Euripides and Menander

1924 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
M. Andrewes
Keyword(s):  
Original Model ◽  
Old Comedy ◽  
The Social ◽  
Comedy Of Manners ◽  
New Comedy

Greek New Comedy, as we know it from references and fragmentary MSS., is the meeting-place of three confluent streams—comedy of manners, Aristophanic comedy, and tragedy. From Sicilian comedy, through Epicharmus at Syracuse and Crates and Pherecrates at Athens, it inherited certain stock stage figures, and a tradition of ‘invented’ plots and sententious speech. Old Comedy it resembled in its fun and informality and many stage conventions; and, indeed, the resemblance was so marked, in at least one of the later plays of Aristophanes, that the writer of his life, mistaking effect for cause, claimed the lost Cocalus as the original model of New Comedy. Perhaps most important of all was the influence of tragedy; and this influence may be estimated by a direct comparison between Euripides and Menander, both in the spirit and form of their plays and in the social and philosophic theories underlying them.

From Aristophanes to Menander

1972 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-80 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. Geoffrey Arnott
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
Young Men ◽  
Peloponnesian War ◽  
Old Comedy ◽  
The City ◽  
New Comedy

At the beginning of 405 b.c., fourteen or fifteen months before the final catastrophe overtook Athens in the Peloponnesian War, Aristophanes produced the Frogs. It is the last extant play of Old Comedy proper. Its plot is at times discursive, its subject-matter is passionately tied to the city in which the play was conceived, and its structure is largely controlled by such traditional and formal Old Comedy elements as the agon and parabasis. The Frogs won first prize. In 316 b.c., just eighty-nine years later, if we accept a plausible emendation in the Bodmer papyrus, Menander in his turn won the first prize at the same festival with his Dyskolos. The Dyskolos is the first extant play of the New Comedy to which we can give a firm date. Its plot is tightly knit, its subject-matter is universal, and its structure is largely governed by a new set of formal elements. Aristophanes' Frogs had a chorus of initiates, who charmed the audience by their nostalgic evocation of the old annual procession to Eleusis, suspended at the time because of the Spartan occupation of Decelea. This chorus of initiates sang and danced between the dialogue scenes a series of specially composed, memorable lyrics which were relevant to the plot, to the city, and to the period; they and their leader also delivered the parabasis. This vivid, lively, functional chorus is replaced in Menander by only a dim shadow: a κ⋯μος of tipsy young men who have no function whatever in the plot, who serve merely to entertain the audience in the intervals between the five acts with a song-and-dance routine whose words are not preserved and possibly were not even specially composed for the play by its author.

Ritual Elements in the New Comedy

1943 ◽  
Vol 37 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 46-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gilbert Murray
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Religious Ritual ◽  
Old Comedy ◽  
Colloquial Language ◽  
Art Form ◽  
The One ◽  
New Comedy

The New Comedy as an art form is descended both from the Old Comedy and from fifth-century Tragedy. It is a middle style of the sort that Diderot called le genre sérieux. On the one side it made an expurgation of the Old Comedy by dropping the gross elements of the primitive ritual ⋯ϕέσεωςκ⋯μος which still survived in Aristophanes, the phallic dress, the ϒεϕυρɩομός in language, and the reckless personal satire, while it kept and emphasized the final Gamos, or union of lovers, and developed a more elaborate plot. On the other side it reformed Tragedy by getting rid of the supernatural stories and the stiff conventions. To quote some words of my own written in 1912, it ‘introduced all the simplifications and improvements which seem to a modern’—I meant a modern philistine—‘so obviously desirable. It developed an easy colloquial language, a flexible and unexacting metre. It left the Chorus quite outside the play, a kind of entr'acte, not worth writing down. It frankly abandoned religious ritual’—please observe that statement, which I now wish to correct—‘and heroic saga. It drew its material from the adventures and emotions of contemporary middle class life, and boldly invented its own plots.’ Menander in particular was considered in antiquity to have held a mirror up to life; a verse by Aristophanes of Byzantium asks.

Strolling Players and Provincial Drama After Shakspere

PMLA ◽  
1922 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 243-280 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alwin Thaler
Keyword(s):  
Comedy Of Manners ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Comedy

Elsewhere I have written of the actors who travelled “softly on the hoof” through the length and breadth of Shakspere's England, and I propose here to deal with their successors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They make part—perhaps a more important part than is generally understood—of the history of the drama and theatre in a period that is full of life and interest even though the greater glory had departed. To the student of Elizabethan times the ways and means of these “weather-beaten weary travellers” are significant because the strollers were, and are, the most conservative of all players. They continued the ancient and honorable traditions of the Elizabethans long after the patent theatres, the new scenes out of France, the new comedy of manners, and, finally, the new sentimentalism, had crowded the very memory of the days of the Globe and the Blackfriars and stamped the customs and devices of those great times as subjects for mockery. But the later strollers are worthy of study in and for themselves, or at least in the light of their practical contribution to the stage history of their time. To be sure, their predecessors at Stratford-on-Avon who gave Shakspere his first glimpse of the puppets dallying, came at a more opportune moment; but those who followed made the most of their opportunities. Bright-plumed “birds of passage” were they, and wheresoever they passed most men were glad of their coming. They left long trails of debt behind them, and played more than one rather scurvy trick upon their hosts, but they brought the old plays and the new away from the cramped quarters of London's theatrical monopoly into the furthest corner of the provinces. They kept England merry England still, besides crossing the ocean and establishing the theatre in the colonies—including America.

The Go-Between or The Temptres (ΠΡΟΚΥΚΛΙΣ‎ Η‎ ΜΑΣΤΡΟΠΟΣ‎)

2009 ◽  
pp. 14-41
Keyword(s):  
Social Scale ◽  
The Social ◽  
Stock Type ◽  
New Comedy

This chapter focuses on Herodas' first Mimiamb, which admirably illustrates Herodas' technique of characterization. It mentions the figure of Gyllis, who speaks over two-thirds of the first Mimiamb's lines. It also analyses the prefatory remarks to Mimiamb 1, which emphasize the character of the more-or-less professional go-between that was a special feature of Sophrôn's mimes, the magoidiai and New Comedy. The chapter discusses how Gyllis have come further down the social scale into the proper province of mime and become a representative of a stock type in mime and comedy. It explains how Herodas takes the type and individualises it with particular traits called the mosaic technique.

MALE SLAVE SEXUALITY AND THE ABSENCE OF MORAL PANIC IN CLASSICAL ATHENS

2013 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 37-53
Author(s):  
S. C. TODD
Keyword(s):  
Moral Panic ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Old Comedy ◽  
New Comedy

Abstract A puzzling feature of slavery in Classical Athenian literature is the lack of attention paid to the sexuality of male slaves or ex-slaves. It is not that they are never depicted as sexual beings, but Athenian writers display much more interest in the sexuality of female than of male slaves, and even where the latter are presented in sexual terms, there is little sense that this might pose a threat to free-born women. To reduce the danger of using sources as proof-texts and ignoring the significance of literary genre, this paper is structured around an analysis of male slave sexuality in Old Comedy, more briefly New Comedy, and Oratory, with comparisons from other texts where appropriate. An extended conclusion explores possible explanations, focusing on differences between classical Athenian and modern US slavery.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document