Comic Fragments Research Articles

Greek Comedy’s Food-Related Imaginary and the Criticism of New Music

Abstract The article aims to present an analysis of lines 26–8 in Pherecr. fr. 155 K.-A., arguing that they may refer to Philoxenus of Cythera’s poetics by exploiting a simile derived from comic food-related imagery. The use of food metaphors to express literary criticism is consistent in comic drama: in particular, mentions of sophisticated dishes can either denote the self-promotion of the comedian’s art, or criticise the excess of kainotēs in other genres, such as tragedy and New Dithyramb. In Pherecrates’ fragment, Mousikē is compared to a rhaphanos, a green usually consumed in frugal meals, stuffed by Philoxenus with kampai (‘caterpillars’, but also ‘modulations’ according to the New Music’s lexicon), possibly describing the poet as an innovative chef. Parallels with other comic fragments and later accounts of Philoxenus’ fame as a glutton and cook may offer a further reading of the lines and shed new light on Greek comedy’s criticism of New Music.

Эмоциональная реакция аудитории как способ оценки комического и ценностного статусов различных явлений

The article examines various emotional reactions of the audience of English-language stand-up comedies both to values and anti-values that are actualized in the text, and to comic statements of a speaker. The purpose of the study is to identify the main emotional reactions of the audience while watching stand-up comedies, classifying these reactions and determining their compatibility. The corpus of the study comprises recordings and scripts of 50 English-language stand-up specials. The study is based on auditory fixation of audience reactions while watching stand-up comedies to comic and non-comic statements. Such emotional reactions of the audience as laughter, applause, emotional approval, and emotional disapproval have been identified and analyzed. Taking into account the degree of laughter intensity, the structural arrangement of comic fragments and their significance, three types of laughter are distinguished: warming-up, main, and follow-up. Applause is found to be the reaction to actualizing values while the corresponding value is either realized during joke creation or is actualized in the corresponding statement. In addition, it has been determined that an emotional approval may only accompany applause. The disapproval of the audience is associated with the actualization of a certain anti-value. It has also been found that an emotional disapproval of some viewers in most cases is accompanied by the laughter of other viewers. Moreover, in certain cases such laughter may be accompanied by applause. The difference in perceiving such jokes is explained by two main factors: 1) different attitudes of viewers towards the corresponding phenomenon; 2) different focus of the audience.

Panel-Page-Aware Comic Genre Understanding.

Using a sequence of discrete still images to tell a story or introduce a process has become a tradition in the field of digital visual media. With the surge in these media and the requirements in downstream tasks, acquiring their main topics or genres in a very short time is urgently needed. As a representative form of the media, comic enjoys a huge boom as it has gone digital. However, different from natural images, comic images are divided by panels, and the images are not visually consistent from page to page. Therefore, existing works tailored for natural images perform poorly in analyzing comics. Considering the identification of comic genres is tied to the overall story plotting, a long-term understanding that makes full use of the semantic interactions between multi-level comic fragments needs to be fully exploited. In this paper, we propose [Formula: see text]Comic, a Panel-Page-aware Comic genre classification model, which takes page sequences of comics as the input and produces class-wise probabilities. [Formula: see text]Comic utilizes detected panel boxes to extract panel representations and deploys self-attention to construct panel-page understanding, assisted with interdependent classifiers to model label correlation. We develop the first comic dataset for the task of comic genre classification with multi-genre labels. Our approach is proved by experiments to outperform state-of-the-art methods on related tasks. We also validate the extensibility of our network to perform in the multi-modal scenario. Finally, we show the practicability of our approach by giving effective genre prediction results for whole comic books.

DOMESTIC COMEDY AND THE CLASSICAL GREEK HOUSE

Greek comedy, especially New Comedy, contains many incidental descriptions of domestic interiors. This article argues that such descriptions constitute a valuable and overlooked source of evidence for historians of the classical Greek house; they are also of interest to literary critics in that they contribute to the thematic and conceptual meaning of the plays. The article presents and discusses all the surviving comic evidence for houses, including many previously neglected comic fragments, as well as a key scene from Menander's Samia which is more detailed than any other surviving literary depiction.

A Repeated Allusion to Pindar and the Eleusinian Mysteries in Anaxilas’ Comic Fragments?

Anaxilas in fragments 25 and 30 K.-A. deliberately alluded to Pindar’s fragment 137 S.-M. and the mystery references it contains, but at the same time completely redesigned the sense of the Pindaric phrase for a strong comic effect.

TIPPLING BUT NOT TOPPLING: EUBULUS, PCG FR. 123

The epitome of Athenaeus does not retain all the details of how these comic fragments were embedded in the conversation which Athenaeus originally presented, though the extract's first sentence shows that one purpose was to exemplify the application of βρέχω to drinking. Editors of both Athenaeus and Eubulus have left the connection of the latter's fragment to its conversational context at that. I submit that what follows in the epitome, as well as what precedes, casts light both on that connection and on how we should restore the text.

Tragedy on the Comic Stage by Matthew C. Farmer

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 179 is an indication of divine involvement—a point she makes repeatedly (and on which cf. Poetics 1452a4–11)—the basis for this claim remains an accumulation of examples; the argument itself is made ex silentio. Such criticisms do not invalidate Lefkowitz’s central thesis. Indeed, given the persistence of the interpretive tradition which views Euripides as a religious revolutionary,1 it is both necessary and timely. If I am skeptical in some respects, it is because tragedy is a complex art and because I genuinely doubt whether it is possible to make a robust case for what Euripides personally believed on the basis of his poetic output. Lefkowitz, I suspect, may feel the same way, but what else do we have to work with? University of Manitoba C. Michael Sampson Tragedy on the Comic Stage. By Matthew C. Farmer. New York: Oxford University Press. 2017. Pp. xi, 267. In the first part of his book, Matthew Farmer examines systematically, for the first time, what can be said about the treatment of tragedy in the hundreds of Attic comedies of which only fragments survive, under the headings of “tragic culture” (Chapter One, “Electra and the Coal Pan: Tragic Culture in the Comic Fragments”) and “tragic parody” (Chapter Two, “Give Me a Bit of Paratragedy: Tragic Parody in the Comic Fragments”). The former term covers “all the ways the comic poets depict their characters . . . talking about tragedy” (12–13); the latter denotes “comic imitations of tragic language, characters, plot, and spectacle” (69). Farmer recognizes that the dichotomy is somewhat artificial, since the two phenomena tend to occur together and morph into each other (65), but it is useful nevertheless. Tragic culture—interest in, and enthusiasm for, tragic drama—suffuses Athenian society of the fifth and fourth centuries. Farmer makes extensive use of the concept of “fandom” introduced to the study of Athenian drama by Ralph Rosen;1 the tragedy fan is a frequent figure in comedy of all periods. The main diachronic development in comedy ’s reflection of tragic culture is, not surprisingly, an increasing focus on dramatists of the past at the expense of those of the present. Tragic parody is, according to Farmer, “an essential feature of all Greek comedy” (71, 113); certainly we have no complete, or nearly complete, comedy from which tragic parody, as defined above, is absent. Coverage has thus to be selective, but a dozen dramatists receive substantial discussion. Farmer is not entirely consistent in his view of how far the subtler features of tragic parody would be appreciated by audiences. At one point (82) he says that the comic poets wrote for an audience “capable of identifying the original tragic sources . . . and [incorporating them] into their understandings of the parodic comedies”; at another (103), more realistically, he distinguishes between more and less sophisticated spectators (cf. Ar. Eccl. 1155–57 on the contest judges). His discussion of Strattis’ Phoinissai (95–103), however, arguably overestimates the abilities even of the more sophisticated. Thus, according to Farmer (97–98), the parody of Eur. 1 See, for a recent example, Pietro Pucci, Euripides’ Revolution under Cover: An Essay (Ithaca 2016). 1 R. Rosen, “Aristophanes, Fandom and the Classicizing of Greek Tragedy,” in L. A. Kozak and J. W. Rich (ed.), Playing around Aristophanes (Oxford 2006) 27–47. 180 PHOENIX Phoen. 546 in Strattis fr. 48 “shows him . . . as a subtle reader of Euripides’ play” because Phoen. 541–547 “stands out . . . as a crucial turning point in the development of Podlecki’s pattern of sun imagery.” This can be true, however, only if (1) the Euripidean passage does have special structural significance, and (2) Strattis perceived this and expected a non-negligible proportion of his audience to perceive it as well, and (3) a large proportion of his other perverted quotations from Euripides’ play were likewise taken from passages of special critical interest. That is quite a stretch. Part Two of the book focuses on Aristophanes’ Wasps (Chapter Three, “The Man Is Obsessed with Song: A Contest of Genres in Wasps”), Thesmophoriazusae (Chapter Four, “Euripides in the Echo Chamber: Poets and their Poetry in Women at the Thesmophoria”), and Wealth (Chapter Five, “Writing Beyond Genres...

Playing the Philosopher: Plato in Fourth-Century Comedy

This article assembles all the references to Plato the philosopher and his works in the comic fragments of the fourth century. It demonstrates that the comic poets engage with Plato in a variety of ways: some assimilate him to earlier portraits of sophists and philosophers; others make superficial references to Platonic doctrines; several depict Plato as a character, or allude directly to Plato's dialogues. These last form the central focus of this article: the comic poets, recognizing affinities between drama and dialogue, parody Plato's texts using the same techniques of imitation and distortion they use to parody tragedy.

Middle comedy: Not only mythology and food

The disappearance of the political and contemporary dimension in the production after Aristophanes is a false belief that has been shared for a long time, together with the assumption that Middle Comedy – the transitional period between archaia and nea – was only about mythological burlesque and food. The misleading idea has surely risen because of the main source of the comic fragments: Athenaeus, The Learned Banqueters. However, the contemporary and political aspect emerges again in the 4th c. BC in the creations of a small group of dramatists, among whom Timocles, Mnesimachus and Heniochus stand out (significantly, most of them are concentrated in the time of the Macedonian expansion). Firstly Timocles, in whose fragments the personal mockery, the onomasti komodein, is still present and sharp, often against contemporary political leaders (cf. frr. 17, 19, 27 K.–A.). Then, Mnesimachus (Φίλιππος, frr. 7–10 K.–A.) and Heniochus (fr. 5 K.–A.), who show an anti- and a pro-Macedonian attitude, respectively. The present paper analyses the use of the political and contemporary element in Middle Comedy and the main differences between the poets named and Aristophanes, trying to sketch the evolution of the genre, the points of contact and the new tendencies.

Pacuvius poeta comicus. Teil I

Pacuvius is generally regarded as the first Roman playwright who only wrote tragedies; fragments transmitted without an indication of title or context are commonly attributed to tragedies, and ancient references to comedies are discarded as unreliable. The present paper questions this consensus. It first raises several methodological objections (section 1) and then examines two quotations preserved by Fulgentius, demonstrating that these comic fragments are unlikely to be forgeries because they comply with the rules of early Latin metre and the motivic and linguistic conventions of Roman comedy (section 2). Section 3 shows that several fragments which have previously been attributed to tragedies do not fit the contexts to which they have been assigned; they have much closer parallels in New Comedy and are likely to come from comoediae palliatae. The observations in sections 1-3 corroborate each other and have three wider consequences which are discussed in section 4: first, Pacuvius was probably more faithful to his Greek models than is currently thought; secondly, the ‘specialization’ in serious drama started one generation later with Accius and Titius; thirdly, the common practice of organizing the fragments of early Roman poetry according to genre is problematic because many fragments would suit both a tragic and a comic context.

The Comedian as Critic: Greek Old Comedy and Poetics by Matthew Wright (review)

Reviewed by: The Comedian as Critic: Greek Old Comedy and Poetics by Matthew Wright Stephen Kidd Matthew Wright. The Comedian as Critic: Greek Old Comedy and Poetics. London: Bristol Classical Press, 2012. Pp. xi, 238. $120.00. ISBN 978–1–7809–3029–9. This book argues that old comedy engaged in literary criticism. This fairly reasonable assertion (Frogs, after all, tends to be standard reading for ancient literary theory courses) is supported by two rather surprising claims: that comedians generally aimed for an “elite” target audience and that they wrote primarily to be read later by these elite readers, not for popular performance. Wright is confi-dently reactionary against notions of performance culture (3–4, 142) and offers instead the idea of a reading culture. Different from some recent notions of reading culture as primarily social and performative (for example, W. Johnson, AJP 121 [2000] 593–627), Wright’s notion is instead rather modern-looking: one where comedians in libraries assiduously plant allusions to be discovered later by equally assiduous readers. Chapter 1, “Reading Comic Criticism,” spells out three positions that are important for the book as a whole: first that comedy was aimed to please an elite “target” audience rather than the masses (4–5); second that this “target” audience read comic texts (5); and, third, that comic humor makes any stated opinion suspect. This last position receives most of the chapter’s attention: instead of offering a clear didactic program, the comedians are “playing around” [End Page 417] with ideas and “having fun by distorting or refracting ideas that were already in the air” (“playing around” and “ludic” being important motifs for the book, x, 24, 70, 139, etc.). Chapter 2 develops Wright’s argument for “elitist” comedy by tackling what surely must be the first question in any reader’s mind: “But weren’t the comedians trying to win a popular competition?” Wright’s answer is: no, they were not. Here he brings in some interesting sociological studies on prizes in culture (37–40), giving substance to the idea that writers might disdain prizes and not be writing to win them at all. Inasmuch as this view is the polar opposite of, for example, Z. Biles’ 2012 Aristophanes and the Poetics of Competition, we can look forward to future debates. Chapter 3 addresses the issue of “novelty” (kainotēs)—the most frequent criterion in comic criticism—and puts Wright’s ironic reading of comedy on display. The comedians do not really mean that their work is “new” and their rivals’ is hackneyed, but are instead “playing around” with the concept of novelty (70). Similarly, in chapter 4, “The Metaphorical Language of Criticism,” which provides a rich investigation of the metaphors comedy uses for critical evaluation (ψυχρός, λεπτός, food, etc.), Wright argues that the comedians are not casting these metaphors as straightforward judgments on poetry, but are again playing with the ideas underlying these metaphors: “It may be that the comedians are trying to make us reflect critically before using hackneyed metaphors or clichés; it may be that they are to be seen as polemically rejecting this sort of language, exposing its inherent ambiguity” (139). Chapter 5 develops Wright’s replacement of “performance culture” (141–42) with “reading culture.” Comedians had access to a library of texts when writing (146) and the pay-off for this historical reconstruction (the evidence of which is based on the allusiveness of the comic texts) is that the ancient comedian writes texts that are intended to be read alongside other texts until all the allusions are tracked down. The pleasure of these allusions often lies exclusively in spotting the allusions themselves (148). The book is clearly written and enjoyable to read. Wright’s use of the comic fragments is deft and lively and fills the book with many colorful examples. He is aware that the “elitist” position will raise some hackles (46), but his claim that there is no evidence (56) that comedians wished to win popular competitions—almost a starting point for his general view—is puzzling. Plato (whom he cites at 44) explicitly says that comedians (and tragedians) pandered to the mob in order to win competitions. How could the elitist...

A Brief History of Athenian Political Comedy (c. 440–c. 300)

This paper reassesses the production-pattern of politically engaged comedy of the Aristophanic type, traditionally considered the hallmark of the Old Comic period, in light of recent work on the comic fragments, and finds that such plays were relatively infrequent, produced only when demagogues were ascendant by poets who opposed them, and that this pattern seems to hold for the fourth century as well.

Brill’s Companion to the Study of Greek Comedy (review)

Reviewed by: Brill’s Companion to the Study of Greek Comedy Elizabeth Scharffenberger Gregory W. Dobrov (ed.). Brill’s Companion to the Study of Greek Comedy. Brill’s Companions in Classical Studies. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010. Pp. xv, 579. $279.00. ISBN 978-90-04-10963-6. This volume presents thirteen substantial essays by highly respected specialists in Greek comedy. The essays average a robust thirty-five to forty pages in length, and they are organized into three sections. At the heart of the collection are the four essays covering Aristophanes (Ralph M. Rosen), the origins of ancient Greek comedy and fifth-century comedians other than Aristophanes (Ian C. Storey), “Middle Comedy” (W. Geoffrey Arnott), and “New Comedy” (Stanley Ireland). These contributions are prefaced by the editor’s historical overview of critical approaches to the study of Greek comedy and by four additional introductory essays, which supply contexts for this enterprise by detailing the nuts and bolts of comic performances in Athens and elsewhere (J. Richard Green on “The Material Evidence” and Eric Csapo on “The Production and Performance of Comedy in Antiquity”), and by considering the intersections of comedy with politics (S. Douglas Olson) and myth and ritual (Angus M. Bowie). In the third section, two essays treat the transmission of the plays of Aristophanes (Alan H. Sommerstein) and comic fragments (Heinz-Günther Nesselrath) from antiquity to the present day; the two other contributions address the structure and meters employed in comedy (Bernhard Zimmermann) and the phonology, syntax, and other linguistic phenomena in fifth-century comedy (Andreas Willi). A bibliography and subject index round out the volume, and several illustrations of vase paintings, mosaics, and reliefs—some of which are not yet well-known—complement Green’s review of the material evidence for the performances and reception(s) of comedy. One would expect this group of “A-list” experts, as Dobrov identifies them in his preface (vii), to deliver first-rate scholarship, and these gentlemen [End Page 567] certainly meet that expectation. Each essay is lucid, informative, and engaging, and taken together they provide a well-rounded picture of the aspects of Greek comedy that have intrigued spectators and scholars for centuries—from its elusive origins to the various choices and accidents that determined the survival of the scraps of information and the handful of texts and fragments in our possession today. Although every contribution deserves praise, it seems wise to mention the merits of those that, in my view, exemplify the strengths of the volume as a whole: Olson’s “Comedy, Politics, and Society” (ch. 2), Csapo’s chapter on the conditions under which comedies were performed and viewed in antiquity (ch. 4), and especially ch. 7 on Aristophanes by Rosen, who took what could have been a ho-hum assignment and did something completely creative and truly helpful, a model of what one can do in these kinds of essays. This volume lacks essays devoted specifically to gender (a topic that is not listed in the subject index—“women” receives but two entries), and to the modern theatrical reception of ancient Greek comedy, although the reception of New Comedy by Plautus and Terence is discussed by several contributors including Dobrov, whose introduction quite intriguingly posits theatrical reception as “an implicit form of criticism” (20). Perhaps the judgment was that topics such as gender and modern reception have been or will be amply covered in other recent or forthcoming publications (e.g., Edith Hall and Amanda Wrigley’s Aristophanes in Performance: 421 b.c.e.–a.d. 2007, or the soon-to-be-published Cambridge Companion to the Study of Greek Comedy, edited by Martin Revermann). Nonetheless, the noninclusions are noticeable. The division of labor among the individual essays seems for the most part appropriate. An exception is Bernhard Zimmermann’s short contribution on both the structure and the meter of Greek comedy. These two broad topics, each of which might easily take up a chapter on its own, cannot be adequately covered in just fifteen pages, and one consequence of the compressed treatment is a lack of sustained engagement with L. P. E. Parker’s magnificent 1997 analysis of the songs of Aristophanes, which explains...

The Bazaar Fish Market in Fourth-Century Greek Comedy

Although scholars have noticed that fish sellers receive especially negative treatment in fourthcentury comedy, they have generally attributed this negativity to the price and supply of fish or a simple cultural bias against commercial activity. I argue that to make sense of fourth-century comic fragments about the fish market, we should look to attitudes and practices among participants in modern bazaar economies as analyzed by anthropologists. If we view the comic material in light of these economies, we may more clearly glimpse the source of the negative attitude towards fish sellers and the motivation behind comic treatments of the fish market.

The Comic Affixation to Myth: a survey of the Poetae Comici Graeci

The comic affixation to mythology: a survey of the Poetae Comici GraeciThe comic poet Philemon (4th c. BC, New Comic) writes about Niobe as follows (K-A 102):ἐγὼ λίθον μὲν τὴν Νιόβην, μὰ τοὺς θeούς,οὐδέποτ’ ἐπeίσθην, οὐδὲ νῦν πeισθήσομαιὡς τοῦτ’ ἐγένeτ’ ἄνθρωπος• ὑπὸ δὲ τῶν κακῶντῶν συμπeσόντων τοῦ τe συμβάντος πάθουςοὐδὲν λαλῆσαι δυναμένη πρὸς οὐδένα, προσηγορeύθη διὰ τὸ μὴ φωνeῖν λίθος. have never been convinced, by the gods, that the rock is Niobe and not now will I be convinced that a human turned into this thing. But by the evils that happened and the affliction that occurred she was not able to say anything to anyone, she was called a rock because she wouldn’t speak.His rationalizing of the myth stands out; the approach and language are borrowed from the mythographer Palaephatus (4th c. BC) who de-mythologizes the same story. As H. G. Nesselrath (1990, 217, 231) notes, myth rationalization (der Mythenrationalisierung) was a popular device of Middle Comedy and he cites two additional mythographers – Euhemerus and Hecataeus – whose approach comics picked up for themselves. For example in a fragment (K-A 31) of Anaxandrides (4th c. BC, Middle Comedy) the poet portrays the god Nereus as the inventor of expensive seafood delicacies which may be compared to some of the Euhemerus narrations found in Diodorus Siculus. It is possible that ancient comics borrowed some of their material from historians and mythographers, since they parodied every other genre including epic and tragedy. Old Comedy does not shy from fixing myths either as this fragment of Aristophanes (5th c., Old Comedy) shows with its false/unexpected etymology (K-A 373): ἐνταῦθα δ’ ἐτυράννeυeν Ὑψιπύλης πατὴρ Θόας, βραδύτατος ὢν ἐν ἀνθρώποις δραμeῖν. (And here the father of Hypsipyle ruled Thoas, who was the slowest to run amongst men.) And even earlier comedy from Sicily like Epicharmus (5th c., Sicilian Comedy) shows a comic rationalizing of myth (K-A 100): ἁ δ’ Ἁσυχία χαρίeσσα γυνά, καὶ Σωφροσύνας πλατίον οἰκeῖ. (And Hesychia is a beautiful woman and she lives near Sophrosyne.) Ancient comedy tends to omit the marvelous side of the myth and instead replaces it with some humanized form, but unlike their models, these de-mythologies have a comic spin. Regardless of period (5th c. Sicilian, Old, Middle, or New) and treatment, gods/goddesses and mythological narrative make up a large portion of all Greek comedies – either in part or full. The following talk will elucidate comic fragments that have a mythological bent and attempt to categorize them based on the assumed comic mechanism of each. Bowie (2000, 322) warns against reading too much into comic titles and categorizing each poem’s approach to mythology just as Rosen (1995, 120) warns against categorizing poets by period. Yet there is much to gain in categorizing each fragment’s approach to mythology whether it’s a rationalization of a story, a first invention of something attributed to a god, or a comic etymology. I will show that ancient comedy had a myriad of different approaches to myth, all of which constitute some comic inversion of models and narrations found in other genres.Select BibliographyBowie, A. “Myth and Ritual and the Rivals of Aristophanes,” in The Rivals of Aristophanes, ed. D. Harvey & J. Wilkens. London, UK: Gerald Duckworth & Co., 2000.Kassel, R. & Austin, C. Poetae Comici Graeca (PCG) [vol. i-viii]. Berlin, Germany: Walter deGruyter & Co., 1983-2001.Nesselrath, H-G. Die attsche Mittlere Komodie. Berlin, Germany: Walter de Gruyter, 1990.Rosen, R. “Plato Comicus and the Evolution of Greek Comedy,” in Beyond Aristophanes (APAACS #38) , ed. G. W. Dobrov. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1995.Stern, J. Palaephatus: On Unbelievable Tales. Wauconda, IL: Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, 1996.

Intertextual Biography in the Rivalry of Cratinus and Aristophanes

MORE THAN A DECADE AGO, Malcolm Heath provided an influential explanation for charges of plagiarism between comic poets when he posited a growing store of ideas that were recycled as quickly as they were invented. As a result, “Anything put on stage in a comedy would become public property and be absorbed into the repertoire, so that all comic poets contributed to it; and all drew on it, although each would aim to give a new and original twist to the material which he borrowed, so that the repertoire constantly evolved. If this was so, then any poet could lay claim to originality . . . and any rival could make a counterclaim of plagiarism.” 1 These remarks have important implications for the study of Old Comedy, not least in exposing the irony of such assertions as that of Antiphanes (Poie\, fr. 189 K-A), which overstates generic distinctions between tragedy and comedy on the score of originality. Beyond merely acknowledging comedy’s essentially adaptive nature, Heath’s position suggests that a certain degree of allusiveness was, as it were, built into the genre. Unfortunately there are few opportunities to test the potential insights that follow from Heath’s general proposition since the corpus of comic fragments poses so many questions of plot, context, attribution, and—always important for this kind of study—chronology. There is one sequence of plays, however, that has attracted attention since antiquity as an example of comic poets responding to one another and for which valuable insights can still be gained by building on Heath’s thesis. In 423 Cratinus took the prize against Aristophanes’ Clouds with Pytine, a play in which Cratinus boldly portrayed himself as the hero while borrowing heavily from Aristophanes’ caricature of him in Knights the previous year. While interest in the relationship of these plays has been renewed in recent years, the convergence of issues pertaining to adaptation, intertextuality, and rivalry has not been fully explored. Besides discussing these ideas as they relate to Knights and

Breach of Dramatic Illusion in the Old Comic Fragments

This article reviews the evidence for breach of dramatic illusion (outside the parabasis) in Old Comedy plays other than those of Aristophanes. Parallels can be found for several techniques attested in the surviving works of Aristophanes; for instance, dramatic illusion is broken in Plato Comicus fr. 167 to explain the situation to the audience (cf. Ar. Eq. 36, Vesp. 54, etc.), and in Pherecrates fr. 154 we have a good parallel for the speculation in Ar. Pax 43 & as to the thoughts of the audience and for the resentment of impatient interference from over-clever spectators. Explicit notice of the stage crane is also attested outside Aristophanes, and there are references to the ohoregus and to the victory-feast. One Aristophanic technique not certainly exemplified in the fragments of the other Old Comedians is that in Ach. 377 sq. and 496 sq., where a character speaks for the poet; Plato Comicus fr. 107 is not a definite parallel. Our evidence for lapse of dramatic illusion in the Old Comic fragments is best for Cratinus.

On Enjoying Bentley's Horace

My feelings for Bentley's Horace are best shown by an account of the steps by which I came to study the book. As a schoolboy one knew the name of Bentley; he was mentioned in the notes almost always with disagreement, especially by Page. When one passed on to the Satires and Epistles, he was mentioned with more frequency and on the whole more sympathy by Palmer and Wilkins; his name, or his symbol B, occurred continually in the apparatus criticus, though even so his suggestions very rarely appeared in the Text. As an undergraduate, one came to regard him as something more than a name: in scholarship apparently he was regarded as a ‘giant’ by Wickham and Munro and Jebb; as a man he was seemingly a high-handed and tyrannical Master of Trinity, for years battling single-handed against lawful authority. And then one began, as a Sixth Form Master, to con the Text of Horace more closely; but the result was not to increase one's admiration of Bentley. In youth one looked for dazzling and palmary emendations, but most of his suggestions one saw to be supported by some manuscript or other. In the Oxford Text of the Odes his name appears fairly often in the critical notes, but in only nine places is there mention of his own conjectures and not one is admitted to the Text. Further research showed that these were only a small selection from a host of emendations, some eight hundred in the whole Horatian Corpus—many of which struck one as arbitrary and improbable. Why then, one asked, all this fuss about Bentley, or at least about Bentley's Horace? In his Terence many of his changes are generally accepted and he laid the foundations for a knowledge of Terentian metre. His Manilius shows a number of emendations which have appeared in every edition since his; and one read of his brilliant reconstructions of Greek Comic Fragments. But why should Wickham speak of him as vir omnium maximus qui Horatium attigerunt ‘who collected all that editors had achieved before him and laid the foundations for all who came after’? And one remembered Housman's chastening dictum: ‘Bentley admired by all admirable scholars and despised by all despicable scholars’.

The Comic Fragments in their Relation to the Structure of Old Attic Comedy

Aristophanic Comedy falls structurally into marked divisions, episodic and epirrhematic. The first is a very simple method of composition consisting of short iambic scenes, connected by choral stasima which are more or less relevant to the action. As a general rule these episodes occupy the second half of the play between the Parabasis and Exodos, and, since they show the hero enjoying the fruits of his earlier struggles, contribute little to the development of the plot. Many of the Comic Fragments in trimeters are probably taken from episodes, but any attempt to classify them would add nothing to knowledge of a play from the structural viewpoint. The case is otherwise with the epirrhematic parts of Comedy. These are of complicated structure, marked by the use of the syzygy, i.e. the correspondence of odes and epirrhemes on the plan abab and also by the use of the tetrameter, which is confined to these sections. They may be further differentiated among themselves by the metre used. In the Parodos anapaests, iambs and trochees are found, in the Agon iambs and anapaests, in the parabatic syzygy only trochees, in the ⋯πλο⋯ν anapaestic and aeolic tetrameters. Taking the use of the tetrameter as guide it is possible to classify certain of the Comic Fragments, and subject matter and the criterion of metre often give some indication of the particular epirrhematic section from which they are taken. Prologue and Exodos stand outside the scheme of both episodic and epirrhematic composition, being structurally self-contained. The former consists of iambic trimeters, not a simple means of differentiation, but sometimes subject matter affords convincing points of analogy with the Aristophanic Prologue. The Exodos shows a great variety of metres, but here again subject matter and Aristophanic analogy are of great value in classification.

The Later Comic Chorus

The history of Attic comedy after the fifth century is not simple. The comic fragments are obscure, because they are fragments: and the ancient interpreters, because they are determined to interpret. But the subject still remains interesting and important, especially in so far as it is concerned with Middle Comedy, which filled the gap between Aristophanes and Menander. Formally and materially, Menander was a modern, while Aristophanes was not: and it was during the fourth century that the ground was being prepared for the change. Now one of the most noticeable differences between Old and New Comedy was the altered position of the chorus; and although the very mixed assortment of facts available makes coherent conclusions difficult, I think it worth enquiring how much can be known of the chorus after Aristophanes.