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This chapter examines what the scripts of Old Comedy have to say about the art of Old Comedy itself. So far as concerns the technique of the genre, all its practitioners seem to attach value to originality, innovation, hard and careful work, and avoidance of crude methods of raising laughter; we also find a fair amount of discussion of detailed issues of structure, style, metre, music, special effects, and methods and targets of satire. These passages evidence clear criteria of artistic merit, tempered by an overriding need to keep all sections of the audience entertained. The well-known claim that comedy is of civic benefit is found, so far as our evidence goes, only in Aristophanes, and is coupled with a claim that he is under divine patronage and protection.

This chapter examines how popular Eupolis is among famous Old Comedy writers. It tries to evaluate these writers' works, and determines how often they make citations of Eupolis' works into their own writings. It examines how Eupolis was regarded by writers, and how he was often compared with poets like Kratinos and Aristophanes. It determines Eupolis' position in the history of Old Comedy. It also assesses Platonios literary works and compares them with Eupolis'.

This chapter begins by comparing Eupolis and Aristophanes, the latter being the only extant poet of Old Comedy. It differentiates the fragmentary remains of Eupolis from Aristophanes's. It discusses the effect of the production of Marikas on the ‘war’ between the poets. It examines the paracomedies created by Old Comedy poets.

The Introduction outlines the chapters that follow, which contain a sample of the author's work in article form on Old Comedy over the last few decades. The Introduction also explains the sequence of the chapters in the book and details the themes explored within.

This chapter describes Eupolis as a forgotten master of Old Comedy, ranked with Kratinos and Aristophanes. It attempts to discover Eupolis' profile and compares him with other well-known poets. It investigates his reputation as a poet of Old Comedy and evaluates some of his recovered literary fragments. It also provides a translation of the collection of those fragments.

This chapter explores the way in which the poets of Old Comedy — Cratinus and Pherecrates as well as Aristophanes — required actors to impersonate literary abstractions that were gendered feminine, such as Poetry and Comedy. The world-stage relationship took on an extremely concrete, vivid, and self-conscious form in a theatrical genre where actors playing ‘real’ members of the community, such as dramatists and other poets, abused other actors playing anthropomorphic feminine symbols of art. Poetic and theatrical innovations are visibly figured as sexual depravity and sexual violence.

This chapter argues that the Aristophanic plot-line often provides an impression of realist continuity because there are innumerable moments, or miniature sequences, of consequential action. It explains that the apparent ‘jumps’ associated with Aristophanes' characters and plots are not only related in kind: they may be the same thing. It notes that Aristophanic Old Comedy is best seen as a sequence of relational states between one interest party — often but not always, one focal individual — and the world at large. It adds that the pattern involves a series of five states or stages: dissatisfaction, quest, conflict, victory, celebration.

As prelude to the discussions of the six chapters that follow, this introduction gives an overview of the evidence for the accessibility of Old Comedy—beyond Aristophanes’s extant plays—during the Imperial era. It also lays out what have been perceived as the two primary ways that Imperial-era authors approached the genre: as a linguistic source and as a problem. In doing so, it provides a survey of the scholarly approaches adopted by the lexicographers (Julius Pollux, Phrynichus, the Anti-atticist) and Athenaeus. It also considers the persistent influence that the writings of Plato, Aristotle, and Hellenistic critics exerted on how later Greeks understood the genre. As examples of this, it discusses Dio Chrysostom’s commentary on the comic poets in Or. 33 (First Tarsian) and Aelian’s account of Socrates’s trial and execution in Historical Miscellany. The chapter concludes with an outline of the structure and argument of the other sections of the book.

Comic dramatists of fifth-century Athens integrated a number of humorous (sometimes non-Athenian) modes of performance into their plays, which led to the decline of many of these earlier pre-comic “genres.” Satyr drama, however, was exempt from this phenomenon during the fifth century, both because it was instituted at the City Dionysia before comedy and also because it had a clear and distinct religious, social, and aesthetic function. Through close analysis of a number of comic and satyric plays, as well as of visual evidence, this chapter examines the ways in which Old Comedy and satyr drama were interconnected but ultimately remained differentiated, even when comedy appropriated a chorus of satyrs. I pay special attention to comedy’s appropriation of satyr play after Euripides’ satyr-less Alcestis, comparing the role of satyrs/silens in the satyric world (romantic, playful, rustic, etc.) with that of the Old Comic world (aischrological, consequential, urban, etc.).

From the second half of the fourth century through the first half of the third, satyr dramatists employed characteristic elements of Old Comedy in their satyric performances: looser metrical rules, paratragedy and, most notably, satire. Python’s Agen, for example, not only put Alexander the Great on stage, but also ridiculed the rebellious satrap Harpalus for his fondness for prostitutes and made paratragic allusion to Sophocles’ Electra. Lycophron and Sositheus provide similar satirical treatments of contemporary philosophers. This chapter explores these literary developments, suggesting that comedy’s own evolution influenced this shift. The final sections of the chapter show that satyr drama in the Roman era maintained a connection to comedy and the kômos up to the second century CE.

This chapter contextualizes the metapoetic strategies of Euripides more broadly within the poetics of fifth‐century drama. It is shown that Aeschylus and Sophocles used some of the same techniques as Euripides, implicitly in their tragedies, and explicitly in their satyr‐dramas. The importance of metapoetry in satyr‐drama is stressed, since this genre was much closer to comedy in its overt use of metapoetic strategies but was composed by the tragedians. Euripides shares some techniques with the old comedians, but there are others that do not cross the boundaries of genre. It is concluded that Euripides exploited both old and new metapoetic techniques in his dramas, and that he did so far more pervasively than Aeschylus and Sophocles, but that his strategies remained appropriate to the tragic genre.

In Athens during Pericles' time, one of the major forms of entertainment was the presentation at state expense of comedies that bristled with explicit attacks on public figures, who were often present in the audience. These plays are known as Old Comedy. The only extant complete examples of Old Comedy are the wickedly inventive plays of Aristophanes, who was born about 455 B.C. and was very active throughout the years of the Peloponnesian War. Old Comedy flourished for the greater part of Pericles' public career, and he was naturally very often the butt of attacks. Characters in comedies call Pericles a tyrant, describe him as Zeus-like in his aloofness, and attack him for his womanizing (a common criticism of powerful men in every age). Aspasia, his Milesian common-law wife, was treated very harshly. In the Acharnians of Aristophanes, performed in 425, the lowly Athenian citizen Dicaeopolis—the Everyman and hero of the play—gives a mock-epic account of the origin of the war.

The chapter opens with an analysis of the emotional dynamics behind the text-audience relationship in Old Comedy. Plato’s suggestion (in the Philebus) that we go to the comic theatre to see our friends suffering misfortunes, and this is phthonos, is discussed, and this compared with Aristotle’s epichairekakia (Schadenfreude/spite). There is some similarity to the ‘reversal’ associated with the ‘carnival’ approach to comedy, where powerful individuals could be lampooned with impunity for some short period. The chapter suggests that one of Old Comedy’s functions is to provide a safety valve for the potentially explosive build-up of hostility between the functional elite and other citizens in democratic Athens. Passages of Aristophanes’ Acharnians, Knights, and Wasps are then discussed, in which politicians, ambassadors, and generals are satirized as groups, and individuals lampooned by name. It is argued that the reasons for hostility (phthonos) toward these groups for various supposed sharp practices are the same that allow them to be effective butts of comedy.

This chapter begins with a close reading of Nikarkhos' longest extant epigram, an elaborate sexual and scatological parody of Homer known in a papyrus copy from Oxyrhynchus as well as from the Anthology. More even than Loukillios, Nikarkhos models his comic exaggeration and coarse humour on Aristophanes. He is best known as an imitator of Loukillios' skoptic technique and of individual poems by him, but the chapter demonstrates that he also satirically rewrites Loukillian originals and develops his own comic scenarios (including humorous contests), using a distinct range of satirical stereotypes to present an independent skoptic persona.

This chapter uses the scripts identified in Chapters 2 and 3 to examine onstage phthonos scenarios in Old Comedy (Aristophanes) and tragedy (Sophocles and Euripides). Five plays are examined, in which phthonos ranges from pervading the entire play, to affecting one brief but momentous action. In Knights, the other slaves’ envy for Paphlagon and his jealousy of his position are pervasive. In Assemblywomen, phthonos is most apparent when the old crone and young girl argue over their right to sex with the youth. Ajax’s decision to inflict wounding and humiliating treatment on Odysseus before killing him and the Atreidai is ascribed partly to jealousy at Odysseus being awarded ‘his’ Arms. Phaidra is argued to suffer envy for Hippolytos’s lifestyle, and when he also arouses her enmity, she gives vent to both through a libel (a typical tool of envy) that causes his death. Finally, Kreusa suffers partly from envy in deciding to kill Xuthus’s son.