seeking to make a living as educators in the field of classical civilazation have to resort to such acrobatic intellectual contortions in order to attract attention.