Paracomedy and Relative Chronology
This chapter presents paracomedy as a tool that can help establish a relative chronology between plays in cases where we can detect an allusive relationship between a tragedy and a comedy but we do not know which play was performed first. Using examples from Sophocles’s Chryses, Euripides’s Cyclops, Euripides’s Heracles, and Euripides’s Ion, it lays out different interpretations for the possible chronologies in an attempt to unpack their implications and to clarify their underlying scholarly assumptions. The chapter analyzes Euripides’s Antiope as a corrective response to Aristophanes’s Women at the Thesmophoria that reverses Aristophanes’s critique that intellectual musicians are useless by making Amphion an intellectual musician who is politically efficacious. The chapter also proposes a new way to interpret the metrical evidence for dating Antiope and suggests that Euripides may have used old-fashioned metrics as an archaizing throwback to support the musical and political goals of his play.