Ancient Greek Comedy

Genre – Texts – Reception

Almut Fries, Dimitrios Kanellakis, Almut Fries, Dimitrios Kanellakis

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783110645224
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This volume, in honour of Angus M. Bowie, collects seventeen original essays on Greek comedy. Its contributors treat questions of origin, genre and artistic expression, interpret individual plays from different angles (literary, historical, performative) and cover aspects of reception from antiquity to the 20th century. Topics that have not received much attention so far, such as the prehistory of Doric comedy or music in Old Comedy, receive a prominent place.

The essays are arranged in three sections: (1) Genre, (2) Texts and Contexts, (3) Reception. Within each section the chapters are as far as possible arranged in chronological order, according to historical time or to the (putative) dates of the plays under discussion. Thus readers will be able to construe their own diachronic and thematic connections, for example between the portrayal of stock characters in early Doric farce and developed Attic New Comedy or between different forms of comic reception in the fourth century BC.

The book is intended for professional scholars, graduate and undergraduate students. Its wide range of subjects and approaches will appeal not only to those working on Greek comedy, but to anyone interested in Greek drama and its afterlife.

Part I: Genre

The Characters of Doric Comedy

Ioannis M. Konstantakos

The term ‘comedy of characters’ is used to designate a kind of comic play in which the personages themselves and their peculiar temperamental traits become the main source of the theatrical action and the humorous effect. As a rule, this type of drama relies on a repertoire of more or less common theatrical types, which may represent professional or class categories (servant, army officer, courtesan, doctor, cook, householder), as well as ethical vices and idiosyncrasies of character (e.g. conceit, stinginess, misanthropy, flattery, or boorishness). The beginnings of this comic form are usually associated with the Athenian theatre of the fourth and third centuries BCE, the periods of Middle and New Comedy, when an ample repertoire of stereotypical figures was developed on the Greek comic stage. Every one of these figures recurred in a multitude of plays and was incorporated each time into a different comic plot, but retained a core of standard characteristics, which constituted his or her peculiar theatrical physiognomy and permanent dramatic identity.¹

Some of these stock characters were instrumental to the love plot, which was established as a main ingredient of comic dramaturgy in the fourth century. Almost every comedy included a young man in love and his beloved girl, who might be a versatile hetaira or the daughter of an honourable citizen; there was also an elderly father, who might obstruct the love affair, and a cunning household slave who helped his enamoured master. Around this central quartet a number of ‘professional’ types moved, which had closer or more distant ties to the love plot. The braggart soldier was the young hero’s rival in love. The parasite or flatterer, attached to the young lover or to the soldier, helped his patron with the love intrigue in return for free meals. The pimp, a profiteering rascal, was the owner of the coveted hetaira. The cook was hired to prepare a banquet, destined either for the enjoyment of the hetaira and her lover or for the young man’s wedding at the finale.

A related dramaturgical tendency of Middle and New Comedy was the exploration of character idiosyncrasies and moral flaws. The playwright placed a personage endowed with a temperamental defect or eccentricity at the centre of the action; around this character various amusing situations were woven, which caricatured his ethical constitution. The lion’s share was taken by characters of the ‘obsessive’ type, that is, figures dominated by an overbearing passion, such as the misanthrope, the miser and the superstitious man.² Another usual vice, conceit (alazοneia), was exemplified by a broad category of boastful professionals, such as the army officer, the grandiloquent cook, the pretentious philosopher and the medical doctor.³ All these personages might also undertake a role in the love-plot, typically as blocking figures that obstructed the lovers’ union.

Doric farce and the roots of the comedy of characters

The comedy of characters was not born ex nihilo in fourth-century Athens. The same type of comic play, based on the interaction of social and moral human types, had been cultivated by the Sicilian Epicharmus, the first great master of literary comedy in the Greek world, during the early decades of the fifth century. A large part of Epicharmus’ production consisted in the humorous portrayal of everyday bourgeois and domestic life and the amusing reflection of social mores; emphasis was put on the construction of comic characters, such as the rustic, the flatterer, the erudite philosopher, the braggart soldier, the cook and the old soothsayer.⁴ Certain playwrights of Attic Old Comedy, such as Crates, Pherecrates and Phrynichus, also took up this type of social and ethical comedy, together with its gallery of character figures.⁵ Some of the personages of this repertoire were further reworked in the satirical comedies of other fifth-century Athenian dramatists, such as Aristophanes and Eupolis.⁶

Nevertheless, the ultimate roots of the comedy of characters can be traced to an even more ancient phase, before the emergence of literary comedy at the beginning of the fifth century. The first signs of a repertoire of archetypical dramatic figures can be discovered in the earliest documented folk forms of Greek comic theatre, that is the popular farces which must have been performed in various places already in the Archaic period.⁷ These folk performances provided the substratum for the formation of the highly artistic genres of comedy in later times. In the sources that happen to be preserved from the ancient world popular comic spectacles of this kind are mainly attested for Doric regions, specifically Laconia, Corinth, Megara and the colonies of South Italy and Sicily.⁸

Most of these theatrical events have left few traces in the literary tradition. No scripts or textual fragments have been preserved from Spartan, Corinthian or Megarian farces. Neither authors’ names nor titles of plays are recorded in any philological or inscriptional source. This should not be attributed to a mere accident of transmission. It seems rather that the early Doric comic performances represented a kind of traditional and extempore theatre, a form of folk art based on orality. Preparation and performance must have been conducted orally, without fixed written scripts, and must have largely depended on the performers’ improvisations. In other words, there were no written texts to reach the library of Alexandria and be excerpted by later grammarians. The live performance, as it was generated anew each time by means of the improvised acts, speeches and dialogues of the players, represented the total of the theatrical experience.⁹

As a result, the available evidence for the study of Doric folk theatre is preciously scarce. A number of Archaic vase-paintings from Corinth and other Doric areas (Boeotia, Laconia, Western Greece) may be connected, in the opinion of some scholars, with local proto-comic performances or dances. The performers depicted in these pictures, usually called ‘padded komasts’ or ‘padded dancers’ in modern scholarship, sing and dance to a piper’s accompaniment; they wear ridiculous padding on their belly and buttocks, which recalls the typical stage underwear worn by the actors of Classical Athenian comedy.¹⁰ A few of the Corinthian vases bear inscriptions which identify the names of the characters or the performers portrayed.¹¹ However, unlike the later group of South-Italian vase-paintings of comic scenes (the so-called ‘phlyax’ vases) from the fourth century, the inscriptions of the Corinthian vases do not yield actual words from the performance, which could count as textual fragments.

Apart from these monuments, the only other available sources of knowledge for the Doric folk farces consist in scattered testimonia of ancient poets and Hellenistic or later historians, grammarians and polymaths.¹² The Attic comic dramatists are of course valuable first-hand sources for contemporary Megarian performances (see below, pp. 17–23). Later scholars and grammarians are also worthy of attention. They might have witnessed analogous performances of their own age, which preserved more ancient elements or descended in direct line from centuries-old local traditions. Furthermore, many of these writers had antiquarian interests and may have conducted serious research into the cultural life and history of their own homeland or other regions. They would have had access to important sources of information, including works of local historiography, inscriptional records, city archives, and also oral traditions, in the form of local legends, personal memories, anecdotes and other popular narratives, which had been preserved by generation after generation of the inhabitants. From these sources they could have collected a wealth of data about the history of theatrical phenomena in a given area, extending back to a d...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Part I: Genre
• Part II: Texts and Contexts
• Part III: Reception
• List of Contributors
• List of publications by Angus M. Bowie
• Index Locorum
• Index Nominum et Rerum