Ancient Greek Comedy

Πρόκειται για την παρουσίαση που δημιουργήθηκε για τις ανάγκες της υποστήριξης της Μεταπτυχιακής μου Εργασίας. Θίγονται επιγραμματικά οι στόχοι και τα συμπεράσματα της έρευνάς μου, η οποία ήταν επικεντρωμένη στην μορφή και τον ρόλο που διαδραμάτισαν οι εταίρες στην Αρχαία Ελληνική Κωμωδία.

Tradicionalmente relacionados somente à perpetuação de herdeiros, a sexualidade e o corpo feminino não foram validados enquanto objetos de estudo pela historiografia do século XIX até meados do XX. Contudo, é notório como ambos estiveram presentes nas produções históricas da Antiguidade Clássica, dos vestígios materiais aos escritos de teatrólogos, filósofos e médicos, como Hipócrates e Aristófanes. Os conceitos de corpo e de sexualidade cristalizaram-se, na historiografia, como um esforço dos autores antigos, sobretudo de Aristóteles, em justificar a suposta inferioridade das mulheres gregas, que estaria baseada em uma composição fisiológica mais fraca. Tal visão acabou por restringir as possibilidades interpretativas oferecidas por outras naturezas documentais do período clássico, como a hipocrática e a aristofânica. Esse artigo busca refletir sobre a correlação histórica das obras de Aristófanes e Hipócrates, com ênfase nas atividades sexuais femininas e nas construções de gênero em Atenas. Palavras-chave: História da Grécia Clássica. Comédia Aristofânica. Medicina Hipocrática. Esposas legítimas. C om base na proposta do presente dossiê em reunir trabalhos que versem sobre as produções atuais acerca dos conceitos de performance e de gênero aplicados às fontes antigas, objetivamos refletir sobre as possibilidades interpretativas oriundas da interlocução entre Hipócrates e Aristófanes. A análise que pretendemos construir a par-tir deste diálogo se alinha à História de Gênero, pois elegemos a relação entre o feminino e o masculino como central ao nosso estudo. Por um lado, a investigação das comédias aristofânicas aponta para a elaboração de uma imagem feminina ativa, especificamente a da esposa legítima em Atenas. Tal imagem, que será explorada mais adiante, nos permite compreender as trocas de gênero que permeiam os enredos de Aristófanes e, também, como

We propose to this simply meant 'instrument for moving', referring to the notorious use of the beet as a laxative, which also explains both why the word was considered funny by the Greeks and also why the Doric form (incorrectly listed as Ionic by most authorities) was used in Athens and then in the Koiné, because Athenians liked their physicians Doric (at least in comedy).  We owe Roberto Batisti special thanks for calling the relevant fact and literature to our attention because we had also fallen for the Ionic story--because after all who are we to disagree with the authorities?

Popular participation and the nature of political power in democratic Athens have long been object of debate among scholars. This workshop will focus on a specific facet of this debate: the political class of Athenian democracy. Was there a political class in democratic Athens? How can we explain the diverging pictures of Athenian politics which emerge from literary and epigraphical sources? Did any major changes take place in Athens’ political equilibrium throughout the fifth and fourth centuries? What was the role of expertise and professionalization in Athenian politics? By tackling these and related questions and analysing them from multiple angles, this workshop aims to renew and advance the debate on Athens’ political class. As a result, it will provide a nuanced and comprehensive view of the nature, breadth, composition and very existence of a political class in Athenian democracy and shape the debate on the topic for the next generation of scholars.

The tragedies of Euripides are composed of traditional mythological material, yet the characters in his tragedies question the validity of their own stories, including the involvement of gods and goddesses. Philosophy, historiography, and early mythography were rationalizing myths at the time when Euripides was composing tragedies. I present several scenes from his tragedies, which exemplify and parallel these other rational genres. My article maintains that Euripides used these approaches to innovate the art of tragedy and participate in the intellectual climate of his milieu.

[Please message me if you would like to request a full digital copy of this publication.]

In the wake of the disastrous end to the Sicilian expedition in 413, Euripides brought Hypsipyle to the stage, thus renewing the Dionysian cultural heritage Athens had long shared with its Lemnian allies in the eastern Aegean. In a move especially characteristic of his later tragedies, Euripides gives Hypsipyle a musically innovative monody, which was apparently so distinctive that the comic poet Aristophanes parodied her as an embodiment of Euripidean musical style in Frogs. Even though substantial passages of this once-lost monody have been recovered, the significance of its female singer for the play’s broader aims has remained obscure. The ‘New Musical’ style of Hypsipyle’s song has cast a long shadow on its reception. Given the general neglect of the fragmentary plays and the particular bias against this parodied, fragmentary drama, Hypsipyle is rarely taken seriously among the female characters of the tragic stage. Attending to the ‘aural form’ of tragedy in its sociocultural context, this essay shows how Hypsipyle’s monody musically embodies the cultic connections that Euripides forges in the play. From the fragments of her monody and its refraction through the parodic lens Aristophanes provides, Hypsipyle emerges as the decidedly New Musical Muse of Euripidean style.

The paper deals with five quotations from Attic drama preserved in the books 17-18 of Priscian’s Ars (6th c. AD), which were written drawing on an ancient Atticist lexicographical source (1st/2nd c. AD). Progress in studies on the manuscript tradition of the Ars as well as the recent publication of the new critical edition of the second half of book 18 by M. Rosellini enable a sounder analysis of both text and context of Priscian’s Greek quotations. On the authority of the late-antique grammarian it is possible to defend a reading witnessed by manuscripts against modern corrections (Eup. fr. 7 K.-A.), to make a new discussion of two authorship and attribution issues (Men. fr. 96 K.-A.; Soph. fr. 1119 Radt), and to point out a common exchange between wasps (dat. Σφηξί) and sphinxes (Σφιγξί) in the title of Aristophanes’ Wasps in lexicographical sources. The survey of the occurrences of this last mistake in Greek lexica and their manuscript traditions allows in its turn to defend in Eup. fr. 32 K.-A. the traditional title Sphinxes, which has been emended by editors in Goats (Αἰξί). At the end of the paper an appendix lists all changes in the text of Priscian’s quotations from Attic drama in Rosellini’s new edition agains Hertz’s one.

Este artigo analisa a ocorrência da imagem do cão que furta alimento em quatro peças supérstites de Aristófanes: Acarnenses, Cavaleiros, Vespas e Pluto. Seu objetivo é delimitar o topos, entender sua relevância para a antiga comédia ática e sua aplicação à situação política da época.
This paper analyzes the occurrence of the imagery pertaining to the dog that steals food in four extant plays by Aristophanes: Acharnians, Knights, Wasps, and Plutus. Its main goal is to define the topos, understand its relevance for Old Comedy, and its pertinence to the political situation at the time.

ABSTRACT - The reason for the demagogue Cleon’s pressing charges against Aristophanes was not the latter’s criticism of Athenian imperialism in the comedy Babylonians staged in 426 a.C. From Diceopoli’s speech (Aristoph. Ach. 520-516), the Chorus (Aristoph. Ach. 630; 659-664) and fragment 67 K. - A. it can be gleaned that there were two accusations by Cleon against Aristophanes: his slandering of the Athenian State and leading Athenian politicians, and his criticism of the Ecclesia, the Athenian Popular Assembly.

LSJ glosses μυρίνης ‘sweet wine’, citing for this meaning Diph. fr. 17.10, Posidipp.Com. fr. 36 and Ael. VH 12.31, but adds immediately thereafter ‘prob(ably) wine flavoured with μύρον’ (perfume), for which more specific sense the reader is directed to Philippid. fr. 40. Montanari s. v. offers the more compact ‘μυρίνης οἶνος, ὁ [μύρον] vino dolce profumato Diph. 17.10 Posidip. 36 Ael. VH 12.31’, combining the remarks in LSJ but dropping the reference to Philippides. All this information goes back to three 2nd-century CE authors, the most important of whom — left unmentioned in both LSJ and Montanari — is Pollux, and both notes require clarification and correction.

pdf available here: https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:33713/

Greek drama has been subject to ongoing textual and historical interpretation, but surprisingly little scholarship has examined the people who composed the theater audiences in Athens. Typically, scholars have presupposed an audience of Athenian male citizens viewing dramas created exclusively for themselves—a model that reduces theater to little more than a medium for propaganda. Women's theater attendance remains controversial, and little attention has been paid to the social class and ethnicity of the spectators. Whose theater was it?

Producing the first book-length work on the subject, David Kawalko Roselli draws on archaeological and epigraphic evidence, economic and social history, performance studies, and ancient stories about the theater to offer a wide-ranging study that addresses the contested authority of audiences and their historical constitution. Space, money, the rise of the theater industry, and broader social forces emerge as key factors in this analysis. In repopulating audiences with foreigners, slaves, women, and the poor, this book challenges the basis of orthodox interpretations of Greek drama and places the politically and socially marginal at the heart of the theater. Featuring an analysis of the audiences of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Menander, Theater of the People brings to life perhaps the most powerful influence on the most prominent dramatic poets of their day.

In the scarce texts we have of the comic writer Epicharm, 6th-5th centuries B.C., and the mimographer Sophron, 5th century B.C., both of them of Syracuse, there are attested to different notations to reflect the hiatuses /eo/ and /eɔː/ , the same in the two authors . Specifically, for /eo/ we find four different spellings <εο> <εου> <ευ> and <ου>, while /eɔː/ is spelt as <εω> and <ω>. In this paper I will attempt to give an explanation to the diversity of spellings in the two authors; a complex problem in which, as I shall try to show, phonics, spelling and textual transmission have participated

The Paestan vase-painting of Zeus on a see-saw (from an unidentified mythological comedy) represents a type of comic scene known in ancient Greek theatre: erotic flirtation between two personages (an aspiring lover and his ladylove) is theatrically rendered through an actual game played by those two characters on stage. Parallels include Platon Comicus fr. 46 and 47 (Heracles playing kottabos with a prostitute), Antiphanes fr. 57 (possibly an enamoured god teaching the kottabos to young Aphrodite), Diphilos fr. 74 and Plautus, Asinaria 904ff. (hetaira and lovers playing dice). The Paestan picture parodies the traditional mythical image of Zeus weighing the fates or souls of opposed warriors in his divine scales, to determine the outcome of a fight (see e.g. Iliad 8.69–74, 22.209–213, Aeschylus’ Psychostasia). In comic reversal, Zeus himself is now put “in the balance”, rising and falling on the see-saw like the heroes placed in the scales. Such laughable inversion of traditional mythical roles was a staple technique in ancient mythological comedies.

In the most important modern Greek dictionaries we find an entry for the
word "peripolis", which is recorded as a coinage of the comic poet Phrynichus in fr. 34
K.-A. from his lost play entitled Muses (405 B.C.); but, if we consider the textual
tradition of the fragment (preserved by Pollux 7, 203), this word turns out to be a
conjecture by the Dutch scholar Tiberius Hemsterhuys in 1706

This book is a study of the ways in which classical Athenian texts represent and evaluate the morality of deception. It is particularly concerned with the way in which the telling of lies was a problem for the world's first democracy and compares this problem with the modern Western situation. There are major sections on Greek tragedy, comedy, oratory, historiography and philosophy.