It is unclear exactly how Greek comic drama originated. Even in the ancient world the issue was a disputed one. Aristotle (384–322) offers a few suggestions. He says that comedy (like tragedy) came about through improvisation, tracing its origins, in part at least, to fertility songs sung in honour of Phales (a divine companion of Dionysus, represented by a pole, or phallus); an example of such a song occurs in Aristophanes’ Acharnians (263ff.). He links comedy to invective or lampoons (iamboi). He also implies that comedy was derived from the kōmos, a ritual act of revelry. Aristophanes’ surviving plays suggest that there is probably some truth in all of these propositions.
In terms of their broad areas of interest there are, perhaps, five notional types of play in Old Comedy. These were not recognized categories in the ancient world, and do not necessarily cover all Old Comedy – in any case, individual plays are not restricted by these types since they tend to fall under several categories – but they do help to describe and distinguish Aristophanes’ surviving plays.
The first is political comedy. While all of Aristophanes’ plays are ‘political’ inasmuch as they concern the city, or polis, of Athens, not all confront pressing political issues directly. Of his surviving works, the earlier plays show a more pronounced political dimension. Knights and Wasps, for example, target a particular, deeply loathed politician, Cleon, who rose to prominence after Pericles’ death. A similar hostility against the later demagogue Cleophon is present in Frogs but only surfaces in passing. Other strongly political comedies involve responses to the Peloponnesian War. In Acharnians the hero makes a controversial, if implausible, private peace with Sparta at a time when the general mood was for continued hostilities. Lysistrata, written when Athenian fortunes were low, shows the women of Athens (and elsewhere in Greece) achieving a fanciful peace by mounting a sex-strike. Such plays, which confront political issues head on, may be contrasted with Women, which is conspicuously free of political concerns.
The second type of play is the comedy of manners, or social comedy. According to Aristotle, the comic playwright Crates developed this type of play a generation before Aristophanes. Several of Aristophanes’ plays involve elements of social comedy. His first play, Babylonians (lost), involved two differently schooled sons vying for their father’s affection. Wasps and Clouds both present conflicts between urbane sons and their unsophisticated fathers. The double-act in the first half of Frogs with Dionysus as dim-witted master and Xanthias as clever slave anticipates the kind of situation-based social comedy that occurs throughout New (and Roman) Comedy, as does the ‘below-stairs’ scene in which Xanthias and Pluto’s slave gossip about their masters.
The third category is comedies about specific topical cultural issues. Plays that may be placed in this group include Clouds, which polemically examines modern education and its transformation by philosophers, or sophists, such as Socrates; Women, which explores Euripides’ presentation of female characters in his tragedies; and Frogs, which surveys tragedy retrospectively from Aeschylus to Euripides. Other playwrights do not appear to share Aristophanes’ preoccupation with tragedy but they did write plays about other kinds of poetry. Plays about cultural issues are often couched in terms of a wider conflict of Old and New. We see this in Frogs, in the contest between old-fashioned Aeschylus and the innovative Euripides, and Clouds with its conflict between traditional and new education. Significantly, in Clouds the contrast between the father who is at heart old-fashioned and the son who has been educated by the avant-garde Socrates is expressed in terms of the former’s fondness for Aeschylus and the latter’s newfound enthusiasm for Euripides.
The fourth category is comedies involving Utopias or fantastic locations. Common settings include the underworld and the Golden Age. There are many lost plays of this kind by other Old Comic playwrights. Of Aristophanes’ plays, Frogs is set in the underworld, while Birds is set in Nephelococcygia (Cloud-cuckooland). The fifth and final category is plays involving mythological or tragic burlesque. There were a surprisingly large number of such plays, which are often identifiable by their use of the titles of tragedies or mythological characters. Aristophanes, however, seems only to have written a very small number of such plays, none of which survive.
We have very little by way of literary criticism on Aristophanic comedy from his contemporaries. Indeed, Aristophanes’ own Frogs, which tells us a great deal about contemporary perceptions of tragedy, is one of the first major pieces of ancient literary criticism. There is, however, one interesting fragment from Old Comedy, written by Aristophanes’ contemporary Cratinus (fr. 342). It involves one character referring to another as ‘a pedantic purveyor of niceties, a real Euripidaristophanes’.7 This conflation of Euripides and Aristophanes into a single name suggests that they are alike in their love of verbal precision and cleverness. The quality of being dexios (‘clever’ or ‘talented’) is not just one that Aristophanes claims for himself and, flatteringly, his audience (e.g., Clouds 521–48); Dionysus, in Frogs 71, explains his quest for Euripides as a yearning for a tragedian who is dexios. Aristophanes’ insistence that he is always introducing new ideas into his comedies (Clouds 547) is also something that implicitly aligns him with Euripides, the innovative tragedian par excellence.
Plato in his Apology complains about Aristophanes’ presentation of Socrates in Clouds. Plato’s main gripe, however, is the negative effect of the portrayal upon the popular perception of Socrates; there is no pejorative criticism of Clouds on artistic grounds. Besides, while complaining of Aristophanes’ treatment of Socrates in particular, Plato acknowledges that Old Comedy as a whole was negative towards philosophers and philosophy.
Aristophanes’ last surviving play, Wealth, shows signs of the shift in taste away from the uninhibited excesses of Old Comedy towards greater restraint, consistency and uniformity (of action, characterization, style, tone and so on). In the fourth century Old Comedy quickly went out of fashion. While tragedies of Euripides and Sophocles were regularly re-performed from 386 BC onwards (those of Aeschylus were re-performed from sometime after his death in 456), there is no evidence for revivals of fifth-century comedies.
The clearest indication of Old Comedy’s fall from grace lies in Aristotle’s verdict in his Poetics. Aristotle expresses a general distaste for Old Comedy’s crudeness, excess and fondness for the ridiculous. He also suggests that Old Comedy’s habit of satirizing particular individuals onstage means that it is not universal. Part of his definition of poetry is that it deals with the hypothetical, or universal, rather than the actual, or particular; this sets poetry above other disciplines such as history and alongside philosophy.8 To accuse Old Comedy of not being universal is tantamount to claiming that, while it may be verse, it does not count as poetry at all. Aristotle further criticizes Old Comedy for neglecting plot. Only one Old Comic playwright, Crates, is described as structuring action satisfactorily (i.e., in accordance with causality and probability). This criticism, however, is misguided. Old Comedy, for the most part, chooses to construct its action in a way that neglects causality and probability in favour of the absurd and the improbable.
Aristotle’s negative verdict notwithstanding, the plays of Aristophanes continued to be read, despite being difficult texts to follow (they had no stage directions, often lacked indications of speaker and were full of obscure topical references). Interest lay not so much in their merits as comic drama but in their exemplification of the expressiveness and charm of Attic Greek (which had by this time given way, along with other regional dialects, to a common dialect known as koinē). Alexandrian scholars, more sympathetic to Old Comedy than Aristotle, gradually established a consensus that Aristophanes, Cratinus and Eupolis were the greatest exemplars of the genre.9
Later responses to Old Comedy are mixed. While Cicero (106–43 BC) saw Aristophanes as ‘the wittiest poet of Old Comedy’, Horace (65–8 BC), in his Ars Poetica, suggests that although the free speech enjoyed by the poets of Old Comedy was notionally a good thing, in practice it d
egenerated into unfettered abuse. In his Satires, however, he praises Old Comedy for its use of laughter (as opposed to outright abuse) as a means of exposing hypocrisy in the public sphere. This more favourable view of Old Comedy may in part be attributed to Horace’s having regarded the genre as a distant precursor of his own satires.
A far less positive judgement is offered by Plutarch (AD c. 45–c. 125) in a comparison of Aristophanes and Menander. He accuses Aristophanes of vulgar action, general boorishness and uncouth language. He also decries what he considers poor puns (e.g., ‘where shall flick you, cursed pot, when you’re the one who’s given me the flick’), weak associations (‘he’s so harsh to us. I suppose it comes of being brought up on his mother’s bitter potherbs’) and laboured jokes (e.g., ‘I’m laughing so much, before I know it I’ll be in Chortleton’).10 Plutarch may have a point – Aristophanic characters do sometimes make bad jokes – but by ignoring context he risks overlooking the underlying purpose of his examples. The remark about potherbs, for instance, one of many jokes in Women about Euripides’ mother being a seller of greens, is part of a broader characterization of the women of Athens as implacably hostile to Euripides.
Plutarch also criticizes Aristophanes for stylistic inconsistency, particularly combining the tragic and the comic, the elevated and the prosaic, and the erudite and the everyday. Characters, he suggests, often do not speak as befits them. He further claims that Aristophanes lacks his much-touted verbal ‘ingenuity’; that his roguish characters are simply malicious; that his rustics are idiotic rather than simple; that he avoids romantic love in favour of pure lust. Like Aristotle, Plutarch is guilty of criticizing Aristophanic comedy simply because it differs from the New Comedy more akin to his conservative sensibilities. Ironically his criticisms, taken as a whole, are almost as excessive and inconsistent as the works they disparage.
The Roman rhetorician Quintilian (AD c. 35–c. 95), writing a little earlier, offers a more positive, less judgemental view:
Old Comedy is almost alone in preserving the genuine grace of the Attic tongue; moreover, it has a most eloquent freedom of speech: and if it is especially notable for its attacks on vices, it has a great deal of strength in other departments also. It is splendid, elegant, graceful; and nothing else after Homer (who, like Achilles, must always be the exception) is more like oratory, or more suitable for training orators. It has many exponents, but Aristophanes, Eupolis and Cratinus stand out. (The Orator’s Training 10.1.65–6)
The Formal Structure of Old Comedy
By Aristophanes’ day Old Comedy had well-established formal elements and conventions, although Aristophanes (and most likely other comic playwrights) felt free to modify, omit or depart from these up to a point.
A fundamental structural pattern found at expected points in Aristophanes’ plays is a scheme of alternation known as the syzygy.11 While it may vary in length, order and complexity, its simplest form is A B A′ B′, where A and A′ are lyric passages corresponding in metre and their number of lines, while B and B′ are similarly corresponding blocks of lines that are spoken or recited.12
The plays of Old Comedy contain certain formal units, or elements, appearing in customary sequence. Among Aristophanes’ surviving plays these units are most fully represented in Wasps. They are as follows:
1. Prologue
The prologue, as defined by Aristotle, is all that precedes the entry of the Chorus. Unlike most other elements it has no strict formal requirements. It generally comprises spoken iambic trimeters, although lyric passages may be inserted (e.g., the servant’s prayer and Agathon’s song in Women, 39–57 and 101–29). The prologue may open with dialogue between major characters (e.g., Women, Frogs, Birds, Lysistrata) or minor characters (e.g., Wasps, Knights, Peace). Alternatively, it may consist of a speech or monologue by the protagonist (e.g., Acharnians, Clouds, Assemblywomen) or another major character (e.g., Wealth). It may then proceed variously. In Wasps, a slave addresses the audience directly and explains the situation in Philocleon’s house, after which there is a slapstick scene with Philocleon trying to escape. In Women and Frogs there are encounters with a character who provides advice or assistance (Agathon and Heracles respectively), followed by scenes of buffoonery.
The prologue establishes the opening situation, introduces the main characters and indicates the play’s main topical and thematic concerns. Thus in Wasps the two slaves discuss their dreams about the deluded Athenian public and its corrupt political leaders, and then describe Philocleon’s delusional condition; in Frogs we hear one discussion between Dionysus and Xanthias about comic conventions and another between Dionysus and Heracles about tragedy past and present. The prologue may include a change of location. The whole prologue of Wasps takes place before Philocleon’s house, but in Women the action shifts from Agathon’s house to the site of the Thesmophoria festival, while in Frogs we move from Heracles’ house to the underworld.
2. Parodos
This is the Entry-Song of the Chorus. The comic Chorus, which numbered twenty-four, would enter via the wings (eisodoi). Its arrival is often anticipated in the text. In Wasps, for example, Philocleon’s old friends, who comprise the Chorus, appear soon after Bdelycleon remarks that they are later than usual (Wasps 217–21). The metre and mood of the parodos can vary. In Wasps the Chorus enters singing in plodding iambic tetrameters to indicate their age and sluggishness. The Choruses of Acharnians and Knights, by contrast, enter singing bustling trochaic tetrameters to reflect their vigour and aggression. The Initiate-Chorus of Frogs sing their parodos mainly in the ionic metre associated with their patron god Iacchus. The parodos in Women, unusually, is in prose.
3. Agōn
This is a formal ‘contest’ or ‘debate’ in which the Chorus, or a major character, chooses between two parties (agōn is the Greek word for ‘trial’). In Wasps the Chorus decides between Philocleon and Bdelycleon; in Frogs Dionysus chooses between Aeschylus and Euripides. Not all plays have an agōn. The absence of an agōn in Peace, for instance, perhaps suggests in formal terms that no arguments for war remain. Knights, by contrast, has two proper agones. In the convention of the formal agōn, the contestant who speaks second is victorious. There are other kinds of competitive scene besides the formal agōn. In Wasps, for example, after the agōn proper there is a trial scene in Philocleon’s kitchen. In Frogs the whole contest between Euripides and Aeschylus, even outside the agōn proper, resembles an expanded agōn (agōn is also the Greek word for the dramatic competition). Another situation resembling the agōn is where a major character presents a case before a hostile audience, such as Mnesilochus’ speech before the women in defence of Euripides in Women.
The agōn is recited rather than spoken. In its fullest manifestation, as in Wasps, it comprises nine components arranged in the form A B C D A′ B′ C D′ E (the examples are all from Wasps):13
A. Ode (526–45, ‘The speaker who will… ghosts of parchment-cases’): a stanza sung by the Chorus to encourage both participants.
B. Katakeleusmos (546–7, ‘Be bold… glib persuasive art’): a brief invitation to the first contestant to begin.
C. Epirrhenta (548–619, ‘Well, to get off to… scarcely greater than my own!’): the first contestant’s speech; in tetrameters (usually anapaestic).
D. Pnigos (620–30, ‘When people speak… damned if I fear you’): a short climactic end to the speech, supposedly recited in a single breath (hence its name, the ‘choker’).
A′. Antode (631–47, ‘A most sensible speech… convert a hostile jury’): a stanza corresponding to the earlier ode, usually praising the first speech.
B′. Antikatakeleusmos (648–9, ‘You’d better think… countering our fury’): an invitation to the second contestant to reply.
C′. Antepirrhema (650–718, ‘It is a difficult undertaking… keeping you shut up’): the second contestant’s speech; also in tetrameters.
D′. Antipnigos (719–24, ‘I want to look after… the paymaster’s milk’): see D. br />
E. Sphragis (725–9, ‘You should never decide… whatever you say’): the announcement of the victor, sealing the result (sphragis means ‘seal’).
4. Parabasis
The parabasis (literally, ‘the stepping forward’), in which the action of the play is suspended, occurs at a point when the stage is empty (although in Women two characters remain). It involves the Chorus suspending its dramatic identity – by temporarily removing masks and some elements of costume – and stepping forward to address the audience directly in recitative mode. The parabasis usually occurs somewhere near the middle of the play, but may vary in complexity and length. The parabasis of Women is relatively short, and that of Clouds simply a single block of lines, while in Wasps not only is it fully developed but there is a second, shorter parabasis. The full parabasis has seven parts and may be expressed in the form A B C D E D’ E’. The parabasis proper (B) is a sizeable block of lines in tetrameters (usually anapaestic), with a corresponding introduction, or kommation (A), and conclusion, or pnigos (C). This is followed by a syzygy (D E D′ E′).
The parabasis typically involves praise of the author and the play – most commonly in the parabasis proper (B) – and abuse of well-known public figures to whom the author is ill-disposed. Usually there is some humorous play on the Chorus’s identity. In Wasps, for example, the Chorus liken their irascible nature and cohesiveness to the behaviour of wasps; in Birds the Chorus threaten to defecate on the judges from on high if the play is not awarded first prize. The parabasis also allows the Chorus-Leader seemingly to speak on the playwright’s behalf.
5. Miscellaneous scenes