The Birth of Comedy: Texts, Documents, and Art from Athenian Comic Competitions, 486-280 ed. by Jeffrey Rusten (review)

Thousands of fragments of Greek comedy survive, most of them preserved by authors of the Hellenistic and Roman periods, who cite them for philological or historical reasons. Much of this material—now readily available in the original language in Kassel-Austin's monumental Poetae Comici Graeci—has not been translated into English since J. M. Edmonds produced his Fragments of Attic Comedy half a century ago. Unlike Edmonds (who also provided his own Greek text), Rusten and his collaborators offer only a selection of fragments, omitting inter alia large numbers of one-word glosses and the like. But they also spread their net far wider, including the early fifth-century Sicilian comedies of Epicharmus, substantial amounts of inscriptional and vase-painting evidence, and numerous ancient testimonia to the history and character of the genre. The result is a volume that will be of use to readers interested in the broad history of a poetic and dramatic form traditionally approached through the plays of Aristophanes and Menander alone.

Individual poets are treated in approximate historical order, with sensible— if difficult—choices having been throughout about which fragments to print or omit. Of the 108 fragments of Theopompus (a slightly later contemporary of Aristophanes) in Kassel-Austin, for example, Rusten et al. give forty-eight, excluding all the dubia, all those belonging to unknown plays, and most of the one-word citations and summary paraphrases, but also the only two fragments of Aphrodite, fr. 37 of Odysseus (only two words but perhaps significant for the plot), and the semi-erotic fr. 38 of Boys. The thinning has been even more brutal in the case of the better attested Antiphanes (fl. mid-fourth century), of whose 327 fragments Rusten et al. present only 93, excluding numerous substantial quotations up to eight lines long. Such reduction in the size of the corpus was inevitable, but it means that readers are given only a taste of individual authors and the remains of individual plays. Nor does the poet-by-poet, play-by-play organization make it easy to see connections among what remains, in the end, obscure and badly damaged material.

The handling of the Greek is also occasionally less precise than one might like, given that readers lacking control of the original language appear to be among the book's primary intended audiences. Thus the translation of the section of Pollux that introduces Theopompus fr. 3 is obscure ("Chests contain not only food, not otherwise vessels for storage of clothing"; οὐδ᾿ ἄλλως presumably means "nor moreover" or the like), and the fragment (τὴν οἰκίαν γὰρ ηὗρονεἰσελθὼν ὅλην / κίστην γεγονυῖαν φαρμακοπώλου Μεγαρικοῦ) more likely says "for when I entered the house, I found that the whole place had turned into a Megarian potion-seller's chest" than "for when I entered the house I found an entire chest that had belonged to a Megarian potion-seller." Fr. 9 (ὁ μὲν ἄρτος ἡδύ, τὸ δὲφενακίζειν προσὸν / ἔμβαμμα τοῖς ἄρτοις πονηρὸν γίγνεται; from Peace) is rendered "Wheat bread is a treat, but it is wicked / that the dipping sauce on the side tricks us," but might be better taken as ".he bread is delicious, but the treachery that's there as a dipping sauce for the bread is nasty." In colloquial Attic, the imperative φέρε is commonly used as a rough equivalent of English "Come on!" rather than a literal "Bring!", as in the translation of fr. 15.1. In fr. 22 (οὔφησιν εἶναι τῶν ἑταιρῶν μέσας / στατηριαίας), the initial relative almost certainly refers to place, and the passage should be translated "where, he says, the mid-priced prostitutes cost a stater," rather than "whose average whores, he says, are worth a stater." And although Athenaeus (who preserves the passage) may be wrong, he claims that ἀπέσθιε in fr. 63.3 means "Don't eat!" rather than "Eat!", while οὐσία in verse 5 is more likely "property" than "existence." Similarly in Antiphanes: νομίσματι in fr. 42.3 must mean "money" rather than "values"; frr. 51 and 57.2-3 do...