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.