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3 INTRODUCTION The Development of Old Comedy 1. The best discussion of the festivals and what is known of them is A. Pickard-Cambridge, The Dramatic Festivals of Athens (2d ed., rev. J. Gould and D. M. Lewis; Oxford, 1968), 25–42 (Lenaia), 57–101 (City Dionysia). 2. See G. M. Sifakis, Parabasis and Animal Choruses (London, 1971), esp. 71–93. OFFICIAL performances of comedies began in Athens at the City Dionysia festival in 487 or 486 b.c. and at the Lenaia festival sometime around 442 b.c.1 The origins of the genre are obscure, and will most likely always remain so. According to the fourth-century philosopher Aristotle in his Poetics, comedy was originally performed in Athens by “volunteers” rather than by professional actors in a state-sponsored contest (1449b1–2); the genre grew out of “introductions to phallic songs,” i.e., from material associated with events like the Rural Dionysia that we see take place onstage at Acharnians lines 237–79 (1449a11–13). Aristotle suggests that the Greek word komoidia (“comedy”), the second part of which certainly means “song,” is derived either from kóme, an (originally non-Athenian?) term for a rural village, or from kómos, “a drunken band of revelers” (Poetics 1448a35–38). The notion that at least some of the roots of Athenian Old Comedy must be sought in informal, local festival traditions also finds support in a number of vasepaintingsfromlate-sixth-centuryAthensthatdepictgroupsofmendressed up as animals, as Aristophanic and other early comic choruses often are.2 In addition, Aristotle notes that Athens’ neighbor Megara claimed that comedy had been invented there (1448a30–32), and the occasional sneering references to unsophisticated Megarian humor in Aristophanes (e.g., Acharni01A -T1535-P1 2/20/01 5:34 PM Page 3 4 Aristophanes and Athenian Old Comedy 3. See O. Taplin, Comic Angels (Oxford, 1993), 1–54. ans lines 738–39, 822; Wasps 57) and elsewhere (Ecphantides fr. 3 K-A; Eupolis fr. 261 K-A) suggest that in the fifth century there was some awareness of the existence of another old local comic tradition. Perhaps more important, Aristotle twice associates the origin of comedy with the work of the Sicilian poet Epicharmos, who probably dates to the early fifth century, although Aristotle would place him a generation or so earlier (1448a32–34, 1449a5–7). Epicharmos’ plays have been preserved only in unrevealing and generally very tiny fragments, but Aristotle reports that he and his even more obscure contemporary Phormis were the first to give comedy a plot (1449a5–6). What little survives of his plays suggests that they featured not only actors but a chorus , and makes clear that their author was fond of mythological parody. That verbal reports and eventually copies of plays by Epicharmos and perhaps also Phormis and others made their way to Athens seems likely, just as we know that a century or so later Athenian comedies were read and even performed in the cities of the Greek West.3 On the most straightforward reading of the evidence, one might conclude that acquaintance with the texts of these Sicilian comedies, and perhaps with a crude Megarian comic theater, led one or more individuals in Athens to think of drawing on local processional and performance traditions to write their own comic dramas. As time passed, work of this sort became more and more sophisticated , until someone suggested that a program of comedies be added to the dramatic competition at the City Dionysia, where tragedy had been performed for a generation or so. It must nonetheless be conceded that this is a largely hypothetical reconstruction, which may be wrong in some (or even most) of its particulars. The Production of the Plays We are better—although still imperfectly—informed about the comic competitions in the second half of the fifth century, when Aristophanes and his older contemporaries were active. The official Athenian year began in midsummer , and one of the first duties of two of the city’s chief annual officers (or “archons”) was to decide which poets would compete in the dramatic festivals at the Lenaia festival (in January) and the City Dionysia (in April). For tragic poets, the City Dionysia, which large numbers of foreign visitors attended, seems to have been a more prestigious venue than the Lenaia, which was a largely intra-Athenian affair; for comic poets, no such difference is apparent. 01A-T1535-P1 2/20/01 5:34 PM Page 4 [3.144.189.177] Project...

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