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The intensely human culture of newly literate Ionia spread into every field of intellectual endeavor. Though it was obviously anti-religious, serious opposition to it took nearly a century to develop. Ionian thought came to Athens later than to Italy. It was introduced by Anaxagoras of Clazomenae and by members of a new “profession,” the Sophists –itinerant lecturers and tutors. The most famous of these was Protagoras, the first Relativist and explicit agnostic. Socrates, a native Athenian, started out as a friend of the scientific side of Pythagoreanism. As such he was caricatured by the comic poet Aristophanes; and as such he was condemned and put to death for “impiety.” But by that time he had undergone a conversion from science to the moral and religious interests also associated with the Brotherhood.

This chapter presents a synthesis of discussions in the preceding chapters. The most important conclusion from studying the six Aristophanic case studies is that it is feasible to operate with categories of variation which are more fine-grained than the well-known ones of ‘foreign dialect’, ‘paratragic style’, or ‘colloquial language’. The universally recognised absence of linguistic continuity in Aristophanes, and the lack of continuous linguistic characterization should not discourage the analysis of discontinuous characterization: first because variation is an interesting topic in its own right, and secondly because linguistic characterization is possible even in a discontinuous mode.

This chapter discusses different forms of temporal calibration and articulation, as well as the complementary nature of natural time and culturally-determined time. After introducing some philosophical problems concerning the nature of time, it examines evidence for the proposition that time as a malleable and constructed concept was familiar within the everyday life of the Greek polis, through the plays of Aristophanes and publicly displayed inscriptions. The connections between time as mapped out on a recurring annual cycle through the calendar and historical time which spans the past of a place are also considered.

This chapter argues that neither Aristophanes, nor his creation Lysistrata, can reasonably be regarded as a pacifist, or even as an unconditional advocate of ending the current war against Sparta. Lysistrata herself uses violence and the infliction of pain to achieve her ends; every reference made by her or her supporters to wars against enemies other than Sparta is a favourable one (as is typical of Aristophanes); and the peace terms she makes with Sparta would have been utterly, and obviously, unattainable for a democratic Athens in early 411 bc, as is virtually admitted within the play itself. The play transports the audience into a dream world where, with divine aid, the impossible is achieved. There is no sign, here or elsewhere, that Aristophanes would have accepted, let alone advocated, any peace that did not leave Athens free to maintain her empire.

This chapter explores the relationship between Socrates and his predecessors, and gives a significant philosophical role to all the speeches of the dialogue. It argues that Socrates' speech is continuous with his predecessors, and completes and resolves some of the issues raised in the previous speeches. In this way, the previous speeches can be compared to Aristotelian endoxa. The contrast between Socrates and his predecessors also exemplifies the contrast between the two sorts of lovers described in the lower and higher mysteries of Socrates' speech. Reading the speeches in light of this contrast provides a further reason to think that the previous speeches are for the sake of our philosophical education, in much the same way as the lower mysteries were taught to Socrates for the sake of the higher. The philosophy of the Symposium, in other words, is extended throughout the dialogue and is not limited to Socrates'speech.

A fresh interpretation of ‘όξύς’ and ‘βαρύς’ underpins a new theory of the ancient Greek accent, applying W. Sidney Allen’s observation that there must have been in Greek a down-glide in pitch, cognate with the Vedic svarita, in addition to the rise whose vowel mora is marked by the received written system of signs devised by Aristophanes of Byzantium. The diachronic analysis is confirmed by Allen’s separate discovery of a pattern of stress in Greek, whose rules predict the same places of accentual prominence as the new theory; by modern synchronic descriptions of the Greek tonal phenomena; and by the fact that the contextual dominance of the svarita proposed for Greek also helps formulate a law that corresponds to the received rules for Latin prosody. Various loci antiqui, including disputed passages from Plato’s Timaeus, are seen in some cases to be inconsistent with received interpretations, but always consistent with the new theory.

This chapter is concerned with how satiric genres of poetry distinguished “blamers” from targets, and how poets enlisted the sympathies of their audiences. The main focus is on the Thersites of Homer, Iliad 2 who is often regarded as a kind of “proto-satirist”. This chapter, however, urges a more nuanced approach to this formulation: by comparing the Iliadic portrait of Thersites (where Thersites is portrayed as having been justifiably punished) to the stories about his death at the hands of Achilles (a patently unjust act) found in other sources, it argues that the Iliadic Thersites is conceptualized by Homer more as a “target” than an actual satirist. Comparanda discussed in this chapter include Aristophanes' Knights and Aesopic fable.

After a preface devoted to the poet, his works, his reputation in antiquity, and the nature of the surviving material, the introduction clarifies the book's methodology. Unlike traditional ways of addressing fragmentary comedy, Cratinus and the Art of Comedy does not merely reconstruct plays or texts, but draws on a range of hermeneutic frameworks and adopts a thematic approach, which offers a means to explore the author's poetics. The introduction further addresses the problem of the ‘shadow’ of Aristophanes, the only author of the period for whom whole plays survive, and suggests ways in which the extant comedies might be used in a productive way while avoiding the distortion caused by superimposing Aristophanes on a fragmentary poet like Cratinus. It closes by discussing earlier scholarship on Cratinus.

This chapter establishes the range of evaluative strategies found in Greek comedy and then concentrates on an explicit lexical evaluation in comedy. It argues that it would be easy to understand why the language of Aristophanes abstains from the use of the ‘basic’ obscene metaphor in reproaching stupidity and unpleasantness if it also abstained from (1) the metaphorical use of ‘deviant’ obscenity and (2) the use of both basic and deviant obscene words in their literal meanings. However, those conditions are not fulfilled, leaving something that resembles an ecological niche inexplicably unoccupied.

This chapter illustrates some of the problems that arise when we try to separate literary and non-literary language. It argues that a figure of speech such as chiasmus (and similarly anaphora) is a natural (or universal) means to package complex information. As long as it fulfils this primary aim, a chiasmus is therefore not a literary embellishment. If, on the other hand, the information complexity is minor so that the chiasmus is functionally ‘unnecessary’, the addressee will perceive it as a literary figure. Most of the Aristophanic examples of chiasmus and anaphora are not ‘justified’ by an excessive information complexity, leading to the conclusion that Aristophanes' style is in this respect more literate than oral.

The creation of a white-collar class in America brought with it changes in demographic patterns, particularly where romance was concerned. No longer largely economic, marriage became increasingly seen as an emotional and romantic fulfillment of human needs. Spiritualists agreed that love was of utmost importance but recognized that many unhappy marriages resulted in women and children caught in impossible situations. Spiritualists advocated an eternal love between soul mates but fought for reform of marriage and divorce law at the same time. True love was understood using Aristophanes’ portrayal of the primal androgynous unit from Plato’s Symposium—love gathered the halves of bodies as well as souls. At the fringes of the movement were sex radicals and free-love adherents like Victoria Woodhull who called for dramatic legal reform in both marriage and eugenics.

This chapter describes the dramatic use of speech within speech in Menander's comedies. It begins with a historical review that stretches from Homer down to Hellenistic literature, then considers the specific role ‘speech within speech’ takes on in New Comedy. By distinguishing factual and imagined quoted speech, it shows that Menander's usage is closer to that of Euripides than to that of Aristophanes even though the absolute frequency of quoted speech is comparable in all three authors.

Chapter 3 states that the library need not be a physical collection of texts, and it explores the phenomenon of the learned literary individual who becomes a virtual library. The personified library grows out of the person who had to personify literature in an earlier period and he becomes an authorized and authorizing figure, who, as the example of Aristophanes, the first librarian at Alexandria, shows, can attest to the legitimacy of texts. Individuals such as Longinus, Nepotianus, and Apuleius come to embody their society's learning and culture, although in later antiquity, with Athenaeus, the memorization of literary texts places the library‐individuals under great pressure as the attempt to accrue literary authority becomes an exaggerated and ridiculous venture.