Ancient Greek Comedy

This book provides a unique panorama of this challenging area of Greek literature, combining literary perspectives with historical issues and material culture.

The Companion to the Study of Greek Comedy sets forth the main resources for the advancing student in three sections: "Contexts,""History," and "Elements.” The volume is a guide for understanding and interpreting the classic comedies as well as for navigating the principal corpora of texts, fragments and scholia.

Originally published in 1956, this is a critical analysis of the comedies of Aristophanes and Menander studied in the context of the history of comedy, of the allied arts, and of contemporary life. Aristophanes and Menander are deservedly the most famous writers of Greek comedy. The extant comedies of Aristophanes are notable for wit, comical action, beautiful poetry, and the dramatization of such problems as health of mind and body, sex, money, government, law, religion, education, and drama, music and poetry. Menander portrays with delicate and sympathetic understanding a world in which the seeming evils of loss and discord eventually lead to the genuine goods of discovery and concord. The art of Aristophanes is critically examined in three chapters and that of Menander in one. For centuries Dionysos had been worshipped in a spirit of ecstasy which manifested itself in song, dance and the wearing of masks and costumes, pantomime, farce, and satire. The processes by which these diverse elements were developed and fused into the complex literary form of Old Comedy are the subject of the first three chapters. Aristophanes was not only pre-eminent as a writer of Old Comedy; he also participated in the transformation of Old Comedy into Middle Comedy, a curious and interesting dramatic form which is fully treated in the seventh chapter. In the last chapter the emergence of New Comedy is traced and the art of Menander criticized. The book ends with a brief indication of the various forms in which the spirit of Greek comedy had survived to the present day.

This volume, in honour of Angus M. Bowie, collects seventeen original essays on Greek comedy. Its contributors treat questions of origin, genre and artistic expression, interpret individual plays from different angles (literary, historical, performative) and cover aspects of reception from antiquity to the 20th century. Topics that have not received much attention so far, such as the prehistory of Doric comedy or music in Old Comedy, receive a prominent place. The essays are arranged in three sections: (1) Genre, (2) Texts and Contexts, (3) Reception. Within each section the chapters are as far as possible arranged in chronological order, according to historical time or to the (putative) dates of the plays under discussion. Thus readers will be able to construe their own diachronic and thematic connections, for example between the portrayal of stock characters in early Doric farce and developed Attic New Comedy or between different forms of comic reception in the fourth century BC. The book is intended for professional scholars, graduate and undergraduate students. Its wide range of subjects and approaches will appeal not only to those working on Greek comedy, but to anyone interested in Greek drama and its afterlife.

This book employs the concept of 'nonsense' to explore those parts of Greek comedy perceived as 'just silly' and therefore 'not meaningful'.

This book explains the importance of food to ancient Greek comedy: it was a medium through which comedy could represent the material, social, agricultural, political and religious worlds to the Greek city-state. The text also contains translations of hundreds of comic fragments; and it reassesses the division of comedy into Sicilian and Attic Old, Middle, and New.

Lysistrata Aristophanes - Greek playwright, Aristophanes, lived during the 5th and 4th century BC and is considered one of the principal authors of the Greek classical period. Of the nearly thirty plays he wrote during his career, eleven are extant. Amongst the most famous of these is Lysistrata, a comedy which focuses on the women of Greece whose husbands have left for the Peloponnesian War. The women do not care about the conflict as much as they care about missing their husbands. Its titular character, Lysistrata, insists that men rarely listen to womens reasoning and exclude their opinions on matters of state. In retaliation she convinces the women of Greece to organize a strike, refusing to have sex with their husbands until both sides agree to cease fighting. The irony of this is that the men become more upset with their wives than they do with their enemies of war. Notable for its positive portrayal of womens rationality in a male-dominated society, Lysistrata stands as one the most popular and frequently performed plays from classical antiquity

In comedy, happy endings resolve real-world conflicts. These conflicts, in turn, leave their mark on the texts in the form of gaps in plot and inconsistencies of characterization. Greek Comedy and Ideology analyzes how the structure of ancient Greek comedy betrays and responds to cultural tensions in the society of the classical city-state. It explores the utopian vision of Aristophanes' comedies--for example, an all-powerful city inhabited by birds, or a world of limitless wealth presided over by the god of wealth himself--as interventions in the political issues of his time. David Konstan goes on to examine the more private world of Menandrean comedy (including two adaptations of Menander by the Roman playwright Terence), in which problems of social status, citizenship, and gender are negotiated by means of elaborately contrived plots. In conclusion, Konstan looks at an imitation of ancient comedy by Moliére, and the way in which the ideology of emerging capitalism transforms the premises of the classical genre.