The Language of Old Comedy

2010 ◽  
pp. 471-510 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Old Comedy

The Agon of the Old Comedy

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Milton Humphreys
Keyword(s):  
Old Comedy

Laughter on the Fringes

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Peterson
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
Autobiographical Writing ◽  
Treasure Trove ◽  
Old Comedy ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Aggressive Humor ◽  
The One ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Impact

This book examines the impact that Athenian Old Comedy had on Greek writers of the Imperial era. It is generally acknowledged that Imperial-era Greeks responded to Athenian Old Comedy in one of two ways: either as a treasure trove of Atticisms, or as a genre defined by and repudiated for its aggressive humor. Worthy of further consideration, however, is how both approaches, and particularly the latter one that relegated Old Comedy to the fringes of the literary canon, led authors to engage with the ironic and self-reflexive humor of Aristophanes, Eupolis, and Cratinus. Authors ranging from serious moralizers (Plutarch and Aelius Aristides) to comic writers in their own right (Lucian, Alciphron), to other figures not often associated with Old Comedy (Libanius) adopted aspects of the genre to negotiate power struggles, facilitate literary and sophistic rivalries, and provide a model for autobiographical writing. To varying degrees, these writers wove recognizable features of the genre (e.g., the parabasis, its agonistic language, the stage biographies of the individual poets) into their writings. The image of Old Comedy that emerges from this time is that of a genre in transition. It was, on the one hand, with the exception of Aristophanes’s extant plays, on the verge of being almost completely lost; on the other hand, its reputation and several of its most characteristic elements were being renegotiated and reinvented.

Archilochus and Lycambes

1986 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Carey
Keyword(s):  
Present Note ◽  
Old Comedy ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
The Voice

A persistent ancient tradition has it that a man named Lycambes promised his daughter Neoboule in marriage to the poet Archilochus of Paros, that he subsequently refused Archilochus, and that the poet attacked Lycambes and his daughters with such ferocity that they all committed suicide. When we reflect that the iambographer Hipponax drove his enemies Bupalus and Athenis and Old Comedy a man named Poliager to suicide, that the ancestress of iambos, Iambe, killed herself, and that all these suicides, like those of Lycambes and his daughters, took the form of hanging, we will not take too seriously the ending of the story of Archilochus' relations with Lycambes and his family.However, it seems now to be generally accepted, at least among English-speaking scholars, that the whole Lycambes tradition is to be rejected. The present note seeks to demonstrate that this extreme scepticism is misguided. I shall begin with a survey of Archilochus' references to Lycambes and his family to ascertain how far the indirect tradition is consistent with the surviving fragments.Lycambes appears to have played a consistent role in Archilochus, as far as the fragments allow us to see. In fr. 38 he appears as the father of two daughters (οἴην Λυκάμβεω παῖδα τ⋯ν ύπερτέρην), in fr. 33 (where the voice of ‘the daughter of Lycambes’ is mentioned) as the father of at least one daughter. In fr. 71 his role cannot be determined. But in fr. 54, if his name is correctly restored in v. 8, he may again figure as the father of a daughter, for a female is mentioned in the fragment, whether for good or ill. If his patronymic is correctly supplied in fr. 57.7, it may be significant that the letters πατρ occur in the same verse.

A Reply on Aristophanic Costume

1957 ◽  
Vol 7 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 185-185 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. B. L. Webster
Keyword(s):  
Old Comedy ◽  
Theatre Production

In answer to Professor Beare's note, which he has generously shown me, I would make the following points: (1) I think it unlikely that Middle Comedy was more obscene than Old Comedy, and the Attic vases go back to about 420 B.C. (see my Greek Theatre Production, pp. 56 f., particularly 66, and Wiener Studien, lxix (1956), 110 f.).

The Dramatic Satura and the Old Comedy at Rome

1894 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
George L. Hendrickson
Keyword(s):  
Old Comedy

scholarly journals The power of the people: the meaning of kratos in dēmokratia

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 56
Author(s):  
John McGuire
Keyword(s):  
Political Discourse ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Constitutional Rights ◽  
Electoral Success ◽  
Old Comedy ◽  
Black Lives Matter ◽  
The People ◽  
Satisfactory Answer

In this paper, I reconstruct the notion of kratos as a unique and distinguishable exercise of political power. Using examples from 5th- and 4th-century Attic tragedy, Old Comedy, and forensic oratory, I show how kratos was used in Athenian cultural and political discourse to convey the irrefutability of a claim, the recognition of someone’s prevailing over another, and the sense of having the last word—all of which makes kratic power dependent upon its own continued demonstrability. I argue that the peculiarly performative character of kratos has little or no role within contemporary democratic thinking because the agency of the dēmos is largely mediated through the mechanisms of electoral success and constitutional rights. Nevertheless—and regardless of whether they are ultimately successful in achieving their stated political aims—the spontaneous, organisationally diffuse protests operating extra-institutionally under the banners of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter reveal how the attempted ‘domestication’ of kratos, and the sublimation of its peculiar power into piecemeal reform, was never a realistic or satisfactory answer for democratic discontent.

‘Do you Think you’re Clever? Solve this Riddle, then!’ The Comic Side of Byzantine Enigmatic Poetry

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simone Beta
Keyword(s):  
Fifth Century ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Old Comedy ◽  
The Many

‘Comic’ is not an adjective one would normally use in connection with or ancient Greek Byzantine riddles. Yet Greek riddles began to show their comic side after the fifth century BCE, when they became typical sympotic pastimes. At some point, ainigmata turned into griphoi and, according to the definition given by the Peripatetic philosopher Clearchus of Soli, became a ‘a problem put in jest’. The comicality we see in in the many griphoi Athenaeus took from Attic comedy in the tenth book of the Deipnosophists is more evident, and less dangerous; and it is generally agreed that such drollery is mostly absent from Byzantine riddles. A survey shows how the unknown Byzantine authors who took pleasure in composing these little conundrums were even able, in some circumstances, to jest with Holy Scripture and to linger on topics more suitable for Old Comedy.

Aristophanic Structures in Sweeney Agonistes, “The Hollow Men,” and Murder in the Cathedral

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua Richards
Keyword(s):  
Structural Elements ◽  
Old Comedy

When T. S. Eliot began his foray into drama in the early 1920s, he wrote according to a schema derived from F. M. Cornford’s The Origin of Attic Comedy. Thus, Sweeney Agonistes is subtitled “Fragments of an Aristophanic Melodrama.” While scholars often mention Cornford’s book, it has rarely been consulted in-depth. Structural clues from “The Fragrment of an Agon” in conjunction with Cornford’s ideas suggest that Doris, and not Sweeney, is the protagonist of the play. An underexplored aspect of Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” is its interrelated genesis with Sweeney Agonistes and what this might suggest of an Aristophanic structure for “The Hollow Men.” Richards performs this thoroughgoing analysis and argues that Attic Old Comedy as delineated by Cornford remained with Eliot into the 1930s. Richards then applies Cornford to explain otherwise enigmatic structural elements of Murder in the Cathedral. 

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