I. Introduction

Ancient Greek comedies were full of maxims encapsulating traditional wisdom in a conveniently memorable and quotable form. Modern scholars conventionally refer to such maxims as gnomai, though the Greeks themselves were not consistent in their use of terminology. (Words such as gnome, paroimia, logos and apophthegma are found more or less indiscriminately throughout the literary tradition, in much the same way as the categories of ‘proverb’, ‘maxim’, ‘saying’, ‘generalisation’ and ‘aphorism’ overlap with one another in standard English usage.)Footnote ¹ In terms of their content, all such maxims are closely comparable: they purport to convey universal insights into human life, and they tend to be utterly traditional in the sentiments they express; originality is seldom a distinguishing feature. Comic maxims range across the conventional territory of Greek popular morality, including such subjects as wealth, love, marriage, friendship, familial relationships and the vicissitudes of fortune. They differ slightly in terms of their form – for instance, some are considerably longer or shorter than others, others explicitly refer to their own traditional content using words such as logos or paroimia,Footnote ² and others still contain rhymes, wordplay or other rhetorical features – but they are all characterised by a pithy or epigrammatic turn of phrase.

In fact, these maxims can be seen as possessing a quality called quotationality. Gary Saul Morson, who coined this expression, defines it as follows: it ‘confers on phrases a degree of otherness’, and it is said to create an ‘aura’ or a vague feeling that something is being quoted, even when the utterance in question is newly created. Not every utterance that is quoted necessarily possesses quotationality: in this respect Morson usefully distinguishes between ‘quotations’ (which do) and ‘citations’ (which do not). But a phrase that does have this quality will typically be ‘short’, ‘memorizable’, ‘interesting’, ‘complete in itself’, ‘shared’ and ‘potentially autonomous’ (of speaker, author or context); it will also possess an inherent ‘doubleness’ or ambiguity, either because it can function in or out of context, or because it has an implied ‘shadowy second speaker, who is not identical to the speaker of the source’.Footnote ³

Comic maxims conform to this definition of quotationality. They are short and memorable; they have a high degree of iterability; they tend to stand out from any surrounding text because of the use of framing devices (e.g. their positioning at the start or end of speeches, or the fact that they normally fill complete lines of verse, facilitating maximum detachability); they have an inherent doubleness about them, allowing them to function both in and out of context; they are often intertextual in a broad sense, in that they are adapted from earlier texts or the tradition of Greek popular wisdom more generally; they seem to blur the narratological category of voice; they also blur the boundaries between past and present, or between the world of the play and the real world of the audience. By including numerous maxims in their plays, the Greek comedians might seem to be encouraging us to view them as custodians of traditional wisdom, along with their epic and lyric predecessors; but, more importantly, they are conferring a high level of quotability on their own work.

One of the biggest questions posed by this material concerns the importance of literary genre when interpreting maxims. That is, are comic maxims significantly different from maxims in other literary or non-literary contexts? I suggest that the answer is yes. Comedy is not like other genres. Its ubiquitous humour and irony inevitably affect our response to anything that we encounter there. As I have argued elsewhere, one of the defining features of Greek comedy is that it typically presents its subject matter inside inverted commas, as it were – that is, in a manner that is pervasively self-conscious or ironical.Footnote ⁴ The comedians tend to take material from elsewhere in literature or life and play around with it, subjecting it to ludic, deflatory or critical treatment. Comedy characteristically invites its audience to see familiar phenomena in unfamiliar ways, or to laugh at things that are normally perceived as serious.

In this article I suggest that the comedians are not simply presenting their audience with traditional wisdom in neatly packaged gobbets, as other poets do, in order to lend authority and moral depth to their work. It is possible to read many comic maxims absolutely straight, as genuine ethical guidance for life, and most critics seem to do exactly that,Footnote ⁵ but I prefer to read them more obliquely. All the comic maxims discussed here should be imagined as framed by a large pair of inverted commas – because of their inherent ‘quotationality’, because they stand out from their dramatic context as detachable lines, because they reiterate familiar material from a wider literary or gnomological tradition, and above all because they are distinguished by a recurrent irony and self-consciousness. In many instances, as I shall demonstrate, the comedians seem to be playing around with, or questioning, the content and form of traditional wisdom. Sometimes they seem to be going even further, poking fun at the maxim as a medium of expression or, more radically, at the habit of quotation itself.

It is significant that several critics and theorists treat the maxim as a distinct literary genre.Footnote ⁶ This is a useful concept for our purposes, because it enables us to draw analogies with comedy's treatment of other literary genres such as tragedy, epic, lyric poetry and so on. Comedy's relationship to these other genres has been widely interpreted in terms of parody or pastiche, or, alternatively, as a flexible and variously nuanced series of intergeneric dialogues.Footnote ⁷ I suggest that comedy can similarly be seen as engaged in an ongoing dialogue with the maxim. The distinctively comic version of the maxim works by evoking, absorbing, parasitising, distorting, subverting or criticising a genre that was familiar from other types of literature and social situations.Footnote ⁸

This is not to claim that every single maxim in comedy functions in exactly the same way; nor is it to deny any serious ethical or didactic purpose to the comic genre. I strongly suspect that many of the comedians were indeed being frivolous and silly, with no particular moral point or message to convey. But if some of them did have a serious purpose, it will probably not emerge through a solemn, literal reading of their maxims. Rather, by creating an ironical distance between themselves and the traditional material, the comedians can be seen as challenging their audiences to think more carefully about the content of traditional popular wisdom and the form in which it was passed down. Instead of simply presenting us, as other poets do, with supposedly universal wisdom, glib generalisations or clichés, certain comedians may have been prompting us to ask more profound questions about the way in which maxims were used by other people, the nature of true wisdom, or the ambivalent relationship between ‘universal’ ethical questions and specific situational contexts.

II. Comedy and quotation culture

Most of the comic maxims we now possess, in the guise of ‘fragments’, have survived precisely because they were quoted by other writers within antiquity. The quotation of decontextualised extracts – including the use of florilegia or anthologies of maxims – was a widespread practice throughout antiquity, for which evidence exists as early as the fifth and early fourth centuries BC.Footnote ⁹ It is obvious that, for many Greeks, selective or non-linear reading was a normal way of engaging with texts (especially poetic and dramatic works).

The popularity of excerption as a reading habit in the fourth century is highlighted, and made fun of, in the following extract from a scene in Menander's comedy Aspis (407–15). Here the slave Daos – who is attempting to bamboozle another character, Smikrines, into thinking that a ‘tragic’ event has taken place – quotes a large number of gnomic verses excerpted from several tragedies by different authors:

These verses are non-consecutive, irrelevant to the comic context and completely unrelated to one another, but the crucial point is that they already resemble extracts from a gnomic anthology. Menander and his audience were evidently well accustomed to making use of tragedy in this way,Footnote ¹⁴ the verb γνωμολογεῖν (‘to collect maxims’ vel sim.) was obviously in common usage, and the excerpts in question had already become ‘popular tags’ (in the words of the play's most recent commentator).Footnote ¹⁵

This scene, alongside other examples from comedy, shows us how tragedy was being treated as a repository of quotations from an early date.Footnote ¹⁶ But if we look for evidence of quotations from comedy itself, a striking fact emerges. Apart from the later anthologisers, who treated comic drama as a rich mine of quotable wisdom (and thus preserved the majority of our surviving fragments), most writers throughout the Classical period are conspicuously lacking in gnomic quotations from comedy. This implies that comedy was not generally treated in the same way as other types of literature. When we look at the comedians’ immediate contemporaries in the late fifth and fourth centuries, their lack of interest in comic maxims is striking. Forensic orators, in particular, quote gnomic verses from a wide range of epic, tragic and lyric poets, but not a single line from comedy. This may be due to the fact that comedy was regarded as too political to be used in a courtroom setting,Footnote ¹⁷ but it may equally suggest that comedy was widely perceived to be lacking in seriousness. This is certainly the opinion of Isocrates, who contrasts comedy with writers such as Hesiod and Theognis and other poets whom he regards as ‘the best advisors for human life’ (ἀρίστους … συμβούλους τῷ βίῷ τῷ τῶν ἀνθρώπων).Footnote ¹⁸ Isocrates complains that most readers ignore the wisdom that is to be found even in morally edifying poets such as these:

This passage confirms that maxims, more than any other passages from poetry, were excerpted and quoted as a source of wisdom or advice for life, but it also implies that – in Isocrates’ eyes, at least – ‘wretched’ comedy was excluded from the category of serious poetry. The reluctance of other writers to quote comic maxims seems to suggest that they mostly shared Isocrates’ viewpoint.

In this respect another very striking fact needs to be emphasised. Although so-called ‘Middle’ and ‘New’ Comedy abound in maxims, there are almost no maxims to be found in fifth-century comedy, apart from quotations or parodies from other literary sources.Footnote ¹⁹ This seems to mark a significant development in the genre over time. Various explanations might be suggested, including the emergence of the epigram as a prominent literary form in the fourth century, or the growing interest in quotation culture and anthologies during the same period. But in large part this development may be due to the fact that fourth-century comedy was even more obsessed with tragedy and paratragedy than earlier comedy had been.Footnote ²⁰ In other words, because tragedy (especially Euripidean tragedy, a favourite source of humour) incorporated a huge number of maxims, so too did later comedy, in an attempt to become – or to seem – more ‘tragic’. It might be thought that comedy had suddenly grown up and become serious, taking on some of the ethical or didactic function traditionally ascribed to tragedy. But had comedy really changed so much in the space of a few decades? Perhaps not.

A couple of comedians in particular, Epicharmus and Menander, have been seen as especially fond of maxims as a vehicle for pursuing serious ethical concerns. These two poets were writing at different periods and in very different contexts, but they pose similar problems. Their names came to be attached, by later writers and scholars, to large anthologies of moralising maxims, but little if any of the content of these anthologies is authentic: they apparently consist of haphazard collections of verses from a variety of authors, genres and periods.Footnote ²¹ I ignore this problematic material here, preferring to focus exclusively on Athenian comedy and on maxims which can confidently be attributed to Menander's plays. I shall return to Menander in more detail below, but it is worth observing here that his complete surviving texts, line for line, contain surprisingly few maxims. Given that many scholars have seen Menander as engaging seriously with Peripatetic thought, it is also important to note that his maxims are not especially interesting from an ethical or philosophical point of view. As David Bain has observed of Menander's supposed moralising purpose, ‘this was a case easier to sustain when all we had of him was fragmentary quotation’.Footnote ²²

The fragmentary state of our sources means that we have to exercise caution when looking for patterns or drawing conclusions, but there are signs that other comedians may have been even more noteworthy than Menander in their use of maxims. The remains of Philemon, for instance, include many gnomic lines revealing a penchant for paradox, an unexpected avoidance of clichés and a certain amount of original imagery, all of which features seem calculated to breathe new life into hackneyed themes: Philemon's maxims may well have offered more food for thought than those of Menander.Footnote ²³ Several comedians from the earlier decades of the fourth century, such as Amphis, Alexis, Anaxandrides and Antiphanes, are particularly well represented by gnomic fragments, and Antiphanes even wrote an entire comedy called Paroimiai.Footnote ²⁴ This work is briefly mentioned by Athenaeus:

Almost nothing survives of this comedy, alas, but it evidently based its whole plot and conception on the idea of quotable maxims and proverbial wisdom. Its title suggests that the chorus members actually represented personified maxims – a witty physical embodiment of an abstract concept, for which parallels can be found in the Dissoi logoi of Aristophanes’ Clouds or the letters of the alphabet in Callias’ Grammatikē tragoidia. It seems likely that Antiphanes’ play incorporated a significant metapoetic element, drawing special attention to the maxim as a topos or a source of humour in its own right. Here, if anywhere, maxims are being paraded before us wearing ironical inverted commas.

So far, then, I have been outlining a general case for regarding the characteristically comic maxim as a ludic, distorted version of an ostensibly familiar form. It could be added that the comedians’ deployment of maxims is essentially metaliterary in purpose. They are drawing their audience's attention (either implicitly or explicitly) to quotation culture and the habit of selective excerption; they are actively participating in quotation culture by the way in which they formulate certain verses so that they stand out as quotations even in their original setting; by inviting the audience to see all these maxims as appearing within ‘quotation marks’ they are challenging them to think about what this might mean in terms of interpretation; and they are obliquely using these maxims as a form of self-referential commentary on contemporary reading practices. The following sections develop this general case through discussion of specific examples.

III. Reading maxims in and out of context

Dramatic maxims have a dual function and purpose: they are formulated so as to be readable either within a specific plot context or out of context as autonomous utterances. Sometimes there will have been a significant discrepancy or dissonance between these two levels of interpretation. The meaning of a maxim might be altered, enhanced or undercut in a variety of ways, depending on its precise situation and timing within a play's plot, or on the identity and status of the speaker. It seems to me that comedy, considerably more than tragedy, typically exploits this sort of dissonance to create a pervasive sense of irony or inconsistency.Footnote ²⁵

To take a single, telling example: the well-known Menandrean one-liner ὃν οἱ θεοὶ φιλοῦσιν, ἀποθνῄσκει νέος (‘He whom the gods love dies young’). If treated out of context as a self-contained utterance, this lends itself to being read as a poignant generalisation about promising lives cut short. Indeed, it became famous, in both ancient and modern times, as an autonomous maxim: it was repeatedly quoted or paraphrased by writers such as George Herbert, Lord Byron and Oscar Wilde,Footnote ²⁶ and it has been described as ‘the expression of a refined, thoughtful, and very sympathetic mind, touched with melancholy but remarkably free from passion or sensuality’.Footnote ²⁷ Nevertheless, the verse evidently made a rather different impression in its original dramatic setting, where it was not a lament for doomed youth but a sarcastic insult directed at an old man by a cheeky slave. The play Dis exapaton survives only in woefully fragmentary form, but we have Plautus’ Latin adaptation of the scene in question (Bacch. 816–21):

In this instance the undercutting effect created by the context and speaker is particularly marked; but no doubt the same sort of dissonance between generalising maxim and specific context was, in varying degrees, frequent throughout comedy.

In all but a few cases we can read these maxims only in their decontextualised/fragmentary form. However, the few complete or partially preserved plays of Menander offer us an opportunity to compare and contrast the function of maxims in and out of context.Footnote ²⁸ It is hard to generalise on the basis of such a small sample, but a few interesting tendencies emerge. First of all, and most strikingly, the effect created by maxims within a particular scenario tends to be much less definitive or less confident than the effect of their decontextualised equivalents. These supposedly universal statements of wisdom and truth are uttered in a way that makes them come across as tentative or provisional. Often the speakers seem to be using maxims in an attempt to persuade others to see things their way when the truth of a situation is in doubt, or in an attempt to bolster up their own authority and status when they are under threat in some way, or in a spirit of self-consolation when the events going on around them seem chaotic or terrible.Footnote ²⁹ It is almost as if these characters are hoping that the very act of stating these ‘truths’ could make them true. The second notable tendency is that maxims are often uttered by the ‘wrong’ people – young, foolish, immoral or servile characters – rather than by their older, wiser, loftier counterparts.Footnote ³⁰ Again, this undermines the authority of the words uttered.

We might have expected to find some contrast between the maxims dished up during the earlier part of a play (when everyone is stumbling about in confusion and error) and those offered towards the end of a play (when it is finally clear what has been happening, and some sort of moral lesson might reasonably be drawn from the events). But there is not a single example of this sort of effect in the surviving plays. Curiously, Menander's characters avoid maxims at just the point at which they have acquired greater knowledge and understanding. It is also surprising that they do not utter maxims towards the end of speeches or scenes, even though this was a common enough structural technique elsewhere. All of this implies that none of the maxims is to be accorded any more weight or emphasis than any other, and it may be thought to add to the overall sense of inconclusiveness.

Let us examine the maxims in one particular play – the Epitrepontes – as a way of illustrating these tendencies.Footnote ³¹ The first, on the subject of idleness, appears towards the start of Act ii. The papyrus text is badly damaged at this point, but the maxim can be completely restored because it was also preserved as an independent quotation/fragment by the anthologiser Stobaeus:Footnote ³²

The speaker is the old miser Smikrines. At this point in the plot he is complaining about the behaviour of his good-for-nothing son-in-law, Charisios, who has abandoned his wife and gone next door to live a life of idleness and debauchery. Smikrines invokes the maxim as a way of criticising Charisios’ behaviour by reference to general principles, which is perfectly reasonable. But his choice of maxim also characterises Smikrines himself, for it is particularly amusing to see a miser worrying about someone overindulging at another person's expense. In fact Smikrines has already complained about Charisios’ wine-drinking, not so much because of his drunkenness but specifically because of the cost of the wine (127–31), and he has also expressed horror at the fees charged by Charisios’ pimp (136–7; cf. 749–50 on the expenses involved in festival attendance). In other words, what is presented by the speaker as a general moral observation about idleness is inherently mixed up with the specifics of the situation and the character of the speaker. In addition to the primary subject matter, there is also an implicit secondary subject (penny-pinching), and the moral arbiter himself unwittingly becomes a target of criticism.

The character of the speaker is also an important factor in the next example (232–6). Here the charcoal-burner Syriskos is attempting to persuade Smikrines to act as impartial arbiter in his dispute with the shepherd Daos:

As Daos immediately interjects, μετρίῳ γε συμπέπληγμαι ῥήτορι – ‘I've got myself involved with a right proper orator!’ – and indeed, as others have observed, it seems incongruous that Syriskos, an uneducated slave, should be presented as so acutely clever and so familiar with rhetorical techniques during this whole scene. Here the maxim is employed for persuasive ends, but it is the second half of the statement that is particularly striking. The speaker is really squeezing two separate points into a single maxim, starting off with an unexceptional and rather vague appeal to justice (τὸ δίκαιον) but expanding this basic point into a more controversial claim about ‘moral proximity’ or the duties of the bystander.Footnote ³³ What is even more important is that Syriskos is transparently motivated by considerations of self-interest rather than, as he claims, by a concern for universal justice. He is really using the maxim as a cover for his own distinctly questionable conduct. The subject of the dispute is a collection of jewellery and ornaments that were abandoned along with the baby whom Daos found and whom Syriskos and his wife adopted, and the point is that Syriskos wants to keep these precious objects for himself.

A little later, Syriskos uses another maxim in his attempts to get hold of the trinkets. This time his argument is both ingenious and ludicrous. He now affects to believe that he and all the others are characters in a tragedy, and he points out (325–40) that tragedies are full of stories of abandoned babies, long-lost relatives and recognition scenes, in which tokens are vital to the resolution of the plot. In that case, Syriskos argues, it would be unfair to deprive this baby of a proper recognition scene and its hope of deliverance and social prospects. It is precisely in this context that he deploys the next maxim (341–5):

As before, what starts off as an unremarkable general observation – on the precarious nature of human life – is developed into a more complex proposition about foresight and the need to look after one's own interests.Footnote ³⁴ But this time the sentiment is undercut by the overt intrusion of metatheatricality and paratragedy.Footnote ³⁵ It is openly acknowledged that the scenario is not real life but a play, with strong generic affinities to tragedy (even though we are still in a comedy); the precious objects have become dramatic props or ‘recognition tokens’ (γνωρίσματα), as if Syriskos already knows that there is a recognition scene coming up in the next act; and the maxim itself might be seen as paratragic in its language and tone.Footnote ³⁶ Several sets of ‘inverted commas’ are simultaneously in play here, and thus it is hard to read the content of the maxim unironically.

Syriskos is not the only character to behave as though he is in a play, nor is he the only one to use maxims in a paratragic manner. An even more striking example is provided by the slave Onesimus, who quotes a genuine tragic maxim towards the end of Act v (1123–6) when he is trying to explain the plot to Smikrines:

The function of this quotation is much the same as Syriskos’ earlier remarks about the parallels between the current situation and the world of tragedy. We are being reminded, none too subtly, that the plot of Epitrepontes is uncannily similar to that of Euripides’ Auge (in which Auge was raped by Heracles and gave birth to a child who was later recognised by means of a ring). In this case the specifically gnomic properties of the quotation are almost irrelevant; it is the literary genre and the particular source of the verses that we are supposed to notice, rather than the fact that this is a maxim. We may also notice that Onesimus, like Syriskos, although a slave, is conversant with literature and able to conjure up an apt quotation for every occasion. As often, it is the ‘wrong’ character who acts as the voice of knowledge and wisdom, while those of superior status and education are seen as helpless fools. A few lines earlier Onesimus had already demonstrated a certain moral authority by supplying Smikrines with another maxim about the importance of a man's inner character (1092–9):

More than any of the other maxims in the play, this may seem to invite us to read it completely ‘straight’. It has been interpreted as a variant on the concept of the guardian daimon or guiding spirit, found in other (perfectly serious) philosophical writings.Footnote ³⁸ Yet here too it appears that the sentiments expressed in the maxim are being undermined, either by their incongruous appearance in the mouth of a comic slave, or by a certain logical inconsistency (if our character is responsible for our actions, how can we choose to ‘please’ it by our own choice of actions?), or by the fact that with this theory Onesimos is controversially rejecting the gods and conventional religious wisdom (cf. 1081–9). In addition, one notes that the deliberate mangling or oversimplification of philosophical concepts seems to have been a recurrent topos of comic maxims: one can identify many similar examples from other comedies, which typically reject serious philosophy in favour of homely popular wisdom.Footnote ³⁹

The only other maxim in the play (793–6) is spoken by Smikrines to his daughter, Pamphile, when he is warning her that she is in danger of being displaced in her husband's affections by a courtesan:

As frequently elsewhere, the maxim is being employed as a tool for persuasion. This particular example, like the last, initially seems straightforward and unproblematic: it presents itself as an expression of a conventional misogynistic topos (and it was treated as such by the fourth-century bishop who later quoted the lines out of context).Footnote ⁴⁰ But in fact – like all the other maxims in this play – its literal value as a statement of universal wisdom is undermined by the development of the plot, for we will shortly see that Habrotonon, the ‘whore’ in question, is a thoroughly good and sympathetic character. She is kind and helpful to Pamphile, she is instrumental in bringing about the reconciliation between Pamphile and Charisios, and she is generally quite unlike the stereotypical scarlet woman that we might have expected.Footnote ⁴¹ Thus Smikrines’ conventional wisdom is revealed as completely inadequate as a response to the situation.

It would be unsafe to regard Epitrepontes as typical of the whole comic genre in its use of maxims; other lost plays and different authors may have handled things very differently.Footnote ⁴² Nonetheless, it is highly suggestive that the apparent meaning of every single maxim in this play is modified, undermined or ironised by its dramatic setting.

IV. Wine and ‘wisdom’

As observed above, comic maxims range widely across the subject matter of Greek popular morality, but one topic in particular – wine – is especially well represented.Footnote ⁴³ No doubt this partly reflects the fact that many of our fragments come from Athenaeus. But it is also unsurprising in view of the thematic preoccupations of the genre. After all, many comedies, from all periods, feature a pronounced sympotic or komastic element, and there is much talk of drinking and getting drunk.Footnote ⁴⁴

Gnomic wisdom relating to wine is not exclusively the property of comedy – it can be found in Homeric epic, lyric poetry and sympotic elegy – but comedy transforms the theme in an idiosyncratic way. Sometimes we might find comedians explicitly challenging traditional ideas from the world of the symposium, as in a passage from Anaxandrides (Thesauros fr. 18) where a character rejects (or revises) the proverbial content of an old drinking-song:

But more often what we see in comedy is a series of playful bons mots formulated from the viewpoint of the bon viveur. Wine is repeatedly presented as a vital component of human existence: it boosts the intellect; it gives one special abilities that one did not possess before; it improves one's conversation; it is akin to poetic inspiration; its effect on the drinker is compared to the watering of a plant.Footnote ⁴⁶ Above all, however, it is alcoholic excess, rather than moderation and good sense, that is recommended in these maxims – as in the following example (Amphis, Philadelphoi fr. 33):

Here, as so often, the maxim is being used in order to persuade or exhort the listener, but the speaker is a drunkard and his interlocutor is a sober, sensible character. This is obviously another variation on the familiar comic pattern of maxims appearing in the mouths of the ‘wrong’ people. Can one take the advice of inebriated people entirely seriously?

Occasionally, it is true, the dangers of strong drink are acknowledged, as in the maxim πολὺς γὰρ οἶνος πόλλ᾽ ἁμαρτάνειν ποεῖ – ‘A lot of wine leads to a lot of mistakes’ (Alexis, Epitropos fr. 82). In fact, overindulgence and its after-effects seem to have provided a stock theme, as illustrated by the following nearly identical maxims from different authors:

Lines like this are funny because almost everyone can relate to them from personal experience – and, of course, the hangover has proved a mainstay of humour for comedians throughout the centuries, from Cratinus to Lucky Jim – but it can scarcely be said that maxims of this sort represent ‘traditional wisdom’ in the way that we would normally expect. In this category of maxims if nowhere else, it is obvious that the comedians are playing around with the traditional form, using it as a vehicle for unorthodox content. The sentiments in question appear (once again) inside ironical inverted commas, since jocular or outré opinions are merely masquerading as wisdom.

V. Comic versus tragic wisdom

I have suggested that the maxim may be treated as a literary genre with which comedy is in dialogue. But another genre – tragedy – is arguably even more significant as a point of reference or departure. As we have already seen, tragedy was routinely treated as a genuinely authoritative source of wisdom and a repository of maxims. One of the most interesting categories of comic maxims consists of verses in which the comedians are openly engaging in dialogue with tragic maxims by explicitly quoting, adapting or parodying specific tragic sources. In these examples, perhaps, we are witnessing not just a dialogue but a contest of comic versus tragic wisdom.Footnote ⁴⁷

A number of comic maxims are created by taking well-known tragic maxims and altering some aspect of them so that they become preposterous. For example, the Sophoclean maxim ὅρκους ἐγὼ γυναικὸς εἰς ὕδωρ γράφω (‘I write down the oaths of a woman on water’, fr. 811 Radt) in its comic incarnation becomes ὅρκον δ᾽ ἐγὼ γυναικὸς εἰς οἶνον γράφω (‘I write down the oath of a woman in wine’, Xenarchus, Pentathlos fr. 6). Xenarchus has retained the traditional form, the quotationality and the authoritative tone of the original, but he has tweaked the content to provide an unexpected punchline. Of course, turning water into wine is thoroughly in keeping with the jocular, boozy moralising that characterises the genre (see above), and thus the maxim has now become distinctively comic. The comedian has ‘improved’ tragedy, rewriting it in a way that is more in keeping with his own generic preoccupations.

Xenarchus’ humour depends on the fact that the Sophoclean maxim was already current as a famous quotation and would have been recognised as such by his audience. A similar effect is seen elsewhere, as in the opening (fr. 1) of Eriphus’ lost comedy Aeolus, the title of which suggests a sustained interest in tragic parody:

Here the maxim is explicitly framed as a quotation (logos) from some other source, and the speaker is apparently vouching for its authority, although the litotes (οὐ κακῶς ἔχων) seems to hint that his tone is somewhat tongue-in-cheek even before the saying has been quoted. In fact Eriphus is parodying Sophocles, not in the content of the maxim but in the way that the maxim is introduced. Eriphus is drawing our attention to the fact that it was unusual and striking for a play to begin with a maxim, as the source text, Sophocles’ Trachiniae, had done.Footnote ⁴⁸ The first lines of this tragedy, spoken by Deianeira, are:

These words, boldly positioned right at the start of the prologue, look remarkably like an epigraph in terms of their interpretative function and their relationship to the rest of the tragedy. The lines are ostensibly programmatic, suggesting that they are (somehow) thematically important for understanding the drama that follows, but at the same time they are provocative and challenging, inviting disagreement or debate.Footnote ⁴⁹ Even in the original version, the maxim is already a quotation, and its speaker explicitly distances herself from the utterance. Deianeira attributes it to other people (or to an anonymous voice of tradition), and she goes on to say that her own personal experiences make her doubt the truth of the saying. In Eriphus’ comic version nothing remains of the original maxim except, as it were, the quotation marks. The comedian is drawing our attention not to the meaning of the Sophoclean maxim but specifically to its function and form (as a provocative opening device and as an example of the complexity of quotation culture). The specific content is new. As in the previous example, sober tragic moralising has been replaced by tipsy comic wisdom (or, rather, ‘wisdom’ – in inverted commas).

Elsewhere Antiphanes (fr. 228) riffs on another Sophoclean theme, mixing together a well-known quotation from Antigone with a gnomic pronouncement of his own on the meaning of life:

The comic and tragic verses are run together as if they formed a single utterance.Footnote ⁵⁰ In fact the Sophoclean lines (Ant. 712–15) are not strictly gnomic, but they contain a simile that obviously struck readers as vivid and memorable. Antiphanes is not the only comedian to make use of the quotation: not long after its original appearance it was already being parodied by Eupolis.Footnote ⁵¹ As often in comedy, half the fun lies in quotation-spotting.Footnote ⁵² Any spectator or reader familiar with Antigone would have been aware that the quotation originally belonged to a speech by Haemon, in which he vainly tried to persuade his father to be less obdurate, but in its new context the lines are manipulated so as to produce a quite different meaning. The streams and torrents of the Sophoclean simile are treated as if they literally represented streams of wine, and the image is used to illustrate the ‘truth’ that life and wine are synonymous. Thus the boundaries between quotation and original, tragedy and comedy, serious and silly are blurred. Perhaps Antiphanes might also be seen as using this maxim to draw our attention implicitly to the problems of excerption as a reading practice, highlighting the way in which readers tend to take quotations out of context and distort them for their own ends.

The contrast between selective excerption and complete sequential reading of texts was made fully explicit in a scene of dialogue in Diphilus’ Synoris (fr. 74):

The maxim is being used specifically to illustrate the contrast between these two different modes of reading. The person doing the quoting is a parasite, who is appropriating the quotation for his own ends (which, as usual, involve persuasion or manipulation). He is not concerned with Euripides’ original meaning, whatever that may have been. Once again, the joke here works by mobilising the audience's knowledge of literature. Those who were well-read in tragedy will have realised, firstly, that the source of the quotation was Euripides’ Antiope and, secondly, that the parasite has deliberately altered the quotation to suit his own interests. The original lines were as follows:

Those who recognised this quotation may have remembered that it formed part of the character Zethus’ strictures against idleness and self-indulgence. If so, they will have found it hilariously incongruous that an idle parasite should be quoting the lines out of context in support of his own way of life. It may also have occurred to some of them that in its original context the Euripidean maxim was not presented neutrally as a universal moral principle. Rather, it was a provocative contribution to an unresolved ideological debate: Zethus represented social and political pragmosyne, in stark opposition to his brother Amphion, who advocated leisure, artistic pursuits and political quietism.

In the comic version, only the first verse from Antiope is retained. The second verse is a paratragic pastiche representing the parasite's own thoughts, and the third verse is taken from a completely different Euripidean play (IT 535). Diphilus, like Antiphanes, has run together several sources to produce a seamless tragicomic mash-up which (just about) makes sense on its own terms but is utterly bizarre. He then challenges his audience to identify the source(s) of the quotation, by making character B ask πόθεν ἐστὶ ταῦτα, πρὸς θεῶν; (‘Where the hell are those lines from?’) Essentially this is a tantalising quiz question to which no answer is supplied: it is up to the audience to fill in the blanks for themselves.Footnote ⁵⁴ But the point is that maxim-collecting and quotation culture are being treated by Diphilus, in a sophisticated and multi-layered manner, as subjects of humour in their own right.

All of these traits – the quotation and subversion of tragedy, the ostentatious deployment of literary knowledge, and the ironical attitude towards decontextualised quotation – can be seen to underpin the humour in our final example (Nicostratus fr. 29):

Here Nicostratus’ character is quoting (without attribution) a verse from Euripides’ tragedy Stheneboea that had already become famous within antiquity as a free-floating maxim.Footnote ⁵⁵ The original source of the line and its sentiment are apparently irrelevant in its comic setting. What matters is the speaker's obvious sarcasm and the underlying attitude that it denotes. The idea that the meaning of life can really be summed up in a dinky quotable soundbite, as Euripides seems to do, comes to seem ludicrous.

All these comic passages reflect the popular culture of the fifth and fourth centuries, and they provide evidence for the contemporary status of tragedy – as classic literature, as representative of ‘high’ culture in contrast with the ‘low’ genre of comedy, as source of moral wisdom and authority, and as repository of maxims par excellence. It seems clear that when comedy itself uses maxims, as it does more and more frequently from the fourth century onwards, it does so in a way that simultaneously emulates and mocks tragedy's status and authority.